Severus Proclaimed Emperor and Purges the Praetorian Guard

The year 193 opened with a sale. After murdering Pertinax, the Praetorian Guard auctioned the throne inside their camp on the edge of the Forum, handing it to the highest bidder, Didius Julianus. Rome’s elites muttered; the streets seethed. On the Danube, where spears solved what speeches could not, a commander from Lepcis Magna moved. Septimius Severus, governor of Pannonia Superior with two campaigning sons at his side, took the oath of his legions and the risk of civil war [2][8].

He marched fast. Across the stone span at Sirmium, down the long line of the Via Flaminia, banners snapping and boots drumming like a war drum in steady time. The Senate, sensing which way the bronze windsock turned, condemned Julianus. Severus entered Rome in a soldier’s cloak, not a senator’s toga, and went straight to the barracks that had turned imperial power into a market stall [1][2].

Cassius Dio, who sat in the Senate and watched the age harden, gives the line that matters: Severus “inflicted the death penalty on the Pretorians” responsible for the sale and drove the rest out of the city [2]. The executions were public theater—cold steel and shouted orders echoing against the travertine walls of the Castra Praetoria. The color that day was the dark crimson of the standards; the sound was the groan of iron gates opening, then closing on a guard that had ruled emperors.

Then he rebuilt. He refounded the Praetorian Guard from his Danubian veterans, men who owed rank and pay to Severus, not to Roman intrigue. He disarmed the old cohort at the city gates and posted his loyalists in their place. Senators who had cheered the end of the auction now understood that the buyer was the army itself [2][1].

Severus did not pretend otherwise. He reassured the Senate with courtesies and kept the machinery of laws grinding, but policy moved with military logic. He scheduled donatives, promised wages, and began to elevate equestrians in key posts, a shift that would accelerate after his victory over rivals in Gaul and Syria [5][12]. The Principate, once masked as a partnership with the Senate, dropped its veil.

Control of the city did not yet mean control of the empire. In Antioch, Pescennius Niger, governor of Syria, raised banners; in Gaul, Clodius Albinus watched and waited. But the center had been retaken by an African-born general who trusted camp discipline more than curial decorum. Rome had heard the ring of shield rims. The next sounds would come from Issus and Lugdunum.