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256 twenty different garbs, fowls served on the same scale, even fish, if the Court happened to be at a distance from the sea. At another time you would be served with a vegetarian diet, or occasionally with nothing but pork, which sounds inconsistent when we consider that the same author has sneered copiously at the Emperor's adoption of the Jewish superstition in this matter. He further tells us that it was not magnificent enough for this child's fancy to recline on silver beds, with covers fashioned in cloth of gold; his cushions were of hare's fur, or down from under the partridge's wing, whilst the whole was strewn thick with flowers and perfumes, those of important guests with saffron and gold dust. Wherever he went were flowers strewing the way—lilies, violets, roses, and narcissus.

No mention of psychological extravagance would be complete without a certain disquisition on the use of perfumes. Here, as everywhere else, Lampridius tells us that Elagabalus contrived to outdo his predecessors. The use he made of unguents was little short of dissolute. As usual, the biographer would have us believe that the failing was an idiosyncrasy peculiar to the Emperor, whose life he was decrying. He had obviously not heard of the soporific nastiness of Solomon's beloved, a lady who is represented to us by the writer of the Canticles as a cluster of camphire, a mountain of myrrh, a hill of frankincense, spikenard and cinnamon, additions which would not only have made her sticky, but noisome to boot. Mahommed and his pavement of musk was beyond Lampridius' ken,