The Roman world had wearied of Macrinus and his pretensions, just as it had wearied of Claudius; both were fantastic, vacillating, abstracted, and cowardly tyrants, declaring themselves to be of the opinion of those who were right, and announcing that they would give judgment in favour of those whose reasons appeared the best. Slipshod and tattered they both went through life; Emperors whom no one obeyed and at whom every one jeered; men who, when they heard that conspirators were abroad, were not indignant, but merely frightened. Perhaps it was the purple which had driven so many Emperors mad, that made Macrinus an idiot; certainly he acted like one, and made way for yet another Phaeton for the universe: a prince for whose sovereignty the world was too small, as Tiberius had remarked of his nephew Caius, nicknamed Caligula, the man without whom neither Nero, Domitian, Commodus, Caracalla, or Elagabalus could have existed. The lives of all are horrible, yet analyse the horrible and you find the sublime. The valleys have their imbeciles, from the mountains poets and madmen come. Elagabalus was both, sceptred at that, and with a sceptre that could lash the earth, threaten the sky, beckon planets, and ravish the divinity of the divine. CHAPTER IV THE WINTER AT NICOMEDIA Saluted by the whole army on the evening of 8th June 218, the young Emperor, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, set out to cover the 20 odd miles which separated Immae from Antioch, the Eastern capital. Next morning, we are told by Dion, he entered the city amidst the customary rejoicings. It had been a principle with the late Caracalla to give conquered cities over to the rapacity of the soldiers, and here the conquering host imagined, nay, strongly urged, that this laudable custom should be revived, but the present Antonine saw no reason for any such proceeding. With a singular lack of subservience, which is, we are told, the first mark of a born sovereign, he informed them that a regular toll would be taken from the citizens instead, and each man paid a sum of 500 drachmae from the imperial exchequer; he thus satisfied their natural expectation of reward, and promised the population that no pillage would take place; that, on the other hand, the ordinary contributions to the exchequer (the marks of settled government in times of peace) were sufficient, while pillage would suggest the wars and disturbances which were now over. It was certainly a bold act, this crossing the will of the soldiers at the very outset, too bold for either a woman or a boy of fourteen to have devised; but Antonine intended to make that city his temporary capital, and had in consequence more than soldiers to conciliate.