THE AMAZING EMPEROR HELIOGABALUS [Illustration] MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD. TORONTO THE AMAZING EMPEROR HELIOGABALUS BY J. STUART HAY ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE, OXFORD WITH INTRODUCTION BY PROFESSOR J. B. BURY, LITT.D. REGIUS PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON 1911 PREFACE The life of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, generally known to the world as Heliogabalus, is as yet shrouded in impenetrable mystery. The picture we have of the reign is that of an imperial orgy—sacrilegious, necromantic, and obscene. The boy Emperor, who reigned from his fourteenth to his eighteenth year, is depicted amongst that crowd of tyrants who held the throne of Imperial Rome, by the help of the praetorian army, as one of the most tyrannical, certainly as the most debased. Few people have made any study of the documents which relate to this particular period, and fewer still have taken the trouble to inquire whether the accounts of the Scriptores are trustworthy or consonant with the known facts. To this present time no account of the life of this Emperor has been published. Histories of the decline and fall of Imperial Rome there are in plenty; other reigns have been examined in detail; German critics have sifted the trustworthiness of the documents, few in number and all late in date, which refer to other reigns; so far nothing has been done on the life of Elagabalus. The present writer started this study with the view that the Syrian boy-Emperor was, in all probability, what his biographers have painted him, and what all other writers have accepted as being a substantially correct account of the absence of mind, will, policy, and authority which he was supposed to have betrayed, along with other even more reprehensible characteristics. The first reason to doubt this estimate came from the continually recurring mention of a perpetual struggle between the Emperor and his female relatives; a fight in which the boy was always worsting able and resolute women, carrying his point with consummate tact and ability, while allowing the women a certain show of dignity and position, where it in no way diminished the imperial authority or his own prerogative.