A Roman emperor who appears on numerous lists of “black Britons” was not black.
Lucius Septimius Severus died on campaign in Britain in 211AD, and has also been named in overviews of “black British history” distributed by councils, teaching colleges, and children’s publishers, despite the emperor being of Middle Eastern and Italian descent.
The suggestion that Severus had black ancestry has been widely repeated, and the Museum of Cambridge this month hosted “Black History Lectures” that included a talk on the ancient ruler.
Last year, the Museum of London created a timeline outlining “Black Londoners through time”, which included the emperor.
Severus was also included on the front cover of a 2022 Puffin children’s book by This Morning presenter Alison Hammond, called Black In Time, which was billed as a history of “the most awesome black Britons”.
Some depictions of the emperor appear to encourage the confusion by showing him with dark skin, compared to the women alongside him.
However, this is typical of Roman portraiture, as tanned skin was considered a sign of masculine outdoor activity and vigour in the ancient world, contrasted to women who would stay indoors, and therefore were depicted as pale.
Local authorities have produced similar material, and Hammersmith and Fulham council has created a timeline of black British history that includes the emperor as its first entry.
These materials do not elaborate on him being a black man but instead qualify his identity as “African”, because he was born in a city on the coast of north Africa called Leptis Magna, now a Unesco site.
Mistake made in US
On the streaming service BBC Select, a documentary on Severus was included in a range of programmes for Black History Month 2023, which takes “a contemporary look at black history” and “celebrates icons from the past and present”.
It is understood the inclusion of the emperor on the BBC Select site was a mistake made during Black History Month in the US, and the programme has now been removed from the listings.
Others have made firmer claims to his ancestry, including Sheffield teacher training college the SCITT, which, in online guidance, published following Black Lives Matter protests asked: “Why don’t we teach our students about Septimius Severus, the black Roman emperor?”
In online learning resources for the Black Lives Matter-inspired charity Anti-Racist Cumbria, Severus is also included, along with the claim that he is “widely believed by historians to have been a black man”.
The ruler was born in the Roman city of Leptis Magna on the coast of what is Libya, and the emperor’s connection to Britain lies in the fact that he died near York in 211AD during a military campaign, ending a reign that began in 193AD.
His mother was of Roman descent, and his father’s ancestry was Carthaginian, a Semitic people with origins in the Middle East.
The ancient biographical collection Historia Augustus explains that Severus was disturbed by the sight of a black person on one occasion, taking his “ominous colour” as a bad omen while on campaign.
‘Silly and patronising’
The inclusion of the emperor in a range of educational material claiming him as a “black Briton”, despite the reality of his ancestry, has been criticised as being “patronising” for black people in the UK
Cambridge historian Prof Robert Tombs said: “Pretending that Britain had a centuries-old black population is silly and rather patronising.
“Apart from tiny numbers, our black population dates overwhelmingly from the last few decades. Why be ashamed of this? Claiming otherwise leads to embarrassing mistakes, as in the recent removal of a plaque to the ‘first black British woman’, who turned out to be from the eastern Mediterranean.
“For the Romans, ‘Africa’ was North Africa, before the arrival of the Arabs, and part of the Graeco-Roman world. Hence, the emperor Septimius Severus was an ‘African’ of Phoenician and Italian descent.”
Fellow historian Zareer Masani said: “The attempt to claim past figures as black is pathetic and unhistorical, referring to a time when the concept of racial identity was non-existent.”
The BBC and others have been contacted for comment.
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