A MEDITERRANEAN EMPIRE 29the inland town of Hadrianoutherae, Aristides’ birthplace) are of particular
signifi cance.^21 He was a senator, a member of the Roman governing class; he
lived right at the end of our period and might therefore have been expected
to refl ect two centuries of social transformation in the frontier regions. We
might note in passing his total ignorance of the geography of Britain, the
scene of a war waged by Septimius Severus in 208–11 (76.12.5; cf. 39.50.2),
and his curiously selective ethnography, which is entirely devoted to the wild
and colourful Caledonians and Macatae against whom the military effort
was directed. Only the barest recognition is afforded the non- hostile, even
friendly, province of Britain from which Severus launched his expedition
(76.12.1–13.4). But it is Dio’s treatment of the Pannonians that deserves the
closest scrutiny. Dio had served as legate of the Danubian province of Upper
Pannonia and therefore, as he himself insists, was writing from knowledge
(49.36.4). The Danubian army constituted the largest concentration of
frontier troops in the empire, about ten legions plus auxiliary regiments. In
unstable times this army was a potent political force. In 193 Septimius
Severus held Upper Pannonia as governor and was carried to power on the
backs of the Danubian legions. Before long, the army, which drew its recruits
from the region, would promote men of local origin who had risen through
the ranks. Maximinus, a huge and heroic soldier from the province of Lower
Moesia who replaced the last of the Severans, Severus Alexander, was merely
the fi rst of a series of Balkan emperors culminating in the great conservative
reformer Diocletian.
Cassius Dio has nothing to say of the consulship (in about 187) or earlier
career of Maximianus the soldier from Ptuj or its implications for the future,
though he is interested in the irregular progress of one Aelius Triccianus. If
Dio’s account of his career is complete, this rank- and-fi le soldier in the
Pannonian army became in succession doorkeeper of the legate of Pannonia,
prefect of one of the new Parthian legions (under Caracalla, AD 198–217),
prefect of the legion stationed on the Alban mount (under the short- lived
emperor Macrinus, in AD 217–18), senator by special adlection, and governor
of Pannonia Inferior before his death by order of the emperor Elagabalus
(218–22). Dio brands him an upstart and implies that his promotion had
attracted criticism. But something is said in his favour: he died because he had
annoyed the men of the Alban legion with the strictness of his discipline.^22
About ten years later ex- legionary soldiers were baying for the blood of
another ex- governor of a Pannonian province for precisely the same reason
(the same words are used). The man concerned – it was Dio himself – after
having served as consul for the second time in AD 229, abandoned Rome and
Italy forever for his native province on the advice of an emperor, Severus
Alexander, who could honour but not protect him (80.4.2ff.). The threat came
from the soldiers of the praetorian guard, who had once been men from Italy,
Spain, Macedonia and Noricum ‘of rather respectable appearance and simple
habits’ but, since the triumphant entry of Septimius Severus into the city in
193, had become Danubians ‘most savage in appearance, most terrifying in