Carinus Numerius
250 – 285 · Generation XV · Western emperor (r. AD 283–285) · The Third Century
Carinus (AD 250 – AD 285). Western emperor (r. AD 283–285). The last emperor before Diocletian’s new order; betrayed by his own officers at the Margus. Left to govern the West while his father and brother marched against Persia, he began creditably, suppressing unrest in Gaul and fighting the Quadi, before handing the Rhine defences to legates and settling in Rome — where he later staged the annual Ludi Romani on a scale never seen before. The surviving accounts blacken him: nine wives married and divorced, the Senate treated with open contempt, old slights avenged — but all of it comes down through hostile channels, shaped by Diocletian, the rival who destroyed him, and the untrustworthy Historia Augusta. Marching east to face that rival after Numerian’s death, he overthrew the usurper Sabinus Julianus in Pannonia on the way. Rome afterwards erased him formally: under the damnatio memoriae his name and his wife’s were chiselled from the inscriptions.
One of 11 people of The Third Century (159–285) in this archive. Not one house but several short ones, in the fifty years the empire nearly came apart.
Parents
- Carus Numerius (222 – 283)
Siblings
- Numerian Numerius (253 – 284)