On the borders of the Orontes, in that part of Syria which is known as Phoenicia, lies a small, disagreeable, and melancholy-looking town, which to-day bears the name of Homs, or Hems. It is a construction of yellow and black stones mixed with mud and broken straw, and is the rendezvous of Curds, Bedouins, and Turkomans, a straggling village, where dirt, squalor, and misery proclaim the absence of trade, roads, or contact with an outside world. A short distance away are the ruins of an ancient castle, built by the Crusaders to dominate the route to Antioch. Here alone is there a trace of fruitfulness, a sort of oasis of green gardens, extending along the river-bank towards what was once the graceful and beautiful capital of the Elagabal monarchy, the famous city of Emesa—celebrated under the independent High-Priest Kings of the family of Sohemais for the splendour of its palaces and the magnificence of its temple, and because it was the headquarters of the worship of the God of Gods, Elah-Gebal, or Baal, which is the name more familiar to Christian ears. For us the chief interest in this wretched village lies in the fact that it is the home of that race of Syrian Emperors who ruled Rome during the period of her greatest renown and prosperity—a period when the splendour of the Purple reached its apogee. Rome had been watching a crescendo that had mounted with the ages; it culminated in the revived Antonine house; but the tension had been too great, something snapped, and there was nothing left. So it had been with Emesa; her splendours endured sorrowfully until the twelfth century, and then were engulfed, as her house had long since been, in a great earthquake which devastated that part of Syria, along with lesser-known parts of the earth’s surface. Little is known of the early history of the hereditary High-Priest Kings of Emesa. Strabo tells us that, like the neighbouring sovereigns of Jerusalem, their origin was sacerdotal, to which functions they had attached the title and jurisdiction of secular rulers on the breaking-up of the Seleucid monarchy.