The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus

by John Stuart Hay

There was nothing sinister about Elagabalus’ feasts, nothing after the style of Domitian’s little supper parties, where all was melanic, walls, ceilings, linen, slaves; parties to which every one worth knowing was ultimately bidden, and, as usual in state functions, every one that was bidden came, only to find a broken column inscribed with a too familiar name behind his allotted couch, and Domitian talking very wittily about the proscriptions and headsmen he had arranged for each.

Caligula and Vitellius had been famous as hosts, but the feasts that Elagabalus gave outranked theirs for sheer splendour. His guests certainly suffered from his passion for teasing, and to dine with the Emperor in such a mood was no sybaritic enjoyment. He might serve you with wax game and sweets of crystal, the counterparts of what he was eating himself, and expect evident signs of enjoyment as you endeavoured to masticate the representation; he would seat you on air cushions, and have them deflated surreptitiously, thoroughly enjoying your discomfort; but when that was over you would be served with camels’ heels, platters of nightingales’ tongues, ostriches’ brains (six hundred at a time), prepared with that garum sauce which the Sybarites invented, and of which the secret is lost. Therewith were peas and grains of gold, beans and amber, quail powdered with pearl dust, lentils and rubies, spiders in jelly, fig-peckers served in pastry. The guests that wine overcame were carried to bedrooms; when they awoke, there, staring at them, were tigers and leopards—tame, of course, but some of the guests were stupid enough not to know it, and died of fright. It might not be pleasant to be promised adorable sirens, and to find oneself shut up for the night with an elderly Ethiopian, but it was not essentially cruel or debased, at least not from the humorist point of view, as was proved by the laughter of the Emperor at the sight of your disgusted face when he let you out in the morning. Unless you were fond of the water, it could not have been a pleasant experience to take the part of a water Ixion—tied to a revolving wheel—for the Emperor’s lust of the eye; but if you submitted to these things, you were sure of a reward more liberal than any you had expected. Lampridius reports that no guests left the Emperor’s presence with empty hands. After dinner he would give you the gold and silver plate from which you had eaten, or cause you to draw lots for prizes which varied from a dead dog to the half of his daily revenue. Elagabalus saw no virtue in sending men away in the style of Domitian with their heads under their arms,—it was too conventionally the pose of the Christian martyr.

The description applied to Caesar’s sexual condition can with equal justice be applied to this youth of seventeen. He was a woman for all men, and a man for all women, at least if one can judge by the number of wives he married during his short reign of less than four years. The number was six, according to Dion Cassius. Three of them were well-known women, one a Vestal, by whom he designed to produce a demi-god. The others are only referred to, their names are quite unknown. By none of them, however, had he any issue, which perhaps is as well, since he frequently remarked that should he have children, he would bring them up to his way of living, in his outlook on life, and the world could scarcely have stood a successor of his abnormal temperament. How far his marriages were true matrimony we do not know, but the fact of his going through the ceremony presupposes that the statements of Lampridius and Zonaras to the effect that he was initiated a priest of Cybele (in the full sense) are exaggerations, and also that the operation which would have made him a woman to outward appearance as well as in sentiment and affections, never took place; indeed, this is impossible on both physiological and psychological grounds.

Despite these marriages, the one romance of this boy’s life was with the fair-haired chariot-driver Hierocles. His identity is somewhat involved, though Dion Cassius states that he was a Carian slave, by profession a chariot-driver. This lad found his fortune by a mere accident. One day he was thrown from his chariot, right against the imperial pulvinar, and lost his helmet. Elagabalus was there and at once noted the perfect profile and curly hair of the athlete. He had him transferred to the palace, where on account of a similarity of taste the intimacy soon ripened into love, and that again, according to Xiphilinus, into a contract of marriage.

Hierocles must have been the best, and certainly was the most powerful, of that army of sycophants and courtesans which had always thronged the Roman Court. We have no complaints against his exercise of authority, though Lampridius says that his power exceeded that of the Emperor himself. His banishment was demanded, with that of others, in the first mutiny, but he was immediately allowed to return, despite the fact that Elagabalus meditated conferring the imperial title upon him. He was a good son, and in his prosperity was in no way ashamed of his mother. He openly purchased her from her owners, and sent a company of the Praetorian Guard to bring her to Rome, there placing her amongst the women whose husbands had been Consuls. He appears to have been proud not only of his position, but also of the Emperor’s love for him, as the story of the Smyrnian Zoticus related by Xiphilinus and Zonaras well illustrates. They relate how he gave the youth a drug which made him useless to the Emperor during the first night, and thus procured his expulsion from the palace, though probably the story of Zoticus’ disgrace, on account of his treachery and venality (Lampridius’ version) contains as much truth as any other. Certainly Hierocles had no just cause for fear; Elagabalus’ affection was too feminine, too deep-rooted, to do more than tease the man from whose hands, like many another woman in history, he was more than willing to take ill-usage and stripes, if only they were signs of jealousy or proofs of affection.

Of course there were others. The Elagabalus of whom Lampridius treats was a second Messalina in the variety of his tastes, and in the frequency of his visits to the various lupanars of the city, and like this Empress he measured his attractiveness by the amount of gold he could carry home after such expeditions. He cultivated the class of person who could discourse on the spintries with which Tiberius had refreshed his jaded mind and enfeebled frame, and made much of the man who could invent new sauces or other species of Sybaritic enjoyment. All such he treated with consideration, teased them and excited them, it is true, but pampered and fed them (sometimes, exclusively on their own inventions, till they could produce something more palatable), and loaded them with gifts, honours, offices, dignities, until they learnt that the condition of perfection is idleness, the aim of perfection is youth. We can well imagine the fury of the legitimate office seekers when they saw these children of pleasure preferred before them.

In a discussion on his psychology mention must be made of Elagabalus’ love of colour. To the Roman, white in its cleanliness and simplicity was the acme of an aesthetic taste, though the profusion of purple borderings, the mingling of scarlet and gold, showed his kinship with the children of the south. Syria, and the East generally, loved that mass of brilliancy which relieves the aridity of the land; Elagabalus, posing as the aesthete of his time, annoyed the Roman world by his love of purple and shaded silk garments, by his passion for green, in all its known shades, and for feasts in which everything was in the deep azure of a cloudless sky. To-day we still cultivate colour schemes without much hostile comment, as it takes the philosopher to discover their puerility, the prurient-minded their wickedness and degeneracy.

We are told that the blatant discussions of his amusements made right-minded men blush, causing ultimate nausea for his tastes and opinions. But it could only have been the few he had the opportunity of disgusting; the majority had heard the same before and showed no desire to be shocked. Other Emperors had been as outspoken, be it said to their reprobation as well as to his, but other Emperors had not been so good-hearted, so filled with the charity that thinketh no wrong. When they had scented opposition they had removed the cause forthwith; Elagabalus let it grow and strengthen till it swallowed him up.

It may be that, as Lampridius says, his effeminacy disgusted the virile Roman world. It was a vice as reprehensible then as now. The genius of the Greek and Roman friendships was all against the weak softness of the Semitic races. Greek love had been regulated “to strengthen hardihood, to breed a contempt for death, to overcome the sweet desire for life, to humanise cruelty, to which powers almost as much veneration is due as to the cult of the Immortal Gods,” says Valerius Maximus, in his treatise De amicitiae vinculo. It would have been small wonder if the whole mass of healthy-minded individuals had turned from Lampridius’ picture of this little painted quean of seventeen years, who never showed in himself any traits of manliness, except when he was on the seat of judgment. If he had been portrayed as wholly woman, or wholly man, we could have understood him, but for this strange admixture even the physicians are at a loss to account, almost to understand. He had his good qualities and had them in plenty, but overshadowing them all, like a terrible blight, there was this organic affliction of the senses, passions, and general outlook. Unfortunately, this blight of femininity still exists in the world to a certain extent, especially amongst religious persons. Gulick holds that the reason why only 7 per cent of young men attend the Christian churches is because the qualities demanded are feminine not virile, such as passive love, passive suffering, rest, prayer, trust; whereas Confucianism and Mahommedanism attract men because the demand is for virile qualities, and the place for women is small. Such faiths make even more than individual demands on the virtues of courage, endurance, self-control, bravery, loyalty, and enthusiasm. Gulick says also, that the able-bodied boy who lacks the courage to fight is generally a milksop, or a sneak, without any high sense of honour.