The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus

by John Stuart Hay

There is no mention of Annia having taken any special part either for or against her husband in the network of treasonable attempts which his family were continually trying. We do not even know how the marriage was dissolved. The natural presumption is that he divorced Annia, as he had divorced Cornelia and Aquilia, though it is allowable in the absence of the usual gibe at his inconstancy, or any suggestion of foul play, to suppose that she died—allowable, but not very probable. Antonine obviously took her as part of his grandmother’s scheme, and got rid of her when he tried to get rid of Alexander, by repudiating the adoption. Dion relates that he then took two nameless women to wife, finally returning to Aquilia Severa. The first part of the statement is obviously a fiction. All Antonine, or any one of his temperament, wanted from a wife was friendship and affection; this he certainly had in Aquilia, whom he only divorced as a precautionary measure, and whom he certainly took back just as soon as he could get rid of Annia.

Of course, to divorce Annia, a really important imperial lady, was a disagreeable step; it would alienate the whole of the upper classes, unless he could show reason for the change. Annia, by the extreme eagerness with which she had jumped at the chance of being Empress, was certainly not going to be party to the divorce—not that her consent was necessary in such times of freedom, when divorce was of daily occurrence, even in the best-regulated families. Cicero divorced his wife, we are told, because she did not idolise him; Caesar his, on the pretext that she ought to be above suspicion. Certainly no actual misconduct was necessary, unless the whim of the moment be regarded as such. Antonine exercised this right to act on his whim, or rather on his knowledge that the lady was an unnecessary burden, but it cost him dear, the lady was not born to take such snubs in a chastened spirit, even if her imperial relations liked to adopt that attitude, which is, to say the least of it, an unlikely supposition.

The odd ladies may be ignored. Dion says they were wives, not concubines. But time did not permit of so many weddings and divorces; while the Emperor’s inclination, continually veering back to Aquilia, would not have let him try so many others. Dion tells us that Antonine remarried this Vestal before the last and fatal plot was set on foot; a statement which is corroborated by certain Alexandrian coins struck after 29th August 221. It was a proceeding, as far as we can judge, more mad than his first mistake. Admitting that Antonine knew that his first error, in taking the nun to wife, had angered the people, it is impossible for us to imagine why he took her again, thus once more upsetting the city. It was the most unaccountable blunder, and one which would finally alienate those whom he had so lately tried to propitiate. There may have been goodness in the act, kindness towards the woman, who had given up so much for his sake. There is goodness everywhere, often the basis of evil is in that virtue; certainly much madness may be traced to it.

In reading the account of this epoch, one feels as though one were assisting at the spectacle of a gigantic asylum where the inmates were omnipotent. From this disease of madness Rome might have recovered, had not her delirium, which was fine, turned to softening of the brain. Until a century later, there was hope, because the guilt was conscious; it was only when guilt became ignorance, that Rome disappeared.

PART II

CHAPTER IX
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE EMPEROR ELAGABALUS

“I would never have written the life of Antoninus Impurissimus,” said Lampridius, “were it not that he had predecessors.” Even in Latin the task was difficult. In English it would be impossible, at least Lampridius’ life. There are subjects that permit of a hint, particularly if it be masked to the teeth, but there are others that no art can drape, not even the free use of Latin substantives. Our task therefore is to deal, rather with their sins of omission, than with the biographers’ offences against all canons of good taste in recording the inexpressible. In his work on the Caesars, Suetonius displayed the eccentricities simply, without adding any descriptive placards; therein lay Suetonius’ advantage; he was able to describe; nowadays a writer may not, at least not the character we possess of Elagabalus. It is not that he was depraved, for all his house was; it is, that, like many moderns, he made depravity a pursuit, and the aegis of the purple has carried the stories beyond the limits of the imaginable, let alone beyond the limits of the real. Were we to accept unexamined, the testimony of his traducers of the Christian era, we would gather that “at the feet of that painted boy Elephantis and Parrhasius could have sat and learned a lesson,” that “apart from that phase of his sovereignty, he was a little Sardanapalus, an Asiatic Mignon, who found himself great.” Of course it would have been curious to see him in that wonderful palace, clothed like a Persian queen, insisting that he should be addressed as Imperatrix, and quite living up to the title. It would not only have been interesting, it would have given one an insight into how much Rome saw and how much she could stand.

Lampridius himself drew breath once, to remark that he could not vouch for the truth of the stories he was committing to paper, but he was employed to show the contrast between Constantine’s “execrable superstition,” as Tacitus describes it, and those of the ancient world, so went on to record things even more impossible. Perhaps his remark was unnecessary. His record has defeated its own end. He has come down to posterity as the biographer whose contradictory collection of scandalous enumerations becomes monotonous rather than amusing as he gets deeper into the mire. For ages the world has secretly revelled over these records, making no sort of effort to get at the truth, perhaps because, in secret, men like to believe that their predecessors were more inhumanly wicked than they are themselves. Not that, in the light of modern science, any physician would consider Elagabalus inhumanly wicked, any more than he would be inclined to apply the term to a man born blind, or with the taint of leprosy in his system; in fact even wickedness itself has been described as “a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of those whom they dislike.” The greater part of the dislike which men have exhibited towards this Emperor and his faults comes from the fact that he was psycho-sexually abnormal, and was possessed of a genius for the aesthetic and the religious that his historians wished to decry. He was evidently abnormal, even in an age that produced abnormalities like Nero, Tiberius, Commodus, and Hadrian; further, he was frankly abnormal, and to-day we know better than to be frank about anything.