If Pertinax managed to survive the Praetorians would he have been able to steer the Roman ship on a better course. He was competent in all aspects. At the very least Rome could avoid the awful Severan dynasty
If Pertinax managed to survive the Praetorians would he have been able to steer the Roman ship on a better course. He was competent in all aspects.
Newbie here. Who is he?
The emperor appointed by the senate immediately after Commodus was drowned in a bathtub for being le enfant terribles who took one look at the budget and nearly shit himself at just what a god awful mess Commodus had left, and the first thing he had to do was reign in military spending, but the military really didn’t like being told not to expect bloated bonuses and salaries any more, so the praetorians murdered him and auctioned the title of Emperor off to the highest bidder. But other figures in the millitary really didn’t like it so a general named Severus Alexander marched on the Praetorians, executed the hapless sap who won the Praetorian’s auction, and installed himself as a military dictator whose entire governing philosophy was “frick everyone but the military” and allowed Commodus’s actions to crystallize into permanent policy and essentially rigged society so that powerful generals could pilfer their local economies and build up a power base in order to make a play at imperial power.
Not helping matters was that after Trajan’s conquest of Dacia there really wasn’t any easily stealable sources of foreign wealth left in Europe for them to seize and as an economic stimulus to boost their flagging economy. Throw in crippling manpower shortages after repeated waves of pandemics, and you’ve got a massively unsustainable military machine with nobody left to make war on but their creditors, and the lid blew off the system after the failure of the Severan dynasty
> a general named Severus Alexander
I’m sorry, Septimius Severus. Severus Alexander was his pathetic momma-controlled puppet emperor of a grandson
See, this here is a prime example of why I never became a simp for Rome. It was a horror show of a society that was so bad people willingly sold themselves into slavery to make ends meet.
Only immature kids think there was anything redeeming about Rome. The fact their greatest philosopher ended up with his tongue cut out and his hands nailed to his own front door says it all, really. What a freak show.
>Cicero
>their greatest philosopher
Frick off, he lived to justify the crystalisation of the Optimates vices and corruption against the plebian classes. He supported the seizure of public land which supported a great number around Rome and brought a net profit to the state all so that he and his friends could send their slaves to farm them instead.
Good orator but a morally corrupt man. The true indictment of Rome is the murder of Caesar.
Caesar was an butthole too. Rome was doomed after what they did to the Gracchi.
>Not helping matters was that after Trajan’s conquest of Dacia there really wasn’t any easily stealable sources of foreign wealth left in Europe for them to seize and as an economic stimulus to boost their flagging economy
His Parthian War wasn't too bad, and his Garamantian Campaign went quite well, even taking their capital Garama and seizing some plunder, but yeah it was nothing compared to the wealth of Dacia. I wonder had he finished his Caledonian campaign, if the state's burdens in the area could be reduced.
>Who is he?
His pre-emperor career was impeccable. His short reign as emperor showed a man who knew what he was doing
>His short reign (87 days) was an uneasy one. He attempted to emulate the restrained practices of Marcus Aurelius and made an effort to reform the alimenta, but he faced antagonism from many quarters.
>Ancient writers detail how the Praetorian Guard expected a generous donative on his ascension, and when they were disappointed, agitated until he produced the money, selling off Commodus' property, including the concubines and youths Commodus kept for his sexual pleasures. He reformed the Roman currency dramatically, increasing the silver purity of the denarius from 74% to 87% – the actual silver weight increasing from 2.22 grams to 2.75 grams.
Pertinax attempted to impose stricter military discipline upon the pampered Praetorians. In early March he narrowly averted one conspiracy by a group to replace him with the consul Quintus Sosius Falco while he was in Ostia inspecting the arrangements for grain shipments. The plot was betrayed; Falco himself was pardoned but several of the officers behind the coup were executed.
On 28 March 193, Pertinax was at his palace when, according to the Historia Augusta, a contingent of some three hundred soldiers of the Praetorian Guard rushed the gates(two hundred according to Cassius Dio).Ancient sources suggest that they had received only half their promised pay. Neither the guards on duty nor the palace officials chose to resist them. Pertinax sent Laetus to meet them, but he chose to side with the insurgents instead and deserted the emperor.[29]
Although advised to flee, he then attempted to reason with them, and was almost successful before being struck down by one of the soldiers.[30] Pertinax must have been aware of the danger he faced by assuming the purple, for he refused to use imperial titles for either his wife or son, thereby protecting them from the aftermath of his own assassination
>He reformed the Roman currency dramatically, increasing the silver purity of the denarius from 74% to 87% – the actual silver weight increasing from 2.22 grams to 2.75 grams.
How does this battle inflation? Constantine did the same thing.
Well merchants and people arent stupid so when the silver content was decreased they simply hiked up the prices to make up for it. Eventually the currency became useless. A couple of decades pertinax it went down to a few percent. Roman currency became completely worthless. Diocletian tried to fight this by establishing new currency, introducing a barter system with how much each good was worth, and price controls. It had limited sucess but it was sucessful. Constantine expanded Diocletian's solidus empire wide and it became the new currency but it was a gold coin so it didnt really help the common man. Same situation applied to silver currency. It wasn't until the reign of Anathasius in the 6th century that the economy was finally fixed as he finally reintroduced bronze coinage.
one of the few emperors who understood inflations
Even if the Severans never came to power the empire was still headed for rough times. Rome never really recovered from the Antonine plague and Germanic migrations would't have halted. Without Severus' military dictatorship the myth of the Principate would have survived for longer and this might result in a more stable political situation, but I doubt it was possible to prevent the army from eventually seizing total political power. And although the third century crisis was a disaster, it did arguably pave the way for men like Gallienus, Aurelian, Diocletian and Constantine who realised that absolute monarchy was more or less the only way to prevent total collapse.
The Severans had awful policies though. They directly contributed to the crisis
Idiotic take
The severans military spending and donatives to the legions is what directly caused the economic crash and subsequent pretenders
>Aurelia
Overrated, merely finished the work that others had done. Probus could've gone down as one of the greats if army hadn't chimped out about having to plant trees. Honestly, I think in the end you can say that was Rome's biggest problem: the army became lazy, greedy and cared about nothing more than its own power. I think Rome could've survived if Alexander Severus hadn't wussed out against the Sassanids. A military victory against Ardashir would've probably restored some troop faith in him and maybe give him the confidence to start growing a spine. But it didn't happen and the military continued to see itself separate and above everything else and became the cancer tha eventually killed the WRE.
if he was competent on all fronts he wouldn't have been assassinated
There was nothing else he could if he actually wanted to fix Rome.
if he was competent he wouldn't have tried to tell the guys with swords in his house to pack it up and go home without getting paid he'd double crossed them when he wasn't in imminent danger of being killed.
He did pay them though. They just wanted more. He literally scraped together whatever he could to pay them which was about half of what they demanded. He had a crippled economy and an empty treasury. He was the urban prefect so thats all the armed support he had. He wasnt a general on the frontiers like other emperors of the year so he didnt have legions. If he forced the populace to pay the praetorians he would be dealingn with a revolt and even if he could pay them he still wouldnt be able fix the conomy since all the money he raised would simply go to the praetorians. Severus had an army so he could easily discharge all the praetorians after he won the civil war. Literally everyone else was fine with Pertinax being the emperor. Pertinax was in one of the worst positions an emperor could be in. Only Jovian and a few others had it worse
There's a concept the romans had already invented several centuries prior and it's called Credit, and no, Pertinax didn't try to write an IOU note he flatly told the praetorians to accept a pay cut and was apparently shocked when a knife ended up in his back. This is incompetence, Richard II wasn't even a particularly good king but as a fricking 14 year old he figured out how to diffuse these kind of situations.
>He thinks the Praetorians would have accepted an IOU
What part of the Roman economy being fricked and the imperial treasury being empty do you not understand? The Praetorians would have known about this since they were apart of the bureaucracy as well
And even then it wasn’t all of the praetorians it was just like a few hundred or so who jumped the gun when they confronted Pertinax and chimped out over a denied bonus, and as soon as Severus began marching his much more massive army on Rome did they realize the magnitude of how badly they fricked up by killing Pertinax and did everything they could in a desperate bid to keep Severus from crucifying the lot of them.
Pertinax sounds like he had a good head on his shoulders but he was in his mid sixties, so it's really.going to come down to how long he personally reigns and how he handles succession. And as others have noted it's unlikely he could have enacted policies to prevent the confederalising of tribes or kept the Sassanids out of power or adapt to the less stable climate as the Roman Warm Period ended. Some problems are bigger than one man.
The only reason Rome struggled with the Germans and Persians was because of the cancerous loop of even more army donatives->inflation->more donatives. This was the leading cause of the collapse of the roman economy.
Rome wouldn't have survived in the very long run, but Pertinax could potentially have brought the (relative) stability later achieved by Diocletian much earlier.
Rome had one problem though. The Roman legions (and Praetorian guard)
Septimius Severus is the worst emperor in Roman history and the fall of the west can be laid squarely at his feet. Commodus did a lot of bad but Severus crystallized it and his "enrich the soldiers and scorn all other men" motto metastasized into a malignant cancer that eventually killed Rome.
How the he did he manage to increase the purity of the coinage in only a few months?
>At the very least Rome could avoid the awful Severan dynasty
Septimius Severus was a strong Emperor who made a system which worked well for him, and his son.
His son Caracalla was somehow an even bigger frick up than Commodus
Why? He didn’t even do anything particularly bad. The only thing that a Wikipedia reader would know is his citizenship edict, which was the most important and influential legal document in all of Roman history
>He didn’t even do anything particularly bad
Massacre of Alexandria. Empting the imperial treasury. Forcing people to build things out of their own pockets only to tell them to knock the stuctures down and start over. Larping as a general and taking the army around to fight in meme wars. Caracalla was a subhuman. Rome was just lucky he had a 4 year reign
Why is this board only knowledgeable about the Romans and nothing else?
It’s a major part of western history and most people who browse this board are westerners.
But we can still summon up good threads about Three Kingdoms era China or the Sengoku period of Japan. Just avoid threads about the Middle East because it attracts Muslim shit posters and threads about Africa invariably attract racist shit posters
>But we can still summon up good threads about Three Kingdoms era China or the Sengoku period of Japan
delusional chink
Frick off, after Total War those are basically entry level subjects on Asian history for Westerners and are infinitely more interesting than having another autistic wankfest about the Holocaust or WW2 era tanks
Seethe more