The Empresses of Rome

by Joseph McCabe

Imperial power, however, meant to the Syrian youth an unrestrained indulgence of his sensual dreams, not a grave concern with the affairs of a mighty people. He dallied in the East, and willingly left his duties to his grandmother, while he devoted himself entirely to his rights. He gathered about him the ignoble company of ministers to lust which the cities of Asia Minor were at all times ready to supply, and there was no depth or eccentricity of vice in Antioch or Nicomedia which he did not explore. Before the end of that year the boy’s nature was completely perverted, and the last trace of masculinity eliminated from it. Mæsa was alarmed, for the cities of the East were wont to talk freely of the vices they implanted or cultivated in their visitors, and the sentiment of Rome could not be ignored. But Bassianus laughed at her timidity, and lingered throughout the following winter in the voluptuous chambers of Nicomedia. As to this Roman Senate, of which she spoke, he sent the grey-beards a painting of himself in his flowing sacerdotal robes and womanly jewels, to be placed over the altar of Victory in their meeting-place.

In the following spring he condescended to visit the capital of his Empire. Rome had received many a strange procession during the centuries of its Imperial expansion, but no spectacle had aroused so much curiosity as the arrival of the young monarch on whose picture the Senators had gazed with bewilderment. The original was even more extraordinary than the portrayal. For the entry into Rome the young priest-Emperor stained his cheeks with vermilion, and artfully enhanced the brilliance of his eyes, like a Syrian courtesan or an actress. He wore his loose robes of purple silk trimmed with gold, his delicate arms were encircled with costly bracelets and his white neck with a string of pearls, and a tiara of successive crowns, flashing with jewels, surmounted his strange figure. And, as the alternative and real power in administration, the Romans regarded with anxiety the two women who rode with him—the grave and dignified Mæsa, and the richly sensuous and evil-famed Soæmias. There is in the Vatican Museum a statue of the mother of Elagabalus as she appeared at this time. She has chosen to be portrayed in the costume, or lack of costume, of Venus; and the voluptuous body and soft round limbs, the low forehead, thick lips, and large nose, combined with the hard and shameless expression, reconcile us to the coarsest epithets the historians have attached to her memory.

JULIA MÆSA

BUST IN THE CAPITOLINE MUSEUM, ROME

To the horror of the Senate this woman was at once associated with him in a character that no Empress, or no woman, had ever assumed in the long history of Rome. At his first visit to the Senate the Emperor demanded that she should be invited to sit by his side and listen to their deliberations. Even Livia had been content to listen behind the decent shade of a curtain. Soæmias, however, had not the wit or seriousness to interfere in any way. She was appointed president of the Senaculum, or “Little Senate,” of women, which Sabina had founded, and Julia restored, in the Forum of Trajan; and she found an easier and more congenial occupation in controlling the grave deliberations of the matrons of Rome on questions of etiquette, precedence, costume, and jewellery. It was left to Mæsa to wield the political power, and she did so with sobriety and judgment. Unhappily, the Emperor was more willing to listen to the easier counsels of his mother than to Mæsa, and he began at once to entertain or disgust Rome with the appalling license which makes his short reign an indescribable nightmare.

He had brought from Emesa the celestial stone, the emblem of Ela-gabal, to which all his prosperity was due, and his first care was to provide the god with a worthy home. A magnificent temple was raised to it, and the stone, encrusted with gems, was borne to it on a chariot drawn by six white horses, the Emperor walking backwards before it in an ecstasy of adoration. In the temple a number of altars were set up, and rivers of blood—even the blood of children—were poured out on them; while the Emperor and his family croned the barbaric chants of primitive Syria, and the highest dignitaries of Rome stood in silent respect. As the earlier officials were soon replaced by men of infamy, chosen, very frequently, on a qualification that one may not describe, we need pay little attention to their feelings. If we suppose that the Emperor, or Elagabalus, as he now called himself, was aware that the conical stone was really a phallic emblem, we may find a clue to some of the stranger vagaries of his erotomania.

Rome had long been accustomed to the barbarism of the more ancient Oriental cults, and had indeed taken a willing part in the orgiastic processions of the mysterious Mother of the Gods, whenever their rulers permitted them. But the security of the Empire seemed to them in danger when Elagabalus went on to place every other idol in a position of subordinate respect in the temple of his fetich. Jupiter, Juno, Venus, and Mars, were not at that time favoured very widely with a literal belief; nor were the Romans concerned when he stole the Astarte of the Carthaginians, and married her, in a magnificent festival, to his lonely deity. The temples and cults of Rome were like the temples and cults of modern Japan. They contributed to the gaiety of life. But if there was little sincere polytheism at Rome—the educated world was divided between an Epicurean Agnosticism and an eclectic Monotheism—there was much superstition, and few could regard without concern a desecration of the ancient Palladium, or statue in the temple of Vesta, to which the fortune of the city was peculiarly attached, and other ancient emblems. Elagabalus despotically overrode their feelings. He broke forcibly into the home of the Vestal Virgins, and bore away the sacred Palladium; since we may regard the later boast of the Virgins, that they cheated him with a substituted statue, as insincere.

Of the Empresses whom he made by marriage we have little knowledge. In less than three years he married, and unmarried, either four or five women. The first was Julia Cornelia Paula, a woman of very distinguished family and, if we may trust the bust in the Louvre, a woman of dignity, refinement, and some strength of character. We may see the action of Mæsa in the choice. A few months later he divorced her and, to the horror of Rome, married one of the Vestal Virgins. Possibly the beauty of Julia Aquilia Severa had caught his fancy when he broke into their sacred enclosure. The Senators were deeply concerned at this sacrilege, for the fate of Rome was still closely connected with the integrity of the noble virgins who tended the undying fire before the altar of Vesta. Elagabalus, who, it was generally known, had no hope of progeny, brazenly argued with the Senate that he was consulting the future of the State, since a union of priest and priestess gave promise of a family of divine children. In any case, he said, he was a maker, not an observer, of laws; and he established Severa in his palace. The coins give her the title of Augusta.

His roving eye soon afterwards was attracted by the charms of Annia Faustina, the great-granddaughter of Marcus Aurelius. The portrait-bust of her in the Capitol Museum has a round full face of great beauty and an expression of sweetness and modesty. She seems to have escaped the taint of the Faustinæ. She was married to Pomponius Bassus, and Elagabalus released her by the familiar device of executing her husband, and transferred her, leaving no time for mourning, to the palace. Her beauty seems to have been too tempered with refinement to engage his affections long. She was dismissed, and replaced by some unknown victim. Then Elagabalus returned to his priestess of Vesta. In all, he seems to have married four women in three years, not counting Severa, whose marriage Dio does not seem to regard as valid.