Rome’s first African emperor, Septimius Severus, was renowned during his reign (193-211 AD) for the mass killings of his rivals (ruthlessness even by ancient standards); for his genocide against the Scots (a rare recourse, despite Rome’s bad reputation as imperialists); and his budget-stretching generosity to his soldiers. He had an unusually glamorous Syrian wife, Julia Domna, who indulged her pet philosophers and her husband’s superstitions while setting a hairstyle trend. He had women Christians thrown to wild animals. His two sons, Caracalla and Geta, notoriously hated each other. The Roman empire ran economically while Severus was alive (with many old buildings repaired and renamed, as though Severus had built them) but collapsed into a century of chaos a few decades after his death. Simon Elliott, a military writer of books on Roman Britain, accentuates the positive where he can.

Septimius Severus killed senators on a scale that Nero had never come close to matching

Severus’s African birthplace did not in itself make him an unusual choice as emperor. Roman Libya was as Roman at the end of the 2nd century as Roman Greece or Gaul – and through the........

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