tudes of fortune. From an humble station she had been raised to greatness, only to taste the superior bitterness of an exalted rank. She was doomed to weep over the death of one of her sons, and over the life of another. The terrible death of Caracalla, though her good sense must have long taught her to expect it, awakened the feelings of a mother and an empress. She descended with a painful struggle into the condition of a subject, and soon withdrew herself, by a voluntary death, from an anxious and a humiliating dependence."* She refused all food, and died of inanition. * This passage from Gibbon is founded on the authority of Dion, and the abridgment of Xiphilins, which, he says, though less particular, is, in this place, clearer than the original." CHAPTER XI. The Women of the Empire--Julia Maesa-Soæmias-Mammea. THE empire, on the death of Caracalla, and under the sudden and transient usurpation of Macrinus, resembled some enormous and untrustworthy bark, struggling for existence amidst the rage and fury of contending elements, straining against the storm, tossed by the swell, and torn and dismantled, beyond the science or power of its commander to right or save it. Yet, beneath the tempest of destructive events, which was sweeping over the surface of society, there flowed on an under-current of history, winding its way to posterity, (though but by a thread,) like the subterranean streamlet, which the earthquake above disturbs not in its course. Marcus Macrinus, an obscure native of Algiers, who had passed through the grades of gladiator, notary, lawyer, and prefect, ascended the throne through perfidy and murder. He was still in Syria, and had scarcely felt himself an emperor, amidst the antagonist interests and discontents of the army and the senate, when a conspiracy of women, " concerted with prudence and conducted with vigour," hurled the false and feeble usurper from the elevated point to which crime and cruelty had led him; and added another page to the history of the intellectual activity of the sex, by which the destinies of mankind have been so often covertly influenced. After the murder of Caracalla, and the death of the Empress Julia Domna, her sister, Julia Maesa, was ordered by the Emperor Macrinus to leave the court and city of Antioch. In the course of twenty years' favour, during the reigns of her brother-in-law, the Emperor Severus, and of her nephew, Caracalla, Julia Maesa had maintained her position near the person of her imperial sister, had amassed an enormous fortune, and made high alliances. The young Syrian adventuress, who had first studied the weakness and gullibility of man in the Temple of Emesa, and who had come to Rome to seek her fortune, not only had won, but, what was far more difficult in such times, had maintained it. Well studied in all the arts and means by which society is moved or imposed on, she had become a power in the imperial court, in which she resided, and which she had followed to Antioch. On the mandate of Macrinus, she retired to her native city of Emesa, taking with her an immense fortune, her two beautiful and widowed daughters, Soæmias and Mammea, and their two sons, (for each had an only child). The younger, Alexander Severus, the son of Mammea, was still in childhood. Bassianus, the son of Soæmias, who had received his cognomen of Heliogabalus from his early consecration to the ministry of Highpriest of the Sun, was a youth of nineteen, remarkable for the beauty of his person, the vivacity of his character, and the grace of his move ments. The troops stationed at Emesa, and constrained by the severe discipline of the new emperor to pass the winter in that remote encampment, resorted in crowds (either from idleness or devotion) to the splendid Temple of the Sun. There, they beheld with veneration and delight the elegant figure and dress of the young pontiff, in whom they thought they recognized a resemblance to his cousin, Caracalla, whose memory they still adored. Julia Maesa, who had probably, more from prudence than superstition, placed her elder grandson in the sanctuary of the most venerated of the eastern temples, saw and cherished the rising partiality of the army for the young and splendid priest. She even endeavoured to deepen the impression of his resemblance to their murdered sovereign, by insinuating a suspicion more favourable to her ambitious views for her grandson, than to the honour of his mother. By the hands of her emissaries, she distributed sums of money to the troops with a lavish hand; and the troops, eager to avenge the hardships inflicted on them by an emperor they despised, were easily induced to proclaim Heliogabalus emperor |