Page:The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus.djvu/136

 and one things which occupy the official mind in the ordinary course of events, let alone on the restoration of a house banished and proscribed by imperial predecessors, had all to be discussed and would certainly take time. Cohen tell us of one of these measures, of which we know nothing save from the coins of 218, some of which bear the legend "Annona Augusti," which he says is a reference to some measure relative to the grain supply, instituted for the benefit of the people. There was certainly enough to occupy every one's attention, but it does not quite account for the whole Court staying at Nicomedia until May 219. Cohen has, however, discovered a fact that no historians mention, namely that during this period the Emperor was unwell, as some of the coins of 219 bear the legend "Salus Augusti," "Salus Antonini Augusti," which are supposed to announce his recovery. If this illness had happened after he arrived in Rome, we should probably have heard about it, besides which it might have been a bar to his matrimony ; if in Nicomedia, as Cohen thinks, it accounts for the length of the stay.

Business apart, of which they say little or nothing (facts have to be culled from coins, inscriptions, reports, etc., not from the pages of paid traducers), the historians now begin their tirades against the Emperor's conduct and religion. The obvious inference is that the self-willed boy was already beginning to get on somebody's nerves ; on whose more likely than on Maesa's and his sensitive aunt Julia Mamaea, who so ardently