A Cyclopaedia of Female Biography/Julia Domina
JULIA DOMINA
Was the daughter of a noble Phoenician, a high priest of the temple of the sun, at Emesa. Nature had blessed her with great intellectual and personal endowments; and the high gifts of beauty wit, imagination, and discernment, were augmented by all the advantages of study and education. She is said to have been well acquainted with history, moral philosophy, geometry, and other sciences, which she cultivated through life; and her mental accomplishments won her the friendship of all the most distinguished among the learned in Rome, "where," says one of her modern historians, "elle vint, dans I'intention de faire fortune, et y reussit."
From the time of her union with Severus, (twenty years before his elevation to the throne,) he almost always adopted her counsels, and mainly owed to them that high reputation with his army, which induced his troops in Illyria to proclaim him emperor. Although Julia Domina has been accused, by the scandal of ancient history, of gallantly in her early days, (the common accusation of the compilers of anecdotes, who pass for historians,) all writers acknowledge that the follies of her youth were effaced by the virtues and the genius which glorified her maturity; and that, when seated on the throne of the empire, she surrounded it by whatever the declining literature and science of the day still preserved of the wise, able, and eminent.
Her husband esteemed her genius, and consulted her up<m all affairs; and she, in some measure, governed during the reign of her sons, though she had the misfortune of seeing one slain by his execrable brother, whose excesses she inwardly murmured at, when she dared not openly condemn.
To the last hour of her son's life, Julia Domina, who had accompanied him to the East, administered all that was moral or intellectual in the government of the empire; and the respectful civility of the usurper Macrinus to the widow of Severus, might have flattered her with the hope of an honourable if not a happy old age, in the society of the lettered and the scientific, whom to the last she served and protected.
But the heart, if not the spirit of this great woman, and most unfortunate of mothers, was broken. "She had experienced all the vicissitudes of fortune. From an humble station she had been raised to greatness, only to taste the superior bitterness of an exalted rank. She was doomed to weep over the death of one of her sons, and over the life of another. The terrible death of Caracalla, though her good sense must have long taught her to expect it, awakened the feelings of a mother and an empress. She descended with a painful struggle into the condition of a subject, and soon withdrew herself, by a voluntary death, from an anxious and a humiliating dependence." She refused all food, and died of starvation, some say of poison, A.D. 217.