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Updated: June 8, 2025
Never did Nero or Heliogabalus surpass in tyranny the representatives of the Convention. Laws and customs always restrained the former to a certain extent. Nothing restrained the commissaries. ``Fouche, writes Taine, ``lorgnette in hand, watched the butchery of 210 inhabitants of Lyons from his window.
But yet I think nobody, could he be sure that the SOUL of Heliogabalus were in one of his hogs, would yet say that hog were a MAN or Heliogabalus. Idea of Identity suited to the Idea it is applied to.
The latest additions, of no special importance, took place under Julia Mamaea and Heliogabalus. Every emperor, to a certain extent, enlarged, altered, destroyed, and reconstructed the work of his predecessors; cutting new openings, walling up old ones, subdividing large rooms into smaller apartments, and changing their destination.
Hence, more or less, the stories which occur in ecclesiastical history of the conversion or good-will of the emperors to the Christian faith, of Hadrian, Mammæa, and others, besides Heliogabalus and Alexander. Such stories might often mean little more than that they favored it among other forms of oriental superstition.
I expected to find libertinism there, but in fact I found none at all. It is only the scum of libertinism, some blows and drunken women lying in deathlike stupor on broken bottles. The first time I saw debauchery at table I heard of the suppers of Heliogabalus and of the philosophy of Greece which made the pleasure of the senses a kind of religion of nature.
It is just this which the portrait of the Capitol lacks for the completion of Caligula. The man who could be so represented in art had nothing wholly vulgar in him. The brutality of Caracalla, the overblown sensuality of Nero, the effeminacy of Commodus or Heliogabalus are all absent here. This face idealizes the torture of a morbid soul.
The reader will perceive that all hope is gone here of deciding whether Herbert could have written Tennyson's poems, or whether Tennyson could have dug as much money out of the Heliogabalus Lode as Herbert did.
From his earliest years his conduct was often a source of vexation to his brother and his family. Westphalia will not soon forget that he was her King; and his subjects did not without reason surname him "Heliogabalus in miniature." The First Consul was harassed by the continual demands for money made on him by his brothers.
Therein many a New England boy is greater than the Roman emperor or the Assyrian king, and these were among the most luxurious eaters of their day and generation. But something more is necessary to make good men than plenty to eat, as Heliogabalus no doubt found when his head was cut off. Cutting off the head was a mode the people had of expressing disapproval of their conspicuous men.
And in the midst of such oscillations, and with examples of such contradictory interpretation, we cannot wonder that the Roman princes did not oftener take warning by the misfortunes of their predecessors. Either jealousy or prudence had led Heliogabalus to make an attempt upon his rival's life; and this attempt had nearly cost him his own through the mutiny which it caused.
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