Heliogabalus

“ After the Proclamation, I have preferred to call the Emperor by his official name, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, or Antonine for short, as this is the only manner in which the coins, inscriptions, and documents describe him. After his death, it seems allowable to give him the nickname which his relations and later biographers have applied to him, namely, the latinised form of the name of his God. I have nowhere adopted the later Greek spelling or adaptation, Heliogabalus, either when referring to the God of the Emesans or to the Emperor himself. ”

“ As PAULA slinks into the peristyle, heliogabalus enters from the triclinium, with dacia on his arm. He is
tall, sallow and apparently somewhat liquored; his bad humour is obvious. He stalks across the stage to
the solium without at word, hands up dacia, and takes his seat beside her with a scowl. He wears a
magnificent toga of imperial purple, with a wide band of cloth-of-gold at the bottom. ”

“ Heliogabalus's attempt to have his god recognized as supreme, and to establish a kind of monotheism in heaven as there was monarchy on earth, was undoubtedly too violent, awkward and premature, but it was in keeping with the aspirations of the time, and it must be remembered that the imperial policy could find the support of powerful Syrian colonies not only at Rome but all over the empire.
Half a century later Aurelian [27] was inspired by the same idea when he created a new worship, that of the "Invincible Sun." ”

“ Heliogabālus, a deity among the Phœnicians.――Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, a Roman emperor, son of Varius Marcellus, called Heliogabalus, because he had been priest of that divinity in Phœnicia. After the death of Macrinus he was invested with the imperial purple, and the senate, however unwilling to submit to a youth only 14 years of age, approved of his election, and bestowed upon him the title of Augustus. Heliogabalus made his grandmother Mœsa and his mother Sœmias his colleagues on the throne ”

“ In the midst of his extravagances Heliogabalus married four wives, and not satisfied with following the plain laws of nature, he professed himself to be a woman, and gave himself up to one of his officers, called Hierocles. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The prodigal Emperors always were adored ; so were their successors, the wicked popes, Man was too near to nature to be aware of shame, and infantile enough to like to be surprised. That was Elagabalus' scheme; he amused his people and surprised them at the same time.
The whole spirit of tolerance of the unusual makes it difficult for us to picture Rome. Modern ink has acquired Nero's blush; yet, however sensitive a writer may be, once Roman history is before him although he may violate it, may even give it a child, he never can make it immaculate. ”

“ Perhaps it was the purple which had driven so many Emperors mad, that made Macrinus an idiot ; certainly he acted like one, and made way for yet another Phaeton for the universe : a prince for whose sovereignty the world was too small, as Tiberius had remarked of his nephew Caius, nicknamed Caligula, the man without whom neither Nero, Domitian, Commodus, Caracalla, or Elagabalus could have existed. The lives of all are horrible, yet analyse the horrible and you find the sublime. The valleys have their imbeciles, from the mountains poets and madmen come. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 future. ”

“ All which facts serve to render this most magnificent period of Roman history unreal and fantastic to men of our more practical and rationalistic age.
The reign of Elagabalus is not a record of great deeds. It shows no advance in science or in military conquest. Save in the realm of jurisprudence, it is not an age of great men, because these are born in the struggles of nations. It is not an age of poverty or distress. ”

“ With its opening came the transference thither of the most venerable objects of Roman superstition: all the sacred stones, even the Palladium from the temple of Minerva, the sacred fire which was the symbol of Rome’s existence, even the shields which had fallen from heaven, and to which the oracles had attached the very destinies of the city itself. But of this more in its proper place.
Certainly, for all his attempts, Elagabal did not become a popular divinity. Men began to fear his propensity for swallowing other cults. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He certainly seems to have been vitally attracted by the charms of Aquilia Severa, a woman no longer in the first flush of youth, to judge by her effigy, but one whom his religious as well as his personal predilections pointed out as a fitting consort. Pallas and Elagabal were united in a heavenly union like so many others amongst Syrian and Egyptian deities; why, then, should not Antonine, the chief priest of the Sun, and Aquilia, an important priestess of Minerva, unite in a fruitful union which would produce a demi-god meet for the Empire? ”

“ If the chronicle of his naughty life has been exploited to illustrate the legend that the pagan society of the Empire was desperately wicked and infamously corrupt, he has not been taken seriously as a ruler. Yet Elagabalus appeared under too ominous a constellation to justify us in dismissing his brief attempt to govern the world as unworthy of more than a superficial description and a facile condemnation. ”

“ Xiphilinus’ idea that Rome had no foreign Gods is equally ecclesiastical, since only the wilfully blind did not know that Rome was comprehensively, sceptically polytheist, and that she admitted and was deeply attached to many similarly monotheistic Eastern cults, notably those of Mithra and Isis. Why then decry the worship of Elagabal alone? One can see no reason except the exclusiveness of that worship, the vast monotheistic ideal to which the Emperor had attached himself, and which he was minded to spread throughout the length and breadth of the empire, by every fair means in his power. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Rome, however, had a different reason for disliking Elagabal. It was because he, like Jehovah, dethroned all other deities. Rome would willingly have accepted the Syrian Deity amongst the lupanar of divinities whose residence was the Pantheon and whose rites were obscene ; but such was not Antonine's scheme, even primus inter pares was impossible. Elagabal was over all supreme ; even Jupiter Capitolinus, Jehovah, and Vesta must serve the one God. But Rome, whose atriums dripped not blood but metaphysics, knew too well the futility of all Gods to wish for any exclusive cult ”

“ As we have said, Antonine had no more idea of making Elagabal a mere rival to the Roman Deities than Constantine had of putting Christ into that unenviable position. He intended that the Lord should swallow up all other Deities, should make captive all the gods of old Rome. To do this it was necessary, first, to impress the world with the splendour, the beauty, the power, and the magnificence of that being who had so miraculously delivered the family of Bassianus from Phoenician obscurity, and brought them into the fierce light of the Roman noonday ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Again, it is most noticeable that in the mass of abuse and obvious animus which the "life" exhibits, there is not one definite act of cruelty reported; no wanton murder is cited; no hint given that the people were discontented with the appointments made, or that they suffered from any of the misrule which had been so prevalent for years past. On the other hand, we are told that the people considered Elagabalus a worthy Emperor, despite all that could be said to his discredit. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the long run we know that the mob triumphed, [273] 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 ”