[217-218 A.D.] While these changes were taking place in the Roman Empire, Artabanus had passed the Tigris with a large army. Macrinus having in vain proposed terms of accommodation, led out his legions, and some fighting took place in the neighbourhood of Nisibis, in which the advantage was on the side of the Parthians; but as they now began to feel the want of supplies, and were anxious to return home, they readily listened to the renewed proposals of the Roman emperor, and a peace was concluded. Macrinus then led his troops back to Antioch for the winter.

Macrinus, as we have already observed, was not a military man. He was a native of Cæsarea in Africa (Algiers), of humble origin, and he was indebted for his elevation to his countryman Plautianus. He was a man of

ROMAN GENERAL (From a vase)

an amiable disposition, and a sincere lover of justice. He therefore turned his attention chiefly to civil regulations, and he made some necessary reforms and excellent laws; but he was timid by nature, and in his anxiety. to serve and advance his friends, he did not sufficiently consider their fitness for the employments which he bestowed on them. He com

mitted a great and irreparable fault in not setting out for Rome at once, and in keeping the army all together in Syria; and he further commenced too soon a necessary, but imprudent attempt at bringing back the discipline of the legions to what it had been under Severus; for though he applied it only to recruits and did not interfere with the old soldiers, these last apprehended that the reform would at length reach themselves, and they became highly discontented. This feeling of the soldiers was soon taken advantage of, and a rival set up to Macrinus.

The empress Julia was at Antioch at the time of the murder of Caracalla. Macrinus wrote to her in very obliging terms; but in the first transports of her grief at the death of her son or the loss of her power, she had given herself several blows on the breast, and thus irritated a cancer with which she was afflicted, and her death ensued. Her sister, named Mæsa, who had lived at court during the last two reigns and had acquired immense wealth, retired by order of Macrinus to her native town of Emesa. She had two daughters named Soæmias and Mamæa, each of whom was a widow with an only son; that of the former was named Bassianus; he was now a handsome youth of seventeen years of age, and the influence of his family had procured for him the lucrative priesthood of the Sun, who was worshipped at Emesa under the title of Elagabalus. The Roman troops who were encamped near the town used to frequent the temple, and they greatly admired the comely young priest, whom they knew to be a cousin of their lamented Caracalla. The artful Mæsa resolved to take advantage of that feeling, and she made no scruple to sacrifice the reputation of her daughters to the hopes of empire she therefore declared (what was perhaps true) that Caracalla used to cohabit with her daughters in the palace, and that Bassianus was in

[218 A.D.]

reality his son. Her assertion, backed with large sums of money and lavish promises of more, found easy acceptance with the soldiers. On the night of the 15th of May, 218, she and her daughter and grandson, and the rest of her family, conducted by their eunuch Gannys, a man of great talent, stole out of the city and proceeded to the camp, where they were joyfully received; and Bassianus was proclaimed emperor by the title of M. Aurelius Antoninus. The camp was immediately put into a state of defence against a siege; and numbers of the other soldiers hastened to sustain the cause of the son of Caracalla.

Macrinus sent the prætorian prefect Ulpius Julianus against the rebels. This officer was successful in his first attack on their camp; but having neglected to push his advantage, he gave the enemy time for tampering with his troops, a part of whom abandoned him; and he was taken and slain. Macrinus had meantime advanced as far as Apamea, where he declared his son Diadumenianus, a boy of only ten years of age, Augustus, and took this opportunity of promising a large gratuity to the army; he also wrote against Bassianus to the senate and governors of provinces. But instead of advancing rapidly against the rebels, he fell back to Antioch, whither they speedily followed him, and he was forced to give them battle near that town. The troops of Bassianus were ably disposed by the eunuch Gannys, who now in arms for the first time in his life showed the talents of a general. But the prætorians on the side of Macrinus fought with such determined valour that the rebels were on the point of flying, when Mæsa and Soæmias rushed out and stopped them; and Bassianus, sword in hand, led them on to the combat. Still the prætorians gave not way, and victory would have declared for Macrinus had he not shamefully fled in the midst of the battle. His troops when assured of his flight declared for Bassianus.

Macrinus fled in disguise, and never stopped till he came to Chalcedon, where he was taken and put to death, and his innocent son shared his fate. His reign had lasted only fourteen months.c

ELAGABALUS (NARIUS AVIBUS BASSIANUS), 218–222 a.d.

Bassianus now hastened to assert his claim to the succession. He was entirely successful; ascending the throne under title of M. Aurelius Antoninus Elagabalus, or, as the Latins called him, Heliogabalus. Dion Cassiuse (as preserved by Xiphilinus) has left us a picturesque account of the accession and brief reign of this effeminate youth, whose name has become a proverb for sensuality of the most degenerate type. We turn to his account, making such omissions as the restrictions of modern taste demand; - the classical writers, as we have had occasion to note heretofore, adjudged the limits between frankness and prudery by standards quite different from ours.

This narrative of Dion Cassius has the unique interest of being the account of an exact contemporary. The author was a member of the Roman senate, at the time of Elagabalus' accession. The following year he was governor of Pergamus and Smyrna. "He had conversed with Macrinus after his elevation, and yet was in the senate when the letters of Macrinus were read on the elevation of Elagabalus" (Clintong).

Here, then, is the story of Rome's most degenerate emperor, as told by this contemporary witness. The account is the most authoritative one that has come down to us; but it will be observed that allowance must be made for current superstitions in parts of the narrative.a

[218 A.D.)

DION CASSIUS ON THE ACCESSION AND REIGN OF ELAGABALUS

Avitus [Elagabalus], who is called pseudo Antoninus, or the Assyrian, or, again, Sardanapalus or Tiberinus (the last name having been bestowed upon him after his body was cast into the Tiber), made his entry next day [after the defeat of Macrinus] into Antioch, having promised five hundred drachmæ to the soldiers if they refrained from pillaging the city, as they greatly desired to do. This sum he of course exacted from the inhabitants. He likewise wrote a letter to Rome, in which, among other matters befitting the occasion, he heaped invectives upon Macrinus for the obscurity of his origin and his conspiracy against Antoninus, and made lavish promises, not only to the soldiers but to the senate and populace (pretending to act in all things after the example of Augustus, whose age he compared with his own, and of Marcus Antoninus); and, in allusion to the censures passed upon him by Macrinus, he added, “He took upon himself to censure my youth, he who nominated his six-year-old son emperor."

Such was his message to the senate. To that assembly and to the legions he despatched an account of what had taken place among the soldiers, together with the letter written by Macrinus to Maximus, in order further to inflame their hatred of Macrinus and their attachment to his own person. In his letter to the senate and his address to the people he styled himself emperor, Cæsar, the son of Antoninus, the grandson of Severus, the pious, the fortunate, Augustus, proconsul, prince invested with tribunician authority. He is also reported to have said, "Let them give me no titles which have to do with war; in the pious' and 'the fortunate' I have enough."

A number of persons having, in both a public and a private capacity, committed offences in word and deed against him and against Caracalla, he declared that he would punish no man whatever; nor did he punish any, although in the rest of his conduct he carried debauchery, injustice, and cruelty to such lengths that certain customs wholly unknown at Rome were practised there as having come down from our forefathers, and that crimes committed in single instances by other men and in other places there flourished freely for the three years and nine months of his reign, reckoning from the battle which put him in possession of the sovereign power.

In Syria he shed the blood of Nestor and of Fabius Agrippinus, governor of the province, and of the chief of the knights who had been about Macrinus, and at Rome he acted likewise towards those who had been most strongly attached to the cause of the late monarch; in Arabia he slew Picas Carianus, to whom the government of that country had been committed, for not having immediately come over to his side;. in Cyprus, Claudius Attalus, a former governor of Thrace, who had been expelled from the senate by Severus at the time of the war with Niger, restored to his honours by Tarantus, and placed by fate at the head of the province of Cyprus, merely because he had given offence to Comazon. For while the latter was serving in Thrace Attalus had placed him among the oarsmen as a punishment for dereliction of duty.

Thus the pseudo Antoninus put Attalus to death, though he had written concerning him to the senate saying that he had recalled him to Rome, whence he had been banished by Macrinus, together with Julius Asper,and Sulla, a former governor of Cappadocia, because he was involved in

[1 Tarantus was a nickname given to Caracalla after his death. It was the name of a gladiator of ignoble aspect.]

[218-222 A.D.]

certain intrigues and because, having been summoned to Rome, he had gone before some Celtic soldiers on their way home from Bithynia, where they had passed the winter, and had stirred up some disorders. Such were the motives from which these two personages perished, no word thereof being sent to the senate. As for Seius Carus, the grandson of Fuscianus, a former prefect of Rome, the reason was that he was rich and noble, and a man of ability; the pretext, that he had incited the soldiers of the Alban legion to mutiny.

The monarch being his only accuser, the trial of Seius was held in the palace, where he was slain. Valerianus Pætus was put to death because he had caused portraits of himself to be made in gold as ornaments for his mistresses. This action brought upon him the charge of intending to go into Cappadocia, a province bordering on his native land (for he was a Galatian) to stir up a rebellion, and having for this purpose made gold pieces bearing his own image.

Besides these, Silius Messalla and Pomponius Bassus were put to death by the senate on a charge of having disapproved of the emperor's conduct, as he said. He did not hesitate to write to the senate, which he styled the examiner of his life and the censor of what took place in the palace: "As for the proofs of their conspiracy, I have not sent them, for it would be idle to read them, since the men are already dead." Messalla had frequently expressed his opinions forcibly in the senate, for which reason the emperor had commanded his attendance in Syria, as though he were indispensable to him, but really lest he should cause an opinion different to his own to prevail in that assembly; as for Bassus, he had a beautiful wife of noble birth (a granddaughter of Claudius Severus and of Marcus Antoninus); whom Elagabalus himself wedded, not permitting her (such was the terror with which he inspired her) to weep for her husband's unhappy fate. We shall presently hear of espousals in which he played the part of bridegroom and bride, for he gave himself out as man or woman indifferently, and behaved with the utmost shamelessness in either character.

The murder of Gannys, who had paved the way for the rebellion, had brought him to the camp and procured him the victory over Macrinus - of Gannys, his foster-father and guardian, which he committed in Nicomedia, caused him to be regarded from the very beginning of his reign as the most impious of men. Gannys lived an effeminate life and loved to receive presents, but, far from doing injury to any man, he conferred many benefits upon numbers of persons; and, what was still more important, he was zealously devoted to his sovereign and enjoyed the favour of Mæsa and Soæmias. But this was not the reason why the emperor put him to death. His real motive was that Gannys obliged him to observe the rules of temperance and wisdom. The monarch, with his own hand, dealt Gannys the first wound, since none of the soldiers dared to begin the attack. In such wise did matters go.

Thus much we have said of the blood that was shed. As for the things done by Elagabalus contrary to the customs of our forefathers, they were matters of small account and did no great harm; unless, indeed, it be that he introduced innovations contrary to our usage, by assuming of his own accord, as I have said, titles of office, substituting himself for Macrinus in the consulate without being elected, and so forth.

He wedded Cornelia Paula, desiring, as he said, to become a father quickly; he, who was not so much as a man. At the celebration of these nuptials, not the senate and the knights alone, but even the wives of the

[218-222 A.D.] senators received liberal presents. There was a banquet for the populace which cost 150 drachmæ, and one for the soldiers which cost more than 100. He also gave gladiatorial shows, at which he was present clad in the toga prætexta, and he appeared in the same garb at the votive games. He likewise caused a great number of wild beasts to be slaughtered, among the restan elephant and fifty-one tigers, a larger number than had ever been exhibited at one time. Afterwards, having put away Paula under the pretext

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A ROMAN MATRON
(From the Capitol)

that she had a blemish on her body, he wedded Aquilia Severa, in open violation of the laws, for with flagrant impiety he defiled a woman who was a vestal. He was bold enough to say, "I have done it that of myself, the pontifex maximus, and of her, the vestalis maxima, divine children may be born"; nor did he hesitate to boast of these sacrilegious acts, for which he should have been first scourged with rods in the Forum and then cast into prison and put to death. Nevertheless he did not keep Severa long, but took another wife, and then another and another, after which he went back to her.

Among his most flagrant violations of the law was the worship of the god Elagabalus, not only by reason of the introduction of a foreign divinity into Rome and the granting of new and gorgeous honours to such a divinity, but by reason of the superiority which the emperor gave him over Jupiter; and the priesthood of Elagabalus which he caused to be bestowed upon himself, by reason of his circumcision and abstinence from pork (as though this abstinence made the worship of this god purer), and also by reason of the barbarous vestments worn by Syrian priests, in which he was often to be seen, a fact which had much to do with his surname of the Assyrian.

As the height of absurdity he bestowed a wife upon Elagabalus, as though the god had need of a wife and children. Moreover, since this wife ought not to be poor or of humble birth, he chose the Urania of Carthage, had the goddess brought from thence, established her in the palace, and exacted wedding gifts for her from all the subjects of his empire, as he had done for his own wives.

Nevertheless this Sardanapalus, who must needs unite the gods by regular marriages, himself led the most irregular of lives. He married several wives, and had relations with many other women with whom he formed no legal tie.

Such was his conduct to all who had to do with him; yet this did not prevent him from playing the part of a bride to a favourite, by name Hierocles, on whom he wished to bestow the title of cæsar, himself being called imperatrix. Being opposed by his grandmother in this design, he broke out into threats against her, and by his shameful conduct no less than for other reasons incurred the hatred of the soldiery. These extravagances were the cause of his ruin.