Julia Domna

Julia Domna was the Syrian wife of Septimius Severus, the mother of Caracalla and Geta, and the most politically powerful Roman empress before the fourth century. She came from Emesa, modern Homs, where her family held the hereditary priesthood of the sun god Elagabal; Severus is said to have married her because her horoscope promised she would marry a king. She travelled with him on campaign, in Britain as well as the east, and was given the title mater castrorum, mother of the camp, which no living empress had held before. She gathered a circle of intellectuals - Philostratus wrote the Life of Apollonius of Tyana at her request - and the contemporary sources credit her with a serious interest in philosophy, which later writers inflated into a salon that probably never existed in that form. Severus died at York in 211 leaving the empire to both sons jointly, an arrangement that lasted ten months: Caracalla had Geta killed, reportedly in his mother's arms, and then ordered his memory erased from inscriptions across the empire, which is why so many Severan monuments have a gap. She continued to run much of the civil administration for Caracalla, handling correspondence and petitions while he campaigned. When he was murdered near Carrhae in 217 and Macrinus took the throne, she was at Antioch; she starved herself to death, possibly also suffering from breast cancer. Her sister Julia Maesa then engineered the accession of two more emperors from the same family, Elagabalus and Severus Alexander, so that the dynasty outlived her by eighteen years. Coins struck across the empire carry her portrait with an elaborate wig that became the fashion of the period. The Arch of the Argentarii in Rome still shows the gap where Geta was chiselled out beside her.

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