imagine a state’s elite guard killing the head of government, barricading themselves in their barracks and proclaiming that the post is for sale to whoever puts the most money on the table. that is, almost to the letter, what happened in rome. on 28 march of the year 193 ce, the praetorian guard auctioned the roman empire to the highest bidder. and someone bought it.
to understand the humiliation you have to know the victim. the emperor pertinax was a soldier of modest origin, son of a freedman, who had reached the very top and attempted something unthinkable: to bring the praetorian guard to heel and cut back its outrageous privileges. the praetorians were the only troops stationed in italy, the corps that guarded the emperor, and they had grown used to collecting colossal bribes at every change of power. pertinax wanted to discipline them. he barely lasted three months: a group of soldiers stormed the palace and killed him.
with the throne vacant and no clear successor, the praetorians did the most cynical thing recorded in the history of rome: they put the empire up for bidding. from the walls of their camp they announced that the purple would go to whoever paid each soldier the most. and two bidders appeared. one was sulpicianus, prefect of the city and father-in-law of the murdered pertinax himself, who was already inside the camp. the other was didius julianus, an immensely rich senator whom, according to the sources, his friends dragged drunk from a banquet to the gates of the barracks.
two millionaires shouting figures at the walls of a barracks. the prize: dominion over the entire world.
the scene, narrated by dio cassius — who was a senator and lived in rome during those years — was grotesque. julianus was kept from entering, so he shouted his offers from outside, at the top of his voice, over the wall, while sulpicianus bid from within. the auction ended in a duel of numbers: sulpicianus offered twenty thousand sesterces to each soldier, and julianus capped it at twenty-five thousand. a fortune per head, the equivalent of a decade’s pay. the praetorians settled with him, opened the iron gates and proclaimed him lord of the world. it is worth qualifying that this image of an “auction” is a hostile metaphor of dio cassius, amplified by herodian; the real mechanism was the donativum, the bounty each new emperor paid the troops to secure their acclamation, which modern historiography does not read as a literal auction.
the nuance worth pinning down is why that could not turn out well. julianus had bought the nine or ten thousand men of the guard, but the real army — the legionaries hardened on the frontiers of the rhine, the danube and the east — was not part of the deal. when the frontier generals learned that an aristocrat had bought rome’s military honour at auction, the outrage was immediate. three of them proclaimed themselves emperors almost at once, opening what history calls the year of the five emperors.
the fastest and the hardest was septimius severus, who marched from the danube toward rome with barely any opposition. julianus tried to negotiate, to bribe, even decreed the death penalty against his rival; nothing worked, because no one was left willing to fight for him. the senate condemned him, and a soldier killed him in the palace he had bought, after only sixty-six days in power. his final sentence, according to the sources, was a pathetic “but what evil have i done?”. the lesson was written in blood: with money you can buy an office, but not the loyalty of those who wield the swords.
