THE WIVES OF THE EMPEROR
This Antonine has been accused of building the Cloaca Maxima, into
which, a century later, all Rome rolled, largely on the grounds that he
divorced at least three wives, and was himself wife of the Chariot Driver
Hierocles, amongst others of his unusually numerous acquaintance.
The imputation of excavating in Rome cannot be attributed to Elagabalus
alone. Augustus had done a little digging there, but hypocritically, as
he did everything else, devising ethical laws as a cloak for turpitudes
of his own; Caligula had done the same, so had Nero, Hadrian, and
Caracalla. Maecenas divorced himself and remarried twenty times, as
both ceremonies were less expensive than they are to-day. Suetonius
said of Caligula that it was uncertain which was the vilest, the unions
he contracted, their brevity, or their cause. With such examples, it
was inevitable that ordinary people should unite but to part, and that
insensibly the law should annul as a caprice, a clause that defined
marriage as the inseparable life.
Under the Caesars, marriage became a temporary arrangement abandoned
and re-established at will. Seneca said that women of rank counted
their years by their husbands; Juvenal, that it was in such fashion
they counted their days. Paul, in a letter whose verbosity apes
philosophical phraseology, regarded the privileges of divorce as inherent
in the patriarchal theories of family life. Tertullian added, somewhat
sapiently, that divorce was the result of matrimony.
Divorce, however, was never obligatory, matrimony was. According to the
Lex Papia Poppoea, whoso at twenty-five was unmarried; whoso, divorced
or widowed, did not remarry; whoso, though married, was childless became
_ipso facto_ a public enemy.
To this law, as was obviously necessary, only a technical attention was
paid. Men married just enough to gain a position or inherit a legacy; the
next day they got a divorce. At the moment of need a child was adopted;
the moment passed, the child was disowned. As with men, so with women.
The Univira became the many-husbanded wife, occasionally a matron with
no husband at all; one who, to escape the consequences of the Lex Papia
Poppoea, hired a man to lend her his name, and who, with an establishment
of her own, was free to do as she liked; to imitate men at their worst;
to fight like them and with them for power; to dabble in the bloody drama
of state; to climb on the throne and kill there or be killed. The Empire
had liberated women from domestic tyranny, just as it had liberated men
from that of the state.
Such was the position of matrimony when, early in July 219, the Emperor
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus took to wife the Lady Julia Cornelia Paula,
of the well-known though by no means patrician family of Cornelia. Her
father was Julius Paulus, probably one of the most famous jurisconsults
and lawyers Rome has ever known. As father-in-law to an Emperor, his
position was doubtless, like that of Sylla, the father-in-law of
Caesar, somewhat heady. Unfortunately it impaired his usefulness to a
considerable degree. We learn from the editors of the _Prosopographia_
that there are only five decrees on subjects of jurisprudence which can
be definitely assigned to this reign, and from Lampridius that Paulus
was appointed to the presumably lucrative, though certainly uninspiring
office of usher to the young Alexander, on whose bovine intelligence he
could unfortunately make no impression. It is doubtless wrong to promote
relations to Court sinecures when they can be better and more usefully
employed in arduous work for the state, but it is a position to which
even the best of us aspire when fatigued with either a misspent or a
full-spent life.
According to Barrachinus, the family of Cornelia came from Padua;
Bertrand says they were from Tyro; and in Pignorius’ estimation they may
even have seen light in Rome. Julius and his daughter are the only two of
the family who have come into prominence. Unfortunately, we do not know
the date of the birth or death of either, nor the year in which Julius
began to climb; suffice it to say, that he had published many volumes
before the death of Septimius Severus, in whose council, according to
Digest xxix., he had a place. His first office seems to have been that
of Praetor, and thence by regular stages he climbed to that of Praefect
of Rome, finishing with the height of all ambition, the Praefecture of
the Praetorium, and as such he was a Senator of the Empire. Tristran—who
knew about as much of the lady personally as you or I can—has remarked
that Julia was beautiful. His taste is certainly not a modern one, as
her effigy represents her with a sharp beaky face, and a long scraggy
neck. This author, with some show of fairness, attempts to justify his
statement by a truism, namely, that the Emperor was such a connoisseur of
beauty that he would never have chosen a lady who had not this necessary
qualification. Precisely, but did Antonine choose the lady at all? The
probabilities are that she was well over thirty at the time of the
marriage, and that the Emperor had neither seen nor heard of her before
she was presented to him by his relations, on his arrival in Rome; in
fact, that this marriage was a political move by means of which the
official classes were closely allied with the imperial house.
We have already described the pomp and circumstance with which this
wedding was celebrated, the games, with their lavish waste of animal
life, amongst the rarest of known beasts, the congiary and donative. As
this is the sole mention of such splendour on the occasion of Antonine’s
committing matrimony, which holy estate he is said to have attempted six
times in two and a half years, it inclines us to the opinion that this
was his first experiment in that direction, especially as the evidence
of coins and medals is perfectly conclusive on this point. Tristran and
Serviez, however, place Annia Faustina as first wife, on Dion’s faulty
arrangement of the events at Nicomedia.
Cornelia Paula was, as we have said, a lady of some renown and position.
Serviez tells us that it was generally believed she had been married
before; was already, in fact, a mother of children; and Tristran adds,
enceinte by some one else at the time of the marriage. The Emperor’s
pretext for marrying her seems to lend support to this contention. It
was that he wished the sooner to provide an heir for the Empire, though,
as Dion says, he was not as yet a man himself. Since Cornelia had no
children by Antonine, and the reason of her divorce, as given publicly,
was a secret blemish in her body, which was only discovered after
about eighteen months of married concord, the presumptive evidence is
against Serviez’ theory; in fact, it presupposes sterility rather than
some corporal deformity, or even over-fruitfulness; and it, of course,
gives the lie to the gratuitous assumption of Tristran that the lady
was enceinte when Antonine married her. What amount of genuine feeling
existed between Julia Paula and her husband we cannot even surmise. From
a psychological point of view, one would be inclined to predicate very
little. The Emperor was too much wedded to his friends, was too feminine
in character to appreciate a wife, other than, as Lampridius says, “a
strumpet who could increase his knowledge of her art.” The family of
Julius Paulus rose to the height of power as soon as a daughter of his
house became Empress. Lampridius is not by any means definite as to the
date of Julius Paulus’ domination in the state; though it seems natural
to suppose that, when Eutychianus Comazon vacated the Praefectship of the
Praetorium in order to become Praefect of Rome (July 219), the Emperor’s
father-in-law was appointed in his room, and vacated this office either
at the time of his daughter’s divorce, or more probably at an earlier
date, _i.e._ when his official year expired in July 220.
The precise date of the divorce is unknown. As we have said, there are
coins struck at Alexandria with Julia’s effigy and inscription, after
29th August 220, and others at Tripolis in Phoenicia, after October in
that year. The most likely supposition is that Antonine divorced her
somewhere in the beginning of 221, after he had made up his mind to take
to wife the Vestal, Aquilia Severa, in accordance with his religious
scheme or ideal.
Julia Cornelia Paula is the only wife of Antonine mentioned in
inscriptions, and, as we hear nothing of her in any other way, it is
improbable that she had much importance at Court. Possibly she was found
to be of no use either to Antonine, Maesa, Soaemias, or Mamaea, each in
their separate ways, and as such was relegated to unimportant obscurity,
neglected as a cypher. Her coin types are equally unimportant. They make
reference to the Concordia which was supposed to exist between the
pair, and introduce the deities protective of matrimony. Her portraits
vary from those of a woman of sixty odd years to the representation of
a woman about thirty years old, which latter age is almost confirmed by
her so-called bust in the Borghese collection at the Louvre; but no known
author can really do more than guess at what this lady was as careful to
conceal as her less fortunate sisters.
Lampridius tries to leave one with the impression, that on the divorce
of this Augusta (the Senate had accorded the title at the time of the
marriage) Julius Paulus was banished. Unfortunately, he mentions him a
little later on as being tutor to Alexander (in the beginning of the
year 222). The inference is, of course, that Lampridius took the two
impressions from conflicting sources. In all probability the great
jurisconsult, having exchanged his position as Praefect of the Praetorium
for a Court sinecure as Alexander’s tutor, did not re-emerge into public
life until his thick-headed pupil was safely seated on the throne. Quite
what office he then occupied Pauly has not determined. It may have been
once again the Praefecture of the Praetorium, a position second only to
that of the Emperor himself, and one which carried with it practical
sovereignty, in the Tudor sense, only excepting the one element which
went to solidify Elizabethan greatness, the assumption of the powers,
dignities, and privileges of the ecclesiastical headship.
Julia Cornelia Paula, shorn of her title and position some time during
the winter of 220-221, retired into opulent privacy. No sane person
would, at that time, have pitied Julia’s lot, unless it were because she
was no longer enjoying the position of Empress. Even in mediaeval times,
when divorce was an ecclesiastical privilege, and in consequence most
costly, it was not regarded as an unmixed evil. Of course, it was rare,
and, being ecclesiastical, carried a certain stigma with it. Furthermore,
as we have said, it was a privilege for which there was not the same need
as in times of women’s greater freedom. No one who, like the mediaeval
husband, had canonical permission to beat his wife when she annoyed him,
stood in vital need of dissolving the bond, (_vide_ Beaumanoir, lvii.:
“Tout mari peut battre sa femme pourvu que ce soit modérément, et sans
que mort s’ensuive”). During the epoch in question, it was the most usual
and ordinary circumstance of daily life. It was continued interest in,
not satiety with, the charms of your spouse that created wonder in old
Rome; suffice it to say, that Julia retired, a woman with a past, and the
knowledge, that if she had her wits about her, there was a considerable
future to look forward to. No one expressed regret at her going, so in
all probability Maesa was agreeable, though we can scarcely think that
the old lady knew of the scheme which her grandson was concocting when
she allowed the mistake to be made without an effort to stop his headlong
swoop to ruin; a flight which would certainly involve the whole family on
its way, unless they could dissociate themselves from the new religious
policy which dictated it.
Probably along with predilection Antonine had seen and admired a lady,
whom Dion describes, or makes Antonine describe, as Chief Priestess of
Vesta. With this designation Preuner emphatically disagrees, accounting
for the ἀρχιέρεια on the grounds that she officiated in the chief worship
of Rome, not that she herself was the chief priestess. It was in the
early months of the year 221 that Antonine, having seconded Julia Paula,
took from her nunnery the Vestal Aquilia Severa, thereby thoroughly
shocking the susceptible. We have already discussed the reasons for this
act of folly. From a religious point of view there was much to be said by
the Emperor, and undoubtedly he said it. From an aesthetic standpoint it
was a mistake. There are still in existence a certain number of coins and
medals which bear her effigy; these give her the appearance of a sinister
and rather evil-looking woman, utterly unlike the helpless Neophyte,
young and beautiful, whom various writers have depicted in their efforts
to excite our pity for the poor nun forcibly ravished by an unattractive
and debauched Emperor.
The whole modern opinion of the community of Vesta is founded on a
mistaken view of their position and usefulness. Our ideas of Vestals
are largely derived from the conceptions which Egyptian anchorites
bequeathed to the esoteric religious communities which flourished during
the middle ages. The truth lies in the fact that the Roman Vestals have
but one point of contact with the successors of the anchorites, namely,
their reputation for chastity, which was, however, grafted on to an
entirely different religious foundation. The Vestals were a community
of high-born Roman ladies, whose duty it was to tend and preserve the
sacred fire which symbolised Rome’s existence, and, while they worshipped
the Phallus, to keep themselves unspotted from the world, not otherwise
from its contact. In the performance of their public functions they were
admirable and most punctilious, but they were not cloistered virgins,
as we know the race to-day. They were women of the world, with a value
enhanced by an often (according to Suetonius) supposititious virginity;
women who, clad in the white linen garments of a blameless life, their
hair arranged in the six braids which symbolised chastity, were the chief
figures at all public functions, the leaders of feeling at the games
and gladiatorial shows, and the arbiters of public opinion in all that
touched religion and morals, at a time when religion and morals meant
courage, bravery, patriotism, and hardihood.
It would be as absurd to impute to these women Christian ideas of
religion and morals as it would be to transfer the same neuroticism to
the Spartan communities of a still earlier age. The ideal was not then
suffering for suffering’s sake, not even suffering to appease an offended
deity, but suffering for the sake of virility, patriotism, and strength.
As we have said, Roman religion was in the third century what it always
had been, purely political. It was the prosperity of the Empire,
its peace and immortality, for which sacrifices were made; with the
individual, his happiness and prosperity, it concerned itself not at
all. The antique virtues were civic, not personal. It was the State which
had a soul, not the individual. Man was ephemeral. It was the nation
that endured, and to secure that permanence each citizen laboured. As
for the citizen, death was near, and so he hastened to live; before the
roses could fade, he wreathed himself with them; immortality was, for
him, in his descendants, the continuation of his name, the respect for
his ashes. Any other form of futurity was a speculation. In anterior
epochs, fright had peopled Tartarus, but fright had gone; the Elysian
fields were too vague, too wearisome to contemplate. “After death,” said
Cicero, “there is nothing”; and philosophy agreed with him. Of such and
kindred religious theories the Roman statesmanship—realising the danger
of independent religions—had constituted her Emperor supreme governor. As
Pontifex Maximus he held much the same position as that which our Tudor
Sovereigns created for themselves as heads of the Church in England. The
Emperor was supreme over religious dogma and practice, whenever occasion
necessitated control.
The old faiths were crumbling, but none the less Rome was the abridgment
of every superstition. The Gods of the conquered had always formed part
of her spoils; to please them was easy—from Jehovah to the unknown Gods
beyond the Rhine their worship was gore. That the upper classes had no
faith goes without saying, but of the philosophical atheism of the upper
classes the people knew nothing; they clung piously to a faith which had
a theological justification for every sin; and turned with equal avidity
to the Mithraic, Egyptian, and even to the Nazarene religion with which
Constantine finally replaced the ancient worship, as long as they were
all the same thing under a different name; the religion of the Empire
with local or foreign mysteries thrown in; the accustomed traditions,
miracles, feasts, and nature worship, unfortunately, as men found after
Constantine, grown contentious and continually more expensive to maintain.
The Vestals were still the guardians and types of the older theories they
professed; they were the link between philosophy and superstition, and
as such they played their part admirably: in private much the same as
other women, in public exact. Occasionally there was a public scandal,
but very rarely. Domitian had recalled the archaic law and had buried one
defaulter alive. Claudius, referring to Messalina, had told them that
the fate which made him the husband of impure women had destined him to
punish such. The lady whom Caracalla buried alive protested, not against
the imputation of a broken vow, but because the vow had not been broken
satisfactorily enough for her liking.
Apparently Antonine was quite without Roman prejudice in this, or indeed
in any other matter. He liked the lady; whether from a religious or an
aesthetic point of view is uncertain. If it were the latter, and her
portraits do her justice, Antonine’s reputation as a judge of female
beauty is irretrievably gone. She was frankly old and ugly. Nevertheless
he wanted to marry her, and what he wanted he usually got. Whether or
not Aquilia Severa wanted him is unknown, at any rate she was perfectly
willing to exchange supposititious virginity for the imperial marriage
bed on more than one occasion. Rome, as we have pointed out, was shocked,
frankly disgusted. The Emperor had the report, probably through the
Senate, and thereupon pointed out to that august body the essential piety
of the proceeding: a Vestal and the Chief Priest of the Holy God were
bound to produce children entirely divine.
It was a veritably Tudor argument, than which nothing more specious,
for the allaying of prejudice, could have been produced by Henry, the
Eighth of that name. Unfortunately, Rome in the third century enjoyed
considerably more of that Tory virtue, and was less bored with a religion
which affected no one personally, than England was in the sixteenth
century. Rome continued to object to the Emperor shocking her prejudices.
England changed her mind, and with it her prejudices, at the bidding of
her sovereigns, and, sacerdotal extermination aiding, she forgot in a
generation what it had taken her a thousand years to learn.
Needless to say, this union of the Emperor was productive of nothing
either human or divine, concerning which, or as a sort of mild reflection
thereupon, Lampridius utters his psychologically illuminating remark
concerning the use this Emperor had for wives and women generally.
The history of Severa’s family is obscure. Her father was the notable
jurist Aquilius Sabinus, who had been Praefect of Rome both in 214 and
216. He was the firm friend of Silius Messala, the kingmaker, and
possibly as a Senator, was one of that gentleman’s judges when he was
condemned for treason against his sovereign. We hear further of a son,
one Fabius Sabinus, who, on account of his wisdom and learning, has
come down to history as the Cato of his age. The daughter must have
partaken of the family ability. Her father’s senatorial rank would, in
all probability, have opened to her the doors of that most exclusive of
corporations to which she belonged, but his position could scarcely have
raised her eyes to the imperial purple.
[Illustration: Coin of Julia Cornelia Paula Augusta (British Museum).
Coin of Julia Cornelia Paula Augusta, A.D. 220-21 (British Museum).
Coin of Julia Aquilia Severa Augusta, A.D. 220-21 (British Museum).
Coin of Annia Faustina Augusta, A.D. 221-22 (British Museum).
Coin of Julia Aquilia Severa Augusta, A.D. 221-22 (British Museum).
_Face page 216._]
We can form no absolute judgment from the records at our disposal,
as to the precise date at which this lady exchanged the practices of
open celibacy for those of problematical matrimony. The most likely
suggestion is that it was early in the spring of the year 221, at a
time contemporaneous with the alliance celebrated between Elagabal and
Minerva. The Alexandrian coins bearing her name are dated LΔ, subsequent
to 29th August 220, while the coins “Aequitas Publica”—which also bear
her name—were issued early in 221, obviously for the third distribution
of money which was held in honour of the double marriage. No games or
excitements such as celebrated Antonine’s first alliance were at this
time attempted; the Emperor had quite enough to do in allaying the
trouble caused by the marriage itself, and in considering projects for
the furthering of his religious schemes. Of the lady’s position and
influence we know nothing, though we can quite believe that she was no
friend of the elderly Maesa, or the cross-grained mother of Alexianus,
both of whom wished her so ill. Serviez is by no means complimentary to
Severa, on account of the avidity with which she changed her position. He
calls her ambition unbounded, though it is very doubtful whether, placed
in a similar position, any one of us would have refused the flattery, and
undoubted compliment made to our superlative worth.
The title of Augusta, of which Julia Cornelia Paula had been relieved,
was conferred on Aquilia, and doubtless the Emperor looked forward to
some considerable degree of felicity in the company of a woman of whose
marriage every one disapproved.
As we know, Antonine found out quite soon that he had made a vital
mistake; that he had attacked the one superstition that Rome would not
allow to be touched, and, with extreme reluctance, he sent both the
Goddess and her Vestal back to their appropriate dwellings. Antonine has
been censured right royally both for his marriage and for the consequent
divorce. Now, if the marriage were wrong, as all the authors say, surely
the divorce was right; certainly Rome thought so, since his compliance
with national wishes seems to have won men over, and appeased their
minds, thus restoring the Emperor to his popularity. Why then did he
further alienate them by remarrying Severa in the early part of the next
year, as Dion and the coins relate? It is a mystery.
Antonine does not seem to have done anything at all for the family
of this wife; there is no record of any offices held by them, or
official appointments given, taken, or received by men of their name.
Of course, they may have got jobs which came under the generic term of
“appointment of unfit persons”; if so, we have no record of what they
got, while the duration of the marriage was so abbreviated that there
was scarcely time for any scandal to develop. The date of the divorce,
like all the dates of the reign, can only be fixed approximately. It
was not before the early spring and not later than the end of June, by
which time Julia Maesa had regained her power (what she had of it) over
the mind of Antonine, that she persuaded him to return both Minerva and
her personification to their respective homes, to send for Astarte, for
Elagabal, to marry Annia Faustina himself, and, above all, to adopt
Alexianus; which latter ceremony took place some time before 10th July
221. We can well imagine the boy’s disgust at the failure of his plans
and at the early loss of a friend in Aquilia, who, as both Dion and
Herodian tell us, was Empress for only a little time.
One of the greatest obstacles which the imperial family had met with was
their lack of connection with the Roman nobility. No doubt this could
easily have been remedied. Maesa might have tried to make her first
alliance in this direction; she seems to have imagined, however, that
such persons were extinct. They had died twice, we are told, at Pharsalus
and Philippi, and those who had not died then had suffered for real or
imaginary crimes under succeeding Emperors. The absolutely necessary
step, therefore, which Maesa had to take in this policy of alliance was
to find the most influential marriageable woman in Rome and put her
into the place that Aquilia Severa was holding to the jeopardy of all
concerned. The lady appeared as if by a miracle. Amongst other persons
who disapproved of Antonine’s proceedings were the two Senators Silius
Messala and Pomponius Bassus, of whom mention has already been made, as
having been concerned in a plot for dethroning the Emperor. Both had
been men of importance for years. Pomponius Bassus had been Consul under
Septimius Severus and Governor of Mysia under Caracalla. In fact, so
important were they in their own estimation, that nothing set bounds to
their ambition. Already between them they had contrived the deposition of
the Emperor Julianus, and the election of Septimius, and, like the great
Earl of Warwick of fifteenth-century fame, they were by no means averse
to putting their heads together once again, in order to rid the state of
whomsoever they thought _incapax imperii_.
Now, this was just the work that Mamaea wanted. For other reasons, Maesa
was not averse to the plot. The gentlemen held a secret court to examine
into the Emperor’s actions, and presumably they found him _incapax_, so
set to work to corrupt the guards in the usual fashion.
Unfortunately for Antonine, that infamous system of informers which had
flourished and been of such vital use under former Emperors (under his
father Caracalla, to go no further back for an example) was considered
by his own government as harsh and objectionable, an utterly intolerable
practice in a good and settled state. Antonine had, therefore, refused to
allow delators to assist the government. This being the case, he ought
to have apprehended all known traitors himself. Messala and Bassus were
known for such; they had always been dangerous persons. Nevertheless,
Antonine left them at large. True, as Lampridius tells us, he did send
for Silius Messala and probably also Pomponius Bassus to come to him
at Nicomedia, because he considered it safer to keep these gentlemen
with him in the East than to allow their tongues to wag freely in Rome,
before such time as he had dictated his own terms of government to the
Senate and people. When they returned to Rome, these men obviously
plotted freely in the accustomed way until they approached too many
soldiers, after which time they were condemned by the Senate, and sent
to other spheres of usefulness, or, as they themselves would have put
it, to an endless nothingness, where an absence of all energy could do
neither good nor evil. It is quite impossible to fix the exact date of
this execution. There is a tendency to assign it to the early part of
the reign, _i.e._, about the beginning of the year 219, whilst the Court
resided at Nicomedia; this, on the very frail evidence that their names
appear amongst Dion’s list of those who were executed during the reign,
which list was published amongst the acts of the first winter. No cause
has been shown, however, for any plot to dethrone and murder the Emperor
at that date; indeed, until the religious mistake in 221, any such plot
would have been utterly impossible, though there is plenty of evidence
concerning the various attempts of the years 221 and 222, of which almost
certainly this conspiracy was one. The execution was obviously connected,
in Dion’s mind, with Antonine’s third marriage. He says that the real
reason, as every one knew, was because the Emperor wanted to play David
to Bassus’ Uriah, with Annia Faustina taking the hackneyed part of
Bathsheba.
But it is a stupid story. Antonine was married to a woman of his own
choosing, and certainly did not want the friend of his grandmother, even
though to please that relation he did take Annia almost as soon as her
husband was dead. This is again the only possible explanation of Dion’s
phrase that “This inhuman monster (_i.e._ Antonine) would not allow
Annia Faustina to spoil her beauty by weeping for her departed husband,”
a story either adapted from the similar lie related of Caracalla and
his mother, or designed to do honour to the work of the unconscionable
traitor Pomponius. It is quite true that Maesa found ample means of
drying any tears that the usual decencies extracted from the Lady Annia;
but, as things turned out, no one seemed more anxious than this scion of
the imperial house of Commodus to marry the present Antonine, despite all
his relations’ epithets, and, through these, what later commentators have
found to say against the boy.
Annia Faustina was the only wife of Antonine who did not assume the
title of Julia; this, presumably, because she was the only lady who had
a name of her own by birth. Her genealogy is obscure, at least on her
mother’s side. Everybody is agreed that she was great-granddaughter of
the Emperor Marcus Aurelius through his fourth daughter Arria Fadilla.
This lady married a certain Cn. Claudius Severus, whose son Ti. Claudius
Severus was Annia’s father. Authorities disagree as to the wife of
Titus. Pauly does not mention any marriage, presumably on the grounds
that all are conjectural; Ramsay, from an inscription found in Phrygia,
postulates that he married a second cousin, one of the Cornificia family.
Tristran asserts that it was yet another cousin, Aurelia Sabina. Eckhel’s
genealogy is too obscure to be of much use, though he also traces the
descent of Titus’ wife to Lucilla, yet another relation. The main
contention is, however, the same in all cases: Annia was descended on
both sides from the imperial house of Commodus, unless the amours of the
younger wife of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius made it more probable that
some lusty soldier or gladiator, rather than her philosophical husband,
had been responsible for the accidents of her children’s birth. Be that
as it may, Arria Fadilla had passed with the rest of the family as an
imperial child, and her descendants enjoyed her worship and renown.
As usual, we are told that Annia was young and beautiful, neither of
which statements is borne out by the coins extant; to judge from these
one would postulate that she was between forty and forty-five years of
age at the time of her marriage with Antonine. Eckhel states definitely
that she was thirty-eight years old at that period. Pauly ventures on
neither the date of her birth nor death. It is, therefore, most unwise
to assert, as the biographers do, what neither portraits nor authorities
will in any way corroborate.
As with her age, so with her life: Annia’s words, deeds and political
aspirations are quite unknown to us. Obviously, coming at the political
juncture of Antonine’s mistake, and bringing the alliance with the old
nobility that Maesa wanted by way of support, Annia was the friend
of the Alexander party in the state. As such, she must have been an
extraordinary annoyance to the Emperor and his friends. Certainly,
from Lampridius’ accounts, the boy-husband was moody, distrustful, and
generally miserable during the whole of this period, which does not
presuppose connubial felicity.
There is no mention of Annia having taken any special part either for
or against her husband in the network of treasonable attempts which his
family were continually trying. We do not even know how the marriage was
dissolved. The natural presumption is that he divorced Annia, as he had
divorced Cornelia and Aquilia, though it is allowable in the absence
of the usual gibe at his inconstancy, or any suggestion of foul play,
to suppose that she died—allowable, but not very probable. Antonine
obviously took her as part of his grandmother’s scheme, and got rid of
her when he tried to get rid of Alexander, by repudiating the adoption.
Dion relates that he then took two nameless women to wife, finally
returning to Aquilia Severa. The first part of the statement is obviously
a fiction. All Antonine, or any one of his temperament, wanted from a
wife was friendship and affection; this he certainly had in Aquilia, whom
he only divorced as a precautionary measure, and whom he certainly took
back just as soon as he could get rid of Annia.
Of course, to divorce Annia, a really important imperial lady, was a
disagreeable step; it would alienate the whole of the upper classes,
unless he could show reason for the change. Annia, by the extreme
eagerness with which she had jumped at the chance of being Empress, was
certainly not going to be party to the divorce—not that her consent was
necessary in such times of freedom, when divorce was of daily occurrence,
even in the best-regulated families. Cicero divorced his wife, we are
told, because she did not idolise him; Caesar his, on the pretext that
she ought to be above suspicion. Certainly no actual misconduct was
necessary, unless the whim of the moment be regarded as such. Antonine
exercised this right to act on his whim, or rather on his knowledge that
the lady was an unnecessary burden, but it cost him dear, the lady was
not born to take such snubs in a chastened spirit, even if her imperial
relations liked to adopt that attitude, which is, to say the least of it,
an unlikely supposition.
The odd ladies may be ignored. Dion says they were wives, not concubines.
But time did not permit of so many weddings and divorces; while the
Emperor’s inclination, continually veering back to Aquilia, would not
have let him try so many others. Dion tells us that Antonine remarried
this Vestal before the last and fatal plot was set on foot; a statement
which is corroborated by certain Alexandrian coins struck after 29th
August 221. It was a proceeding, as far as we can judge, more mad than
his first mistake. Admitting that Antonine knew that his first error, in
taking the nun to wife, had angered the people, it is impossible for us
to imagine why he took her again, thus once more upsetting the city. It
was the most unaccountable blunder, and one which would finally alienate
those whom he had so lately tried to propitiate. There may have been
goodness in the act, kindness towards the woman, who had given up so much
for his sake. There is goodness everywhere, often the basis of evil is in
that virtue; certainly much madness may be traced to it.
In reading the account of this epoch, one feels as though one were
assisting at the spectacle of a gigantic asylum where the inmates were
omnipotent. From this disease of madness Rome might have recovered, had
not her delirium, which was fine, turned to softening of the brain. Until
a century later, there was hope, because the guilt was conscious; it was
only when guilt became ignorance, that Rome disappeared.
PART II
CHAPTER IX
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE EMPEROR ELAGABALUS
“I would never have written the life of Antoninus Impurissimus,” said
Lampridius, “were it not that he had predecessors.” Even in Latin
the task was difficult. In English it would be impossible, at least
Lampridius’ life. There are subjects that permit of a hint, particularly
if it be masked to the teeth, but there are others that no art can drape,
not even the free use of Latin substantives. Our task therefore is to
deal, rather with their sins of omission, than with the biographers’
offences against all canons of good taste in recording the inexpressible.
In his work on the Caesars, Suetonius displayed the eccentricities
simply, without adding any descriptive placards; therein lay Suetonius’
advantage; he was able to describe; nowadays a writer may not, at least
not the character we possess of Elagabalus. It is not that he was
depraved, for all his house was; it is, that, like many moderns, he made
depravity a pursuit, and the aegis of the purple has carried the stories
beyond the limits of the imaginable, let alone beyond the limits of the
real. Were we to accept unexamined, the testimony of his traducers of
the Christian era, we would gather that “at the feet of that painted boy
Elephantis and Parrhasius could have sat and learned a lesson,” that
“apart from that phase of his sovereignty, he was a little Sardanapalus,
an Asiatic Mignon, who found himself great.” Of course it would have
been curious to see him in that wonderful palace, clothed like a Persian
queen, insisting that he should be addressed as Imperatrix, and quite
living up to the title. It would not only have been interesting, it would
have given one an insight into how much Rome saw and how much she could
stand.
Lampridius himself drew breath once, to remark that he could not
vouch for the truth of the stories he was committing to paper, but he
was employed to show the contrast between Constantine’s “execrable
superstition,” as Tacitus describes it, and those of the ancient world,
so went on to record things even more impossible. Perhaps his remark
was unnecessary. His record has defeated its own end. He has come
down to posterity as the biographer whose contradictory collection of
scandalous enumerations becomes monotonous rather than amusing as he
gets deeper into the mire. For ages the world has secretly revelled over
these records, making no sort of effort to get at the truth, perhaps
because, in secret, men like to believe that their predecessors were more
inhumanly wicked than they are themselves. Not that, in the light of
modern science, any physician would consider Elagabalus inhumanly wicked,
any more than he would be inclined to apply the term to a man born blind,
or with the taint of leprosy in his system; in fact even wickedness
itself has been described as “a myth invented by good people to account
for the curious attractiveness of those whom they dislike.” The greater
part of the dislike which men have exhibited towards this Emperor and
his faults comes from the fact that he was psycho-sexually abnormal, and
was possessed of a genius for the aesthetic and the religious that his
historians wished to decry. He was evidently abnormal, even in an age
that produced abnormalities like Nero, Tiberius, Commodus, and Hadrian;
further, he was frankly abnormal, and to-day we know better than to be
frank about anything.
Since the world began, no one has been wholly wicked, no one wholly good.
The truth about Elagabalus must lie between the two extremes, admitting,
however, a congenital twist towards the evil tendencies of his age.
He had habits which are regarded by scientists less as vices than as
perversions, but which, at the time, were accepted as a matter of course.
Men were then regarded as virtuous when they were brave, when they were
honest, when they were just; and this boy did, despite his hereditary
taint, show more than dashes of these virtues. The idea of using the
expression “virtuous” in its later sense, occurred, if at all, in jest
merely, as a synonym for a eunuch. It was the matron and the vestal who
were supposed to be virtuous, and their virtue was often supposititious.
The ceremonies connected with the Phallus, and those observed in
the rituals of the city were of a nature that only the infirm could
withstand. Indeed, the symbol of human life was then omnipresent.
Iamblichus, the philosopher, has much to say on the subject; so have
Arnobius and Lactantius. If Juvenal, Martial, and Petronius are more
reticent, it is because they are not Fathers of the Church nor yet
antiquarians. The symbol was on the coins, over the bakers’ ovens; as a
preservative against envy it hung from the necks of children; the vestals
worshipped it; at weddings it was used in a manner which need not be
described. It was a religious emblem, and as such formed the chief symbol
in the training of the boy who was now ruler of the world. By birth a
Syrian, by profession High Priest of the Sun, whose devotees worshipped
the Phallus as his symbol, was it likely that he, the chief exponent,
should remain cold, should take no interest in what was an all-absorbing
topic? Besides which, the family was corrupted by the presence of a
living fire in their veins, engendered by the perpetual heat of the sun.
Consider the history of his relations, and no one will wonder that he
was by nature voluptuous. But it was not his voluptuousness that the
world objected to; it was the abnormal condition of his mind; because in
the body of the man resided the soul with all the natural passions of a
woman. He was what the world knew as a Psycho-sexual Hermaphrodite.
In form he was attractive and exceedingly graceful; his hair, which was
very fair, glistened like gold in the sun; he was slender and possessed
of glorious blue eyes, which in turn were endowed with the power of
attracting all beholders to his worship; and he knew his power over men;
he had first realised it when the legionaries flocked to the temple at
Emesa attracted by the reports of this Prince Charming. He was then just
at the age of incipient manhood, and his woman’s instinct taught him, as
no outside force could have done, that virility and strength were the
finest things in the world; his religion, surroundings, and education
told him nothing about the restraint of, what was to him, a perfectly
natural, perhaps even an hereditary passion, the exercise of which so
endeared him to the soldiers that they forthwith placed him upon the
throne of the world. As Emperor he had every desire, and was under no
compulsion to abstain from gratifying the craving to study and exaggerate
that swift, vivid, violent age, when what Mill in his Essay on Liberty
desired was enjoyed by the Augustitudes, “There was no check on the
growth of personality, no grinding down of men to meet the average.”
Not that any one has ever accused Elagabalus of being average. In no
particular can he be considered mediocre. Perhaps his life and habits
were not those to which the virile Roman world was addicted, despite the
fact that Hadrian had deified, in Antinous, not a lad, but a lust, whose
worship, a half-century later, Tertullian noted was still popular; since
which time Christian diatribes of all kinds have been levelled against
the pagans of the decadence, merely because their atriums dropped, not
blood, but metaphysics.
Were it permitted to examine Elagabalus’ extravagances in print, we
should at once realise that they are those common (in a greater or less
degree) to all animals at the age of puberty, where instinct has not
associated the developing powers with any one special person or thing,
but that they are, in this instance, exaggerated by the traits of his
heredity and surroundings. What character should we expect to-day from
a child of nature if he were free with an unbounded liberty, and rich
beyond the efforts of imagination, to say nothing of the possession of
a congenitally perverted instinct? The more one sifts the records, the
clearer it appears that Elagabalus’ actions are those of an incredibly
generous person, instinctively trusting, open-hearted and affectionate,
a mighty contrast, both in his pleasures and his punishments, to the
persons who preceded him, and to his successors, who mistook new
superstitions for progress in the development of the world. The example
he set in tolerance of opinions not his own, and his reluctance, to
punish those who opposed him, must have led men to expect great things
from his manhood. Alone of all the Emperors he stands out with the proud
boast that no murder for political or avaricious purposes can be laid
to his charge. There were a few executions, amongst the adherents of
Macrinus, rendered necessary by attempts to take the crown from the new
Emperor; but despite the fact of serious provocation, his amnesty to the
Senate and to Rome, for their participation in the usurpation of Macrinus
and his son, was scrupulously kept. In religious matters—his special
domain—no one can say that he was apathetic, and yet there is no instance
of persecution recorded, even by Fathers of the Church. His whole life
was devoted to the introduction of a fantastic eastern monotheism,
designed to extinguish the polytheistic atheism which permeated Roman
society. Undoubtedly opposition and bitterness would have been raised
if the Emperor had not shown a moderation foreign to his years, unless
he had exercised a restraining influence over a mob which was still
thirsting for the blood of the Judaisers, as later records demonstrate.
In one particular, however, we are told that Elagabalus was fierce,
namely, in the contradiction of his pleasures, none of which can in
fairness be said to have affected the outside world. He might have been
led; certainly he could not be driven; what Antonine could? His tutor
Gannys found this out too late, and suffered for his mistake.
With a singular lack of consistency, Lampridius ascribes all Elagabalus’
moderation to his grandmother Maesa, all his excesses to his own fault,
whereas psychologists can demonstrate from a mass of similar cases that
both his virtues and excesses are those usually exhibited by one of his
temperament, and at any rate his relations were responsible for his lack
of early training and non-association with sane, healthy-minded persons.
Undoubtedly Maesa’s influence, in the executive government, was an
aggravating factor; but considering the state of autonomy which the
machine had then reached, and the large influence exerted by favourites,
it cannot be said that she was supreme; indeed, on more than one
occasion, we see the boy of fourteen years opposing her influence most
strenuously, especially after she had hoodwinked him into appointing
Alexianus as his coadjutor in the Empire. It was pitiable, then, to see
the old lady’s efforts to retain her position; this, however, she only
managed to do by persuading the troops to mutiny and slay her grandson.
There is not much to be said for either party, but Elagabalus obviously
found relations a tedious pack of people, and their influence, like
drugs, best taken in small quantities.
Quite a cursory study of authorities on psychology, such as Krafft-Ebing,
Bloch, Forel, Moll, etc., will show us that characters like Elagabalus
have occasionally appeared, and are still known in history. They are
almost curiosities of nature, and are rarely if ever responsible for
their own instincts, neither are they cruel nor evil by nature.
To-day we are inclined to regard the romantic friendships exhibited
in the stories of David and Jonathan, Herakles and Hylas, Apollo and
Hyacinth, to mention no others, as the outcome of somewhat similar
natures, and we decry some of the noblest patriots, tyrannicides,
lawgivers, and heroes, in the early ages of Greece, because they
regarded the bond of male friendship as higher and nobler than what they
called the sensual love for women, or because they received friends
and comrades with peculiar honour on account of their staunchness in
friendship. Nevertheless, psychologists have noted that this tendency
towards the more elevated forms of homosexual feeling is still to be
found, more or less developed, amongst religious leaders and other
persons with strong ethical instincts. It is only therefore when this
tendency occurs in slightly abnormal minds that we excite our passions
against men whom our imagination alone has branded as debased criminals,
men for whom the only fitting reward is an application of the stake and
faggot, without further inquiry.
To the vulgar-minded, all persons who present deformities, whether
physical or mental, are subjects of derision and hatred; to those who
realise something of the disabilities under which these unfortunates are
labouring, they are the objects of either active or passive sympathy,—in
the abstract, of course; should the insane, the leprous, or even the man
of genius get in our way we, as normal persons, feel ourselves justified
in ridding the world of its nuisance. It is thus that the instinct of
fear, rather than that of justice, spurs us on to use the collective
strength of the average, to exaggerate the abnormalities of the few;
but it is not a high or noble instinct, this fear which has led men for
many centuries through a mire of cruelty, superstition, and deceit; and
it is under this lack of justice that the memory of Elagabalus has long
suffered. No credit has been given him for the quality of mercy which he
displayed, though an absurd charge of cruelty has been preferred, on
the ground that he occasionally took luncheon in the circus during the
progress of the games; his biographer gratuitously assuming that it was
only done when there were criminals to be executed. Another absurd charge
of cruelty has been raised on account of Antonine’s passion for flowers,
of which, says Lampridius, such masses fell from panels in the ceiling
that many were smothered; an obvious exaggeration, unless the guests
were paralytics or suicidal lunatics, and, as even the author’s account
mentions no compulsion put on these gentlemen thus to die, he would seem
to invite a verdict of death by misadventure, rather than by design,
however aesthetic.
There was nothing sinister about Elagabalus’ feasts, nothing after the
style of Domitian’s little supper parties, where all was melanic, walls,
ceilings, linen, slaves; parties to which every one worth knowing was
ultimately bidden, and, as usual in state functions, every one that was
bidden came, only to find a broken column inscribed with a too familiar
name behind his allotted couch, and Domitian talking very wittily about
the proscriptions and headsmen he had arranged for each.
Caligula and Vitellius had been famous as hosts, but the feasts that
Elagabalus gave outranked theirs for sheer splendour. His guests
certainly suffered from his passion for teasing, and to dine with the
Emperor in such a mood was no sybaritic enjoyment. He might serve you
with wax game and sweets of crystal, the counterparts of what he was
eating himself, and expect evident signs of enjoyment as you endeavoured
to masticate the representation; he would seat you on air cushions, and
have them deflated surreptitiously, thoroughly enjoying your discomfort;
but when that was over you would be served with camels’ heels, platters
of nightingales’ tongues, ostriches’ brains (six hundred at a time),
prepared with that garum sauce which the Sybarites invented, and of
which the secret is lost. Therewith were peas and grains of gold, beans
and amber, quail powdered with pearl dust, lentils and rubies, spiders
in jelly, fig-peckers served in pastry. The guests that wine overcame
were carried to bedrooms; when they awoke, there, staring at them, were
tigers and leopards—tame, of course, but some of the guests were stupid
enough not to know it, and died of fright. It might not be pleasant to be
promised adorable sirens, and to find oneself shut up for the night with
an elderly Ethiopian, but it was not essentially cruel or debased, at
least not from the humorist point of view, as was proved by the laughter
of the Emperor at the sight of your disgusted face when he let you out in
the morning. Unless you were fond of the water, it could not have been a
pleasant experience to take the part of a water Ixion—tied to a revolving
wheel—for the Emperor’s lust of the eye; but if you submitted to these
things, you were sure of a reward more liberal than any you had expected.
Lampridius reports that no guests left the Emperor’s presence with empty
hands. After dinner he would give you the gold and silver plate from
which you had eaten, or cause you to draw lots for prizes which varied
from a dead dog to the half of his daily revenue. Elagabalus saw no
virtue in sending men away in the style of Domitian with their heads
under their arms,—it was too conventionally the pose of the Christian
martyr.
The description applied to Caesar’s sexual condition can with equal
justice be applied to this youth of seventeen. He was a woman for all
men, and a man for all women, at least if one can judge by the number
of wives he married during his short reign of less than four years. The
number was six, according to Dion Cassius. Three of them were well-known
women, one a Vestal, by whom he designed to produce a demi-god. The
others are only referred to, their names are quite unknown. By none of
them, however, had he any issue, which perhaps is as well, since he
frequently remarked that should he have children, he would bring them
up to his way of living, in his outlook on life, and the world could
scarcely have stood a successor of his abnormal temperament. How far his
marriages were true matrimony we do not know, but the fact of his going
through the ceremony presupposes that the statements of Lampridius and
Zonaras to the effect that he was initiated a priest of Cybele (in the
full sense) are exaggerations, and also that the operation which would
have made him a woman to outward appearance as well as in sentiment
and affections, never took place; indeed, this is impossible on both
physiological and psychological grounds.
Despite these marriages, the one romance of this boy’s life was with the
fair-haired chariot-driver Hierocles. His identity is somewhat involved,
though Dion Cassius states that he was a Carian slave, by profession a
chariot-driver. This lad found his fortune by a mere accident. One day
he was thrown from his chariot, right against the imperial pulvinar,
and lost his helmet. Elagabalus was there and at once noted the perfect
profile and curly hair of the athlete. He had him transferred to the
palace, where on account of a similarity of taste the intimacy soon
ripened into love, and that again, according to Xiphilinus, into a
contract of marriage.
Hierocles must have been the best, and certainly was the most powerful,
of that army of sycophants and courtesans which had always thronged the
Roman Court. We have no complaints against his exercise of authority,
though Lampridius says that his power exceeded that of the Emperor
himself. His banishment was demanded, with that of others, in the first
mutiny, but he was immediately allowed to return, despite the fact that
Elagabalus meditated conferring the imperial title upon him. He was a
good son, and in his prosperity was in no way ashamed of his mother.
He openly purchased her from her owners, and sent a company of the
Praetorian Guard to bring her to Rome, there placing her amongst the
women whose husbands had been Consuls. He appears to have been proud
not only of his position, but also of the Emperor’s love for him, as
the story of the Smyrnian Zoticus related by Xiphilinus and Zonaras
well illustrates. They relate how he gave the youth a drug which made
him useless to the Emperor during the first night, and thus procured
his expulsion from the palace, though probably the story of Zoticus’
disgrace, on account of his treachery and venality (Lampridius’ version)
contains as much truth as any other. Certainly Hierocles had no just
cause for fear; Elagabalus’ affection was too feminine, too deep-rooted,
to do more than tease the man from whose hands, like many another woman
in history, he was more than willing to take ill-usage and stripes, if
only they were signs of jealousy or proofs of affection.
Of course there were others. The Elagabalus of whom Lampridius treats was
a second Messalina in the variety of his tastes, and in the frequency of
his visits to the various lupanars of the city, and like this Empress he
measured his attractiveness by the amount of gold he could carry home
after such expeditions. He cultivated the class of person who could
discourse on the spintries with which Tiberius had refreshed his jaded
mind and enfeebled frame, and made much of the man who could invent new
sauces or other species of Sybaritic enjoyment. All such he treated with
consideration, teased them and excited them, it is true, but pampered and
fed them (sometimes, exclusively on their own inventions, till they could
produce something more palatable), and loaded them with gifts, honours,
offices, dignities, until they learnt that the condition of perfection is
idleness, the aim of perfection is youth. We can well imagine the fury of
the legitimate office seekers when they saw these children of pleasure
preferred before them.
In a discussion on his psychology mention must be made of Elagabalus’
love of colour. To the Roman, white in its cleanliness and simplicity
was the acme of an aesthetic taste, though the profusion of purple
borderings, the mingling of scarlet and gold, showed his kinship with
the children of the south. Syria, and the East generally, loved that
mass of brilliancy which relieves the aridity of the land; Elagabalus,
posing as the aesthete of his time, annoyed the Roman world by his love
of purple and shaded silk garments, by his passion for green, in all its
known shades, and for feasts in which everything was in the deep azure of
a cloudless sky. To-day we still cultivate colour schemes without much
hostile comment, as it takes the philosopher to discover their puerility,
the prurient-minded their wickedness and degeneracy.
We are told that the blatant discussions of his amusements made
right-minded men blush, causing ultimate nausea for his tastes and
opinions. But it could only have been the few he had the opportunity
of disgusting; the majority had heard the same before and showed no
desire to be shocked. Other Emperors had been as outspoken, be it said
to their reprobation as well as to his, but other Emperors had not been
so good-hearted, so filled with the charity that thinketh no wrong.
When they had scented opposition they had removed the cause forthwith;
Elagabalus let it grow and strengthen till it swallowed him up.
It may be that, as Lampridius says, his effeminacy disgusted the virile
Roman world. It was a vice as reprehensible then as now. The genius of
the Greek and Roman friendships was all against the weak softness of the
Semitic races. Greek love had been regulated “to strengthen hardihood,
to breed a contempt for death, to overcome the sweet desire for life, to
humanise cruelty, to which powers almost as much veneration is due as to
the cult of the Immortal Gods,” says Valerius Maximus, in his treatise
_De amicitiae vinculo_. It would have been small wonder if the whole mass
of healthy-minded individuals had turned from Lampridius’ picture of this
little painted quean of seventeen years, who never showed in himself
any traits of manliness, except when he was on the seat of judgment.
If he had been portrayed as wholly woman, or wholly man, we could have
understood him, but for this strange admixture even the physicians are
at a loss to account, almost to understand. He had his good qualities
and had them in plenty, but overshadowing them all, like a terrible
blight, there was this organic affliction of the senses, passions, and
general outlook. Unfortunately, this blight of femininity still exists
in the world to a certain extent, especially amongst religious persons.
Gulick holds that the reason why only 7 per cent of young men attend the
Christian churches is because the qualities demanded are feminine not
virile, such as passive love, passive suffering, rest, prayer, trust;
whereas Confucianism and Mahommedanism attract men because the demand is
for virile qualities, and the place for women is small. Such faiths make
even more than individual demands on the virtues of courage, endurance,
self-control, bravery, loyalty, and enthusiasm. Gulick says also, that
the able-bodied boy who lacks the courage to fight is generally a
milksop, or a sneak, without any high sense of honour.
In this epitome of the qualities demanded of men we see the true grounds
on which the world has instinctively condemned Elagabalus, though
probably without quite knowing why they did so. It is because they have
been told that he possessed the virtues, along with the mind, of the
woman, and a voluptuous woman at that, and had nothing of what the world
expects to find in the male animal. His reign was short, so he left no
traces of his mind on the Empire, and what little he did effect was
reversed by his successor. His reign of prodigal extravagance caused not
one single new impost; his government of the city and provinces alike was
one of peace and harmony. That infamous system of informers under which
the aristocracy and plutocracy of Rome had suffered so direly up to the
death of Caracalla was never re-established by Elagabalus; despite the
fact that his rule had been subverted, on more than one occasion, by the
existing aristocrats. The people was sovereign, and it was important
that that sovereign should be amused, flattered, and fed. All was done
that had been done before by the demi-gods, and all was done with an
exaggeration unparalleled. His games in the circus were such that even
Lampridius admits the people considered him a worthy Emperor, because
he was endowed with a sense of the grandeur of the imperial position,
and expressed it by his marvellous prodigalities. They made him what he
was, and has ever remained in history, the Emperor of extravagance. In
him the glow of the purple reached its apogee. Rome had been watching
a crescendo that had mounted with the ages. Its culmination was in
this hermaphrodite. But the tension had been too great, even for the
solidarity of Imperial Rome; it was as though the mainspring had snapped,
and the age of anarchy, both military and religious, did the rest:
undermining the State, till the Emperors, whose sceptre had lashed both
gods and sky, became little better than a procession of bandits, coloured
and ornate it is true, but utterly lacking in that strength and virility
which is the essential of real government throughout the world.
Thus did Rome make way for Attila, the scourge whom God sent for the
final extinction of art and philosophy, and incidentally for the
refurbishing of the world under its mediaeval guise.
CHAPTER X
THE EXTRAVAGANCES OF THE EMPEROR ELAGABALUS
The Rome of Elagabalus was a dream aflame with gold, “a city of triumphal
arches, enchanted temples, royal dwellings, vast porticoes, and wide,
hospitable streets; a Rome purely Greek in conception and design. On its
heart, from the Circus Maximus to the Forum’s edge, the remains of the
gigantic Palace of Nero still shone, fronted by a stretch of columns
a mile in length; a palace so wonderful that even the cellars were
frescoed. In the baths of porphyry and verd-antique you had waters cold
or sulphurous at will, and these Elagabalus threw open to all whose forms
pleased him, men and women alike” (a custom of mixed bathing which had
been abolished by Hadrian and was again proscribed by Alexander Severus).
“The dining-halls had ivory ceilings, from which flowers fell, and
wainscots that changed at every service. The walls were alive with the
glisten of gems, with marbles rarer than jewels. In one hall was a dome
of sapphire, a floor of malachite, crystal columns and red gold walls;
about the palace were green savannahs, forest reaches, the call of the
bird and deer; before it was a lake, eight acres of which Vespasian had
drained and replaced by an amphitheatre, which is still the wonder of the
world.”
Into this profusion of aesthetic loveliness the youth of fourteen
summers stepped proudly, realising how fitting a background it made
to his glorious beauty. It was Nero’s creation, and here was a young
Nero (in face and manner) suddenly reappeared to enjoy what he had been
prematurely forced to leave.
In spite of everything, Nero was still the idol of the masses. For
years fresh roses had lain on his tomb, the memory of his festivals was
unforgettable, regret for him refused to be stilled; he was more than a
god, he was a tradition, and his second advent was confidently expected.
The Egyptians had proclaimed that the soul has its avatars; the Romans
had sneered in their philosophical fashion at all ideas of soul migration
till Elagabalus sauntered from that distant Emesa, an Antonine at the
head of an adoring army; then they began to think that the Egyptians were
wiser than they looked, for in the blue eyes of the young Emperor the
spirit of Nero’s magnificence shone.
All men were charmed; the Senate with their Aurelius, the people with
their Nero, the army with their Antonine. Certainly in profusion
Elagabalus was destined to rival his prototype. His prodigalities were
more excessive, his mignons more blatant, his wives more numerous,
and his processions more splendid. Only in cruelty (at which none can
cavil) did the resemblance fail. Nero had regretted his ability to
write when first a death-warrant was presented for his signature; he
appended his name and soon found the taste for blood. Elagabalus wept
at the sight of suffering, poverty and misery to the end of his life;
and as he never avoided seeing it, he must have wept often. In fact, a
favourite pastime, according to Herodian, was wandering disguised through
the purlieus of the city; sometimes he would serve as potboy in the
taverns, or as barber’s assistant in the slums, as itinerant vendor of
vegetables and perfumes about the streets; which antics assume a most
reprehensible flavour in the mouth of the historians after the Emperor
had conceived the notion of taking the world into his confidence and had
ordered paintings of himself in the plebeian garbs above mentioned. Any
way, Elagabalus tried to alleviate distress, which was more practical
than tears, though an unusual extravagance amongst the Emperors of the
decadence.
From his infancy the boy had gloried in extravagance. Even as a private
citizen we are told that he refused to stir without a procession of sixty
chariots following, a foible which had caused Maesa to gnash her teeth
instead of adopting measures which would prevent the recurrence of such
ostentation. He had never even thought of austerity, simplicity, and
poverty as necessary evils, let alone as Christian virtues, to be borne
with fortitude and temperance. Once when a friend asked him whether
he was not afraid that his prodigalities would land him in ultimate
necessity, he replied with an astounding self-complacency, “What can be
better for me than to be heir to myself.” Like many a modern child,
he objected to woollen garments, and his parents were foolish enough
to give way to his whimsies; he disliked the feel of wool, he said.
Another prejudice was against linen that had been washed. So dainty was
he that he never used the same garments, the same jewels, the same woman
twice (unless it were his wife), says Lampridius. But in Rome wool was
necessary; Rome was never healthy. Maesa knew it by experience, but
was more than willing to tempt providence by returning thither. The
Tramontana visited it then as now; fever too, and sudden death. Wool was
certainly necessary; besides, it was the accustomed dress of the country,
and Rome was intensely conservative, she would not endure an Emperor who
came dressed as an Eastern barbarian; the boy of thirteen years must
adopt the clothes, habits, and customs of his adopted country, of his
reputed father; thus the grandmother argued till Elagabalus was bored
with the discussion, and told the lady so. He was devising, moreover,
he announced, garments more splendid and more bizarre than any Rome had
found outside the temple at Jerusalem. His fancy was a frail tunic of
purple silk diapered with gold, or that even more resplendent vestment
which was woven throughout of fine gold and encrusted with gems. Alone
of the garments he had seen, this enhanced his beauty and gave dignity
to his movements. The sleeves were long and full, reaching to his heels,
open to show the rounded softness of his girlish arms; gilded leather
covered his feet and reached to his thighs; it was softer than wool and
certainly showed his form to better advantage. Sometimes after supper he
would appear in public dressed in the stiff dalmatic of a young deacon,
calling himself Fabius Gurgis, and Scipio, because the parents of these
youths had formerly shown them to the people in this costume in order to
correct their bad manners.
Encircling his curls (but in the palace only) was a diadem of heavy gold,
studded with jewels; not the simple golden circlet known to the Roman
world, but one after a Persian design, first introduced by Caracalla,
rich, splendid, and brilliant with the numbers of rubies, sapphires,
and emeralds which he thought became him. Unfortunately, his taste
for precious stones did not stop here. Lampridius and Herodian pour
deserved scorn on the numerous bracelets, rings and necklaces, all as
rich and costly as could be made, with which he decked his person; but,
perhaps unnecessarily, on his shoe-buckles, whose stones, engraved cameo
and intaglio, were the wonder of the beholder, and their cry has been
increased to a howl by later commentators, who seem to consider it a
species of indecency that the Emperor’s shoes should be of fine leather,
his stones priceless, while theirs were of ill-dressed cowhide, held
together with buckles of paste.
Of course, it is not a pleasant taste, this overlaying of the body with
an inordinate display of wealth, even when done merely for the honour of
one’s God, as Elagabalus protested. Unfortunately, it is still known both
in the Plutocratic and Sacerdotal worlds. Certain minds still revolt,
still see its snobbery, vanity and degeneracy, are even foolish enough
to imagine that the personal vanity of such functionaries will one day
renounce what is their main means of attraction.
Elagabalus’ love of extravagance comes out most strongly in his ritual
of worship. Never in the history of Rome had such daily waste of life
and liquor, such profusion of colour and gold, flowers, music, and
movement displayed the honour of God or man. The Emperor’s one idea was
to eclipse all that his predecessors had imagined. It was a stupendous
task to surpass Nero in fantasy, Otho and Vitellius in greediness; but he
had read Suetonius, and not an eccentricity of the Caesars had escaped
his notice. He knew, too, where to exceed them, and still lives on the
reputation of a work accomplished.
The hecatombs of oxen and innumerable quantities of sheep which came
daily to the temple of the Only God required a perfect army of butchers
that their slaughter might do homage to the Deity while daylight lasted.
These, with the spices, wine, and flowers, were but part payment of the
interest which the high priest felt his family owed to Elagabal for the
past and present successes of his house, while his most beloved title was
that which styled him “Invictus Sacerdos, Dei Soli.” There is a great
variety in his medals, both in those coined by the Senate and in those
struck by himself, whereon this priesthood of his is described. Chief
Priest and Invincible Priest of Elagabal, or the Sun, are commonly to
be met with round his image, which stands in a sacrificing posture, with
a censer in his hand, over an altar. It was in this supreme ineffable
spirit that the Emperor put his trust, to him he ascribed his health,
wealth, and security, together with that of his whole catholic church
militant here on earth.
On his arrival in Rome in the year A.D. 219, Elagabalus thought well
to carry through the laudable custom (for the poor) of bestowing the
usual congiary on the people. If Mediobarbus were to be trusted, he gave
six such during his short reign of approximately four years, besides
the soldiers’ donatives (which to his cost and undoing he foolishly
neglected as time went on). To-day such liberalities on the part of a
sovereign take the form of free meals and a limited supply of beer, but
are amiable and satisfying methods of spending the public money in an
ingratiating fashion. What Elagabalus gave was from the private funds
of his house, and was given in a manner quite his own. Formerly it had
been usual to distribute gold and silver (Nero had added eccentric gifts,
of course) on such occasions, but Elagabalus signalised his assumption
of the Consulship by the distribution of fat oxen, camels, eunuchs,
slaves, caparisoned saddle-horses, closed sedans and carriages, hoping,
as he remarked, that all men would remember these were the gifts of the
Emperor; as though any were likely to forget when they found themselves
saddled with a dromedary, and expected to conduct it safely to their own
backyard through the crowded lanes of the city. Such gifts were often
more trouble than they were worth, and the scramble at the distribution
much what it would be now, at least, according to Lampridius’ description
of those yearly distributions which followed the translation of the Great
God to his temple in the suburbs.
At times Elagabalus gave money; witness the congiary and donative to
celebrate his marriage with Cornelia Paula, when, as Herodian tells
us, not only the people, but also the Senators, Equites, and even the
Senators’ wives partook of the liberality, receiving 150 denares each,
the soldiers 250, on account, presumably, of their superior usefulness.
Had this boy’s megalomania stopped short at donatives and congiaries, we
should know little but good of him; unfortunately, he considered that to
love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance, and spent his money
as best pleased his fancy at the moment, which was always with a taste
for resplendency.
We can imagine the beauty of his reclining couches, solid silver, richly
chased, the cushions upholstered in purple woven with pure gold. Entire
services in silver for table use, very massive; even the saucepans were
in the same metal, and elegantly fashioned vases or cups containing 100
lbs. weight of precious metal apiece, with the most obvious indecencies
engraved or repousséd on the sides; the strange part of it all being that
he took delight, not so much in the possession of all this splendour as
in the giving of it to his friends, so much so that the silversmiths
could scarce keep pace with his generosity. It is a good feeling that of
giving generously, better to give than to receive, and what Elagabalus
got in return cost the giver so little pain.
To food and drink the Emperor was as much addicted as the traditional
city alderman, though his imagination certainly surpassed that of the
retired tradesman, at least in quality and design. His chief authority
was Apicius, the renowned author of a book entitled _De re coquinaria_,
but he had other models almost as famous, if not as long-lived, in
the Emperors Otho and Vitellius, and managed to outdo them all in
extravagance. Lampridius states that no feast cost Elagabalus less than
100,000 sesterces, and often reached the stupendous figure of 300,000,
_tout compris_. The number of dishes has been reached, if not surpassed,
by modern luxury, but to Lampridius twenty-two courses sounded absurd;
not so, however, the ablutions and courtesans who always attended and
utilised the intervals in an unbecoming manner. Occasionally these
intervals were of some length, caused by the removal of whole services
of plate to the possession of some guest who had said the right thing
at the psychological moment. Another means of delay was found in the
practice, which Elagabalus instituted, of taking each course in the house
of a different friend, an arrangement which necessitated the transference
of the whole party in their gold and ivory chariots from the Capitol to
the Palatine, thence to the Coelian Hill, and again to another friend
who might live beyond the walls, or yet to another in Trastevere. This,
with the usual impedimenta, arriving at the house of each, for the dishes
in their order, took time, and in such a fashion we can well believe
the chronicler who states that a single feast was scarce finished in
the daytime, especially as the intervals for customary enjoyments were
arranged with due regard for the utmost desires of the guests.
It is charming to imagine a feast such as is recorded of Maecenas, where
“in ungirdled tunics the guests lay on silver beds, the head and neck
encircled with amaranthe—whose perfume, in opening the pores, neutralises
the fumes of wine—fanned by boys, whose curly hair they used as napkins.
Under the supervision of butlers the courses were served on silver
platters, so large that they covered the tables. Sows’ breasts with
Lybian truffles; dormice baked in poppies and honey; peacocks’ tongues
flavoured with cinnamon; oysters stewed in garum—a sort of anchovy
sauce made of the intestines of fish—flamingoes’ and ostriches’ brains,
followed by the brains of thrushes, parroquets, pheasants, and peacocks,
also a yellow pig cooked after the Trojan fashion, from which, when
carved, hot sausages fell and live thrushes flew; sea-wolves from the
Baltic, sturgeons from Rhodes, fig-peckers from Samos, African snails and
the rest.” A full list of the dainties set forth would weary the amateur,
might even make him envious of the times that are now long dead, times
when the ceaseless round of beef and mutton would have been considered
monotonous or bad art, and year in year out plain boiled greens were
unknown; times when the Emperor served, as we have recorded, grains of
gold with his peas, rubies with lentils, beans and amber, for the mere
pleasure of sight; though his salads of mullets’ fins with cress, balm
mint, and fenugreek, we should probably have found no greater delicacy
than the undercooked vegetables of this twentieth century of our
salvation and discomfort.
As with food, so with wine, Elagabalus was a glutton. Mulsum, that cup
composed of white wine, roses, nard, absinthe and honey, was _vieux
jeu_. The delicate wines of Greece were always palatable; so was the
crusty Falernian of the year 632 A.U.C., to those who were of an age to
appreciate its worth. The young gourmet thought otherwise, and rendered
them noisome by the addition of crushed pine kernels and fir cones. It
was a youthful taste, such as we still distrust, but scarcely immoral
in the generally accepted sense of the term. As regards a tendency to
over-indulgence in good liquor, we have no data; there is a passage in
Lampridius (though evidently faulty) which asserts that the Emperor used
to mix wine with the baths and then invite the guests to drink, the basin
from which he had drunk being easily distinguishable by the fall in its
level; an utter impossibility, and not even clever as a bit of scandal.
Another extravagance culled from the same biographer tells how this child
realised the summer by feasts at which all was of one colour, food as
well as fittings, and how he would order all the dishes of a certain day
to be composed of a single sort of flesh: it might be pheasant under
twenty different garbs, fowls served on the same scale, even fish, if
the Court happened to be at a distance from the sea. At another time you
would be served with a vegetarian diet, or occasionally with nothing but
pork, which sounds inconsistent when we consider that the same author has
sneered copiously at the Emperor’s adoption of the Jewish superstition
in this matter. He further tells us that it was not magnificent enough
for this child’s fancy to recline on silver beds, with covers fashioned
in cloth of gold; his cushions were of hare’s fur, or down from under
the partridge’s wing, whilst the whole was strewn thick with flowers and
perfumes, those of important guests with saffron and gold dust. Wherever
he went were flowers strewing the way—lilies, violets, roses, and
narcissus.
No mention of psychological extravagance would be complete without a
certain disquisition on the use of perfumes. Here, as everywhere else,
Lampridius tells us that Elagabalus contrived to outdo his predecessors.
The use he made of unguents was little short of dissolute. As usual, the
biographer would have us believe that the failing was an idiosyncrasy
peculiar to the Emperor, whose life he was decrying. He had obviously
not heard of the soporific nastiness of Solomon’s beloved, a lady who
is represented to us by the writer of the Canticles as a cluster of
camphire, a mountain of myrrh, a hill of frankincense, spikenard and
cinnamon, additions which would not only have made her sticky, but
noisome to boot. Mahommed and his pavement of musk was beyond Lampridius’
ken, but he had certainly heard of the perfumes which scented the temple
at Jerusalem, and it would have been no new sight for him to have watched
Elagabalus pour tons of aromatics upon the new altars erected to the
ancient gods.
Even to-day we know something about the odour of sanctity and
occasionally inhale its delights by stealth, because, despite undoubted
legal prohibition, the clergy have persuaded us that the Gods still love
the smell of incense. Our point is, however, that everything sacred and
profane stank horribly at the period. Thank heaven, the personal use of
_mille fleurs_ which then obsessed the world has now given place to a
smell of the open. But there was nothing unusual during the third century
in the fact that Elagabalus burnt Indian aromatics instead of coal in
his dining-rooms, balm instead of petroleum in his lamps, and heated
his stoves and bathrooms with odours instead of the more commonplace
materials. What is repulsive is the depraved use which the world made of
perfume. The tunics of men, their baths, beds, horses, rooms, streets,
servants, even their food smelt. Caligula had wasted a fortune on
perfumes. Nero had waded in them. Myrrh, aloes, and cassia, saffron and
cinnamon, not to mention others equally objectionable and even more
costly; these all made life heavy and cloying, turned conceptions of
wrong into right, made the unholy adorable, stained the thoughts and
depraved the mind, just as M. Huysmans (in _À Rebours_) describes what he
succeeded in doing during his stay at Fontenay.
Not that Rome was as objectionable as Athens. There, we are told that
both men and women painted their faces with white lead, their eyelids
with kohl, and their nails with henna; and in order to draw attention
to the depravity, they perfumed their hair with marjoram, rubbed their
arms with mint, their legs with ivy, and the soles of their feet with
baccaris. In Greece this idea of attention to personal beauty was a
perfect cult—the latest recipes for artificial adornments were engraved
on tablets and exhibited in the temples of Aesculapius, and, this done,
the state imposed a fine for a slatternly appearance; but for all that
it was decadent and nasty. People, of course, still spend money on their
personal appearance, but patchouli, thank heaven! has gone, even from
Piccadilly.
The Emperor’s fondness for fish was tempered by its rarity. He would
never eat of its living things whilst he sojourned near the sea; he would
have them transported to the immense salt-water tanks he had constructed
amongst the mountains and in the interior of the country, both for their
preservation and his own amusement. We are told that he invented a method
of fishing in which oxen figured, a conceit which later years has not
revived.
First in history he conceived of sausages made from lampreys’ roes,
soft-shelled oysters, lobsters, and crayfish, and fed the country
peasants on the same. Indeed, his generosity here, as in Rome, was
unbounded, the chroniclers relating how he would throw from the windows
as many dishes as he offered to his own guests then at table. There was
nothing of our niggardly idea of charity here, no notion that any crusts
were good enough for the hungry. His dogs were fed on foie-gras, his
horses on grapes, his lions on pheasants and parroquets—an unnecessary
and unpleasant waste when one knows how much these beasts would have
preferred a more ordinary fare.
His fish sauce was a triumph of the culinary art, which is utterly lost.
It was a transparent bluish-green, the counterpart of sea water, in which
the fish looked alive and natural, utterly unlike the ragged ugliness
which is now presented for our consumption. So famous were his dishes
that the pastrycooks and dairymen of the day were wont to reproduce them
in their own particular wares, selling the same as imperial affectations.
The menus also were his own conception, embroidered on the tablecloth—not
the mere list of dishes, but pictures drawn with the needle of the
dishes themselves—which, of course, necessitated a change of cloth with
each service. He first, we are told, made the public feasts, as well as
private dinners, great and magnificent. Formerly these feasts had been of
a military simplicity. Elagabalus could not see why even political guests
should not enjoy themselves when they came to dine with him, and served
them with hydrogarum, the then last word in Sybaritic enjoyment. His
successor Alexander thought differently, and reverted to the old order, a
proceeding which pleased no one save the flatulent.
Elagabalus was, unfortunately, tainted with what is perhaps natural in
young people, though in elderly plutocrats is an acquired vice, that of
overt snobbery. It is recorded by more than one of his guests that he
would often ask them to price his dishes, in order to hear an excessive
value suggested, remarking that great cost gave a good appetite,
especially when one knew that dishes were scarce and out of season. Of
course, it was bad form, even in a boy, but how much else that happens is
the same? There are other things in plenty to cavil at.
It was not by food alone that Elagabalus drained the treasury; he had
other ways of flattering the sovereign people of Rome. The spectacles
which he gave in the amphitheatre were unique. Fancy 80,000 people on
ascending galleries, protected from the sun by a canopy of spangled
silk, an arena three acres in extent, carpeted with sand, vermilion, and
borax, in that arena were naval displays on lakes of wine, and the death
of whole menageries of Egyptian beasts (in one show, Herodian tells us,
fifty-one tigers alone were killed). There were chariot races, in which
not only horses, but also stags, lions, tigers, dogs, and even women
figured, till the spectators showed a colossal delight. The magnificence
of the spectacle almost surpasses belief: from below came the blare of a
thousand brass instruments, and from above the caresses of flutes, while
the air, sweet with flowers and perfume (for the Emperor had provided
saffron even for the cloaks of the crowd), was alive with multicoloured
motes. The terraces were parterres of blending hues, when into that
splendour a hundred lions, their tasselled tails sweeping the sand,
entered obliquely, and anon a rush of wild elephants, attacked on either
side; another moment of sheer delight, in which the hunters were tossed
upon the terraces, tossed back again by the spectators, and trampled
to death. By way of interlude, the ring was peopled with acrobats, who
flew up in the air like birds, and formed pyramids together, much in the
fashion that we know them to-day. There was a troop of tamed lions, their
manes gilded, that walked on tight-ropes, wrote obscenities in Greek,
and danced to cymbals, which one of them played; a chase of ostriches
and feats of horsemanship on zebras from Madagascar. The interlude at
an end, the sand was re-raked. Then, preceded by the pomp of lictors,
interminable files of gladiators entered, while the eyes of the women
lighted and glowed; artistic death was their chiefest joy, for there
was no cowardice in the arena. The gladiators fought for applause, for
liberty, for death—fought manfully, skilfully, terribly too, and received
the point of the sword or the palm of victory with an equally unmoved
expression, an unchanged face. It was a magnificent conception on which
the Romans, or, more exactly, the Etruscans, their predecessors, had
devised to train their children for war and allay the fear of blood.
It had been serviceable indeed, and though the need of it had gone,
the spectacle endured, and, enduring, constituted the chief delight
of the Vestals and of Rome. By its means a bankrupt became Consul, an
Emperor beloved. It had stayed revolutions, because it was felt to be
the tax of the proletariat on the rich. Silver and bread were for the
individual, but these things were for the crowd. When evening descended,
so did torches and the Emperor to take chief part in the ballet which he
considered as the culminating point in the performance.
In a robe, immaterial as a moonbeam, his eyelids darkened with antimony,
his face painted in imitation of the courtesans who sat on high chairs
and ogled passers-by in the Suburra, he entered the arena, and there,
to the incitement of crotals, he danced with his Syrians before the
multitude, a protecting claque of 80,000 persons toasting the performer
with the magnificent cry, “Io Triumphe!” whatever they thought of its
indecency. Lampridius tells us of his importing from Egypt those little
serpents, known under the name of “good genius,” and letting them loose
amongst the audience, among whom many were bitten, many killed, in the
stampede. It was quite a likely prank to play—is even heard of to-day—but
one cannot imagine that Elagabalus wanted to disperse the audience, as
his biographer suggests, before they had witnessed the magnificence which
he had prepared for their delectation. It would have been too foolish,
especially if he wanted an appreciative reception for his own turn.
So much for his public appearances. Many of his private pleasures are
quite repeatable, though all are extravagant, such as his chariot races
in the palace and in the Gardens of Hope, his teams of great dogs to
draw him from place to place, his naked women for the same purpose, or
when he himself, in the attributes and customary undress of Bacchus,
was drawn by lions, tigers, and the female sex. In driving, Elagabalus
had a splendid nerve, as we learn from the record of his chariot races
with camels and elephants even over the Vatican and its tombs. He
seems to have imagined that others were possessed of the same daring
and hardihood. Witness his requests to guests that they should drive
chariots, to which were harnessed four wild stags, through the porticoes
in front of his dining-rooms, which porticoes were strewn thick with
gold and silver dust, because he could not get electrum. Many found
the task most unpleasant, especially if they were portly, or Senators
whose pomposity ought to have put such antics out of the question; but
Elagabalus was no respecter of persons, unless, of course, they were
young, beautiful, and full of lust; to such he was ever considerate,
whether they were men or women. One day, because they pleased him, he
presented to the courtesans and procurers of the city the whole supply of
corn for a year’s provision, and promised a like amount to those dwelling
outside the walls. On another he collected the _cocottes_ of the theatres
and circuses, and, having harangued them as “companions in arms,”
presented them with a soldier’s donative of three pieces of gold, saying,
“Tell no one that Antonine has given you this.”
Elagabalus is the originator of lotteries, which have since become a
source of profit to European states. There was one for the people, one
for the comedians. Of course, he provided the prizes, and there does not
seem to have been any purchase of tickets. These were singular, as were
all his other gifts, and varied from 1 lb. of beef to 100 pieces of gold
or 1000 of silver.
In summer he had the audacity to erect a snow mountain in his orchard, in
order that cool airs might relieve the oppressiveness of Sol in Leone.
Even in the relief of natural functions he was magnificent, using only
vases of gold, onyx, and myrrhin. Whether this last is a metal or sort of
agate has been disputed, but Pliny had no doubt as to its extreme worth.
He tells us that a drinking cup was sold for 70,000 sesterces, and a
sacrificial capis for 1,000,000, to his own knowledge.
The progresses of Elagabalus were a sight that made even the citizens of
Rome stare open-mouthed. Nero had taken a train of 500 carriages, and
the boy Emperor was not to be outdone. He ordered a following of 600 at
a time, saying that the King of Persia had a train of 10,000 camels, and
for himself, his numerous courtesans, procurers, and the rest, whom he
had bought and freed, all richly habited, could not be accommodated with
less, wherein he showed a certain chivalry, as also in the case of the
very famous _cocotte_, whom he had bought for 100,000 sesterces, and then
relegated to perpetual virginity.
The Syrian astrologers had told Elagabalus that he would meet with a
violent death, which information seems in no way to have disturbed his
equanimity; it merely added to his extravagances, in that he built a
tower, from which he designed to throw himself, when his hour was come,
on to a pavement of gold encrusted with gems, in order that men might
say, “qualis artifex periit.” To make assurance doubly sure, he carried
with him little cases fashioned in emeralds and rubies, containing deadly
poisons, also cords of purple silk, with which he might strangle himself
if he were in any real trouble, though the adulation of the people made
it doubtful if such could ever happen. Was it a wonderful thing that the
people loved him—the originator of lotteries where no one but the Emperor
was the loser, the distributor of an incessant shower of tickets that
were exchangeable, not for bread or trivial sums, but for gems, pictures,
slaves, fortunes, ships, villas, and estates? Such a one was bound to be
adored; indeed, his lavishness deified him in the eyes of the sovereign
people of Rome.
There is one record of wanton waste which Lampridius has laid to his
charge, namely, that of sinking laden ships in the harbours in order to
show men at what a price he valued his wealth, that it could pay any
compensation, could stand any strain. It is a foolish and criminal fault
for a statesman to squander the wealth of his country, but an accusation
which is still levelled against the statesmen of our own time, and that
not infrequently. They may not attempt to realise the greatness of their
country by collecting cobwebs by the ton, as Elagabalus once managed to
do, saying that he wished thus to realise the greatness of Rome, but they
are perfectly capable of ordering equally unproductive labour and paying
for it at an enormous price, which is, ethically speaking, much the same
thing. The psychology of extravagance has not yet been examined, so we
are still free to condemn what we do not fully understand. Megalomania
we all know something about and can all condemn as experts. It was
Elagabalus’ success, as it has tended to the progress of other equally
well-known persons.
CHAPTER XI
THE RELIGION OF THE EMPEROR ELAGABALUS
One of the main causes of complaint against the Emperor Marcus Aurelius
Antoninus was his religion. Lampridius and Xiphilinus are unanimous
in their condemnation of its tendencies and beliefs. Into these it is
unnecessary to enter at greater length than has been done in preceding
chapters. If there is one point on which all his biographers are fully
agreed, it is that the Emperor was pre-eminently religious. God took the
first place in his calculations and designs.
Had he been a private person, no one could have objected to this
tendency. In general, piety towards the Gods has been commended
throughout the world’s history. It is only when a man occupies a public
position and subordinates his civil to his religious duties that the
world is apt to look askance at the latter. This is the position of
Elagabalus, at least in part; he is accused of neglecting the business
of the state for the sake of his conscience. Other sovereigns have been
likewise accused, and have likewise suffered at the hands of a world even
more vitally religious than were the Senate and people of third-century
Rome. Similar instances may be found not far from home which have perhaps
even less justification, when we consider that the cause of offence here
was ceremonies, not vital creeds.
A word may also be said concerning the objects which Antonine’s
biographers had in view when they condemned what we should—at first
sight—have expected them to have praised in the Emperor’s life.
As we have already pointed out, Constantine’s determination to impose
Christianity on the empire led to grave opposition, chiefly from the
adherents of the similarly monotheistic cult of Mithra, a cult which
was certainly identified with that of Elagabal, the only God. It was—if
on that account alone—obviously necessary that, not only the opposing
religion, but also the chief exponent of that worship, should come in for
severe censure at the hands of the fourth-century monotheism.
As one reads the story of Antonine’s life, one is struck not so much
by the record of his perverse sexualities, about which no one can have
known anything definite, and which, even if the reports be true, we are
bound to regard as congenital, in the light of modern research, as we
are by the record of his religious fanaticism. This trait is, and in all
probability justly, considered to be reprehensible. It is not, however,
restricted to the Emperor in question; probably everybody has come across
it, in one form or another, during the course of his life; some have even
suffered under its potency. Antonine was, as we have said, in a peculiar
position; he was young, powerful, and extremely religious; he ascribed
the success of his house to the favour of his God, and desired to make
some return in the shape of coercing men to that God’s worship. To this
Emperor the possession of supreme power meant limitless possibilities
for the effecting of his scheme. Further, as we have seen, he came of
a religious stock, or rather of a family whose traditions were bound
up with a very definite form of religious worship, which is generally
considered as the same thing.
The origin of religion is a much-disputed point. Some men have considered
that the source of all religion is fright; others prefer love; both of
which appeal to the superstitious instinct inherent in man. It may be
that these instincts breed reverence, fear, or love for forces outside
man’s control, and incomprehensible to him; in any case, these forces
were the first things to be deified in the history of religions, and took
their precedence in the natural order of their mystery or usefulness,
becoming a sort of aristocracy of talent, with a supreme head, the God of
Gods.
In process of time the older religions of Greece and Rome gave way to
philosophies; and the thinkers having reasoned away the potency of their
deities, fought against what they considered a decadent and sentimental,
not to say a baseless tradition, with all the aids that experience
gave them. Then it was that the signs, portents, and miracles which
had bolstered up the faith of the ignorant, which had kept fright and
superstition alive, even the very prophecies and revelations which were
the sacerdotal proofs of inherent genuineness became either natural
phenomena or debasing charlatanry, amongst men who knew their origin and
history, or had learned from Archimedes the principles of mathematics.
Nevertheless, in imperial Rome the atmosphere was charged with the
marvellous, very much as it was in Northern Europe until the time of
the Renaissance. The world was filled with prodigies, strange Gods, and
credulous crowds. The occult sciences, astrology, magic and divinations,
all had their adepts, and commanded the respect which kindred practices
command amongst the credulous to-day.
But the philosophy of the older religions was undoubtedly hard and
cold. Courage, moderation, and honour were qualities that enforced the
permanence of the state, not of the individual. Men laboured not for
hope of reward, but for the sake of duty; they knew that vice was part
of the universal order of things, perhaps an error of the understanding,
certainly an error which it was idle to blame, yet righteous to rectify.
But the older religions as they had developed during the latter days of
the republic were far from satisfying the whole aspirations of man.
The mind of man is not his only function, he has physical parts and
passions as well, such as fright, superstition, attractions, antipathies,
and sex. Some men were incapable of thought, few were single in aim,
and there was a craving, it may be quite irrational, but still human,
which longed to create, or at least to imagine, something higher than
self, something mightier than mind, something to which the irrational
and traditional side of man could appeal; and so, as one God died, a
newer and more mystical personage took his place. Jupiter had ceased to
dominate the world with a visible potency, Mithra, more mystical, more
sentimental, took his place as a power, so intimately connected with
man’s physical parts and passions, that the world of philosophy, which
dealt with the body through the mind, could scarcely touch the fringes of
his garment.
There was, therefore, in Rome at the beginning of the third century A.D.
a party of men strongly attached, for sentimental or neurotic reasons, to
one or other of the recently imported Eastern creeds; but there was also
a large party of conservatives whose atheism was as cool and detached
as that of Horace; and a still larger party of ordinary people whose
attachment to the old practices of Roman Polytheism expressed all that
they considered either necessary or expedient, from the point of view
of ordinary piety. But in each case the religion was subordinated to a
paramount political, not to an essentially religious life, which life
was evolving, as we learn from nearly all authors, towards degeneration,
despite the fact that culture and literature was still based upon the
philosophy of intellectual freedom.
Unfortunately, the very rule which had made for political greatness was
now robbing men of every liberating interest, was leaving society sterile
and empty. As a consequence of this, each generation was becoming less
wishful to think, and less capable of thought; not that the intellect of
Rome had by any means descended to that ultimate plane of intelligence
from which it was ready to enslave itself under the retrograde tendencies
of Eastern theistic beliefs. Rome, the mistress of the world, had seen
good in all Gods; she had acknowledged and included in her worship the
philosophies and deities of all nations, tribes, and tongues; every
force, natural, physical, and political, was represented at her altars.
Rome was comprehensively, sceptically Polytheist, when to her palaces
flocked the engineers, astronomers, and philosophers of that vast empire.
It was only to the common people, possessed as they were by beliefs in
non-human powers, in beings that beset life with malignity, that the
restoration of cults and ritual commended itself, and even they were
eclectic in their tastes and fancies.
Despite pulpit learning, we know that Rome was no more attracted by those
doctrines of the universal socialistic brotherhood which had emanated
from Nazareth, than she was by the system of the ecstatic visionary from
Tarsus, who was destined—by a more systematic and regular development
of his revelations—to capture the freedom of the earlier intellectual
religions, as soon as the world’s hoary wisdom, having lost its virility,
was involved in the dotage of an unreasoning antiquity.
In the long run we know that the mob triumphed, and that every religion
of the West was orientalised, every superstition and neurotic tendency
developed, and philosophy was brought to its knees utterly debased, until
its function was merely to be the apologist of all that superstition
taught or did. For the present, rational thinking men were alive. When
they died, exclusive monotheism came, carrying before it, like a flood,
the greatness of the former world. But the issue was still uncertain. Had
Elagabalus lived; had the beauty and impressiveness of his Semitic ritual
made its way; had time been given for men to grasp his idea of one vast,
beneficent, divine power, into the empire of whose central authority men
might escape from the thousand and one petty marauders of the spirit
world, they might have been attracted to the worship of life and light
instead of enmeshed by the seductive force of obscure and impossible
dogmas, tempted by the bait of an elusive socialism and a problematical
futurity.
It was not that Rome, atheist or religious, objected to the worship of
Baal. She had her own and a round dozen other Jupiters, as men conceived
him to be, and was quite ready to include him amongst the number. The
trouble was that rational thinking men could not bring their minds to
conceive of any supreme potency in the world, outside man himself; while
religious persons had each his own particular conceit in the way of
deities, all of which the new Emperor, with more zeal than discretion,
proceeded to make subject to his own Lord’s will.
But there was obviously more than mere amalgamation in Antonine’s scheme.
We have already pointed out the Emperor’s position of supremacy over the
old cults, and discussed the disintegrating tendency of the mystical and
independent monotheisms, which was already apparent even in the city
itself. The danger which these new religions imported into political life
lay in the establishment of an imperium over the souls of men, which,
based on superstitious terrors rather than on any appeal to reason or
logic, claimed an authority over the mind equal to that of the State over
the persons of its subjects.
The main attraction of these forms of faith lay in their ability to
supply men with a personal and spiritual religion, which, being free
from State intervention, was able to incite its adherents to rebellion,
against any policy of which its priesthood disapproved, on spiritual or
even on financial grounds. Statesmen had long recognised the danger,
and were obviously attempting to cope with the new forces. Antonine’s
proposal was one for the extension of his jurisdiction (as Pontifex
Maximus) to the new monotheisms, by the amalgamation of these with
the older worships over which his authority as Pontifex Maximus was
unchallenged. If he had succeeded he would have exerted his headship of
religion in much the same fashion as Elizabeth Tudor—claiming a similar
headship—exerted hers in the sixteenth century. This policy meant the
appointment of State officials endowed with the wealth, titles, and
a portion of the vesture of those old prelates, who had by their
traditions and claims to magical powers, coerced, and indeed still coerce
the minds of the credulous to the disintegration of the State. Antonine
foreshadowed what Tudor greatness effected; namely, the erection of a
State church, whose business it was to replace an independent priesthood
which fostered fanaticism, by a race of civil servants who would restrain
and modify superstition, turning all dangerous and harmful elements in
the religious life into useful and philanthropic energies, concerning
whose profit it would take an anchorite to disagree.
We have traced the steps by which Antonine proceeded to carry out his
policy of amalgamation. The erection of that superb and gigantic temple
in the XIth region; the summer residence for his God near the Porta
Praenestina; and the procession, in which all men and most of the Gods
took part, have been catalogued already. It was, however, this very
amalgamation to which Rome, atheist and religious, objected. Antonine
could have done what pleased him in the way of introducing a new worship;
he might have caused all men to assist at his ceremonies, and no one
would have objected; but to desecrate the older religions, and deprive
them of their treasured possessions, was an offence against all canons of
Roman taste.
There can be little doubt that one by one the temples were despoiled of
their chief objects of veneration in order that these might contribute
to Baal’s glory, and attract more worshippers to his shrine. It was in
this way that the Emperor designed to extinguish all the other cults in
the city, and so leave his God supreme; but persecution would have been
preferable to contempt. Elagabal’s temple was indeed a perfect museum of
ecclesiastical relics, all _ad majorem dei gloriam_; still it did not
attract, because it was contrary to the whole spirit of the time; no one
demanded a monotheistic creed, and, though all the worships of the city
should be comprehended in that of Elagabal, men could not raise devotion
towards an amalgamation which, they felt, was neither good deity nor good
philosophy.
Undoubtedly the Emperor was most eager. Why he did not persecute in
order to attain his end was a mystery, until men understood something of
his psychology. He would go (according to Lampridius) to any lengths of
personal inconvenience in order that he might further his plan, but would
put no one else to unnecessary discomfort or loss. We are told that his
desire to obtain the sacred objects from the temple of Cybele led him
to sacrifice fat bulls to that Goddess, with his own hands, and, when
that was not enough (as the priests proved difficult), that he submitted
himself to their ordination (a ceremony which included castration) in
order that he might possess himself of their sacred stone.
Lampridius has been understood to assert this castration, using the words
“_genitalia devinxit_,” but, as Professor Robinson Ellis has pointed
out to me, _devinxit_ usually means no more than “tied up.” Aurelius
Victor, being later, is naturally more explicit. He says “_abscissis
genitalibus_,” but despite his fourth-century statement, there is
considerable ground for doubt as to whether the operation actually took
place, chiefly on account of the records which his biographers have left
concerning the Emperor’s later proclivities—matrimony and the like—in
which he is supposed to have indulged until the last moment of his
life. And it would certainly have been a miserable ending to a life of
pleasure, as he understood the meaning of the word. If it is true, it
certainly proves a zeal for the Kingdom of Heaven’s sake which we are
scarcely capable of understanding.
Towards idols made with hands Antonine had no attraction. It was the
acquisition of stones with a claim to divinity on which he had set his
mind, even (according to a most faulty passage in Lampridius) to the
Laodicean statue of Diana, which Orestes with his own hands had placed in
its proper sanctuary. These he made, one and all, servants of the only
God—some chamberlains, some domestics. Early Christianity had much the
same idea as Antonine concerning the position of the older Gods, but,
with a singular lack of perspicacity, it turned them into demons,—where
they did not become saints,—and by so doing created a power of evil out
of what had formerly been a powerful beneficence.
Undoubtedly, one of the Emperor’s chief mistakes was his attempt to
amalgamate the kindred worship of Jerusalem, in its various forms, with
that of the Roman deities, and even though his circumcision almost
certainly belongs to the period when he became High Priest of Elagabal
(the period when he attained to puberty), the connection of this
ceremony with the kindred Jewish observance was sufficient, in the Roman
mind, to brand Antonine as a Hebrew innovator. The same odium would not,
however, have been attached to him when it was reported that he had
submitted to the triune baptism practised by various of the Christian
sects; since this practice was well known to the Romans on account of
its inclusion amongst the ceremonies at the Mithraic initiations. The
ceremony, therefore, would only become unpopular when men realised that
it was an outward and visible sign of their Emperor’s inclusion of the
Nazarene sect in his grand reunion of churches.
Much has been said by persons, whose business it was to find causes of
complaint, against the foolish and blasphemous proposal of the marriage
for his God. To our modern notions it was a scheme quite unworthy of the
great work the Emperor was inaugurating. In the third century modern
notions of religion were as yet unborn. There was at the time many a
divine pair, both in Rome and in the provinces, who attracted attention.
The proposal was, therefore, neither unusual nor sacrilegious. It was
certainly inadvisable to subordinate the chief cult of Rome in the
drastic fashion which Antonine employed, and the Emperor paid for his
temerity; but when he proposed Urania as consort, no one objected, and it
was only the return of the Vestal to connubial felicity that re-aroused
the annoyance which his compliance with Roman sentiment had pacified. The
idea of matrimony amongst the Gods was quite usual, so much so, that
the expressions of the biographers betray wilful ignorance, not only of
contemporary religion, but also of the Emperor’s scheme and purpose.
Concerning the magnificence of the worship all authorities tell us
something, and from them we can gather that, accustomed as the Romans
were to a severe and simple ritual, the Syrian worship, whether on
the Palatine or in the temple at Jerusalem, was a thing for fools to
gaze at and wise men to scorn. A few grains of incense, a few drops of
wine in libation, a perfect pentameter verse, and the dignified Roman
passed on. Here there was one long succession of butchery, hecatombs of
oxen, and runlets of the finest wines, which, together with clouds of
incense, served to increase the feeling of nausea caused by the smell
of the victims. Nor was this all. Round and round the countless altars
the wonderful painted boy, in whose eyes fanaticism and mystery glowed,
led men and women through the latest and most approved terpsichorean
measures, to the accompaniment of a band whose noise recalls that of
Nebuchadnezzar; if there be any truth in either record, as we have it.
The psalms and hymns which formed part of the worship were equally
unusual in the city of the Caesars; their only place was in the Eastern
religions which gave them birth, because such a display of barbaric
worship had long been superseded amongst the intellectual and progressive
peoples of the West. Such useless waste of life, such prodigality of
movement, music, and colour, was but little in accord with the Western
philosophy of religion, and it was with a sigh for his sanity that wise
men escaped from the orgy in which their Emperor was taking chief part.
It was all so freakish that men might have looked and listened quietly,
if the High Priest—in accordance with his scheme of reform—had not
desired the assistance of his great officers of state; naturally, these
men objected all the more strongly because they were perforce to profess
interest in their new duties, and joyfully spread disaffection, once they
were amongst the conspirators and out of the Emperor’s hearing.
Lampridius’ legend of Antonine’s human sacrifices must be dealt with as
another calumny. He says that the Emperor used to sacrifice young boys of
the best families, preferring those whose parents were alive, and, being
present, would be most grieved at the deed. In this case the refutation
is scarcely needed, since the author asserts that such was the custom
of the Syrian worship, whereas it is now certain that Rome had caused
the cessation of human sacrifices long before the second century amongst
all Semitic peoples. It is in all probability the same legend which was
attached to the early Christian mysteries, and with even less reason, for
while the Christian worship was in secret, and so might lend itself to
the supposition of nefarious practices, that of the Sun God was public
and blatantly open before the world, following a well-known and approved
ritual.
No, Antonine may have been mad, but there was a certain method in his
madness, and this form of lunacy would only have alienated the very
people he was striving so hard to win. It was in the method he failed,
not in the conception, for monotheism was continually gaining ground;
Paganism was obviously falling asleep quite gently; Isis was giving way
to Mary, apotheosis to canonisation, and saints succeeding divinities.
Antonine, with the true Eastern conception of religion, strove to impress
men with his vivid monotheism by means of the magnificence of the
worship, the prodigal expenditure of a gorgeous pageant. This he gave the
world right royally, but it was precisely this that the austere Roman
could not understand was meant to be connected with the simple philosophy
of his Western religion. Antonine thought to make his God great by means
of a pompous show. He succeeded in presenting him as a low comedian in
the last act of a puerile melodrama; unfortunately not the first, or
last, deity who has been thus presented before the eyes of an astonished
world.
It had long been a Roman custom to commemorate the greatest of her
victories by the erection of gigantic columns in the forums of the city;
Antonine proposed to build the most magnificent that had yet greeted
human eyes. It was to be a memorial to the triumph of the Lord over the
deities of chance and circumstance. Its summit, which he designed should
be reached by a stairway inside, was to support the great meteorite.
Death intervened to spoil the plan and to deprive Rome of a monument
surpassing in grandeur any that the city should ever see. Such were
the methods by which the boy strove to win acceptance for Elagabal, and
through him for the great monotheistic principle in religion. It must be
clearly understood that the religion of Emesa was in no sense idolatrous.
It is true that the city possessed a huge black meteorite, which it
venerated exceedingly, because it was a portion of the being of its God.
In shape, we are told, it was a Phallus, and as such was the symbol of
fecund life, typifying the great force of light, joy, and fruitfulness,
which men regarded as the be-all and end-all of their existence.
Of this theory in religion Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was high priest
and chief exponent, and even his boy’s mind could see the superiority
of life to death, of the supreme beneficent being to the lesser deities
who oppressed other peoples. Certainly he was so impressed, and resolved
to spread that worship and knowledge by means of the vast power which
resided in his childish hands from the year of grace 218.