Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/245

 cabinets and crowns. The destiny of being " born in the purple" has often warped and ruined character, besides exposing a man to every temptation that lofty station invites.

We have spoken of Cæsars who were distinctively soldier-emperors,—ever with sword in hand. Numerous Cæsars not military except by proxy present examples of homosexualism. The reader can refer to the chronicles of Suetonius, Tacitus, Lampridius, Dion Cassius, or to modern studies of the Roman Empire socially, to compare the shades of homosexual instincts and practices of Augustus, Tiberius, Caius ('Caligula'), Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Titus, Hadrian, Heliogabalus, Commodus, and so on. Of Augustus as homosexual in youth and in maturity, we have ample testimony. Hadrian's pederastic loves for the young Antinoüs and others have passed into art forever. It is however to be noted as quite impossible that Tiberius ever was a sexual satyr, a monster of brutal cruelty, as Suetonius and others depict him; the moral and personal character of Tiberius nowadays is justly retrieved. But Nero, Caligula and Heliogabalus are repulsive types. In the amazing story of Nero occurs a minutely clear example of a gifted, intensely receptive but superficial aesthete. We remark a young man unlucky enough to be obliged to reign as an emperor instead of struggling to live as a second-rate actor, or stage-singer. Nero, if divested of his royal atmosphere, if imagined as powerless to command human lives and fortunes, becomes almost wholly an object of pity. He even wins our sympathy. The aesthetic temperament was fundamentally the undoing of Nero, exactly as of thousands of less exalted decadents. A considerable likeness exists between Nero and an impressionable, aesthetic, out-of-place Uranian of modern days—Ludwig II of Bavaria. In each story we see the struggles to be free from political responsibilities that stood in the way of a life of art, of a super-aestheticized