The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus

by John Stuart Hay

Had he been a private person, no one could have objected to this tendency. In general, piety towards the Gods has been commended throughout the world’s history. It is only when a man occupies a public position and subordinates his civil to his religious duties that the world is apt to look askance at the latter. This is the position of Elagabalus, at least in part; he is accused of neglecting the business of the state for the sake of his conscience. Other sovereigns have been likewise accused, and have likewise suffered at the hands of a world even more vitally religious than were the Senate and people of third-century Rome. Similar instances may be found not far from home which have perhaps even less justification, when we consider that the cause of offence here was ceremonies, not vital creeds.

A word may also be said concerning the objects which Antonine’s biographers had in view when they condemned what we should—at first sight—have expected them to have praised in the Emperor’s life.

As we have already pointed out, Constantine’s determination to impose Christianity on the empire led to grave opposition, chiefly from the adherents of the similarly monotheistic cult of Mithra, a cult which was certainly identified with that of Elagabal, the only God. It was—if on that account alone—obviously necessary that, not only the opposing religion, but also the chief exponent of that worship, should come in for severe censure at the hands of the fourth-century monotheism.

As one reads the story of Antonine’s life, one is struck not so much by the record of his perverse sexualities, about which no one can have known anything definite, and which, even if the reports be true, we are bound to regard as congenital, in the light of modern research, as we are by the record of his religious fanaticism. This trait is, and in all probability justly, considered to be reprehensible. It is not, however, restricted to the Emperor in question; probably everybody has come across it, in one form or another, during the course of his life; some have even suffered under its potency. Antonine was, as we have said, in a peculiar position; he was young, powerful, and extremely religious; he ascribed the success of his house to the favour of his God, and desired to make some return in the shape of coercing men to that God’s worship. To this Emperor the possession of supreme power meant limitless possibilities for the effecting of his scheme. Further, as we have seen, he came of a religious stock, or rather of a family whose traditions were bound up with a very definite form of religious worship, which is generally considered as the same thing.

The origin of religion is a much-disputed point. Some men have considered that the source of all religion is fright; others prefer love; both of which appeal to the superstitious instinct inherent in man. It may be that these instincts breed reverence, fear, or love for forces outside man’s control, and incomprehensible to him; in any case, these forces were the first things to be deified in the history of religions, and took their precedence in the natural order of their mystery or usefulness, becoming a sort of aristocracy of talent, with a supreme head, the God of Gods.

In process of time the older religions of Greece and Rome gave way to philosophies; and the thinkers having reasoned away the potency of their deities, fought against what they considered a decadent and sentimental, not to say a baseless tradition, with all the aids that experience gave them. Then it was that the signs, portents, and miracles which had bolstered up the faith of the ignorant, which had kept fright and superstition alive, even the very prophecies and revelations which were the sacerdotal proofs of inherent genuineness became either natural phenomena or debasing charlatanry, amongst men who knew their origin and history, or had learned from Archimedes the principles of mathematics.

Nevertheless, in imperial Rome the atmosphere was charged with the marvellous, very much as it was in Northern Europe until the time of the Renaissance. The world was filled with prodigies, strange Gods, and credulous crowds. The occult sciences, astrology, magic and divinations, all had their adepts, and commanded the respect which kindred practices command amongst the credulous to-day.

But the philosophy of the older religions was undoubtedly hard and cold. Courage, moderation, and honour were qualities that enforced the permanence of the state, not of the individual. Men laboured not for hope of reward, but for the sake of duty; they knew that vice was part of the universal order of things, perhaps an error of the understanding, certainly an error which it was idle to blame, yet righteous to rectify. But the older religions as they had developed during the latter days of the republic were far from satisfying the whole aspirations of man.

The mind of man is not his only function, he has physical parts and passions as well, such as fright, superstition, attractions, antipathies, and sex. Some men were incapable of thought, few were single in aim, and there was a craving, it may be quite irrational, but still human, which longed to create, or at least to imagine, something higher than self, something mightier than mind, something to which the irrational and traditional side of man could appeal; and so, as one God died, a newer and more mystical personage took his place. Jupiter had ceased to dominate the world with a visible potency, Mithra, more mystical, more sentimental, took his place as a power, so intimately connected with man’s physical parts and passions, that the world of philosophy, which dealt with the body through the mind, could scarcely touch the fringes of his garment.

There was, therefore, in Rome at the beginning of the third century A.D. a party of men strongly attached, for sentimental or neurotic reasons, to one or other of the recently imported Eastern creeds; but there was also a large party of conservatives whose atheism was as cool and detached as that of Horace; and a still larger party of ordinary people whose attachment to the old practices of Roman Polytheism expressed all that they considered either necessary or expedient, from the point of view of ordinary piety. But in each case the religion was subordinated to a paramount political, not to an essentially religious life, which life was evolving, as we learn from nearly all authors, towards degeneration, despite the fact that culture and literature was still based upon the philosophy of intellectual freedom.