“be united, fill the soldiers with gold and despise everything else.” those were, according to the sources, the last orders of a roman emperor to his two sons. not a sentimental piece of advice or a paternal blessing: a survival manual in three lines, cold and exact, dictated by a man who knew he was dying and who knew perfectly the animal he was leaving loose.
the man was septimius severus, and he died on 4 february 211 ce in eboracvm — present-day york —, in the north of britannia, worn out by illness and by a very hard campaign against the tribes of caledonia. severus had reached the throne eighteen years earlier by winning a civil war, was of african origin, born in leptis magna, and had ruled like what he was: a pragmatic military man who despised forms and leaned without disguise on the army. ill and aware of the end, he had the urn that would hold his ashes brought to him, held it and said to it, according to tradition: “you will contain a man whom the world could not contain”.
the problem was not dying, but what he was leaving behind. the empire was to fall to his two sons, caracalla and geta, named co-emperors. and the two brothers hated each other with a deep and public rancour: they had grown up at odds, competed for everything, and the entire court was divided into two camps. severus knew that shared inheritance was a powder keg, and his testament was a last desperate attempt to put out the fuse.
he handed them the key to rome in a single sentence: buy the army and forget the rest. one of the two retained only the first half.
the three orders were a stark portrait of how imperial power really worked. the first, “be united”, appealed to the only thing capable of preventing another civil war between the heirs. the second, “enrich the soldiers”, laid bare the cynicism of the regime: severus had understood that the throne did not rest on the senate or the people, but on the legions, and that an emperor with the army well paid was practically untouchable. the third, “despise everything else”, clinched the lesson: the senate, the plebs, public opinion, all expendable as long as the soldiers were paid on time.
caracalla absorbed the money part to perfection and discarded the brotherly love part entirely. that same year, barely a few months after his father’s death, he had geta killed. tradition tells that his brother died in the arms of his mother, julia domna, run through by caracalla’s men while he sought refuge in her. afterwards, caracalla ordered the damnatio memoriae of geta: they erased his name from inscriptions, chipped his face out of portraits, tried to remove him from history.
caracalla, faithful to the second order, raised the troops’ pay even higher to secure their loyalty after the fratricide. he lasted six years in power until he was assassinated — how else — by his own troops. severus’s testament turned out to be a prophecy with one error: he trusted that blood would unite his sons. dynastic ambition does not tolerate partners, not even brothers.
