Page:The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus.djvu/15

 examine the opinions of German and Italian critics on the measure of credibility which could safely be attached to the Scriptores Historiae Augustae. It was an agreeable surprise to find that their estimates of the Scriptores ranged from those of men who stigmatised the whole collection as an impudent and unenlightened forgery to men who, like Mommsen, contended that, though originally the lives might have had some real historical value, they had been so edited and enlarged as to lack the essential weight of historical evidence, and contained, as they stood, but a modicum of consecutive and unvarnished fact.

Authorities being so far in accord, the present writer set to work to sift the accounts which were obviously quite unnaturally biased, and to separate what was merely stupidly contradictory from what was mutually exclusive. This method has been applied merely to the first seventeen sections of Lampridius' work, the portion which professes to contain a more or less historical account of the events from Elagabalus' entry into Rome to his disappearance into the main drain of the city.

In the latter portion of the life there is a wealth of biographical detail, which, in plain English, means an account in extenso of what has been already described too luridly in the foregoing sections. It is written in Latin, and has never been translated into English, to the writer's knowledge, nor has he