ABSTRACT
Domna’s elder sister Julia Maesa married before her and it is worth comparing the two husbands. Maesa was given to a man apparently connected with the dynastic family of Emesa, and so with its presumed descendants. Julius Avitus, who is also called Alexianus by Herodian, is named by the literary sources as her husband, and he has been plausibly identified with C. Julius Avitus Alexianus, who is known from two inscriptions.1 C. Iulius Avitus Alexianus began his career as the equestrian prefect of an auxiliary unit originally from Petra and stationed in Syria, and his equestrian career carried him only as far as the junior procuratorship of the grain supply at Ostia. He was clearly brought into the Senate by Severus in 193: being allowed to omit the junior ranks, he held the praetorship, then commanded the Upper Moesian legion IV Flavia, and probably during the war against Albinus, in 196, served as governor of Raetia. He became consul in about 200; in 208 he went with the imperial party to Britain in 208. While governing Raetia he dedicated an altar to ‘the’, or ‘his’, ‘ancestral Sun God Elagabalus’. Maesa’s husband looks like a man of worth in his town, one who was doing well in the junior ranks of the equestrian service – and who owed his further advancement primarily to the success of his sister-in-law’s husband. Their daughters married knights and continued in the Syrian network: Sohaemias married Sex. Varius Marcellus of Apameia, by whom she had several children, and Mamaea, in a second marriage, Gessius Marcianus of Arca.2
