The Importance of Severus in the Empire

Severus reorganized the Praetorians into a force of some 50,000 cracked troops and in so doing altered their mandate from being the Emperor's personal bodyguard to being his personal army. Refusing to forget about the regular soldiers who would not be chosen to serve in the expanded Praetorians, Severus then nearly doubled the annual pay of all the men left out on the frontiers. In this he found himself once again paralleling Domitian, who you'll recall, used a similar wage increase to guarantee that an officer's call to revolt would always fall on deaf ears. The long-term effects of the rays though would be to further cleave the interests of civilian and