Page:The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus.djvu/280

 beyond the limits of the imaginable, let alone beyond the limits of the real. Were we to accept unexamined, the testimony of his traducers of the Christian era, we would gather that "at the feet of that painted boy Elephantis and Parrhasius could have sat and learned a lesson," that "apart from that phase of his sovereignty, he was a little Sardanapalus, an Asiatic Mignon, who found himself great." Of course it would have been curious to see him in that wonderful palace, clothed like a Persian queen, insisting that he should be addressed as Imperatrix, and quite living up to the title. It would not only have been interesting, it would have given one an insight into how much Rome saw and how much she could stand.

Lampridius himself drew breath once, to remark that he could not vouch for the truth of the stories he was committing to paper, but he was employed to show the contrast between Constantine's "execrable superstition," as Tacitus describes it, and those of the ancient world, so went on to record things even more impossible. Perhaps his remark was unnecessary. His record has defeated its own end. He has come down to posterity as the biographer whose contradictory collection of scandalous enumerations becomes monotonous rather than amusing as he gets deeper into the mire. For ages the world has secretly revelled over these records, making no sort of effort to get at the truth, perhaps because, in secret, men like to believe that their predecessors were more inhumanly wicked than they are themselves. Not that, in the light of