Bassianus
2. A Phoenician of humble extraction, who nevertheless numbered among his lineal descendants, in the three generations which followed immediately after him, four emperors and four Augustae, -- Caracalla, Geta, Elagabalus, Alexander Severus, Julia Domna, Julia Maesa, Julia Soemias, and Julia Mamaea, besides having an emperor (Sept. Severus) for his son-in-law. From him Caracalla, Elagabalus, and Alexander Severus all bore the name of Bassianus; and we find his grand-daughter Julia Soemias entitled Bassiana in a remarkable bilingual inscription discovered at Velitrae and published with a dissertation at Rome in 1765. (Aurelius Victor, Epit. 100.21, has preserved his name; and from an expression used by Dio Cassius, 78.24, with regard to Julia Domna, we infer his station in life. See also the genealogical table prefixed to the article CARACALLA.)
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.