The ceremonies connected with the Phallus, and those observed in the rituals of the city were of a nature that only the infirm could withstand. Indeed, the symbol of human life was then omnipresent. Iamblichus, the philosopher, has much to say on the subject; so have Arnobius and Lactantius. If Juvenal, Martial, and Petronius are more reticent, it is because they are not Fathers of the Church nor yet antiquarians. The symbol was on the coins, over the bakers’ ovens; as a preservative against envy it hung from the necks of children; the vestals worshipped it; at weddings it was used in a manner which need not be described. It was a religious emblem, and as such formed the chief symbol in the training of the boy who was now ruler of the world. By birth a Syrian, by profession High Priest of the Sun, whose devotees worshipped the Phallus as his symbol, was it likely that he, the chief exponent, should remain cold, should take no interest in what was an all-absorbing topic? Besides which, the family was corrupted by the presence of a living fire in their veins, engendered by the perpetual heat of the sun. Consider the history of his relations, and no one will wonder that he was by nature voluptuous. But it was not his voluptuousness that the world objected to; it was the abnormal condition of his mind; because in the body of the man resided the soul with all the natural passions of a woman. He was what the world knew as a Psycho-sexual Hermaphrodite. In form he was attractive and exceedingly graceful; his hair, which was very fair, glistened like gold in the sun; he was slender and possessed of glorious blue eyes, which in turn were endowed with the power of attracting all beholders to his worship; and he knew his power over men; he had first realised it when the legionaries flocked to the temple at Emesa attracted by the reports of this Prince Charming. He was then just at the age of incipient manhood, and his woman’s instinct taught him, as no outside force could have done, that virility and strength were the finest things in the world; his religion, surroundings, and education told him nothing about the restraint of, what was to him, a perfectly natural, perhaps even an hereditary passion, the exercise of which so endeared him to the soldiers that they forthwith placed him upon the throne of the world. As Emperor he had every desire, and was under no compulsion to abstain from gratifying the craving to study and exaggerate that swift, vivid, violent age, when what Mill in his Essay on Liberty desired was enjoyed by the Augustitudes, “There was no check on the growth of personality, no grinding down of men to meet the average.” Not that any one has ever accused Elagabalus of being average. In no particular can he be considered mediocre. Perhaps his life and habits were not those to which the virile Roman world was addicted, despite the fact that Hadrian had deified, in Antinous, not a lad, but a lust, whose