“One of the blackest of his crimes,” to quote Xiphilinus, the monk of Trebizond, the abbreviator of Dion Cassius, “was the worship of his God, which he introduced into Rome (though it was a foreign God), whom he revered more religiously than any other, so far as to set him above Jupiter, and to get himself declared his priest by decree of the Senate. He was so extravagant as to be circumcised and abstained from hogs’ flesh. He appeared often in public in the habit resembling that of the priests of Syria, which caused him to be named the Assyrian. Is it necessary to mention those whom he put to death without reason? since he did not spare his best friends, whose wise and wholesome remonstrances he could not bear.” These are the sum total of the great crimes which during this period Xiphilinus brings against the Emperor, to which Herodian adds the accusation of a disordered life. Let us examine the statements in order. “The blackest of his crimes was the worship of his God and the introduction of a foreign God into Rome.” To Xiphilinus the ecclesiastic, in all probability the worship of any God except his own was a foul and insolent crime, best dealt with by the holy office of the Inquisition, or whatever took the place of that most useful body (for general purposes of extermination) at the period. But at the moment the knowledge and worship of Xiphilinus’ God was, for all practical purposes, confined in Rome to washerwomen or to people of their mental calibre. Xiphilinus’ idea that Rome had no foreign Gods is equally ecclesiastical, since only the wilfully blind did not know that Rome was comprehensively, sceptically polytheist, and that she admitted and was deeply attached to many similarly monotheistic Eastern cults, notably those of Mithra and Isis. Why then decry the worship of Elagabal alone? One can see no reason except the exclusiveness of that worship, the vast monotheistic ideal to which the Emperor had attached himself, and which he was minded to spread throughout the length and breadth of the empire, by every fair means in his power. It was this idea, later centred in Mithraism, which was the most determined opponent of the similarly monotheistic ideal of Xiphilinus, and, as its strongest opponent, called forth the monk’s hatred. Rome, however, had a different reason for disliking Elagabal. It was because he, like Jehovah, dethroned all other deities. Rome would willingly have accepted the Syrian Deity amongst the lupanar of divinities whose residence was the Pantheon and whose rites were obscene; but such was not Antonine’s scheme, even _primus inter pares_ was impossible. Elagabal was over all supreme; even Jupiter Capitolinus, Jehovah, and Vesta must serve the one God. But Rome, whose atriums dripped not blood but metaphysics, knew too well the futility of all Gods to wish for any exclusive cult; such must fall to the washerwomen, because they were unwanted, unlearned, barbaric, and out of date. But