The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus

by John Stuart Hay

Since the world began, no one has been wholly wicked, no one wholly good. The truth about Elagabalus must lie between the two extremes, admitting, however, a congenital twist towards the evil tendencies of his age. He had habits which are regarded by scientists less as vices than as perversions, but which, at the time, were accepted as a matter of course. Men were then regarded as virtuous when they were brave, when they were honest, when they were just; and this boy did, despite his hereditary taint, show more than dashes of these virtues. The idea of using the expression “virtuous” in its later sense, occurred, if at all, in jest merely, as a synonym for a eunuch. It was the matron and the vestal who were supposed to be virtuous, and their virtue was often supposititious.

The ceremonies connected with the Phallus, and those observed in the rituals of the city were of a nature that only the infirm could withstand. Indeed, the symbol of human life was then omnipresent. Iamblichus, the philosopher, has much to say on the subject; so have Arnobius and Lactantius. If Juvenal, Martial, and Petronius are more reticent, it is because they are not Fathers of the Church nor yet antiquarians. The symbol was on the coins, over the bakers’ ovens; as a preservative against envy it hung from the necks of children; the vestals worshipped it; at weddings it was used in a manner which need not be described. It was a religious emblem, and as such formed the chief symbol in the training of the boy who was now ruler of the world. By birth a Syrian, by profession High Priest of the Sun, whose devotees worshipped the Phallus as his symbol, was it likely that he, the chief exponent, should remain cold, should take no interest in what was an all-absorbing topic? Besides which, the family was corrupted by the presence of a living fire in their veins, engendered by the perpetual heat of the sun. Consider the history of his relations, and no one will wonder that he was by nature voluptuous. But it was not his voluptuousness that the world objected to; it was the abnormal condition of his mind; because in the body of the man resided the soul with all the natural passions of a woman. He was what the world knew as a Psycho-sexual Hermaphrodite.

In form he was attractive and exceedingly graceful; his hair, which was very fair, glistened like gold in the sun; he was slender and possessed of glorious blue eyes, which in turn were endowed with the power of attracting all beholders to his worship; and he knew his power over men; he had first realised it when the legionaries flocked to the temple at Emesa attracted by the reports of this Prince Charming. He was then just at the age of incipient manhood, and his woman’s instinct taught him, as no outside force could have done, that virility and strength were the finest things in the world; his religion, surroundings, and education told him nothing about the restraint of, what was to him, a perfectly natural, perhaps even an hereditary passion, the exercise of which so endeared him to the soldiers that they forthwith placed him upon the throne of the world. As Emperor he had every desire, and was under no compulsion to abstain from gratifying the craving to study and exaggerate that swift, vivid, violent age, when what Mill in his Essay on Liberty desired was enjoyed by the Augustitudes, “There was no check on the growth of personality, no grinding down of men to meet the average.” Not that any one has ever accused Elagabalus of being average. In no particular can he be considered mediocre. Perhaps his life and habits were not those to which the virile Roman world was addicted, despite the fact that Hadrian had deified, in Antinous, not a lad, but a lust, whose worship, a half-century later, Tertullian noted was still popular; since which time Christian diatribes of all kinds have been levelled against the pagans of the decadence, merely because their atriums dropped, not blood, but metaphysics.

Were it permitted to examine Elagabalus’ extravagances in print, we should at once realise that they are those common (in a greater or less degree) to all animals at the age of puberty, where instinct has not associated the developing powers with any one special person or thing, but that they are, in this instance, exaggerated by the traits of his heredity and surroundings. What character should we expect to-day from a child of nature if he were free with an unbounded liberty, and rich beyond the efforts of imagination, to say nothing of the possession of a congenitally perverted instinct? The more one sifts the records, the clearer it appears that Elagabalus’ actions are those of an incredibly generous person, instinctively trusting, open-hearted and affectionate, a mighty contrast, both in his pleasures and his punishments, to the persons who preceded him, and to his successors, who mistook new superstitions for progress in the development of the world. The example he set in tolerance of opinions not his own, and his reluctance, to punish those who opposed him, must have led men to expect great things from his manhood. Alone of all the Emperors he stands out with the proud boast that no murder for political or avaricious purposes can be laid to his charge. There were a few executions, amongst the adherents of Macrinus, rendered necessary by attempts to take the crown from the new Emperor; but despite the fact of serious provocation, his amnesty to the Senate and to Rome, for their participation in the usurpation of Macrinus and his son, was scrupulously kept. In religious matters—his special domain—no one can say that he was apathetic, and yet there is no instance of persecution recorded, even by Fathers of the Church. His whole life was devoted to the introduction of a fantastic eastern monotheism, designed to extinguish the polytheistic atheism which permeated Roman society. Undoubtedly opposition and bitterness would have been raised if the Emperor had not shown a moderation foreign to his years, unless he had exercised a restraining influence over a mob which was still thirsting for the blood of the Judaisers, as later records demonstrate. In one particular, however, we are told that Elagabalus was fierce, namely, in the contradiction of his pleasures, none of which can in fairness be said to have affected the outside world. He might have been led; certainly he could not be driven; what Antonine could? His tutor Gannys found this out too late, and suffered for his mistake.

With a singular lack of consistency, Lampridius ascribes all Elagabalus’ moderation to his grandmother Maesa, all his excesses to his own fault, whereas psychologists can demonstrate from a mass of similar cases that both his virtues and excesses are those usually exhibited by one of his temperament, and at any rate his relations were responsible for his lack of early training and non-association with sane, healthy-minded persons.

Undoubtedly Maesa’s influence, in the executive government, was an aggravating factor; but considering the state of autonomy which the machine had then reached, and the large influence exerted by favourites, it cannot be said that she was supreme; indeed, on more than one occasion, we see the boy of fourteen years opposing her influence most strenuously, especially after she had hoodwinked him into appointing Alexianus as his coadjutor in the Empire. It was pitiable, then, to see the old lady’s efforts to retain her position; this, however, she only managed to do by persuading the troops to mutiny and slay her grandson. There is not much to be said for either party, but Elagabalus obviously found relations a tedious pack of people, and their influence, like drugs, best taken in small quantities.

Quite a cursory study of authorities on psychology, such as Krafft-Ebing, Bloch, Forel, Moll, etc., will show us that characters like Elagabalus have occasionally appeared, and are still known in history. They are almost curiosities of nature, and are rarely if ever responsible for their own instincts, neither are they cruel nor evil by nature.

To-day we are inclined to regard the romantic friendships exhibited in the stories of David and Jonathan, Herakles and Hylas, Apollo and Hyacinth, to mention no others, as the outcome of somewhat similar natures, and we decry some of the noblest patriots, tyrannicides, lawgivers, and heroes, in the early ages of Greece, because they regarded the bond of male friendship as higher and nobler than what they called the sensual love for women, or because they received friends and comrades with peculiar honour on account of their staunchness in friendship. Nevertheless, psychologists have noted that this tendency towards the more elevated forms of homosexual feeling is still to be found, more or less developed, amongst religious leaders and other persons with strong ethical instincts. It is only therefore when this tendency occurs in slightly abnormal minds that we excite our passions against men whom our imagination alone has branded as debased criminals, men for whom the only fitting reward is an application of the stake and faggot, without further inquiry.

To the vulgar-minded, all persons who present deformities, whether physical or mental, are subjects of derision and hatred; to those who realise something of the disabilities under which these unfortunates are labouring, they are the objects of either active or passive sympathy,—in the abstract, of course; should the insane, the leprous, or even the man of genius get in our way we, as normal persons, feel ourselves justified in ridding the world of its nuisance. It is thus that the instinct of fear, rather than that of justice, spurs us on to use the collective strength of the average, to exaggerate the abnormalities of the few; but it is not a high or noble instinct, this fear which has led men for many centuries through a mire of cruelty, superstition, and deceit; and it is under this lack of justice that the memory of Elagabalus has long suffered. No credit has been given him for the quality of mercy which he displayed, though an absurd charge of cruelty has been preferred, on the ground that he occasionally took luncheon in the circus during the progress of the games; his biographer gratuitously assuming that it was only done when there were criminals to be executed. Another absurd charge of cruelty has been raised on account of Antonine’s passion for flowers, of which, says Lampridius, such masses fell from panels in the ceiling that many were smothered; an obvious exaggeration, unless the guests were paralytics or suicidal lunatics, and, as even the author’s account mentions no compulsion put on these gentlemen thus to die, he would seem to invite a verdict of death by misadventure, rather than by design, however aesthetic.