Here, for all practical purposes, Lampridius’ account of the Emperor’s life ceases. There are still seventeen chapters of mere biographical scandal, some of it illuminating, some hypocritically obscene. Nevertheless, it has been possible to abstract from these sections a certain amount of information descriptive of the boy’s extravagances and their setting, his psychology and its result, his religious ambitions, and with them the reasons for his downfall. These are all obvious traits in Antonine’s character, and can be discerned despite the mass of exaggerations and hostility with which the pages abound. To criticise these statements in any sort of detail is, however, obviously impossible on the information at present available, and furthermore, we are scarcely competent to judge the period from our modern standpoint of prejudice. There is no period of history which fully corresponds to these last years of imperial greatness; few men who embody the spirit which breathed life into all that splendour, and even fewer in the modern world who understand the revived paganism of the Renaissance. Here too there was a difference. In old Rome it has been said that a sin was a prayer; under Leo X. it was, rather, a taxable luxury. Sinning is still a luxury, but no longer taxable; the Reformation has set us free from such extortion and restraint, and supplied us with hypocrisy and cant to take its place. From Suetonius we gather that the Roman world sinned and sparkled; we still sin, but are perforce to yawn in the process. The world of Suetonius was the world _où on s’en fichait_. Our world is the world _où on s’ennuie_. Hence our inability to grasp the spirit of philosophical paganism, a spirit whose morality does not consist in improper thoughts about other people, but in a mind set free from terror of the Gods, not very much caring what other people do so long as they do not interfere with us. It is thus that we must view Elagabalus. To look at him through any other spectacles is to examine the restless, frivolous, perhaps debased dragon-fly as though he were a vampire, and then, imagination aiding, describe him as a stampeding unicorn with a taste for _marrons glacés_. It is absurd, purely grotesque, this caricature we have of Antonine; perhaps that is why the world has left him alone, that they may gaze the longer on a mask that allures. If these criticisms have done anything to remove part of the accretions with which the world has daubed his figure at the bidding of his relations, the trouble is amply repaid. Naturally, this monograph is not the last word; it is, on the other hand, the first, put forward in the hope that it may at least commend itself as a point of view. Neither is it a compromise with the proprieties, which are, after all, in the modern world, little else save a compromise with either our neighbours or the police; what one expects from them, certainly not how much they may expect from oneself, or even from Elagabalus.