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Updated: May 15, 2025
The trials of these men brought to light horrors surpassing anything that Suetonius and Lampridius have related of the worst Cæsars. But it was impossible to punish subordinate agents who, bad as they were, had only acted in accordance with the spirit of the government which they served, and, at the same time, to grant impunity to the heads of the wicked administration.
"But that a being in whom the will-power is dead obeys every external impulse is a truth which reason admits and which experience proves. The example which you cited reminds me of another one somewhat similar. It is that of my unfortunate comrade, Alexandre Le Mansel. A verse of Sophocles killed your heroine. A phrase of Lampridius destroyed the friend of whom I will tell you.
But, immediately before Alexander, Heliogabalus, who was no philosopher, while he formally seated his Syrian idol in the Palatine, while he observed the mysteries of Cybele and Adonis, and celebrated his magic rites with human victims, intended also, according to Lampridius, to unite with his horrible superstition "the Jewish and Samaritan religions and the Christian rite, that so the priesthood of Heliogabalus might comprise the mystery of every worship."
See Eusebius, Vopiscus, Lampridius, etc., as quoted by Bayle. See Brucker on this point, vol. ii. p. 141, who refers to various authors. Eusebius takes a more sober view of the question, allowing the substance of the history, but disputing the extraordinary parts. See in Hierocl. 5 and 12. Most of them are imitations of the miracles attributed to Pythagoras. See Philostr. i. 4, 5, viii. 30, 31.
Such a uniform tenor of life, which left not a moment for vice or folly, is a better proof of the wisdom and justice of Alexander's government, than all the trifling details preserved in the compilation of Lampridius. Since the accession of Commodus, the Roman world had experienced, during the term of forty years, the successive and various vices of four tyrants.
Alexander Severus was ruled by his mother Mammaea Lampridius, Alex. Severus, 14; Herodian, vi, i, i and 9. Gallienus invited women to his cabinet meetings Trebellius Pollio, Gallienus, 16. The wives of governors took such a strenuous part in politics and army matters that it caused the Senate grave concern see examples in Tacitus, Annals, in, 33 and 34, and iv, 20; also i, 69, and ii, 55; id.
Lampridius also testifieth that the Emperor Heliogabalus, to acquire unto himself the reputation of a soothsayer, did, on several holy days of prime solemnnity, in the presence of the fanatic rabble, make the head of his idol by some slight within the body thereof publicly to shake.
Then the divine Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Julius Capitolinus, says how he learned to paint, Diognetus being his teacher; and even Ælius Lampridius relates that the Emperor Severus Alexander, who was an exceedingly powerful prince, himself painted his genealogy to show that he descended from the lineage of the Metelos.
He recited at the top of his voice this sentence of Lampridius: "'On the day of the birth of Alexander Severus, a chicken, belonging to the father of the newly-born, laid a red egg augury of the imperial purple to which the child was destined. "His excitement increased to fury. He foamed at the mouth. He cried: 'The egg, the egg of the day of my birth. I am an Emperor.
Yet some theologians would have us believe that conjugal love and fidelity is an invention of Christianity. Pliny, Panegyricus, 26. For other instances see Capitolinus, Anton. Pius, 8; Lampridius, Alex. Severus, 57; Spartianus, Hadrian, 7, 8, 9; Capitolinus, M. Anton. Phil., 11. Gaius, i, 190. Ulpian, Tit. xi, 25. Cf. Frag, iur Rom. Vatic.
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