Bust of Septimius Severus

In March of AD 193 the Praetorian Guard, the soldiers who protected the emperor in Rome, murdered the emperor Pertinax. Then, as the historian Cassius Dio tells it, they sold the throne to the highest bidder. On the Danube the legions of Septimius Severus, a general born at Leptis Magna in North Africa, proclaimed him emperor instead, and he marched on Rome. Within five years he had defeated two rival emperors and taken Ctesiphon, the capital of the Parthian empire.

The museum dates this bust to around 200, with those wars just behind him, and it shows him as a soldier, in a cuirass with a cloak over it. Three locks fall over his forehead, the mark of a variant of his third portrait type.

The bust was carved in one piece with its base, and the head was made separately and set into it. On the base his name is inscribed, Septimius Severus.