IN THE DAYS OF ELAGABALUS
The fates were now preparing as strange a revolution, and bringing
upon the Imperial stage as grotesque a figure, as any that have yet
come under our notice. Three women--the sister and the nieces of Julia
Domna--are the engineers of this revolution, and, clothed with the
Imperial dignity, control the fortunes of Rome in the extraordinary
period that followed it. But before we introduce the tragi-comic figure
of Elagabalus, we must clear the stage of the temporary Emperor and his
faint shadow of an Empress.
Opilius Macrinus was a weak, vain, and unimpressive old man. Accident
had put the Empire within his reach. He timidly grasped it because no
other offered to do so, and held it until another desired it. He was in
his fifty-third year, a man of obscure African origin, an adventurer
in the public service. He was married to Nonia Celsa, of whom we know
only that her qualities were not generally believed to include the
possession of virtue. Their son Diadumenianus was a tall and handsome
youth, with black eyes and curly yellow hair. When his father made him
Cæsar, and he donned a purple robe, the spectators are said to have
melted with affection. He lived long enough to show, by urging his
parents to deal more drastically with rebels, that his heart was not so
tender as his pretty looks had suggested.
“How happy and fortunate we are,” Macrinus wrote to his family, when
his accession was secured. In little more than a year he would be
flying over the hills of Asia Minor, and he and his handsome boy would
be cruelly put to death. He set out at once, with great display,
against the unruly Parthians. But he soon purchased an ignoble peace
from them, and repaired to the banquets and pleasures of Antioch.
Anxious as he was about his position, he made the fatal error of
keeping the troops in camp, and there soon passed from legion to
legion an ominous murmur. The soldiers contrasted his luxury with
Caracalla’s sharing of their march and their cheese, and chafed under
the discipline he rightly sought to enforce. The rumour spread, too,
that Macrinus had given offence to the Senate; and that a mule had
borne a mule at Rome, and a sow had given birth to a little pig with
two heads and eight feet. The apparition of a comet and an eclipse of
the sun made it yet more certain that something was going to happen,
and confirmed those who were preparing the event. In the month of May
Macrinus heard that a boy of fourteen, supported by three women and
a eunuch, had claimed the throne, and seduced some troops. He sent a
general, with a moderate force, to bring him the boy’s head. In a week
or two a messenger returned with a head--his general’s head. He roused
himself from the drowsy luxury of Antioch, and set out with his army.
The three women were, as I have said, Julia Mæsa, sister of Julia
Domna, and her daughters, Soæmias and Mamæa. At the death of Julia
Domna they had retired to the ancestral home at Emesa, in Syria, but
with a very considerable fortune, which Mæsa had gathered at the court
of Severus and Caracalla. The two daughters seem to have lost their
husbands, though each had a son. Soæmias had a child of fourteen
years, named Varius Avitus Bassianus, a strikingly pretty boy.[17] His
cousin Alexianus was three or four years younger. Avitus was therefore
clothed with the dignity of priest of the temple, which seems to
have been hereditary, and the little group resumed the life they had
quitted, twenty years before, to dwell in the Imperial court. Mæsa,
and probably Soæmias, found this rustic tranquillity unendurable, and
followed political events with interest. The one retained dreams of
Imperial power, the other of Imperial indulgence. Their chief servant
was a clever eunuch, Gannys by name, who is strangely described by Dio
as “practically living with Soæmias.” A geographical accident brought
their vague dreams to a practical issue.
Near the little town of Emesa was a camp of the Roman soldiers.
Cosmopolitan as they now were in race and religion, and fretting at
their detention in the dull countryside, the soldiers took a close
interest in the temple of the strange god. The great wealth and fame
of the shrine, the peculiar nature of its deity and its ritual, often
attracted them, and the knowledge that these rich and handsome women of
the priestly family had been so closely connected with their popular
Caracalla increased the interest. But the chief feature that drew
their attention was the beauty of the young high-priest. The soft and
feminine delicacy of his form and features was enhanced by a long robe
of Imperial purple, fringed with gold, and a crown that flashed back
the rays of the Syrian sun from its precious gems. The romance was not
lessened when they reflected that the great Severus had often fondled
this boy in his arms, and that he might have inherited the throne. The
women, or their servants, now doubled the interest of the soldiers by
insinuating a whisper that he was the son of their Caracalla, and when
Mæsa’s gold began to pass freely into their purses, they contrived
to see a resemblance to the dark and repellent features of the late
Emperor in the girlish beauty of the boy. Soæmias had no difficulty
in paying the poor price of her reputation for a return to court.
Lampridius bluntly calls her a _meretrix_.
On the night of May 15th, 218, the three women and the two boys were
transferred to the camp. Mæsa’s fortune went with them, as the price of
Empire, and on the following day the soldiers announced that Bassianus,
as he was now called, was Emperor. The camp was fortified, and in a few
days Macrinus’s general, Julianus, appeared before it with his troops.
Their companions in the camp exhibited the young son of Caracalla on
the rampart, and, as they exhibited also the bags of Mæsa’s gold, they
convinced and seduced the assailants. Julianus’s head was cut off, and
sent to Antioch. Macrinus now marched against them, and the two armies
met in the intervening country on June 8th. The softened troops wavered
on both sides, and it looked as if Macrinus might win, when Mæsa and
Soæmias sprang from their chariots in the rear of the army, rushed into
the ranks, and spurred their flagging followers on to victory. Macrinus
fled, in an ignominious disguise, across the hills and valleys of Asia
Minor, and within a few weeks Nonia Celsa learned that she had lost her
throne, her husband, and her boy. The Emperor of Rome was the pretty
boy-priest of Elagabalus.
Imperial power, however, meant to the Syrian youth an unrestrained
indulgence of his sensual dreams, not a grave concern with the affairs
of a mighty people. He dallied in the East, and willingly left his
duties to his grandmother, while he devoted himself entirely to his
rights. He gathered about him the ignoble company of ministers to lust
which the cities of Asia Minor were at all times ready to supply, and
there was no depth or eccentricity of vice in Antioch or Nicomedia
which he did not explore. Before the end of that year the boy’s nature
was completely perverted, and the last trace of masculinity eliminated
from it. Mæsa was alarmed, for the cities of the East were wont to talk
freely of the vices they implanted or cultivated in their visitors,
and the sentiment of Rome could not be ignored. But Bassianus laughed
at her timidity, and lingered throughout the following winter in the
voluptuous chambers of Nicomedia. As to this Roman Senate, of which she
spoke, he sent the grey-beards a painting of himself in his flowing
sacerdotal robes and womanly jewels, to be placed over the altar of
Victory in their meeting-place.
In the following spring he condescended to visit the capital of
his Empire. Rome had received many a strange procession during the
centuries of its Imperial expansion, but no spectacle had aroused so
much curiosity as the arrival of the young monarch on whose picture
the Senators had gazed with bewilderment. The original was even more
extraordinary than the portrayal. For the entry into Rome the young
priest-Emperor stained his cheeks with vermilion, and artfully enhanced
the brilliance of his eyes, like a Syrian courtesan or an actress. He
wore his loose robes of purple silk trimmed with gold, his delicate
arms were encircled with costly bracelets and his white neck with a
string of pearls, and a tiara of successive crowns, flashing with
jewels, surmounted his strange figure. And, as the alternative and
real power in administration, the Romans regarded with anxiety the
two women who rode with him--the grave and dignified Mæsa, and the
richly sensuous and evil-famed Soæmias. There is in the Vatican Museum
a statue of the mother of Elagabalus as she appeared at this time.
She has chosen to be portrayed in the costume, or lack of costume, of
Venus; and the voluptuous body and soft round limbs, the low forehead,
thick lips, and large nose, combined with the hard and shameless
expression, reconcile us to the coarsest epithets the historians have
attached to her memory.
[Illustration: JULIA MÆSA
BUST IN THE CAPITOLINE MUSEUM, ROME]
To the horror of the Senate this woman was at once associated with him
in a character that no Empress, or no woman, had ever assumed in the
long history of Rome. At his first visit to the Senate the Emperor
demanded that she should be invited to sit by his side and listen to
their deliberations. Even Livia had been content to listen behind
the decent shade of a curtain. Soæmias, however, had not the wit or
seriousness to interfere in any way. She was appointed president of
the Senaculum, or “Little Senate,” of women, which Sabina had founded,
and Julia restored, in the Forum of Trajan; and she found an easier
and more congenial occupation in controlling the grave deliberations
of the matrons of Rome on questions of etiquette, precedence, costume,
and jewellery. It was left to Mæsa to wield the political power, and
she did so with sobriety and judgment. Unhappily, the Emperor was more
willing to listen to the easier counsels of his mother than to Mæsa,
and he began at once to entertain or disgust Rome with the appalling
license which makes his short reign an indescribable nightmare.
He had brought from Emesa the celestial stone, the emblem of Ela-gabal,
to which all his prosperity was due, and his first care was to provide
the god with a worthy home. A magnificent temple was raised to it, and
the stone, encrusted with gems, was borne to it on a chariot drawn by
six white horses, the Emperor walking backwards before it in an ecstasy
of adoration. In the temple a number of altars were set up, and rivers
of blood--even the blood of children--were poured out on them; while
the Emperor and his family croned the barbaric chants of primitive
Syria, and the highest dignitaries of Rome stood in silent respect. As
the earlier officials were soon replaced by men of infamy, chosen, very
frequently, on a qualification that one may not describe, we need pay
little attention to their feelings. If we suppose that the Emperor, or
Elagabalus, as he now called himself, was aware that the conical stone
was really a phallic emblem, we may find a clue to some of the stranger
vagaries of his erotomania.
Rome had long been accustomed to the barbarism of the more ancient
Oriental cults, and had indeed taken a willing part in the orgiastic
processions of the mysterious Mother of the Gods, whenever their rulers
permitted them. But the security of the Empire seemed to them in danger
when Elagabalus went on to place every other idol in a position of
subordinate respect in the temple of his fetich. Jupiter, Juno, Venus,
and Mars, were not at that time favoured very widely with a literal
belief; nor were the Romans concerned when he stole the Astarte of
the Carthaginians, and married her, in a magnificent festival, to his
lonely deity. The temples and cults of Rome were like the temples
and cults of modern Japan. They contributed to the gaiety of life.
But if there was little sincere polytheism at Rome--the educated
world was divided between an Epicurean Agnosticism and an eclectic
Monotheism--there was much superstition, and few could regard without
concern a desecration of the ancient Palladium, or statue in the temple
of Vesta, to which the fortune of the city was peculiarly attached, and
other ancient emblems. Elagabalus despotically overrode their feelings.
He broke forcibly into the home of the Vestal Virgins, and bore away
the sacred Palladium; since we may regard the later boast of the
Virgins, that they cheated him with a substituted statue, as insincere.
Of the Empresses whom he made by marriage we have little knowledge.
In less than three years he married, and unmarried, either four or
five women. The first was Julia Cornelia Paula, a woman of very
distinguished family and, if we may trust the bust in the Louvre,
a woman of dignity, refinement, and some strength of character. We
may see the action of Mæsa in the choice. A few months later he
divorced her and, to the horror of Rome, married one of the Vestal
Virgins. Possibly the beauty of Julia Aquilia Severa had caught his
fancy when he broke into their sacred enclosure. The Senators were
deeply concerned at this sacrilege, for the fate of Rome was still
closely connected with the integrity of the noble virgins who tended
the undying fire before the altar of Vesta. Elagabalus, who, it was
generally known, had no hope of progeny, brazenly argued with the
Senate that he was consulting the future of the State, since a union
of priest and priestess gave promise of a family of divine children.
In any case, he said, he was a maker, not an observer, of laws; and
he established Severa in his palace. The coins give her the title of
Augusta.
His roving eye soon afterwards was attracted by the charms of Annia
Faustina, the great-granddaughter of Marcus Aurelius. The portrait-bust
of her in the Capitol Museum has a round full face of great beauty
and an expression of sweetness and modesty. She seems to have escaped
the taint of the Faustinæ. She was married to Pomponius Bassus, and
Elagabalus released her by the familiar device of executing her
husband, and transferred her, leaving no time for mourning, to the
palace. Her beauty seems to have been too tempered with refinement to
engage his affections long. She was dismissed, and replaced by some
unknown victim. Then Elagabalus returned to his priestess of Vesta. In
all, he seems to have married four women in three years, not counting
Severa, whose marriage Dio does not seem to regard as valid.
Severa was the chief associate of his life in the palace, and it is
quite impossible to convey an impression of the sordid scenes into
which she had passed from the austere sanctuary of Vesta. Twelve
condensed pages of the “Historia Augusta” are occupied with his
enormities, and at the close of what is probably the most appalling
picture of unrestrained license in any literature--even if we admit
exaggeration--Lampridius assures us that he has, from a feeling of
modesty, omitted the worst details. It would seem that the human
imagination, in its most diseased condition, could devise nothing
lower. We do not know whether Severa was an Octavia or a Poppæa, but
the circumstance that she consented to live is grave enough. In that
vast colony of vice, to which a system of pandars, spread over the
Empire, dispatched every man who had some special physical or moral
feature to fit him for the orgies, no decent woman would have clung to
mortality. A Cæsonia or a Marcia might laugh when Elagabalus returned
at night, dressed as a common female tavern-keeper, from the low
wine-shops in which he had been rioting--might even smile when she saw
Elagabalus’s “husband,” a burly slave, beating and bruising him for his
infidelity, or when she heard at night the rattle of the golden rings
and the shameful appeal of the new Messalina behind his curtain--but
Severa was of noble birth, the daughter of a man who had twice been
consul.
One of the unpardonable sins of Rome was that it hesitated so long
to assassinate some of its rulers. The very excesses of Elagabalus
protected him for a long time, as he urged the people to share or
imitate his pleasures. No screen was drawn about his vices. He would
discuss them with the Senate, or collect all the _meretrices_ of Rome
in a hall, and address them on those various schemes of vice which
we find to-day depicted on the walls of the _lupanar_ in Pompeii.
He would invite the common folk to come and drink with him at the
palace, where they might see the furniture of solid silver, the beds
loaded with roses and hyacinths, the swimming-baths of perfume, the
gold dust strewn in the colonnades, the paths paved with porphyry. He
provided for them the spectacle of naval battles in lakes of wine,
and a mountain of snow, brought from the remote mountains, in the
middle of summer. But his chief device for cajoling the citizens was
to distribute tickets, as for a lottery, and see them press for the
sight of the gifts corresponding to their numbers. You might get ten
eggs or ten ostriches, ten flies or ten camels, ten toy balloons or
ten pounds of gold; and the mania grew until your chance lay between a
dead dog, a slave, a richly caparisoned horse, a chariot, or a hundred
pounds of gold. At times he would invite a crowd to dinner, and smother
them, with fatal effect to some, under a thick shower of flowers; or
seat them on inflated bags, which slaves would deflate in the middle of
the banquet; or have them borne away intoxicated at the end, to find
themselves in the morning sleeping with bears or lions.
The frivolous Romans were so much entertained by these vagaries that
they overlooked his personal luxury, and made no inquiry into the state
of the treasury. No dinner could be placed before him that had not cost
thirty pounds of silver. Robed in a tunic of pure gold or pure Chinese
silk, sitting under perfumed lamps, amid masses of the choicest blooms,
he picked delicately at the tongues of larks and peacocks, the brains
of thrushes, the eggs of pheasants, the heads of parrots, or the heels
of camels. He fed his horses with choice grapes and his lions with
pheasants. His chariots were of gold only, studded with gems, and they
were drawn through the streets by strings of nude women, or by stags.
Delicate in every detail, he had cords of silk and swords of gold
prepared for inflicting death on himself in case of need. He little
knew that he would die in the latrine of the soldiers’ camp.
Soæmias seems to have enjoyed this orgiastic life, but the more prudent
Mæsa was concerned. Finding that remonstrances were quite useless, she
cunningly persuaded Elagabalus to associate his cousin with him in the
government. Alexander--as Alexianus had now been named--was three or
four years younger than the Emperor, and did not share his disease. His
mother, Mamæa, inherited the prudence and sobriety of Mæsa, and guarded
her boy from the contamination with the utmost care. His excellent
disposition ensured the success of their plan, and Elagabalus began to
perceive that the younger boy was winning a dangerous popularity. It
is said that a judicious distribution of money by Mamæa fostered the
growing esteem for him, especially among the soldiers.
From suspicion Elagabalus passed to hatred, and from hatred to a design
on his cousin’s life. Mamæa secured the favour of the guards with great
adroitness, and watched the actions of Elagabalus. He first, in order
to test public feeling, sent word to the Senate and the camp that he
had withdrawn the title of Cæsar from his cousin; and he directed
that the boy should be put to death if this announcement created no
disorder. In the anxious hour that followed, Alexander waited in a
room of the palace with his trembling mother and Mæsa; Elagabalus went
down to the gardens to supervise the preparations for a chariot-race,
and await impatiently the news that his cousin was dead. Presently a
tumultuous crowd of the guards rushed across the city, and burst into
the gardens of the palace. Elagabalus fled to his room, and covered
himself with a curtain; and the soldiers conveyed the two women and the
boy in triumph to the camp, many of them remaining in the garden to
threaten Elagabalus.
Soæmias, seeing the Empire slip from her, awoke to energetic action.
She hastened on foot to the camp, and pleaded passionately for her son.
They did not wish to take his life, the guards said, but must have
a security for the life of Alexander and a promise of reform. They
returned to the gardens, and the young autocrat, in his purple silks
and jewelled shoes, had to plead with the rough soldiers to spare the
favourite ministers of his vices. He had filled the highest posts with
men whose only qualifications were such that we cannot describe them,
and his army of attendants were the scum of the Empire. The guards
forced him to dismiss the most obnoxious, preached him an inglorious
sermon on his infamies, and directed their officers to watch over the
life of Alexander.
The swords of gold and the cords of variegated silk were not employed,
but Elagabalus could never forgive the degradation he had experienced.
He made several attempts to remove the obstacles to his design: sent
the Senate from Rome, and removed or executed several of the soldiers.
Mamæa watched him assiduously, and Mæsa easily penetrated his secrets.
Not a particle of food or drink from the Imperial kitchen was allowed
to pass the lips of Alexander. Rome knew that the end was near. It was
only a few years since Bassianus and Geta had disgraced the palace
with a similar quarrel. Mæsa attempted in vain to conciliate them. On
January 1st, 222, they were both to receive the consular dignity from
the Senate. She had to threaten Elagabalus with a fresh mutiny of the
guards before he would go.
Some ten weeks later the feud came to a crisis. Elagabalus, to test
the soldiers, sets afoot a rumour that Alexander is dead. The guards,
believing the rumour, withdraw their contingent from the palace,
and shut themselves in the camp. Elagabalus takes his cousin in his
golden chariot to the camp, to show that the rumour is false, and loses
control of himself when the guards burst into exclamations of joy at
the sight of Alexander. Mamæa and Soæmias come upon the scene, and an
angry altercation follows, each mother making a wild appeal to the
soldiers. Either there is a division of feeling among the soldiers,
or some of Elagabalus’s ministers are present, for swords are drawn
and are soon at work. Elagabalus and Soæmias, the Sybarites, rush into
the latrine of the camp for safety, and are slain there by the guards.
Their bodies are disdainfully thrown out to the mob, who have gathered
outside. The effeminate frame of the young Emperor, with its soft limbs
and large pendent breasts, and the voluptuous body of his mother, are
dragged through the streets, and, as the opening of the sewer is too
narrow to receive them, they are thrown into the Tiber. And the cry of
“Ave, Imperator!” rings in the ears of Mamæa and her boy.