The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus

by John Stuart Hay

It was certainly not long before Antonine found that his success had not been as unqualified as he had imagined. Alexander was Caesar by decree of the Senate; Severus by some utterly unconstitutional decree of the army; Antonini filius and Severi Nepos; but here it began and ended. The boy was utterly unresponsive to the affection that Antonine was anxious to lavish upon him; utterly incapable, so the Emperor said, of any sort of training for the position he was destined to occupy. Undoubtedly a great mistake had been made, the boy was a born prig, and the Emperor had given his case away by adopting him at all, by putting him into a position in which his popularity was bound to increase amongst those who did not know him personally. In fact, Antonine arrived at the conclusion before the wine harvest that he had played his aunt’s game and not his own, and in consequence he became moody and uncomfortable.

Lampridius’ contrast of the two characters is, as we have said, a caricature drawn for the laudation of the younger, the reprobation of the elder. If only a part is true, it must have been very annoying for the Emperor of seventeen to be saddled, through his own stupidity, with a nincompoop of twelve, a boy who quoted proverbs to a purpose, and the maxims of a detestable crowd of female relatives at every turn. Of course, Lampridius’ likeness of his little hero is stocked with fulsome adulation. One would think, on reading it, that there was at least one person in the world who did not deceive himself when he said that he was without sin, and therefore ready to cast the first stone. The account of his first meeting with the Senate is simply ludicrous; no child, however disgusting, could have displayed the unction and greasiness which is recorded as having slipped off his tongue. Were he one-half as nasty as Lampridius asserts, we can well imagine that the whole devil in Antonine was striving to get hold of his cousin’s prejudices, trying to persuade him to run, dance, play, to wake him up from the self-satisfaction which so ill became his years. All of this, we are told, Antonine did, under the generic terms of corrupting his morals, which is after all the sum total of Antonine’s enormities.

But here Mamaea stepped in. She had spoilt her son’s youth, as many another parent has done both before and since, and was not going to stand by and see her work dissipated, blown to the winds. Not that she need have feared. The Bassiani developed young; Alexander’s character was moulded, and he had no desire to change, to live his life as a man, instead of as a vegetable, or enjoy the gifts which the gods had given to men. Antonine had thought that something might be done for the cousin he pitied, by turning him loose; he found it was no good, and soon lost patience. He then realised the trend of affairs; he saw the growing influence of the women, the stupidity of the boy, and chafed more each day under both. The nonconformist conscience, which was Alexander’s chief attraction, and is still his only title to fame, annoyed the Emperor continually. Friction arose at every turn. It was Antonine striving to minimise the influence of the women, and the women striving to destroy the influence of Antonine, together with his crew of wretched favourites. Neither did the elderly Annia Faustina tend to mend matters. She as well as Alexander had been a mistake, and so the Emperor resolved to get rid of both his troubles at one swoop. To do this, however, he had to quarrel openly with his relatives, and by a coup d’état regain paramount authority in the state. The question was, would he be strong enough? Would a boy of seventeen, surrounded by friends who, however agreeable as sportsmen, however able in the histrionic art were anything but trained politicians, have much chance of regaining what statecraft, diplomacy, and guile had filched from him at a moment when he was comparatively helpless?

His first act was to follow the same tactics that he had adopted on 10th July. He sent to the Senate ordering the fathers to withdraw the title of Caesar which he had conferred on Alexander and which they had confirmed. That august assembly, we are told, preserved a discreet silence, not quite knowing whom to please, or which way the strongest cat was going to jump. Here, after all that the author has said about Alexander’s popularity and the general hatred testified towards Antonine, occurs a strange statement. Lampridius says they were silent because, “according to certain persons, Alexander was popular with the army.” This, as we see, is a much-qualified expression of opinion when compared with those in the foregoing sections, and put in conjunction with the Senate’s reluctance to commit itself one way or another, it is certainly significant, and points to the fact that the real hatred towards the Emperor had yet to be worked up, like the similar hatred towards the aristocracy in this country. Another significant fact concerning the Emperor’s honest and straightforward intentions towards his cousin is, that right up to the last he seems to have had command of the boy’s person, and never took any decisive measure, either openly or secretly—in the usual Antonine fashion—for removing him to another sphere of usefulness in realms celestial, despite the plots formed against his own life, of which, before now, he had had ample proof.

It is probable that about this time Antonine made several official appointments which were considered thoroughly bad by the older politicians. Names are not mentioned, but we can well believe that the Emperor had grown suspicious of his old advisers ever since he had seen them paying court to the young Caesar and his mother. We are told that he put men into offices, especially those about the palace, who, from a personal and too intimate relation, he felt he could rely on. As ever, such appointments are a gross mistake. As mere friends such men would have tended to his undoing; as officials they tended to revolution.

Following up his command to the Senate, Antonine sent messengers to the army. These demanded that the soldiery should relieve Alexander of the title of Severus, or Caesar, or whatever designation they had taken upon themselves to confer on the boy, while the same messengers were ordered to deface the statues and inscriptions in the camp, as the custom was to treat those of dethroned tyrants. Now, this was unwise, without so much as by your leave, or with your leave, because the property belonged to the regiments, and not to the Emperor.

Next in order comes the record of an attempt made by Antonine to assassinate his cousin. It is a story which requires careful examination, because Herodian never mentions it at all, and Dion only refers to it casually in the following words: “Much as Sardanapalus loved his cousin, when he began to suspect everybody and learnt that the general feeling was veering towards Alexander, he dared to change his resolution, and did all in his power to get rid of him. He tried one day to have him assassinated, and not only did not succeed, but nearly lost his own life in the attempt.” Lampridius is, of course, much more explicit. This we might expect, because he lived so much later and had a century of vilification to work upon as well as Dion’s official story. From him we learn that Antonine sent men to assassinate Alexander, and also sent letters to the boy’s governors (all of whom, be it remembered, were of Mamaea’s appointment and consequently were working for her, not for Antonine) with promises of wealth and honours if they would only kill their charge in any way they thought best, either in the bath, by poison, or the sword.

This policy of bovine artfulness accomplished, Antonine went to his gardens in the suburbs (ad spem veterem) for an afternoon’s exercise in chariot-driving, certainly without any sufficient guard. At this juncture Lampridius stops his fantastic story of the most futile attempt at assassination ever recorded, in order to utter a few sententious platitudes, which, however, cut both ways. He remarks with a verisimilitude of sincerity, that “the wicked can do nothing against the innocent.” Now this is a maxim which is not always regarded as a truism, even on the Stock Exchange, but it was a convenient way of accounting for the incomprehensible ending to this absurd allegation.

Lampridius then continues that the promulgation of these orders, as carried to the soldiers, did not increase the popularity of the Emperor, at any rate amongst that party who were in Mamaea’s pay; besides which, fratricide was by no means a popular, even when it was a fashionable crime. The result of these two supposed epistles when communicated to the soldiers (by whom or why is unfortunately not mentioned) was to rouse them to the highest pitch of anger. Quite spontaneously they ran, some to the palace, where Alexander was living with his mother, and some to the gardens, where, also by some unexplained power of divination, they knew they would find Antonine; their intention being to carry out Mamaea’s wishes on the person of the Emperor without further delay. Soaemias, we are told, followed them on foot with the design of warning her son concerning the danger that threatened him. Antonine was preparing for a chariot race when he heard the noise approaching, and being frightened, says Lampridius, he hid in the doorway of his bedroom, behind the curtain; surely not a very safe place to hide when thoroughly frightened by an angry mob, and quite unlike his usual procedure in times of danger. Next he sent his praefect Antiochianus to find out the reason of the tumult. This man easily managed to dissuade the soldiers from their murderous designs, and recalled them to their oaths, because, as Lampridius naïvely remarks, they were too few in number; the greater part having refused to leave their standard, which Aristomachus had kept out of the treasonable attempt.