This intimate association with so foul an Emperor as Caracalla lent colour to the current belief that she was linked with him in another capacity than that of mother. Herodian (iiii), Eutropius (viii), and Aurelius Victor (“Epitome,” xxi), give the charge as an undoubted fact. Spartianus (“Historia Augusta,” “Caracalla,” x) gives a circumstantial story of the mother leading the son astray, and Aurelius Victor gives the same anecdote in his “De Cæsaribus,” xxi. She is said to have presented herself to Caracalla in what Serviez calls “an exceedingly magnificent and becoming dress”--_se maxima corporis parte denudasset_, is the text--and yielded with ease. The anecdote is too common a sample of the salacious gossip of the time to be taken seriously, but the substantial charge is not so easily set aside. Dio, it is true, does not give it. When he speaks (c. 10) of Caracalla having “possessed the rascality [πανοῦργον] of his mother,” he does not indeed pay a tribute to her character, but the word he employs seems to indicate craft, perhaps unscrupulous craft, rather than lasciviousness. But even Dio relates an adventure which fairly shows that this grave charge against Julia was widely credited in his day. In the year 216, during his tour in the East, Caracalla announced that he would honour Alexandria with a visit. Unsparing as the Alexandrians had been in their witticisms on the ugly, bald, and prematurely old young man, with all his brutality and folly, they had no suspicion of his real intention, and they prepared to receive him with great honour. Once inside their gates, however, he savagely precipitated his troops on the unarmed citizens and for several days directed the carnage and pillage from the temple of Serapis. This savage onslaught is said by Dio to have been a punishment for the jibes of the Alexandrians, and we know from Herodian that one of their most deadly shafts was to speak of him and his mother as Œdipus and Jocaste. It cannot therefore be said that Dio is unaware of the current belief, nor can we follow Miss Wilkins when she suggests that the “elderly Empress” was incapable of such conduct. Julia had been married only twenty-nine years before, and may very well be presumed to have been in her early forties in the year 216. She was in “the full flush of life,” as Dio expressly says, and is not known to have embraced any system of ethics or religion which would lay a stigma on incest. But the general moderation of her career and the repellent character of Caracalla, unrelieved by a single grace of person or disposition, must weigh heavily in the scale against the gossip of Rome.