Rome’s Praetorian Guard was the emperor’s household force, and on at least two occasions it ended an emperor’s reign. Its soldiers stabbed Caligula, and they eliminated Pertinax.
more
Where the Guard came from
The Guard began as the cohors praetoria, young men of good family who served as a bodyguard for Republican generals in the second century BC. It became a permanent force only after Augustus destroyed Mark Antony at the sea battle of Actium and made himself sole master of the Roman world.
The Guard’s reputation outlived Rome. Edward Gibbon called its “licentious fury” the first symptom and cause of the empire’s decline. The name still serves as an insult for a military that grabs politics for itself.
The bodyguards who killed Caligula
The Guardian’s account follows the imperial biographer Suetonius. Caligula liked to tease Cassius Chaerea, the chief of the Praetorian Guard. Chaerea eventually stabbed him in the neck, and other guards piled in until Caligula died of multiple stab wounds.
The guards then killed some of the assassins and various bystanders. The Guardian’s author argues that his unpredictability, not his cruelty alone, turned the men around him against him. At his death he was reportedly pondering high political office for his horse, Incitatus.
A new guard for a new dynasty
The BBC’s account of Septimius Severus describes the next turn. After the assassination of Commodus in 192 AD, the short-lived emperor Pertinax was elevated and then eliminated by the Praetorians.
Severus marched on Rome early in 193 AD, on the pretext of avenging Pertinax. He dissolved the Praetorian units and staffed a replacement guard with his own soldiers.
Severus did not hide the lesson. The BBC says every emperor knew that armed support kept him in power and that its loss left him easy to remove. Severus was the first to say so openly. He gave the army a pay rise, its first for many decades, and more privileges. On his deathbed in York in 211 AD, he told his sons to look after the soldiers and ignore everyone else.
