The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus

by John Stuart Hay

Before discussing either of these, however, it will be well to sum up what we know of the work done during this winter spent in Asia Minor. According to Hydatius’ statement, drawn from the Consularia Constantinopolitana, Antonine ordered the records of indebtedness to the fiscus to be burnt, which burning took thirty days. If the story be true, it was either a foolish waste of indebtedness to the government, or an acknowledgment of the hopelessness of collecting the debts, though how the new government could have grasped this fact so quickly is not recorded; in any case, it was a real bid for popularity.

Much time would also be spent in the legal proceedings which settled the fate of the various pretenders, malcontents, and traitors. Again, the consideration of grants to legions, fitting rewards for assistance given in time of need, in fact the thousand and one things which occupy the official mind in the ordinary course of events, let alone on the restoration of a house banished and proscribed by imperial predecessors, had all to be discussed and would certainly take time. Cohen tell us of one of these measures, of which we know nothing save from the coins of 218, some of which bear the legend “Annona Augusti,” which he says is a reference to some measure relative to the grain supply, instituted for the benefit of the people.

There was certainly enough to occupy every one’s attention, but it does not quite account for the whole Court staying at Nicomedia until May 219. Cohen has, however, discovered a fact that no historians mention, namely that during this period the Emperor was unwell, as some of the coins of 219 bear the legend “Salus Augusti,” “Salus Antonini Augusti,” which are supposed to announce his recovery. If this illness had happened after he arrived in Rome, we should probably have heard about it, besides which it might have been a bar to his matrimony; if in Nicomedia, as Cohen thinks, it accounts for the length of the stay.

Business apart, of which they say little or nothing (facts have to be culled from coins, inscriptions, reports, etc., not from the pages of paid traducers), the historians now begin their tirades against the Emperor’s conduct and religion. The obvious inference is that the self-willed boy was already beginning to get on somebody’s nerves; on whose more likely than on Maesa’s and his sensitive aunt Julia Mamaea, who so ardently desired her own son to occupy his room. Maesa must have learned by now, from her own sense of the fitting and the insistent representations of Mamaea, that she would have been much better advised, even from her own point of view, if she had set up her younger grandson instead of this headstrong youth who was flouting her at every turn. Of course, it was a question whether Alexianus’ elevation would even have been possible, while an elder and a more charming son of Caracalla was known to the soldiers, nevertheless Maesa ruminated and left records which her scribes have copied.

“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 the Emperor persisted, which annoyed his grandmother and other people hugely (she seems to have been generally annoyed, however, so this may be taken as said on other occasions). She had told the boy at Emesa that religion was only a means to the end, and he, with his usual contrariness, had flouted her opinion, backed up by his mother, and persisted in making it the main end of his life. In so doing he went clean contrary to the Zeitgeist, and eventually suffered for his folly in not hanging up the fishing-net when once the fish was landed. Xiphilinus makes another egregious mistake in declaring that Antonine caused the Senate to declare him priest of Elagabal, since it was the possession of that hereditary rank or office which had paved the way to empire at all. Again, we are asked to believe that to this period belong his circumcision and resolve to abstain from hogs’ flesh, whereas Cheyne considers that these two religious peculiarities were common to all Syrian religious, as well as to the Egyptian and Semitic peoples, and dated with him in all probability from the usual age at which circumcision was performed, the age of puberty, which corresponded with his assumption of the priesthood in 217 or early 218. Lampridius, on the other hand, dates the commencement of these observances as part of the fanaticism of the later period in Rome; when the Emperor formulated his scheme for one universal church, which was to include the distinctive rites of all religions, an inference which is not by any means necessary. Antonine’s religion was undoubtedly exclusive and fanatical, though even here it was not peculiar, as the Christian history gives us far more pitiable records of these vices. Antonine’s religion was never cruel, it never persecuted, whereas from the moment that Christianity attained the ascendancy she has considered persecution her especial rôle. There may be joy in heaven over the sinner that repents; in Christendom the joy is at his downfall. We can fancy the difference with which the monk would have treated this Emperor’s memory had he been successful, had he even had the foresight to affiliate his church with the kindred worship of Jerusalem, to call his Deity Jehovah in the later adaptation of the term, and had then died as other martyrs had done, a victim to the conviction that in him resided the fulness of the godhead bodily, and further, in the prosecution of a scheme for monotheistic worship, such as no Emperor had ever yet formulated. It is a thousand pities for his reputation that he did not see ahead. In that case, though he would not have formed a fourth part of the ineffable Trinity, his life would at least have become blameless, not only by the baptism of blood, but also in the pages of ecclesiastical historians. We might then have seen St. Antoninus “Athleta Christi,” a holy martyr worshipped throughout the length and breadth of Christendom, as the upholder of monotheism against the forces of his polytheistic surroundings.

In connection with this question, one act of pride is recorded of the sojourn of Nicomedia, an act which well shows the temper of the boy, namely, his assumption of the latinized name of his God, Elagabalus (though, apparently, this was not done for official purposes, as it never occurs on the coins or inscriptions of his reign). Earlier Emperors had been deified at their death; latterly it had been customary to accord divine honours during the lifetime of the monarch. Elagabalus did not believe that, a senatorial patent aiding, he could become a new God. He did believe, unfortunately, like so many prophets and other religious maniacs, that he could associate himself with his God as his earthly emanation or expression; and henceforward, says Lampridius, none might address him officially except on the knee. It was a weird fancy, but no uncommon delusion, and the world has connived at his conceit by giving him that title when all others are forgotten save amongst numismatists. That Antonine intended others to regard him in this light, and was thus a constant menace to Christ, is certain from the fact (recorded by Herodian) that he sent to the imperial city during this winter his portrait, painted in the full splendour of his Aaronic vestments, with the command that it should be placed in the Senate House, immediately above the statue of Victory, and that each Senator on entering should offer incense and an oblation to Deus Solus in the image of his High Priest on earth. Herodian records another effort, made during this winter, to introduce the worship of Deus Solus into the minds of men. This was an order sent to magistrates officiating at the public sacrifices that this name should take the first and most important place; an order which, we are told, even Montanist Christians were able to obey, especially as there were no penalties attaching to the refusal.

It had obviously been a gross error of judgment on Maesa’s part to introduce a boy of such a temperament to a religion of any sort, much more so to have made him the directing force thereof; but it was done, and with it went the clothes she now hated so cordially. At Emesa, Antonine had accustomed himself to the clinging softness of the silken raiment worn by that priesthood; now he declined to lay it aside. He hated wool and refused to wear it, neither did linen take his fancy. Silk and cloth of gold encrusted with jewels was his ostentatious conceit, and he was going to wear what his soul delighted in, now that he was free to indulge his proclivities, but what had been entirely proper and fitting at Emesa would not do for the War Lord of the Roman Empire. One knows that circumstances alter cases, and can fancy the state of Maesa’s mind when she contemplated the wide-eyed astonishment which would greet the painted priest as he made his entry into Rome the conservative. The Emperor thought he knew better than his elders; he had found the secret of popularity with the army, and thought that similar attractions would bring the city captive to his feet. Money, beauty, and voluptuousness, says Capitolinus, had brought him to the throne of the world, and he had artistic taste enough to realise that his beauty, height, and grace were enhanced when he was robed in the silken garments of his choice. He did not realise that the clothes were too rich for a soldier; that bracelets, necklaces, and tiaras were the means by which priests rule women, not soldiers the hearts of men; that now he must put away childish things, since he had begun to be a man, the leader of armies. Again Maesa was right, but she was overruled, and made more entries against the day when the sum of this grandson’s iniquities against her should be so complete that she might put another in his room. It is only fair to state, however, that Dion totally disagrees with this other “eye-witness” when he remarks, that Antonine always wore the Toga Praetexta at the games and shows, thus restricting the use of the Syrian clothes to religious and family appearances.

But, to proceed to Xiphilinus’ third charge, that of putting men, even his best friends, to death without reason. This almost certainly refers to the death of Gannys, his mother’s and grandmother’s obliging servant, and the Emperor’s tutor, to whom, Herodian tells us, he was much attached. Forquet de Dorne says that this man considered himself authorised to remonstrate continually with the Emperor on his conduct, just as though his relations’ grumblings did not weary him sufficiently. Further, Wotton tells us that a marriage had been arranged between him and one of the imperial ladies, and that there was an idea of declaring him Caesar. Probably these two circumstances led to the tragedy or accident which resulted in Gannys’ death, and which, we are told, Antonine always bitterly regretted.