whereas Confucianism and Mahommedanism attract men because the demand is for virile qualities, and the place for women is small. Such faiths make even more than individual demands on the virtues of courage, endurance, self-control, bravery, loyalty, and enthusiasm. Gulick says also, that the able-bodied boy who lacks the courage to fight is generally a milksop, or a sneak, without any high sense of honour. In this epitome of the qualities demanded of men we see the true grounds on which the world has instinctively condemned Elagabalus, though probably without quite knowing why they did so. It is because they have been told that he possessed the virtues, along with the mind, of the woman, and a voluptuous woman at that, and had nothing of what the world expects to find in the male animal. His reign was short, so he left no traces of his mind on the Empire, and what little he did effect was reversed by his successor. His reign of prodigal extravagance caused not one single new impost; his government of the city and provinces alike was one of peace and harmony. That infamous system of informers under which the aristocracy and plutocracy of Rome had suffered so direly up to the death of Caracalla was never re-established by Elagabalus; despite the fact that his rule had been subverted, on more than one occasion, by the existing aristocrats. The people was sovereign, and it was important that that sovereign should be amused, flattered, and fed. All was done that had been done before by the demi-gods, and all was done with an exaggeration unparalleled. His games in the circus were such that even Lampridius admits the people considered him a worthy Emperor, because he was endowed with a sense of the grandeur of the imperial position, and expressed it by his marvellous prodigalities. They made him what he was, and has ever remained in history, the Emperor of extravagance. In him the glow of the purple reached its apogee. Rome had been watching a crescendo that had mounted with the ages. Its culmination was in this hermaphrodite. But the tension had been too great, even for the solidarity of Imperial Rome; it was as though the mainspring had snapped, and the age of anarchy, both military and religious, did the rest: undermining the State, till the Emperors, whose sceptre had lashed both gods and sky, became little better than a procession of bandits, coloured and ornate it is true, but utterly lacking in that strength and virility which is the essential of real government throughout the world. Thus did Rome make way for Attila, the scourge whom God sent for the final extinction of art and philosophy, and incidentally for the refurbishing of the world under its mediaeval guise. CHAPTER X THE EXTRAVAGANCES OF THE EMPEROR ELAGABALUS