The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus

by John Stuart Hay

But there was much to temper her power. There was an element which even she, far-sighted as she was, had forgotten, and left out of count, namely, the Emperor himself. From the moment of his elevation he showed that he had a mind and will of his own; probably he had possessed them all along, but his grandmother had never thought that they would get in her way till she was brought face to face with them.

By nature Bassianus was gentle and affectionate, with no other passions than an innocent fanaticism for the cult of the only God, and a hereditary temperament, which we know to-day is less of a vice than a perversion; a temperament which Suetonius assures us he shared with the majority of his predecessors, and Dion says was common amongst the Syrian clergy. Caracalla had, innate in his being, jealousy, hatred, and revenge. Bassianus hated no one; he was, in fact, only too prone to love his fellows, but, like Caracalla, he had a strong and imperious will. He had no sooner grasped the limitless possibilities of the imperial position than vertigo seems to have overtaken him. But fancy the position! On a peak piercing the heavens, shadowing the earth, a precipice on either side, the young Emperors of Old Rome stood. Did they look below, they could scarce see the world. From above, delirium came; while the horizon, though it hemmed the limits of their vision, could not mark the frontiers of their dream. In addition, there was the exaltation that altitudes produce.

The Emperor was alone; henceforward his will was unopposed. His grandmother tried to make herself felt; on each occasion she had to give way, to retire beaten, till one can well imagine that lady’s despair at the unforeseen development,—almost anticipate the final resolve of that crafty old sinner, to rid herself of the grandson whom she had set up, fondly imagining him her mere puppet. Still, advisers were necessary. From what we can see of the available men (and a man would certainly be Antonine’s choice) there is but one for whom consistently through his life the Emperor had respect, namely, Eutychianus. He had, so Dion states, conceived the plot of the proclamation, and carried it out by himself, while the women were still unconscious of what was going forward. He was immediately made Praetorian Praefect, later he was Consul, and twice City Praefect, which frequent recurrence of office, being unusual in one person, is put down by Dion as a gross breach of the constitution—where no constitution existed except the imperial will. The sneer of Xiphilinus at his buffooneries is obviously an untruth, considering the fact that we know of him as a soldier as far back as Commodus’ reign. If he had been a mere nonentity or a worthless person, it is incredible that, in the proscriptions and murders that followed that of Antonine, Eutychianus should have been reappointed to the office of Praefect of Rome for at least the ensuing year. Taking all the evidence into consideration, it is probable that from the outset the soldier Eutychianus was chief minister and director of the government, and as such supported Antonine against his grandmother. To him therefore, as well as to Maesa, may be attributed much of the sane common-sense work that was done; work which, especially in the dealings with the soldiers, shows a man’s hand, a soldier’s touch, indeed that of a soldier who knows, by reason of his position, just how far he can go.

The first recorded act of the new government was to announce to the Roman Fathers the restoration of the house of Antonine. Now the Senate of the Roman people was in no very pleasant position, considering the possibilities and the knowledge that the imperial house had not a few grudges to settle with their august assembly. Rome, as we know from the record of the Arval Brothers’ meeting held on 30th May, was expecting some announcement almost daily, either of the accession or extirpation of the late imperial connection. The last communication from the East had been signed by Macrinus. It was a distracted and illiterate epistle announcing the elevation of his small son to the empire, and the speedy fall of the pseudo-Antonine. In all probability the news which had reached the Arval Brothers was common property, and the Senate was not so sure of the result of the revolt as Macrinus would have liked them to be. The main cause for anxiety was their answer, which was probably still on its way to Macrinus: a dutiful response to his demand—made about 20th April—that the Antonine family should be proscribed and declared enemies to the state. With their usual subservience, the Conscript Fathers had decreed as desired, had even gone out of their way to level invectives and ordures against the memory of the house of Severus, and this with a hearty goodwill that showed their genuineness.

Now, if these tactless epistles, as the Fathers feared, had reached Antioch either just before or just after the new monarch’s arrival, they were likely to cause an infinity of trouble, especially if they fell into the wrong hands, which, as luck would have it, they promptly did. This circumstance quite decided Elagabalus on the amount of respect which it was necessary to pay to the “Slaves in Togas” either in his own or in any other state. Judge of their apprehensions when an answer to their obedient proscriptions was brought into the Senate House, within the first fortnight of July, if not earlier, by a herald declaring his mission from the august Emperor, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Antoninus’ son, Severus’ grandson, Pius and Happy, Tribune and Proconsul, without so much as by your leave or with your leave from the assembled Fathers. (Dion omits the title of Consul, despite the fact that there are inscriptions which call Antonine Consul at that date.) Think how willingly now the Fathers would have given their right hands to repair the egregious mistake they had just made. They had been too precipitate, too hurried altogether, and they knew from past experience that the house of Antonine did not visit such mistakes in a chastened spirit.

At last the imperial message was laid before the house. It was as though the Gods had been for once propitious to human stupidity. The letter contained gracious words, “dropping as the gentle dew from heaven.” Was it a mere ruse, such as former Antonines had played, or was it in reality the herald of a new world to come? Surely yes, for it promised amnesty, on the word of the Emperor, to the Senate and people of Rome, for all words, acts, and proscriptions formerly promulgated against the divine Caesar, by command of the usurping murderer Macrinus; to whom the same Senate and people were commanded to give neither help nor assistance, but rather to condemn and execrate, in the precise terms they had so recently applied to the divine Emperor now happily reigning. For was he not an enemy to the state who had not only murdered his master, whom he had been appointed to guard, but also in that he, who was neither Senator nor otherwise worthy, had pretended to Empire, being a mere slave and gladiator, whom Caracalla had raised to the rank of Praetorian Praefect?

There was some more biting sarcasm on the ease with which that august body had accepted the pretensions of the ex-slave without question, and had been persuaded to confirm him in the position of his murdered master. For himself, Antonine makes the mere announcement of his succession, much as Macrinus had done on the occasion of his son’s elevation, with the obvious implication that the Fathers will confirm the accomplished facts with as little delay as is compatible with the usual decencies. He tells them that to err is human, but Antonine, mirabile dictu, will forgive, on the conditions mentioned, of course; which conditions taken as fulfilled, the Emperor continues with an explanation of the happy auguries for the commencement of his reign. He was come, he said, a second Augustus; like Augustus he was eighteen years of age (an obvious lie, and they knew it, but an Emperor of fourteen did not sound well); like Augustus his reign started with a victory which revenged the murder of his father, and the success, with which both he and Augustus had met, was a good omen for the people, who might expect great things from a prince who proposed to unite the wisdom of Augustus with that of the philosopher Marcus Aurelius, and to rule after these truly admirable examples. Another letter to the soldiers was delivered at the same time, which contained extracts from Macrinus’ correspondence with Marius Maximus, Praefect of the City. In this the vacillating duplicity of the late Macrinus and his opinion of the army generally was made the most of, his innate civilian distrust of the military held up to ridicule and scorn.

To crown these admirable productions of literary persuasiveness was a promise to the soldiers of their immediate return to the privileges and conditions existent under Caracalla in the case of each and several of the Emperor’s beloved comrades. They were certainly admirable letters, designed to rejoice the hearts of both guards and people, and to leave the Senate in pleasurable anticipation of favours to come, if they took immediate advantage of the opportunity now given them to change their minds,—otherwise—well, the more stringent methods of Augustus might have to be employed, and orders were sent to Pollio, Consul Suffectus, to this effect. Undoubtedly the Fathers made up their minds with admirable promptitude—they do not seem to have made a single inquiry as to the fate of the Moor who was nominally reigning Emperor. Never was their voice more willingly given; public thanksgivings were decreed for the restoration of the house of Antonine, and the acts of an Emperor who had treated them as so much garden refuse were lauded most fulsomely. Proscription was the lot of the “Tyrant and Murderer,” who had usurped the imperial styles, titles, and addresses; in fact anything that lay in their power to oblige with they were most happy to offer; more than he had ever thought of asking the Fathers hastened to lay at the feet of the child whose origin, whose sentiments, whose feminine beauty, whose very female relatives breathed divinity from every pore.

There is no better example of the vast comprehensiveness of mind possessed by bodies of men fulfilling the functions which Aristotle calls the “collective wisdom of the many,” than this instance of the wonderful facility with which they are able to see all points of view in succession, especially the more advantageous. Only a few short weeks back the infallible wisdom had decreed that the new deities were enemies to the state. Now they knew that the existence of these very enemies was only another way of stating the life and being of the state itself. Their one regret was that they had not known it sooner; as it was, they were forced to admit that, if the well-bred can contradict other people, the wise must contradict themselves.