IN THE DAYS OF ELAGABALUS  
THE fates were now preparing as strange a revolution, and bringing upon the Imperial stage as grotesque a figure, as any that have yet come under our notice. Three women—the sister and the nieces of Julia Domna—are the engineers of this revolution, and, clothed with the Imperial dignity, control the fortunes of Rome in the extraordinary period that followed it. But before we introduce the tragi-comic figure of Elagabalus, we must clear the stage of the temporary Emperor and his faint shadow of an Empress.
 
Opilius Macrinus was a weak, vain, and unimpressive old man. Accident had put the Empire within his reach. He timidly grasped it because no other offered to do so, and held it until another desired it. He was in his fifty-third year, a man of obscure African origin, an adventurer in the public service. He was married to Nonia Celsa, of whom we know only that her qualities were not generally believed to include the possession of virtue. Their son Diadumenianus was a tall and handsome youth, with black eyes and curly yellow hair. When his father made him C?sar, and he donned a purple robe, the spectators are said to have melted with affection. He lived long enough to show, by urging his parents to deal more drastically with rebels, that his heart was not so tender as his pretty looks had suggested.
“How happy and fortunate we are,” Macrinus wrote to his family, when his accession was secured. In little211 more than a year he would be flying over the hills of Asia Minor, and he and his handsome boy would be cruelly put to death. He set out at once, with great display, against the unruly Parthians. But he soon purchased an ignoble peace from them, and repaired to the banquets and pleasures of Antioch. Anxious as he was about his position, he made the fatal error of keeping the troops in camp, and there soon passed from legion to legion an ominous murmur. The soldiers contrasted his luxury with Caracalla’s sharing of their march and their cheese, and chafed under the discipline he rightly sought to enforce. The rumour spread, too, that Macrinus had given offence to the Senate; and that a mule had borne a mule at Rome, and a sow had given birth to a little pig with two heads and eight feet. The apparition of a comet and an eclipse of the sun made it yet more certain that something was going to happen, and confirmed those who were preparing the event. In the month of May Macrinus heard that a boy of fourteen, supported by three women and a eunuch, had claimed the throne, and seduced some troops. He sent a general, with a moderate force, to bring him the boy’s head. In a week or two a messenger returned with a head—his general’s head. He roused himself from the drowsy luxury of Antioch, and set out with his army.
The three women were, as I have said, Julia M?sa, sister of Julia Domna, and her daughters, So?mias and Mam?a. At the death of Julia Domna they had retired to the ancestral home at Emesa, in Syria, but with a very considerable fortune, which M?sa had gathered at the court of Severus and Caracalla. The two daughters seem to have lost their husbands, though each had a son. So?mias had a child of fourteen years, named Varius Avitus Bassianus, a strikingly pretty boy.17 His cousin212 Alexianus was three or four years younger. Avitus was therefore clothed with the dignity of priest of the temple, which seems to have been hereditary, and the little group resumed the life they had quitted, twenty years before, to dwell in the Imperial court. M?sa, and probably So?mias, found this rustic tranquillity unendurable, and followed political events with interest. The one retained dreams of Imperial power, the other of Imperial indulgence. Their chief servant was a clever eunuch, Gannys by name, who is strangely described by Dio as “practically living with So?mias.” A geographical accident brought their vague dreams to a practical issue.
Near the little town of Emesa was a camp of the Roman soldiers. Cosmopolitan as they now were in race and religion, and fretting at their detention in the dull countryside, the soldiers took a close interest in the temple of the strange god. The great wealth and fame of the shrine, the peculiar nature of its deity and its ritual, often attracted them, and the knowledge that these rich and handsome women of the priestly family had been so closely connected with their popular Caracalla increased the interest. But the chief feature that drew their attention was the beauty of the young high-priest. The soft and feminine delicacy of his form and features was enhanced by a long robe of Imperial purple, fringed with gold, and a crown that flashed back the rays of the Syrian sun from its precious gems. The romance was not lessened when they reflected that the great Severus had often fondled this boy in his arms, and that he might have inherited the throne. The women, or their servants, now doubled the interest of the soldiers by insinuating a whisper that he was the son of their Caracalla, and when M?sa’s gold began to pass freely into their purses, they contrived to see a resemblance to the dark and repellent features of the late Emperor in the girlish beauty of the boy. So?mias had no difficulty in paying the poor price of her reputation for a return to court. Lampridius bluntly calls her a meretrix.
On the night of May 15th, 218, the three women and213 the two boys were transferred to the camp. M?sa’s fortune went with them, as the price of Empire, and on the following day the soldiers announced that Bassianus, as he was now called, was Emperor. The camp was fortified, and in a few days Macrinus’s general, Julianus, appeared before it with his troops. Their companions in the camp exhibited the young son of Caracalla on the rampart, and, as they exhibited also the bags of M?sa’s gold, they convinced and seduced the assailants. Julianus’s head was cut off, and sent to Antioch. Macrinus now marched against them, and the two armies met in the intervening country on June 8th. The softened troops wavered on both sides, and it looked as if Macrinus might win, when M?sa and So?mias sprang from their chariots in the rear of the army, rushed into the ranks, and spurred their flagging followers on to victory. Macrinus fled, in an ignominious disguise, across the hills and valleys of Asia Minor, and within a few weeks Nonia Celsa learned that she had lost her throne, her husband, and her boy. The Emperor of Rome was the pretty boy-priest of Elagabalus.
Imperial power, however, meant to the Syrian youth an unrestrained indulgence of his sensual dreams, not a grave concern with the affairs of a mighty people. He dallied in the East, and willingly left his duties to his grandmother, while he devoted himself entirely to his rights. He gathered about him the ignoble company of ministers to lust which the cities of Asia Minor were at all times ready to supply, and there was no depth or eccentricity of vice in Antioch or Nicomedia which he did not explore. Before the end of that year the boy’s nature was completely perverted, and the last trace of masculinity eliminated from it. M?sa was alarmed, for the cities of the East were wont to talk freely of the vices they implanted or cultivated in their visitors, and the sentiment of Rome could not be ignored. But Bassianus laughed at her timidity, and lingered throughout the following winter in the voluptuous chambers of Nicomedia. As to this Roman Senate, of which she spoke, he sent the214 grey-beards a painting of himself in his flowing sacerdotal robes and womanly jewels, to be placed over the altar of Victory in their meeting-place.
In the following spring he condescended to visit the capital of his Empire. Rome had received many a strange procession during the centuries of its Imperial expansion, but no spectacle had aroused so much curiosity as the arrival of the young monarch on whose picture the Senators had gazed with bewilderment. The original was even more extraordinary than the portrayal. For the entry into Rome the young priest-Emperor stained his cheeks with vermilion, and artfully enhanced the brilliance of his eyes, like a Syrian courtesan or an actress. He wore his loose robes of purple silk trimmed with gold, his delicate arms were encircled with costly bracelets and his white neck with a string of pearls, and a tiara of successive crowns, flashing with jewels, surmounted his strange figure. And, as the alternative and real power in administration, the Romans regarded with anxiety the two women who rode with him—the grave and dignified M?sa, and the richly sensuous and evil-famed So?mias. There is in the Vatican Museum a statue of the mother of Elagabalus as she appeared at this time. She has chosen to be portrayed in the costume, or lack of costume, of Venus; and the voluptuous body and soft round limbs, the low forehead, thick lips, and large nose, combined with the hard and shameless expression, reconcile us to the coarsest epithets the historians have attached to her memory.
 
JULIA M?SA
BUST IN THE CAPITOLINE MUSEUM, ROME
To the horror of the Senate this woman was at once associated with him in a character that no Empress, or no woman, had ever assumed in the long history of Rome. At his first visit to the Senate the Emperor demanded that she should be invited to sit by his side and listen to their deliberations. Even Livia had been content to listen behind the decent shade of a curtain. So?mias, however, had not the wit or seriousness to interfere in any way. She was appointed president of the Senaculum, or “Little Senate,” of women, which Sabina had founded, and Julia restored,215 in the Forum of Trajan; and she found an easier and more congenial occupation in controlling the grave deliberations of the matrons of Rome on questions of etiquette, precedence, costume, and jewellery. It was left to M?sa to wield the political power, and she did so with sobriety and judgment. Unhappily, the Emperor was more willing to listen to the easier counsels of his mother than to M?sa, and he began at once to entertain or disgust Rome with the appalling license which makes his short reign an indescribable nightmare.
He had brought from Emesa the celestial stone, the emblem of Ela-gabal, to which all his prosperity was due, and his first care was to provide the god with a worthy home. A magnificent temple was raised to it, and the stone, encrusted with gems, was borne to it on a chariot drawn by six white horses, the Emperor walking backwards before it in an ecstasy of adoration. In the temple a number of altars were set up, and rivers of blood—even the blood of children—were poured out on them; while the Emperor and his family croned the barbaric chants of primitive Syria, and the highest dignitaries of Rome stood in silent respect. As the earlier officials were soon replaced by men of infamy, chosen, very frequently, on a qualification that one may not describe, we need pay little attention to their feelings. If we suppose that the Emperor, or Elagabalus, as he now called himself, was aware that the conical stone was really a phallic emblem, we may find a clue to some of the stranger vagaries of his erotomania.
Rome had long been accustomed to the barbarism of the more ancient Oriental cults, and had indeed taken a willing part in the orgiastic processions of the mysterious Mother of the Gods, whenever their rulers permitted them. But the security of the Empire seemed to them in danger when Elagabalus went on to place eve............