Severus Alexander
Severus Alexander was made emperor at thirteen, governed for thirteen years under his mother, and was killed by his own soldiers for trying to buy peace instead of winning it. He was a cousin of Elagabalus, whose four years of religious provocation had exhausted the army's patience, and he was raised to the purple by the praetorians who murdered him. His mother Julia Mamaea governed with a council of senators, among them the jurist Ulpian, and the regime was deliberately the opposite of the one before it: the eastern god was sent home, the coinage was stabilised, taxes were cut and the lawyers were given standing. It was the last quiet stretch before the collapse. He is remembered for a religious tolerance unusual for the period - a later and unreliable biography claims he kept images of Abraham and of Christ in his private shrine, which may be invention but matches a reign in which Christians were not persecuted and Origen was writing in Alexandria unmolested. The frontiers ended him. In 226 the Parthian kingdom was replaced by the Sasanian Persians, an aggressive state with a claim to everything the Achaemenids had held, and Alexander's campaign in the east in 232 achieved a stalemate presented as a triumph. Germanic raids across the Rhine followed while the army was away. At Mogontiacum in 235 he opened negotiations to pay the Germans to withdraw. The legions, who wanted a war and the plunder from it, proclaimed a Thracian officer named Maximinus and killed Alexander and his mother in his tent. He was twenty-six. What followed was fifty years in which some twenty-six men were acclaimed emperor and almost all of them were killed, and no emperor after him could take the loyalty of the army for granted.
- Lived: 208 CE – 235 CE
- Nationality: Roman
- Roles: head_of_state, royalty
