The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus

by John Stuart Hay

No mention of psychological extravagance would be complete without a certain disquisition on the use of perfumes. Here, as everywhere else, Lampridius tells us that Elagabalus contrived to outdo his predecessors. The use he made of unguents was little short of dissolute. As usual, the biographer would have us believe that the failing was an idiosyncrasy peculiar to the Emperor, whose life he was decrying. He had obviously not heard of the soporific nastiness of Solomon’s beloved, a lady who is represented to us by the writer of the Canticles as a cluster of camphire, a mountain of myrrh, a hill of frankincense, spikenard and cinnamon, additions which would not only have made her sticky, but noisome to boot. Mahommed and his pavement of musk was beyond Lampridius’ ken, but he had certainly heard of the perfumes which scented the temple at Jerusalem, and it would have been no new sight for him to have watched Elagabalus pour tons of aromatics upon the new altars erected to the ancient gods.

Even to-day we know something about the odour of sanctity and occasionally inhale its delights by stealth, because, despite undoubted legal prohibition, the clergy have persuaded us that the Gods still love the smell of incense. Our point is, however, that everything sacred and profane stank horribly at the period. Thank heaven, the personal use of mille fleurs which then obsessed the world has now given place to a smell of the open. But there was nothing unusual during the third century in the fact that Elagabalus burnt Indian aromatics instead of coal in his dining-rooms, balm instead of petroleum in his lamps, and heated his stoves and bathrooms with odours instead of the more commonplace materials. What is repulsive is the depraved use which the world made of perfume. The tunics of men, their baths, beds, horses, rooms, streets, servants, even their food smelt. Caligula had wasted a fortune on perfumes. Nero had waded in them. Myrrh, aloes, and cassia, saffron and cinnamon, not to mention others equally objectionable and even more costly; these all made life heavy and cloying, turned conceptions of wrong into right, made the unholy adorable, stained the thoughts and depraved the mind, just as M. Huysmans (in À Rebours) describes what he succeeded in doing during his stay at Fontenay.

Not that Rome was as objectionable as Athens. There, we are told that both men and women painted their faces with white lead, their eyelids with kohl, and their nails with henna; and in order to draw attention to the depravity, they perfumed their hair with marjoram, rubbed their arms with mint, their legs with ivy, and the soles of their feet with baccaris. In Greece this idea of attention to personal beauty was a perfect cult—the latest recipes for artificial adornments were engraved on tablets and exhibited in the temples of Aesculapius, and, this done, the state imposed a fine for a slatternly appearance; but for all that it was decadent and nasty. People, of course, still spend money on their personal appearance, but patchouli, thank heaven! has gone, even from Piccadilly.

The Emperor’s fondness for fish was tempered by its rarity. He would never eat of its living things whilst he sojourned near the sea; he would have them transported to the immense salt-water tanks he had constructed amongst the mountains and in the interior of the country, both for their preservation and his own amusement. We are told that he invented a method of fishing in which oxen figured, a conceit which later years has not revived.

First in history he conceived of sausages made from lampreys’ roes, soft-shelled oysters, lobsters, and crayfish, and fed the country peasants on the same. Indeed, his generosity here, as in Rome, was unbounded, the chroniclers relating how he would throw from the windows as many dishes as he offered to his own guests then at table. There was nothing of our niggardly idea of charity here, no notion that any crusts were good enough for the hungry. His dogs were fed on foie-gras, his horses on grapes, his lions on pheasants and parroquets—an unnecessary and unpleasant waste when one knows how much these beasts would have preferred a more ordinary fare.

His fish sauce was a triumph of the culinary art, which is utterly lost. It was a transparent bluish-green, the counterpart of sea water, in which the fish looked alive and natural, utterly unlike the ragged ugliness which is now presented for our consumption. So famous were his dishes that the pastrycooks and dairymen of the day were wont to reproduce them in their own particular wares, selling the same as imperial affectations.

The menus also were his own conception, embroidered on the tablecloth—not the mere list of dishes, but pictures drawn with the needle of the dishes themselves—which, of course, necessitated a change of cloth with each service. He first, we are told, made the public feasts, as well as private dinners, great and magnificent. Formerly these feasts had been of a military simplicity. Elagabalus could not see why even political guests should not enjoy themselves when they came to dine with him, and served them with hydrogarum, the then last word in Sybaritic enjoyment. His successor Alexander thought differently, and reverted to the old order, a proceeding which pleased no one save the flatulent.

Elagabalus was, unfortunately, tainted with what is perhaps natural in young people, though in elderly plutocrats is an acquired vice, that of overt snobbery. It is recorded by more than one of his guests that he would often ask them to price his dishes, in order to hear an excessive value suggested, remarking that great cost gave a good appetite, especially when one knew that dishes were scarce and out of season. Of course, it was bad form, even in a boy, but how much else that happens is the same? There are other things in plenty to cavil at.

It was not by food alone that Elagabalus drained the treasury; he had other ways of flattering the sovereign people of Rome. The spectacles which he gave in the amphitheatre were unique. Fancy 80,000 people on ascending galleries, protected from the sun by a canopy of spangled silk, an arena three acres in extent, carpeted with sand, vermilion, and borax, in that arena were naval displays on lakes of wine, and the death of whole menageries of Egyptian beasts (in one show, Herodian tells us, fifty-one tigers alone were killed). There were chariot races, in which not only horses, but also stags, lions, tigers, dogs, and even women figured, till the spectators showed a colossal delight. The magnificence of the spectacle almost surpasses belief: from below came the blare of a thousand brass instruments, and from above the caresses of flutes, while the air, sweet with flowers and perfume (for the Emperor had provided saffron even for the cloaks of the crowd), was alive with multicoloured motes. The terraces were parterres of blending hues, when into that splendour a hundred lions, their tasselled tails sweeping the sand, entered obliquely, and anon a rush of wild elephants, attacked on either side; another moment of sheer delight, in which the hunters were tossed upon the terraces, tossed back again by the spectators, and trampled to death. By way of interlude, the ring was peopled with acrobats, who flew up in the air like birds, and formed pyramids together, much in the fashion that we know them to-day. There was a troop of tamed lions, their manes gilded, that walked on tight-ropes, wrote obscenities in Greek, and danced to cymbals, which one of them played; a chase of ostriches and feats of horsemanship on zebras from Madagascar. The interlude at an end, the sand was re-raked. Then, preceded by the pomp of lictors, interminable files of gladiators entered, while the eyes of the women lighted and glowed; artistic death was their chiefest joy, for there was no cowardice in the arena. The gladiators fought for applause, for liberty, for death—fought manfully, skilfully, terribly too, and received the point of the sword or the palm of victory with an equally unmoved expression, an unchanged face. It was a magnificent conception on which the Romans, or, more exactly, the Etruscans, their predecessors, had devised to train their children for war and allay the fear of blood. It had been serviceable indeed, and though the need of it had gone, the spectacle endured, and, enduring, constituted the chief delight of the Vestals and of Rome. By its means a bankrupt became Consul, an Emperor beloved. It had stayed revolutions, because it was felt to be the tax of the proletariat on the rich. Silver and bread were for the individual, but these things were for the crowd. When evening descended, so did torches and the Emperor to take chief part in the ballet which he considered as the culminating point in the performance.