Lampridius himself drew breath once, to remark that he could not vouch for the truth of the stories he was committing to paper, but he was employed to show the contrast between Constantine’s “execrable superstition,” as Tacitus describes it, and those of the ancient world, so went on to record things even more impossible. Perhaps his remark was unnecessary. His record has defeated its own end. He has come down to posterity as the biographer whose contradictory collection of scandalous enumerations becomes monotonous rather than amusing as he gets deeper into the mire. For ages the world has secretly revelled over these records, making no sort of effort to get at the truth, perhaps because, in secret, men like to believe that their predecessors were more inhumanly wicked than they are themselves. Not that, in the light of modern science, any physician would consider Elagabalus inhumanly wicked, any more than he would be inclined to apply the term to a man born blind, or with the taint of leprosy in his system; in fact even wickedness itself has been described as “a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of those whom they dislike.” The greater part of the dislike which men have exhibited towards this Emperor and his faults comes from the fact that he was psycho-sexually abnormal, and was possessed of a genius for the aesthetic and the religious that his historians wished to decry. 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. Men were then regarded as virtuous when they were brave, when they were honest, when they were just; and this boy did, despite his hereditary taint, show more than dashes of these virtues. The idea of using the expression “virtuous” in its later sense, occurred, if at all, in jest merely, as a synonym for a eunuch. It was the matron and the vestal who were supposed to be virtuous, and their virtue was often supposititious.