The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus

The Emperor who is studied in this volume has commonly been treated as if his reign had no significance, unless it were to show to what deep places the Roman Empire had sunk when such a monster of lubricity could wield the supreme power. If the chronicle of his naughty life has been exploited to illustrate the legend that the pagan society of the Empire was desperately wicked and infamously corrupt, he has not been taken seriously as a ruler. Yet Elagabalus appeared under too ominous a constellation to justify us in dismissing his brief attempt to govern the world as unworthy of more than a superficial description and a facile condemnation. His reign lasted less than four years; but those years fell in a period which was critical for the future of European civilisation, and he was brought up in a circle intensely alive to the religious problems which were then moving the souls of men. Mr. Hay has broken new ground, and he has done history a service, in making Elagabalus the subject of a serious and systematic study.

The third century, so obscurely lit by poor and meagre records, saw the Empire of Rome shaken to its foundations. There was a manifest decline in its strength and efficiency, marked by the insolent domination of the common soldier, and luridly illustrated by the statistical facts that from Septimius Severus to Diocletian the average reign of an Emperor was about three years and that there were only two or three sovereigns who were not the victims of a mutiny or a conspiracy. As one of the efficacious causes of this decline has often been suggested (most recently by M. Bouché-Leclercq) the detachment of men’s interest from the public weal by the attraction and influence of individualistic oriental religions, which did not aim at securing the stability of the state, like the old religions of Rome and Greece, but undertook to save the individual and ensure his happiness in a life beyond the tomb. It is undoubtedly true that in this period religious currents were stirring society to its depths, and several rival worships were engaged in a competition of which the issue was decided in the following century. And if the state was really weakened by a cleavage which had become sensible between the private spiritual interests of the individual citizen and the public interests of society, if its cohesion was endangered by the tendency to place the former interests above the latter, we can understand the statesmanship of Constantine the Great, who, by closely connecting the state with one of those individualistic religions, conciliated and identified the two interests. I do not suggest that Constantine formulated the problem in the general terms in which we may formulate it now; he was pushed to his far-reaching decision by a variety of particular social facts, which involved the general problem, while they forced upon him a particular solution. But the problem which he solved had long been there, and a hundred years before Constantine established Christianity, another Emperor had attempted to solve it. That Emperor was Elagabalus.

The religious currents of the age of the Severi did not escape the notice, or fail to engage the interest, of the Court. Julia Domna, Julia Mamaea, Alexander Severus, were all under the influence of the spirit of the time. These were the days in which Julia Domna and Philostratus discovered for the world a new saviour in the person of Apollonius of Tyana. But the religious zeal of Elagabalus was more passionate than the intellectual interest of any of his house. He conceived a universal religion for the Empire, and his abortive attempt to establish it is examined by Mr. Hay with a full sense of its significance and an unprejudiced desire to understand it.