Severa was the chief associate of his life in the palace, and it is quite impossible to convey an impression of the sordid scenes into which she had passed from the austere sanctuary of Vesta. Twelve condensed pages of the “Historia Augusta” are occupied with his enormities, and at the close of what is probably the most appalling picture of unrestrained license in any literature--even if we admit exaggeration--Lampridius assures us that he has, from a feeling of modesty, omitted the worst details. It would seem that the human imagination, in its most diseased condition, could devise nothing lower. We do not know whether Severa was an Octavia or a Poppæa, but the circumstance that she consented to live is grave enough. In that vast colony of vice, to which a system of pandars, spread over the Empire, dispatched every man who had some special physical or moral feature to fit him for the orgies, no decent woman would have clung to mortality. A Cæsonia or a Marcia might laugh when Elagabalus returned at night, dressed as a common female tavern-keeper, from the low wine-shops in which he had been rioting--might even smile when she saw Elagabalus’s “husband,” a burly slave, beating and bruising him for his infidelity, or when she heard at night the rattle of the golden rings and the shameful appeal of the new Messalina behind his curtain--but Severa was of noble birth, the daughter of a man who had twice been consul. One of the unpardonable sins of Rome was that it hesitated so long to assassinate some of its rulers. The very excesses of Elagabalus protected him for a long time, as he urged the people to share or imitate his pleasures. No screen was drawn about his vices. He would discuss them with the Senate, or collect all the _meretrices_ of Rome in a hall, and address them on those various schemes of vice which we find to-day depicted on the walls of the _lupanar_ in Pompeii. He would invite the common folk to come and drink with him at the palace, where they might see the furniture of solid silver, the beds loaded with roses and hyacinths, the swimming-baths of perfume, the gold dust strewn in the colonnades, the paths paved with porphyry. He provided for them the spectacle of naval battles in lakes of wine, and a mountain of snow, brought from the remote mountains, in the middle of summer. But his chief device for cajoling the citizens was to distribute tickets, as for a lottery, and see them press for the sight of the gifts corresponding to their numbers. You might get ten eggs or ten ostriches, ten flies or ten camels, ten toy balloons or ten pounds of gold; and the mania grew until your chance lay between a dead dog, a slave, a richly caparisoned horse, a chariot, or a hundred pounds of gold. At times he would invite a crowd to dinner, and smother them, with fatal effect to some, under a thick shower of flowers; or seat them on inflated bags, which slaves would deflate in the middle of