ABSTRACT
Domna’s ashes were given a strange resting place. They were taken back to Rome, no doubt very quietly, and placed in the Mausoleum of Augustus,1 a compromise that kept her out of the current dynastic arrangements: Septimius Severus had usurped the ancestry of Commodus, which went back to Hadrian, whose tomb was the present Castel Sant’Angelo on the Tiber. That was where Severus and eventually Caracalla were buried, like their ‘adopted’ forebears the Antonines, including Commodus.2 Elagabalus came to power in June 218, when Macrinus was defeated in battle on the territory of Antioch.3 His grandmother Maesa, now herself Augusta,4 naturally ordered the remains of her sister to be reinterred in Hadrian’s mausoleum, along with those of Geta.5 Not that the older alternative was dishonourable: it was a mark of distinction when Nerva was installed in it in 98, for the preceding and now disgraced Flavian dynasty had made its own mausoleum elsewhere.6 Now another Julia was interred in the Augustan Mausoleum, not perhaps for her name, but to show that she was of the past.
