Clodius Albinus

At nearly one and the same time, after Pertinax—who was killed at the instigation of Albinus—Julianus was proclaimed emperor by the senate at Rome, Septimius Severus by the army in Illyricum, Pescennius Niger in the East, and Clodius Albinus in Gaul. Herodian indeed says that Clodius was Severus' Caesar; but when each resented the other's ruling, and the Gauls and the German armies could not endure it—since they too had their own particular prince—everything everywhere was thrown into confusion. Now Clodius Albinus was of a noble family, though from Hadrumetum in Africa; and for this reason he claimed for himself that oracle, by which we said in the Life of Pescennius that Severus was praised, refusing it to be understood as "Albinus the worst"—which was contained in the very same verse that held both the praise of Severus and the approval of Pescennius Niger. But before I discuss either his life or his death, this too must be said, which is what made him noble.

For to this same man Commodus once, when he was making him Albinus' successor, had sent a letter in which he ordered that he should be Caesar; I have inserted a copy: "The Emperor Commodus to Clodius Albinus. On another occasion I sent to you officially concerning the succession and your honour; but this letter is private and domestic, written, as you see, entirely in my own hand, by which I give you the power, if necessity should arise, to come forward before the soldiers and assume for yourself the name of Caesar. For I hear that both Septimius Severus and Nonius Murcus speak ill of me among the soldiers, that they may secure for themselves the management of the imperial office. You will moreover have, when you have done this, the free power of granting a donative up to three aurei, since I have sent a letter about this also to my procurators, which you yourself shall receive sealed with the Amazonian seal, and, when need arises, you shall give it to the accountants, lest they fail to heed you when you wish to draw upon the treasury. And so that I may add to you some token of imperial majesty, you shall have for the present the use of the scarlet cloak, both there and when you come to me; and when you are with me, you shall have purple as well, but without gold, since in this way my own great-grandfather Verus, who died as a boy, received it from Hadrian, who adopted him."

Having received this letter, he was wholly unwilling to do what was ordered, seeing that the hateful Commodus, on account of his character—by which he had ruined the state and disgraced himself—must one day be struck down, and fearing that he himself might be killed along with him. There survives, finally, a speech of his by which, when he received the imperial power—and, as some say, confirmed by the will of Severus—he makes mention of this matter; of which this is a copy: "That I was led to the imperial power against my will, comrades, this too proves: that I scorned Commodus when he offered me the name of Caesar. But both your wish and that of Severus Augustus must be obeyed, since I believe that under a most excellent man and a brave one the state can be well governed." Nor can it be denied—as Marius Maximus too says—that Severus' first intention was that, if anything should befall him, he would name Pescennius Niger and Clodius Albinus as his successors; but afterwards, in his concern for his sons, who were now growing up, and envying the affection felt for Albinus, he changed his mind and crushed both of them in war, moved chiefly by his wife's entreaties. In fact Severus even designated him consul, which assuredly he would not have done except for a most excellent man, being a careful judge in choosing magistrates.

But to return to him: Albinus was, as I said, a native of Hadrumetum, yet noble among his own people and tracing his descent from Roman families, namely the Postumii and the Albini and the Ceionii. This family even today, most noble Constantine, is most distinguished, both enlarged by you and to be further enlarged—the same that grew greatly through Gallienus and the Gordians. Yet he himself was born in a modest home, of very slender patrimony, of upright parents, his father being Ceionius Postumus, his mother Aurelia Messalina, and he was the firstborn to his parents. When he came from the womb—contrary to the custom of infants, who when they are born are usually red—he was exceedingly white, and so was called Albinus; that this is true is shown by a letter of his father sent to Aelius Bassianus, then proconsul of Africa, a kinsman, it seems, of those very families. The letter of Ceionius Postumus to Aelius Bassianus: "A son has been born to me on the seventh day before the Kalends of December, so white at once over his whole body that he outdid the linen cloth in which he was received; wherefore, having taken him up, I have given him to the family of the Albani, which is shared by you and me, and have imposed on him the name Albinus. See that you love the state and us, as you do."

He therefore passed his whole boyhood in Africa, moderately educated in Greek and Latin letters, since even then his spirit was military and proud; for it is reported that very often in school, among the little boys, he would sing: "Madly I seize my arms, though in arms there is little reason," repeating "Madly I seize my arms." Many signs of empire are said to have been given when he was born; for a white bull was born with horns of a full purple colour, which, however, are said to have remained for a long time placed in the temple of Apollo at Cumae by him when he was already a tribune; for when he was drawing a lot concerning his fate, he is said to have received this answer in these verses: "This man on horseback, while a great tumult disturbs the Roman state, shall set it right; he shall lay low the Carthaginians and the rebel Gaul." And indeed it is established that in Gaul he subdued many peoples; but he himself supposed that the words "he shall lay low the Carthaginians" had been foretold to him concerning Severus, because Septimius was an African. There was also another sign of future empire; for since the imperial family had this particular custom, that the little ones of its house were bathed in tubs of tortoise-shell, when the infant was born a huge tortoise was brought to his father as a gift by a fisherman; and his father, being a literate man, accepting the omen, gladly received the tortoise and ordered it to be tended and dedicated to the boy's childhood baths, hoping that from this too he would be made distinguished. And since it was rare for eagles to be seen in those places where Albinus was born, on the seventh day, at the hour of the banquet which was assigned to the celebration of the child—when his names were being given—seven little eagles were brought from their nests and, as if in play, set around the boy's cradle. Nor did the father reject this omen, but ordered the eagles to be fed and carefully tended. A further omen was added: since the boys of that family were swaddled in little reddish bands, when by chance the reddish bands which his mother in pregnancy had prepared happened to be washed and wet, he was wrapped in his mother's purple band; whence, in his nurse's jest, the name Porphyrius too was given him. These and other signs of future empire there were, which whoever wishes to know may read in Aelius Cordus, who pursues all the trivial details concerning omens of this kind.

As a young man, then, he at once devoted himself to military service and became known to the Antonines through his kinsmen Lollius Serenus and Baebius Maecianus and Ceionius Postumianus. He commanded as tribune the Dalmatian cavalry; he commanded also the legion of the Fourth and of the First; he held the Bithynian armies faithfully at the time when Avidius was in revolt; then, by Commodus, he was transferred to Gaul, where, having routed the peoples across the Rhine, he made his name famous both among the Romans and among the barbarians. Inflamed by these deeds, Commodus offered him the name of Caesar and the power of granting a donative and the use of the scarlet cloak. From all these he prudently abstained, saying that Commodus was seeking men who would either perish with him or whom he himself could kill with good cause. The favour of the quaestorship was conferred on him. This granted, he was aedile no more than ten days, because he was being sent in haste to the army; then he held the praetorship under Commodus most notoriously—for at the games of this same office Commodus is reported to have given exhibitions of combat both in the forum and in the theatre. He was declared consul by Severus at the time when Severus had prepared to substitute him, along with Pescennius, in his own place.

He came to the imperial power already advanced in years and older than Pescennius Niger, as Severus himself says in his own Life. But when Pescennius had been defeated, since Severus desired to preserve the empire for his own sons and saw the senate's great affection toward Clodius Albinus—because he was a man of ancient family—he sent him, through certain men, letters of the highest love and the highest devotion, in which he urged that, since Pescennius Niger had been killed, Albinus should govern the state faithfully along with him; of which Cordus shows this to be the copy: "The Emperor Severus Augustus to Clodius Albinus Caesar, his most loving and most longed-for brother, greeting. Pescennius having been defeated, I have sent letters to Rome, which the senate, most loving of you, gladly received. I beg you to govern the state in that spirit in which you were chosen as the brother of my heart, the brother of my empire. Bassianus and Geta salute you. Our Julia salutes both you and your sister. To your little son Pescennius Princus we shall send gifts worthy of his station and yours. I should wish you to keep the armies for the state and for us, my one in heart, my dearest, my most beloved."

And this letter indeed he gave to the most faithful of his attendants, whom he had sent, charging them to deliver the letter publicly, but afterward to say that they wished to convey many things in secret which pertained to military affairs and to the secrets of the camp and to loyalty at court; and when they had come into a private place, as though about to deliver their instructions, five very strong men were to kill him with small swords hidden beneath their clothing. Nor indeed was their loyalty wanting. For when they had come to Albinus and delivered the letter, which when he had read it, and they said certain things were to be suggested more secretly and demanded a place set apart from all witnesses—and when they would by no means allow anyone at all to go forward with Albinus to the very long colonnade, on the pretext that the instructions might be betrayed—Albinus perceived the plot; and finally, indulging his suspicions, he handed them over to torture, men who at first long denied everything but afterward, overcome by necessity, confessed those things which Severus had charged them. Then, the matter now betrayed and the plot laid open, Albinus, perceiving that the things he had suspected were plain, gathered a huge army and against Severus and his generals

came; and in the first encounter he had the advantage against Severus' generals. But afterward Severus himself, having brought it about before the senate that Albinus should be judged a public enemy, set out against him and fought most fiercely and bravely in Gaul, not without changes of fortune. Finally, when in his anxiety he consulted the augurs, he received the answer, as Marius Maximus says, that Albinus would indeed come into his power, but neither alive nor dead—which is what happened. For when the last battle had been joined, countless of his men slain, very many put to flight, and many also surrendering, Albinus fled and, as many say, killed himself; or, as others say, was struck down by his own slave and brought half-alive to Severus. From this the augury which had been foretold beforehand was confirmed. Many besides say that he was killed by soldiers who sought the favour of Severus by his death. Albinus had one son, as some say; as Maximus says, two. To these Severus first granted pardon, but afterward he killed them together with their mother and ordered them thrown into a running stream. His head he cut off, carried about on a spear, and sent to Rome, with letters addressed to the senate in which he insulted them for having loved Albinus so greatly that they loaded his kinsmen, and especially his brother, with vast honour. Albinus' body is said to have lain before Severus' headquarters for very many days, even to the point of stench, and, torn by dogs, was cast into the running stream.

Of his character various things are said. Severus indeed himself speaks thus of him, calling him base, malicious, dishonest, disreputable, greedy, and dissolute. But these things were said in time of war or after the war, when no credit could be given to him concerning an enemy—although Severus himself had sent him frequent letters as to a most dear friend, and many thought well of Albinus, and Severus himself had wished him to be called his own Caesar, and, when he was considering a successor, had had this man first before his eyes. There survive, moreover, letters of Marcus concerning this same man, which bear witness both to his virtues and to his character; of which it was not absurd to insert one, addressed to his prefects concerning his name: "Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to his prefects, greeting. To Albinus, of the family of the Ceionii, an African indeed but having not much of the African in him, son-in-law of Plautillus, I have given two squadrons of wing-cavalry to command. He is a practised man, austere in life, weighty in character; I think he will prove useful in matters of the camp, and I know well enough that he certainly will not be harmful. To him I have decreed a double salary, a simple military dress but of his rank, and quadruple pay. Encourage him to show himself to the state, for he shall have the reward he deserves." There is also another letter, which the same Marcus wrote in the days of Avidius Cassius concerning this same man; of which this is a copy: "The steadfastness of Albinus is to be praised, who held the armies that were grievously falling away, when they were taking refuge with Avidius Cassius. And had he not been there, they all would have done so. We have therefore a man worthy of the consulship, whom I shall appoint in place of Cassius Papirius, who has been reported to me as now all but lifeless. This in the meantime I do not wish to be made public, lest it reach either Papirius himself or his kinsmen, and we seem to have appointed a consul in the place of a living man."

These letters too, then, show that Albinus was a steadfast man, and this above all: that he sent money to restore those cities which Niger had ground down, so that he might the more easily win over their inhabitants to himself. Cordus, who pursues such matters in his volumes, says he was a glutton, and indeed so much so that he consumed as much fruit as human reckoning cannot allow; for he says that, fasting, he ate five hundred dried figs—which the Greeks call callistruthiae—and a hundred Campanian peaches and ten Ostian melons and twenty pounds of Labican grapes and a hundred fig-peckers and four hundred oysters. As for wine, Cordus says he was indeed sparing; which Severus denies, who asserts that he was drunk even in battle. With his own men he never agreed, either on account of his love of wine, as Severus says, or on account of the harshness of his character. To his wife he was most hateful, to his slaves unjust, fierce toward the soldiery; for often even the regular centurions, when the nature of the case did not require it, he sent to the cross; he certainly flogged them very often with rods and never spared their offences. In dress he was most splendid, at table most squalid and given only to abundance; among the foremost of lovers of women, ever ignorant of unnatural lust and a persecutor of such men; most skilled in the cultivation of the soil, so that he even wrote a Georgics. Some say that the Milesian Tales are also his, whose reputation is held not ignoble, although they are written but moderately well.

By the senate he was loved as no other prince was, particularly in hatred of Severus, whom the senators vehemently hated for his cruelty. And so, when Albinus was defeated, very many senators were killed by Severus who either truly had been of his party or seemed to be. Finally, when he had killed him at Lugdunum, he at once ordered letters to be sought out, that he might discover both to whom he himself had written and who had written back to him; and all those whose letters he found he caused to be judged enemies by the senate; nor did he spare them, but killed them too and posted up their goods and transferred them into the public treasury. There survives a letter of Severus which displays his temper, sent to the senate; of which this is a copy: "Nothing more grievous can befall me, conscript fathers, than that Albinus should have your favour rather than Severus. I have brought grain to the state; I have waged many wars for the state; I have brought to the Roman people as much oil as the nature of things scarcely held; I, having killed Pescennius Niger, freed you from tyrannical evils. Truly you have repaid me in great measure, with great gratitude: a man from among the Africans, and indeed from Hadrumetum, pretending that he drew his blood from the lineage of the Ceionii, you so exalted that you wished to have him as prince while I was prince, with my children safe. Was there lacking, I ask, in so great a senate one whom you ought to love, who would love you? His brother you raised with honours; from him you hope for consulships, from him praetorships, from him the insignia of any magistracy. You do not render me that gratitude which your ancestors showed against the Pisonian faction, and likewise on behalf of Trajan, and lately against Avidius Cassius. That feigned man, ready for every kind of lie, who lied even about his nobility, you preferred to me. Nay more, in the senate Statilius Corfulenus had to be heard, who proposed that honours be decreed to Albinus and his brother—to whom it remained only this, that a noble man should decree against me a triumph for that fellow. Greater was my grief that very many of you thought him to be praised as a man of letters, when he grew old, taken up with certain old-womanish trifles, among the Punic Milesian Tales of his Apuleius and literary frivolities." From this it appears with what severity he avenged either the Pescennian or the Clodian faction. All of which indeed is set down in his Life. Whoever wishes to know it more thoroughly, let him read, among Latin writers, Marius Maximus, and among Greek writers, Herodian, who have related most things faithfully.

He was tall in stature, with hair knotted back and curly, a broad forehead and marvellous whiteness, so that most think he took his name from it; with a womanish voice, almost approaching the sound of eunuchs; easy in movement, grave in anger, most gloomy in fury, varied in luxury—for often eager for wine, often abstaining; thoroughly versed in arms, so that he was not badly called the Catiline of his time. We believe it not amiss to set forth the causes by which Clodius Albinus earned the love of the senate. When he was governing the British armies by order of Commodus, and had learned—falsely, as yet—that Commodus had been killed, since the name of Caesar had been offered him by Commodus himself, he came forward before the soldiers and used this speech: "If the senate of the Roman people held that ancient power of its own, and so great a matter did not rest in the power of one man, the public destinies would not have come to the Vitellii nor the Neros nor the Domitians. Under consular rule were those families of ours, the Ceionii, the Albini, the Postumii, of whom your fathers—who themselves had heard from their grandfathers—learned much. And surely the senate joined Africa to the Roman empire; the senate subdued Gaul and the Spains; to the eastern peoples the senate gave laws; the senate attempted the Parthians, and would have subdued them, had not the fortune of the state then assigned so greedy a prince to the Roman army. Caesar subdued the Britains—a senator, to be sure, though not yet dictator. How much better this very Commodus would have been, had he feared the senate! And down to Nero indeed the authority of the senate held strong, which did not fear to condemn a base and impure prince, when sentences were pronounced against him who then held the power of life and death and the imperial command. Wherefore, comrades, I do not want the name of Caesar which Commodus offered me. May the gods grant that not even others should want it! Let the senate command, let it apportion the provinces, let the senate make us consuls. And why do I say the senate? You yourselves and your fathers—for you yourselves will be senators."

This speech, while Commodus was still alive, was reported to Rome, and it exasperated Commodus against Albinus, and he at once sent a successor, Junius Severus, one of his own companions. But it pleased the senate so much that they adorned him, though absent, with wondrous acclamations, both while Commodus lived and afterward when he was killed; so that some even urged Pertinax to take him as a colleague, and with Julianus his authority was of the greatest weight in the matter of killing Pertinax. And that this may be understood as true, I have inserted a letter of Commodus addressed to his prefects of the guard, by which he indicated his mind concerning the killing of Albinus: "Aurelius Commodus to his prefects, greeting. I believe you have heard, first, that it was a fiction that I had been killed by the design of my own people; then, of the speech of Clodius Albinus delivered before my soldiers, by which he commends himself greatly to the senate—and that, so far as we see, not in vain. For he who denies that there ought to be a single prince in the state, and who asserts that the whole state ought to be governed by the senate, seeks the empire for himself through the senate. Beware therefore most diligently; for now you know the man must be shunned by you soldiers and by the people." When Pertinax had found this letter, he was eager to publish it to bring Albinus into hatred. For this reason Albinus was the instigator to Julianus of the killing of Pertinax.