The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus

by John Stuart Hay

The title of Augusta, of which Julia Cornelia Paula had been relieved, was conferred on Aquilia, and doubtless the Emperor looked forward to some considerable degree of felicity in the company of a woman of whose marriage every one disapproved.

As we know, Antonine found out quite soon that he had made a vital mistake; that he had attacked the one superstition that Rome would not allow to be touched, and, with extreme reluctance, he sent both the Goddess and her Vestal back to their appropriate dwellings. Antonine has been censured right royally both for his marriage and for the consequent divorce. Now, if the marriage were wrong, as all the authors say, surely the divorce was right; certainly Rome thought so, since his compliance with national wishes seems to have won men over, and appeased their minds, thus restoring the Emperor to his popularity. Why then did he further alienate them by remarrying Severa in the early part of the next year, as Dion and the coins relate? It is a mystery.

Antonine does not seem to have done anything at all for the family of this wife; there is no record of any offices held by them, or official appointments given, taken, or received by men of their name. Of course, they may have got jobs which came under the generic term of “appointment of unfit persons”; if so, we have no record of what they got, while the duration of the marriage was so abbreviated that there was scarcely time for any scandal to develop. The date of the divorce, like all the dates of the reign, can only be fixed approximately. It was not before the early spring and not later than the end of June, by which time Julia Maesa had regained her power (what she had of it) over the mind of Antonine, that she persuaded him to return both Minerva and her personification to their respective homes, to send for Astarte, for Elagabal, to marry Annia Faustina himself, and, above all, to adopt Alexianus; which latter ceremony took place some time before 10th July 221. We can well imagine the boy’s disgust at the failure of his plans and at the early loss of a friend in Aquilia, who, as both Dion and Herodian tell us, was Empress for only a little time.

One of the greatest obstacles which the imperial family had met with was their lack of connection with the Roman nobility. No doubt this could easily have been remedied. Maesa might have tried to make her first alliance in this direction; she seems to have imagined, however, that such persons were extinct. They had died twice, we are told, at Pharsalus and Philippi, and those who had not died then had suffered for real or imaginary crimes under succeeding Emperors. The absolutely necessary step, therefore, which Maesa had to take in this policy of alliance was to find the most influential marriageable woman in Rome and put her into the place that Aquilia Severa was holding to the jeopardy of all concerned. The lady appeared as if by a miracle. Amongst other persons who disapproved of Antonine’s proceedings were the two Senators Silius Messala and Pomponius Bassus, of whom mention has already been made, as having been concerned in a plot for dethroning the Emperor. Both had been men of importance for years. Pomponius Bassus had been Consul under Septimius Severus and Governor of Mysia under Caracalla. In fact, so important were they in their own estimation, that nothing set bounds to their ambition. Already between them they had contrived the deposition of the Emperor Julianus, and the election of Septimius, and, like the great Earl of Warwick of fifteenth-century fame, they were by no means averse to putting their heads together once again, in order to rid the state of whomsoever they thought incapax imperii.

Now, this was just the work that Mamaea wanted. For other reasons, Maesa was not averse to the plot. The gentlemen held a secret court to examine into the Emperor’s actions, and presumably they found him incapax, so set to work to corrupt the guards in the usual fashion.

Unfortunately for Antonine, that infamous system of informers which had flourished and been of such vital use under former Emperors (under his father Caracalla, to go no further back for an example) was considered by his own government as harsh and objectionable, an utterly intolerable practice in a good and settled state. Antonine had, therefore, refused to allow delators to assist the government. This being the case, he ought to have apprehended all known traitors himself. Messala and Bassus were known for such; they had always been dangerous persons. Nevertheless, Antonine left them at large. True, as Lampridius tells us, he did send for Silius Messala and probably also Pomponius Bassus to come to him at Nicomedia, because he considered it safer to keep these gentlemen with him in the East than to allow their tongues to wag freely in Rome, before such time as he had dictated his own terms of government to the Senate and people. When they returned to Rome, these men obviously plotted freely in the accustomed way until they approached too many soldiers, after which time they were condemned by the Senate, and sent to other spheres of usefulness, or, as they themselves would have put it, to an endless nothingness, where an absence of all energy could do neither good nor evil. It is quite impossible to fix the exact date of this execution. There is a tendency to assign it to the early part of the reign, i.e., about the beginning of the year 219, whilst the Court resided at Nicomedia; this, on the very frail evidence that their names appear amongst Dion’s list of those who were executed during the reign, which list was published amongst the acts of the first winter. No cause has been shown, however, for any plot to dethrone and murder the Emperor at that date; indeed, until the religious mistake in 221, any such plot would have been utterly impossible, though there is plenty of evidence concerning the various attempts of the years 221 and 222, of which almost certainly this conspiracy was one. The execution was obviously connected, in Dion’s mind, with Antonine’s third marriage. He says that the real reason, as every one knew, was because the Emperor wanted to play David to Bassus’ Uriah, with Annia Faustina taking the hackneyed part of Bathsheba.

But it is a stupid story. Antonine was married to a woman of his own choosing, and certainly did not want the friend of his grandmother, even though to please that relation he did take Annia almost as soon as her husband was dead. This is again the only possible explanation of Dion’s phrase that “This inhuman monster (i.e. Antonine) would not allow Annia Faustina to spoil her beauty by weeping for her departed husband,” a story either adapted from the similar lie related of Caracalla and his mother, or designed to do honour to the work of the unconscionable traitor Pomponius. It is quite true that Maesa found ample means of drying any tears that the usual decencies extracted from the Lady Annia; but, as things turned out, no one seemed more anxious than this scion of the imperial house of Commodus to marry the present Antonine, despite all his relations’ epithets, and, through these, what later commentators have found to say against the boy.

Annia Faustina was the only wife of Antonine who did not assume the title of Julia; this, presumably, because she was the only lady who had a name of her own by birth. Her genealogy is obscure, at least on her mother’s side. Everybody is agreed that she was great-granddaughter of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius through his fourth daughter Arria Fadilla. This lady married a certain Cn. Claudius Severus, whose son Ti. Claudius Severus was Annia’s father. Authorities disagree as to the wife of Titus. Pauly does not mention any marriage, presumably on the grounds that all are conjectural; Ramsay, from an inscription found in Phrygia, postulates that he married a second cousin, one of the Cornificia family. Tristran asserts that it was yet another cousin, Aurelia Sabina. Eckhel’s genealogy is too obscure to be of much use, though he also traces the descent of Titus’ wife to Lucilla, yet another relation. The main contention is, however, the same in all cases: Annia was descended on both sides from the imperial house of Commodus, unless the amours of the younger wife of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius made it more probable that some lusty soldier or gladiator, rather than her philosophical husband, had been responsible for the accidents of her children’s birth. Be that as it may, Arria Fadilla had passed with the rest of the family as an imperial child, and her descendants enjoyed her worship and renown.

As usual, we are told that Annia was young and beautiful, neither of which statements is borne out by the coins extant; to judge from these one would postulate that she was between forty and forty-five years of age at the time of her marriage with Antonine. Eckhel states definitely that she was thirty-eight years old at that period. Pauly ventures on neither the date of her birth nor death. It is, therefore, most unwise to assert, as the biographers do, what neither portraits nor authorities will in any way corroborate.

As with her age, so with her life: Annia’s words, deeds and political aspirations are quite unknown to us. Obviously, coming at the political juncture of Antonine’s mistake, and bringing the alliance with the old nobility that Maesa wanted by way of support, Annia was the friend of the Alexander party in the state. As such, she must have been an extraordinary annoyance to the Emperor and his friends. Certainly, from Lampridius’ accounts, the boy-husband was moody, distrustful, and generally miserable during the whole of this period, which does not presuppose connubial felicity.