On the night of May 15th, 218, the three women and the two boys were transferred to the camp. Mæsa’s fortune went with them, as the price of Empire, and on the following day the soldiers announced that Bassianus, as he was now called, was Emperor. The camp was fortified, and in a few days Macrinus’s general, Julianus, appeared before it with his troops. Their companions in the camp exhibited the young son of Caracalla on the rampart, and, as they exhibited also the bags of Mæsa’s gold, they convinced and seduced the assailants. Julianus’s head was cut off, and sent to Antioch. Macrinus now marched against them, and the two armies met in the intervening country on June 8th. The softened troops wavered on both sides, and it looked as if Macrinus might win, when Mæsa and Soæmias sprang from their chariots in the rear of the army, rushed into the ranks, and spurred their flagging followers on to victory. Macrinus fled, in an ignominious disguise, across the hills and valleys of Asia Minor, and within a few weeks Nonia Celsa learned that she had lost her throne, her husband, and her boy. The Emperor of Rome was the pretty boy-priest of Elagabalus. Imperial power, however, meant to the Syrian youth an unrestrained indulgence of his sensual dreams, not a grave concern with the affairs of a mighty people. He dallied in the East, and willingly left his duties to his grandmother, while he devoted himself entirely to his rights. He gathered about him the ignoble company of ministers to lust which the cities of Asia Minor were at all times ready to supply, and there was no depth or eccentricity of vice in Antioch or Nicomedia which he did not explore. Before the end of that year the boy’s nature was completely perverted, and the last trace of masculinity eliminated from it. Mæsa was alarmed, for the cities of the East were wont to talk freely of the vices they implanted or cultivated in their visitors, and the sentiment of Rome could not be ignored. But Bassianus laughed at her timidity, and lingered throughout the following winter in the voluptuous chambers of Nicomedia. As to this Roman Senate, of which she spoke, he sent the grey-beards a painting of himself in his flowing sacerdotal robes and womanly jewels, to be placed over the altar of Victory in their meeting-place.