Note: This article is from the Guardian.

This article titled “How Gaddafi toppled a Roman emperor” was written by Charlotte Higgins, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 28th November 2011 11.29 UTC

Lucius Septimius Severus: no, he didn’t kill Dumbledore. Septimius Severus was Roman emperor from AD 193-211. (And JK Rowling studied classics joint honours at Exeter University, so that’s where she’ll have got the names.)

Septimius Severus was Libyan. Tripoli, when you come to think about it, has a nice Greek ring to it, and indeed means “three cities” – ancient Tripolitania consisting of Sabratha, Oea and Lepcis Magna. His legacy in Tripolitania was a massive rebuilding of Lepcis Magna – a vast new city centre with all the trimmings of theatre, basilica, forum and temple. On Saturday, at a study day run by the Association for Roman Archaeology and the Roman Society at the British Museum, Dr Philip Kenrick described fascinatingly how this grandiose scheme seems never have been properly completed. In the massive basilica, with its columns of Aswan granite, the mouldings on the column bases had been rounded off and polished – but only on the side facing outwards into the nave. The parts facing the aisles remain to this day rough and angular, unfinished. Kenrick said he liked to imagine a deadline having been set for the official opening – and overworked artisans being ordered to get the important, really visible bits done, and just leave the rest.

Also at the event was Dr Hafed Walda, a Libyan scholar based at King’s College, London, who welcomed the audience “on behalf of the new government”. He was able to confirm that the extraordinary archaeological sites around Lepcis and Sabratha had survived the recent conflict unscathed. And he spoke about Gaddafi’s relationship with Severus. For years, said Walda, an antique bronze statue of the emperor had stood in Green Square, now Martyrs’ Square. “It witnessed all the major events there from the era of the kings, to the Italian period, to the Gaddafi period,” he said. In the late 1970s, as things got tougher under the dictator, the statue started to get used as a way of cloaking and depersonalising subversion. “Septimius Severus became the mouthpiece for opposition,” explained Walda. “People would ask each other, ‘What’s Septimius Severus saying today? So Gaddafi decided to topple him.” The statue was duly removed from Green Square. Later, in the 1990s, the archaeological authorities decided to reinstate the statue but in a new location at the site at Lepcis. “In 1993 there was a fancy opening, and Gaddafi was invited, but he refused. His aides said, ‘No wonder – he sees Septimius Severus as a rival.’ “

Septimius Severus is a figure in British history: having grasped the purple after his defeat at Lyon of the governor of Britain, Clodius Albinus, and having fought off trouble in Parthia (modern Iraq), he spent the last three years of his life in Britain with his imperial retinue including his Syrian wife Julia Domna and his sons Caracalla and Geta. The Roman empire, then, was briefly run from York (there’s a very impressive tower forward of the city walls, now in the gardens of the Yorkshire Museum, which is thought to date from this period).

Severus undertook campaigns in Scotland; traces of a line of marching camps right up into Perthshire, probably used during the Severan expeditions, can still be seen, and little lead seals depicting the imperial family have been found at the fort at Arbeia, modern South Shields, suggestive of its use as a supply base. Hadrian’s wall was also renovated at this time – such that for some time antiquarians believed that he had built it. Unusually, there is in existence a painting of the imperial family – a wooden tondo depicting Severus with Julia Domna and their sons. Geta’s face has been rubbed out, a process known as “damnatio memoriae”, attesting to the fact that Caracalla murdered his brother after a brief period of joint rule after the death of their father. (Roman “damnatio memoriae” meant removing every public mention or depiction of a discredited leader. There are plenty of Roman inscriptions in Britain where the word “Geta” has been rubbed out.)

There were great talks on Saturday too from Nick Hodgson from Tyne and Wear Museums and from Fraser Hunter of the National Museums of Scotland, who was brilliant on the Roman finds from an Iron Age settlement up near Elgin. But that’s for another day. And full disclosure: I’m on the council of the brilliant Roman Society.

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