ABSTRACT
Secondary politicians who depend on an autocrat are as likely to be rivals as allies. A famous scenario of AD 48 presents three of Claudius’ leading freedmen, Narcissus, Callistus, and Pallas, promoting candidates in a contest to provide the emperor’s next wife – who would be duly grateful. Pallas won the argument, supporting Agrippina. His main rival Narcissus did not survive the death of Claudius by more than a few days.1 Domna accordingly had a foe whose importance was proportionate to her own, as well as allies, and lost influence in the middle years of Severus’ Principate because of the ascendancy that C. Fulvius Plautianus, sole Prefect of the Guard since 200, gained over his boyhood friend (lover, if we believe Herodian’s anonymous informants), a fellow native of Lepcis, a kinsman on the mother’s side; Severus’ maternal family shared his name. Among the protégés Plautianus took into service was a man who later held the same office of Prefect of the Guard: another man from north Africa, the Mauretanian Opellius Macrinus. Plautianus was already a trusted agent at the beginning of Severus’ rule in 193, though attested in office as Prefect of the Guard only by 1 January 197, then as a clarissimus uir, a man of senatorial rank, on 9 June. Plautianus had previously held the post of Prefect of the Watch, and before that seems to have fallen into disgrace with Pertinax when the future emperor was proconsul of Africa.2 Services to Severus won him positions of power, and he used those to acquire more. From 200 his rise seemed irresistible. Award of the consular ornaments was routine; they simply meant that, within the equestrian order, the holder was of a standing equivalent to that of a consular in the Senate; but in 203 he held the consulship itself, as Sejanus had held it with Tiberius in 31. To add to the distinction, the consulship was numbered ‘II’ as if it were the second time he had held it. The award of ornamenta was being treated as if it were equivalent to a substantive tenure of the consulship; only a second tenure now conferred much distinction. As a member of the Senate Plautianus was eligible for one of the two more distinguished priestly offices that senators monopolized: the pontificate, in the college of priests of which the emperor himself was chief as Pontifex Maximus. Plautianus was also awarded patrician status. His rise to power led, we are told, to the production of more statues of him than of the
emperor himself, and on a larger scale. This must have been one of the complaints against him, as it was noticed that Tiberius could see (evidently through others’ eyes, as he was a recluse on Capri) gilt portraits of his prefect Sejanus venerated everywhere.3 But Dio explicitly says that Plautianus’ power was greater than Sejanus’ had been. It is not surprising that a statue of Plautianus has been recognized in the ‘colossal image’ set up at Athens and placed alongside one of a Caesar, presumably Caracalla.4 Caracalla had multiple reasons for hating Plautianus: such equations with himself and fears for his own future might have been aggravated by anger on his mother’s account, especially if he had heard the tale of Plautianus’ earlier relations with Severus.
