[Severus,] the emperor of the Romans, sent men to besiege Byzantium; for the generals of Niger[1] who had fled were still there. This place was later captured by starvation, and the whole city was razed to the ground; Byzantium lost her theatres and baths, all her ornament and honor, and it was given as a subject village to the Perinthians [2], just as Antioch was given to the Laodiceans.[3]
It was forbidden that the soldiers sleep with women, but Severus permitted this and lavishly presented them with gold rings.
Severus came to Byzantium, but, when he saw the citizens with olive branches praising him and asking for salvation and providing excuses for their conduct, he refrained from slaughter, but he again subjected them to the Perinthians and furnished the colonnades for a theatre and a hunting ground, and he built the hippodrome and decorated it with ships' half-decks and beaks. He bought houses and gardens from some orphaned brothers, and, after cutting through the trees which stood around the hippodrome, he outfitted it as the arrangement looks now -- joining to it a bath in the sanctuary of Zeus which was called Zeuxippus, and he also renovated the so-called Strategium. While Severus first began all these things, yet it was his son Antoninus[4] who brought them to completion.
Severus went to Alexandria and found an inscription on the gate "the city of the lord Niger", but, while he was upset at this, the commons of the Alexandrians met him and cried out "We know we said 'the city of the lord Niger’; this was because you are the lord of Niger." And he accepted their prompt excuse and acquiesced to them.[5]