AD 193: The Year Rome Had Five Emperors

On the evening of 28 March 193, one of the richest men in Rome stood outside a locked military camp, shouting numbers over a wall. Inside was another senator, shouting numbers back, while soldiers ran between them carrying the offers. Twenty thousand sesterces per man. Then more. Then Didius Julianus shouted twenty-five thousand, and the gates opened.

The prize, according to the ancient accounts, was the Roman Empire.

It is one of those stories that sounds too perfect to be true: the most powerful office in the known world auctioned to the highest bidder. And perhaps it was too perfect. Cassius Dio, who was in Rome at the time, likens the contest to a market or auction room; Herodian describes the empire being offered for sale. Modern scholarship has questioned whether their hostile framing turned rival accession payments into a literal auction. That argument remains open because the competitive promises are better attested than the theatrical label attached to them.

But whichever version you accept, the disturbing part is the same. A group of soldiers had murdered one emperor that afternoon, and by nightfall they were deciding who came next. Rome had just discovered that nobody knew how to stop them.

To see how the empire reached that evening, you have to go back eighty-seven days, to a New Year's Day when everything looked very different.

On the final night of 192, Commodus died inside the imperial palace. The surviving accounts are hostile and dramatic: a conspiracy involving people close to him, an attempted poisoning, and finally his strangulation. However exactly it happened, the political fact was much simpler. Commodus was dead, and he had left no son, no designated successor and no obvious answer to the question that suddenly mattered more than any other.

Who was emperor now?

Rome had ruled much of the known world for generations. It had armies from Britain to Syria, governors administering vast provinces, taxes moving through a huge bureaucracy. An order could travel thousands of kilometres and still carry the force of Roman law.

And yet Rome had never settled on a single binding procedure that could decide every succession. No crown passed automatically from one head to another, no election result compelled universal acceptance, no constitutional sentence said when the emperor dies, this is what happens next. What we call "the emperor" was really a collection of powers, titles, relationships and commands, and when Commodus died, none of it transferred to anyone on its own. Someone had to assemble it again through recognisable acts of military, political and administrative acceptance.

That is the problem underneath the entire story.

History remembers 193 as the Year of the Five Emperors, and even that famous name is messier than it sounds. Pertinax, Didius Julianus, Septimius Severus and Pescennius Niger all made imperial claims during the year. Clodius Albinus, the traditional fifth, was initially recognised as Caesar, the junior imperial position, and did not proclaim himself Augustus until the political settlement collapsed later.

So even counting the emperors forces the central question. What actually made someone an emperor? The title? The Senate? The army? The capital? The people who printed your face on coins? Or simply whether enough people behaved as though you were one?

Rome was going to find that question harder every time it tried to answer it.

The conspirators who removed Commodus already had someone in mind: Publius Helvius Pertinax. He was sixty-six years old, the son of a freedman, and had spent decades working his way through Roman public life and military command. He was experienced and he was respected. According to the tradition, when the conspirators came to him during the night, he first assumed that Commodus had sent them to kill him. Instead, they told him they wanted to make him emperor.

What Pertinax did next tells us almost everything. He did not go to the Senate first. He went to the Praetorian Guard, the soldiers stationed at Rome to protect the emperor and the imperial centre. He addressed them, promised them twelve thousand sesterces each, and they acclaimed him. Only then did he go to the Senate, where, according to Cassius Dio, himself a senator, the response was genuinely enthusiastic. The Senate voted Pertinax the powers and titles of imperial office.

By the end of the day, Rome had manufactured a new emperor.

No single moment made Pertinax emperor. The soldiers recognised him, the Senate legitimised him, the administration accepted him, the palace was his, and the state began operating in his name. The combination is what did it.

For a few weeks it worked. Then Pertinax made the mistake of assuming that because he held imperial power, he controlled the institutions that had handed it to him.

Pertinax inherited a court shaped by twelve years of Commodus, and he tried to change it. He sold imperial property, cut expenditure and attempted to restore discipline. He also confronted a Praetorian Guard that had grown accustomed to a very different relationship with the palace.

The exact causes of what followed are more complicated than the familiar story of a strict emperor and spoiled soldiers. Money mattered, and privilege, and faction, and fear, and the failed attempts to bring the Guard under control. But something else mattered too. Three months earlier, people inside the imperial household had killed Commodus, and the empire had produced another emperor the next morning. The political system had absorbed the murder. That teaches people something.

On 28 March, roughly two hundred Praetorians left their camp and marched toward the palace. Not the entire Guard: about two hundred men. Pertinax knew they were coming and went out to confront them. According to Dio, his speech briefly affected some of the soldiers. It was not enough. Pertinax was killed, and his head was cut off and carried away.

He had been emperor for eighty-seven days. Rome now faced exactly the question it had faced on New Year's Eve, except that this time everyone understood the rules a little differently.

After killing Pertinax, the Praetorians returned to their fortified camp and shut the gates. Two candidates emerged.

The first was Flavius Sulpicianus, Pertinax's father-in-law and prefect of Rome. He had gone to the camp to calm the situation and found himself already inside, among the soldiers who had just murdered his relative. Then came Didius Julianus, who was outside, on the wrong side of a closed gate. So the competition took place across the walls, with soldiers, in Dio's account, carrying the offers from one candidate to the other. Sulpicianus reached twenty thousand sesterces per man. Julianus offered twenty-five thousand. The Guard chose Julianus, and the gates opened.

Then the soldiers escorted their new emperor to the Senate.

Hours earlier, those soldiers had murdered the man the Senate had enthusiastically approved. Now they arrived with his replacement, and the senators voted under the eyes of armed Praetorians. Julianus received the imperial powers and titles. Coins were issued in his name, documents recognised his reign, and the Roman government functioned under him.

It is tempting to dismiss Julianus as a joke. He wasn't. By Rome's existing mechanisms, he really was emperor. He had the Senate, the palace, the administration, the mint and the Guard. He had Rome.

There was just one problem. Rome was not the Roman Empire.

Leave the city. Travel north toward the Danube, cross the sea to Britain, go east toward Syria, and the political map changes.

Most of Rome's serious military power was not standing in Rome. It was distributed across the frontiers, and those armies had commanders. Three of those commanders suddenly mattered enormously. In Upper Pannonia, near the Danube, was Septimius Severus. In Syria was Pescennius Niger. In Britain was Clodius Albinus.

They were separated by enormous distances. No bulletin went out announcing Pertinax's murder, no simultaneous moment in which the empire learned that the throne was vacant. News travelled. A courier might cover something like fifty to eighty kilometres in a day under ordinary favourable conditions, and armies were much slower. Politics moved at the speed of horses, roads, ships, weather and human decisions. The range is a model, not proof of any particular message's route.

So for a period in 193, different parts of the Roman world could receive different news at different times, recognise different men and act on different assumptions. The empire did not experience one succession crisis. It experienced several versions of the same succession crisis at once.

Severus turned that moving information into organised force.

Pertinax died on 28 March. The Roman army later observed 9 April as Severus's accession anniversary: twelve days after the murder, across an immense road distance from Rome. The surviving calendar was compiled a generation later, so the anniversary does not necessarily preserve the exact moment when soldiers at Carnuntum first acclaimed him.

That timing raises a question. Did news move extraordinarily quickly? Had people on the Danube already been anticipating a crisis? Was the proclamation more prepared than the sources admit? The evidence supports the question more confidently than it supports a neat answer.

What Severus did next was politically brilliant. He adopted Pertinax's name. He presented himself not simply as another governor whose soldiers had proclaimed him emperor, but as the avenger of a murdered one. That changed the public story of his march: an emperor had been murdered, and Severus claimed to be advancing toward Rome to punish the killers.

He understood something his rivals repeatedly underestimated. Force is not enough on its own. You also need an explanation for why your force is legitimate.

Meanwhile, in Syria, Pescennius Niger was also proclaimed emperor. And Niger was not pretending. His coins called him Augustus. His portrait appeared on money struck in the East. Cities and provinces recognised him. He had substantial military backing, and he controlled one of the wealthiest regions of the empire. In Rome, crowds had reportedly shouted his name even before his bid for power had fully developed.

Niger was not a provincial rebel waiting to be crushed by the "real" emperor. To the people recognising him, Niger was the emperor.

This is where the usual story, five men racing toward a single throne, starts to become misleading. There was no empty chair sitting in Rome waiting for the fastest claimant. Different men controlled different components of imperial power. Julianus controlled the centre, Niger much of the East, Severus a growing military coalition on the Rhine-Danube axis, and Albinus Britain.

That left Severus with a strategic problem. If he attacked east toward Niger, Albinus might move behind him; if he moved west, Niger would have time to consolidate. So Severus offered Albinus something: the title Caesar. Not emperor. Not yet. But heir. The message was essentially you do not need to fight me. Wait, and you can have everything later.

Albinus accepted. And this was not simply a private promise between two ambitious men. Coins were struck recognising Albinus as Caesar. He took Severus's family name. The two shared the consulship in 194. The arrangement became public reality.

With one political deal, Severus had taken an entire front off the board, and he could concentrate on Rome.

Julianus knew Severus was coming. But as Severus moved toward Italy, something strange happened. There was no great battle for Rome. Instead, Julianus's regime began to dissolve. Cities chose not to resist. Ravenna and its fleet went over to Severus. Envoys sent by Julianus defected. Attempts to stop him failed. The closer the army came, the weaker the emperor in Rome became.

This is the paradox at the centre of Julianus's story. He possessed the institutions of the Roman state, but those institutions were operated by people, and people could change sides. So could a city, a fleet, an envoy, a Senate. Power that looked solid from the palace was actually made of hundreds of individual decisions, and Severus was changing those decisions before he ever entered Rome.

Eventually, the Senate acted. The same Senate that had voted Julianus imperial power now condemned him and recognised Severus. Julianus was killed inside the palace. Dio preserves a final question attributed to him: what evil had he done? Whom had he killed?

He had been emperor for sixty-six days. Severus had defeated him without fighting a battle for the capital. Julianus had possessed Rome; Severus had persuaded Rome to abandon him.

Before he formally entered Rome, Severus dealt with the Praetorian Guard. The men who had killed Pertinax and elevated Julianus were summoned outside the city, disarmed, stripped of their military ornaments and expelled. Severus then rebuilt the Guard from soldiers tied to his victorious military coalition.

This was punishment. It was also institutional engineering. The Praetorians had demonstrated that an armed force sitting beside the capital could remove one emperor and manufacture another, and Severus had no intention of leaving that machine intact.

Only after securing the centre did he perform the acts expected of an emperor. He entered Rome. He addressed the Senate. He honoured Pertinax. He paid his soldiers.

The winner still wanted recognition, and that point is easy to miss. Severus had an army, he had defeated Julianus politically, and the Senate could not realistically have stopped him. He wanted the Senate anyway, because imperial government required more than military victory. Someone had to issue appointments, judge cases, mint money, collect taxes and send orders that a governor hundreds of kilometres away would treat as legitimate. Conquest had to become administration.

If this were a simpler story, Severus entering Rome would be the ending. The capital had fallen, the Guard had been replaced, Julianus was dead and the Senate recognised Severus. But Pescennius Niger was still emperor across much of the East, and Niger had something Julianus never possessed: a military coalition capable of fighting back.

So Severus had to dismantle it, and that meant more than defeating Niger the man. It meant dismantling the system that made Niger an emperor.

The conflict moved through the strategic crossings, routes and cities of Asia Minor. Cyzicus. Nicaea. Issus. Antioch. Eventually Niger's field position collapsed. He fled. He was killed. The surviving evidence fixes the sequence more securely than it fixes an exact day for every battle.

And even then the story did not end, because killing an emperor did not automatically kill the political world that had recognised him.

Egypt gives us an extraordinary glimpse of what imperial recognition actually looked like. Roman documents were dated using the reigning emperor: contracts, receipts, administrative records, legal documents. The name mattered. The papyrological chronology indicates that by 13 February 194 Egypt was recognising Severus rather than Niger.

At some point, officials sat down to write and began writing a different emperor's name. Power can change hands without a dramatic ceremony. Sometimes sovereignty looks like a clerk changing the first line of a document. That is what recognition looked like at ground level: not philosophy, not constitutional theory, but a different name on the paperwork.

And then there was Byzantium.

Byzantium had backed Niger, and Byzantium kept resisting. It resisted after Severan victories elsewhere. It resisted after Niger's position collapsed. It resisted even after Niger himself was dead. The siege continued for years.

This may be the most revealing episode in the entire crisis. If an emperor were simply one man sitting at the top of a hierarchy, Niger's death should have ended the matter. It didn't, because Niger's power had never existed only inside Niger. It existed in soldiers who had sworn to him, cities that had backed him, officials who recognised him, mints that produced his money, local elites who had made political choices, and strategic places that could close their gates. Once those commitments existed, killing the claimant did not magically erase them.

Severus had to make the empire converge on one answer again, one place at a time.

There was still Albinus. For years, Severus's solution had worked. Albinus was Caesar, recognised heir and public partner, his image on Roman coinage, his political status real enough to give him a reason to wait rather than fight.

By 195 or 196, Severus was raising his own son Caracalla into the succession and the settlement with Albinus was breaking down. The precise sequence and causality are disputed, but the political problem is clear. There could only be one future emperor. Albinus's position had depended on a shared expectation about what would happen next, and when that expectation disappeared, so did the settlement.

Albinus proclaimed himself Augustus and moved from Britain into Gaul. The Roman world split again.

The coins show the transformation with unusual clarity. On coinage produced while Albinus was Caesar, he appears as the junior figure recognised under Severus's order. Later, as Augustus, the political message changes. Same man, same army, different title, different political reality. That is how fragile Roman legitimacy could be. Nothing physical about Albinus needed to change. What changed was what everyone believed his position meant.

On 19 February 197, the two sides finally met near Lugdunum, modern Lyon. The ancient numbers for the armies are not reliable, but the confrontation was severe and Severus did not cruise to victory. The fighting was hard and his position became dangerous. Eventually Albinus's army broke, and Albinus died.

The long crisis that had begun when Commodus was killed at the end of 192 was finally over. One emperor remained: Septimius Severus.

But saying "Severus won" does not really explain anything. The more interesting question is why him.

Put Julianus and Niger beside each other.

Julianus possessed Rome. He had the palace, the Senate, the administration, the central machinery of government. He lasted sixty-six days, and his regime collapsed before Severus needed to fight a battle for the capital.

Niger had none of those central institutions. What he had was armies, cities, provincial recognition, mints, money and territory. His coalition had to be defeated piece by piece, and even after he died, Byzantium continued resisting.

One man possessed the centre and disappeared in weeks. The other possessed no centre at all and remained politically difficult to erase long after his death.

That is what 193 revealed. An emperor was not a crown, or simply the Senate's choice, or the army's choice, or the man occupying the palace. Imperial power was a bundle: military force, money, territory, institutions, recognition, communications, and a story explaining why everyone else should recognise you too. Different men briefly possessed different parts of that bundle.

Severus won because he assembled more of it than anyone else. He secured soldiers. He neutralised one rival through a political settlement. He gave his march a legitimate story through Pertinax. He watched Julianus's institutions defect toward him. He acquired the Senate. He replaced the Praetorian Guard. He defeated Niger's network in the East, and years later he destroyed Albinus's alternative in the West.

He did not simply seize the throne. He made enough of the empire's major institutions give the same answer to the question of who was emperor that no rival coalition could survive.

Severus learned the lessons of 193 extremely well. Perhaps too well. He strengthened the relationship between emperor and army, substantially increased military pay, rebuilt the Praetorian Guard around men drawn from his own victorious military world, and created three new legions, one of which was eventually stationed unusually close to Rome. Whatever his private intentions, the effect was to make it harder for anyone to repeat the strategy he had used himself.

But there was one problem he never solved, and it was the problem that started everything. Succession. How do you hand an empire from one ruler to another without forcing the entire political system to decide again who it wants to obey?

Severus had mastered the game. He had not changed the rules. When he died in 211, he left the empire to his two sons, Caracalla and Geta. Within a year, Caracalla had murdered Geta.

Rome could conquer continents. It could build roads across them, tax them, garrison them, administer them and connect them to a political system centred on one man. What it could never quite figure out was how to choose that man without risking everything all over again.