ALEXANDER SEVERUS — 8th ed. (1853

ALEXANDER SEVERUS, a Roman emperor who reigned

from A.D. 222 till A.D. 235. He was born about A.D. 205, in Alexandria, Phoenicia, being the son of Julia Mammaea, by her husband Gessius Marcianus, a Syrian, or, according to others, by Caracalla. When his cousin Elagabalus was raised to the imperial throne, he accompanied him to Rome, where after some time he was adopted by his cousin, and elevated to the rank of Caesar. On his adoption by Elagabalus he received the name Alexander (he had before been called Bassianus), to which subsequently that of Severus was added. As the young Caesar refused to take part in the brutal amusements of the emperor, he drew upon himself hatred and persecution, which were only increased by the circumstance that he was a favourite with the soldiers. This gave rise to more than one outbreak among the praetorians, who in March 222, murdered Elagabalus and raised Alexander Severus to the throne. The senate and people readily acquiesced in this decision of the praetorian guards, and conferred upon the new emperor the highest titles and honours. He had been carefully educated by his mother and Miesa his grandmother, who had procured for him the ablest instructors of the time. While on the throne he was guided by the counsels of these two ladies, and was ever ready to listen to the advice of men of wisdom and experience, among whom we find the illustrious lawyers Ulpian and Paulus. It was on the suggestion of his mother that Alexander excluded women from the senate, and formed a privy-council of sixteen of the wisest and most virtuous senators, of which Ulpian became the president. Notwithstanding her jealousy and some disposition to cruelty, Mammaea exercised a most salutary influence over the emperor and the affairs of the empire. Alexander himself was not wanting either in ability or in zeal: he devoted the greater part of the day to public business; and in his leisure hours refreshed himself by the study of Virgil, Horace, Plato, and Cicero. He did away with the superstitious abominations which had been introduced at Rome by his predecessor, but at the same time appears to have had a peculiar religion of his own, for we are informed that in the chapel of his palace (the Lararium) he paid divine honours to Abraham, Orpheus, Apollonius of Tyana, and Jesus Christ, of all of whom images were set up there. His reign is indeed praised on account of his great mildness, but at the same time he always allowed the law to take its course unimpeded, and endeavoured by all means to check the immorality which pervaded all classes. His attempts, however, to reform the legions and praetorians were unsuccessful; and as the latter regarded the wise Ulpian as the author of the measures adopted by the emperor, they mutinied and compelled Alexander to give up that most faithful friend and adviser to be murdered before his own eyes, in A.D. 228. In the mean time commotions had taken place in Asia, where the empire of the Parthians and the kingdom of the Arsacidae had been overturned by the Persians. The conquerors, under their king Artaxerxes, even marched across the frontiers of the Roman empire, in consequence of which Alexander was obliged, in A.D. 232, to undertake an expedition against the Persians. According to some accounts he was successful, while according to others the whole undertaking was not carried out in a very creditable manner. It is certain, however, that the Persians after this time for some years abstained from making inroads into the Roman dominion. On his return from Asia, Alexander found that the northern barbarians were threatening the frontier in another part. He accordingly hastened to the Rhine. While he was there encamped in a place called Sicilia, the soldiers, instigated by their commander Maximinus, murdered both him and his mother, and proclaimed the Thracian Maximinus his successor, A.D. 235. Compare Gibbon, chap. vi.; Niebuhr, Lect. on Rom. Hist. iii. p. 273, fol. (L. 8.)

Alexander. ALEXANDER V., raised to the papal see in 1409, was born in the island of Candia, of parents so poor that he begged from door to door. He is praised by historians for the purity of his morals. He died at Bologna aged 70, after a pontificate of about ten months.

ALEXANDER VI., Pope, Rodrigo Lenzuoli, was born of a noble Spanish family at Valencia, in 1429, and assumed the name of Borgia, on the elevation of his maternal uncle, Calixtus III., to the chair of St Peter, who made Rodrigo a cardinal at the age of 25. His private life had always been a disgrace to his ecclesiastical profession; and before his election to the papacy, he had four natural children by Vanozza, his Roman mistress, who long possessed the chief place in his affections. That he was a man of talent has never been denied; but his open profligacy and contempt for decency even after he became pope, were such that his reign is compared by Gibbon to that of Tiberius in ancient Rome. While cardinal, he was employed in several important negotiations, during which he contrived to amass great wealth, and to lay the foundations of the future power of his family. On his return from one of these embassies to Spain and Portugal, he was shipwrecked, and was one of the few survivors of a catastrophe in which 180 persons perished; among whom were three bishops, and many other men of rank and learning. His wealth, unscrupulously used, enabled him to attain the papacy in 1492, on the demise of Innocent III.

We shall not dwell on the impurities and crimes that stained the court of Alexander, which the concurrent testimony of Italian writers, represent as flagitious in the highest degree; but give his character in the words of Guicciardini. "In Alexander VI. were singular degrees of prudence and sagacity, a sound understanding, a wonderful power of persuasion, and an incredible vigilance and dexterity in all he undertook. But these qualities were more than counterbalanced by his vices. In his manners he was most shameless; wholly divested of sincerity, of decency, and of truth; without fidelity, without religion; in his avarice immoderate; in his ambition insatiable; in his cruelty more than barbarous; with a passionate desire of elevating his numerous children by whatever means this could be accomplished." His pontificate was the signal for the recommendation of those troubles and jealousies among the Italian potentates that had slumbered for some time, and which paved the way for a succession of foreign oppressions under which fine country long groaned, commencing with the unprincipled irruption of the French King Charles VIII. "No sooner," says Roscoe, "was the new pontiff firmly seated in the chair of St Peter, than those jealousies, intrigues, and disputes among the potentates of Italy which had for some time ceased to agitate that country, began again to revive, and prepared the way not only for a long series of bloodshed and misery, but for events which overturned in a great degree the political fabric of Italy, and materially affected the rest of Europe." The pontificate of Alexander VI. must be considered, from the intrigues and crimes of him and his family, as disastrous and disgraceful to Italy. His violence and misrule for a while interrupted the progress of reviving literature, which had begun to spread from Italy as a centre over Europe.

The audacious villanies, however, of the pontiff's son Caesar Borgia, throw those of the father into the shade. The equivocal character of his only daughter Lucrezia, has found a chivalrous defender in the elegant historian of the Medici. (See Appendix I. Life of Leo. X.) Lucrezia was first married to Gio. Sforza, lord of Pesaro, but divorced from him by her father, who soon after united her to Alfonso of Aragon, a natural son of Alfonso II. of Naples; but two years afterwards her unfortunate husband was assassinated

before the great door of the church of St Peter, as is al-Alexander, leged with probability by the instrumentality of her brother Caesar, who is alleged also to have murdered his own brother Giovanni in the streets of Rome. In the following year, 1501, she was finally married to Alfonso d'Este, the son of the reigning Duke of Ferrara. From this time, whatever may have been her previous character, Lucrezia became the ornament of the court of Ferrara, the patroness of learning, and was entrusted by her husband with the principal administration of his affairs during his military expeditions, in which she acquitted herself with ability and dignity.

After a life of profligacy and crime, in which he had cut off the principal members of the Colonna, Orsini, and Savelli families, the noblest of the Roman nobility, and had concentrated wealth on his own family, Alexander died Aug. 18. 1503, in the 74th year of his age, by poison prepared by himself for the destruction of the cardinal of Corneto. (T.S.T.)

ALEXANDER VII., Pope. See CHOI.