Page:The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus.djvu/77

 cause her in after-life all the reproaches of a misspent youth, with little to show for the sacrifice. Perhaps mention ought to be made of the opinion of Dexippus, that the boys Bassianus and Alexianus were cousins-german paternal, which, as we know from theologians, when they are fitting facts to theory, is the same thing as brothers by the same father. Certainly Mamaea's beauty is remarkable. As we see it in her bust at the Louvre, she is a younger edition of her aunt Julia, perhaps without the humanity and gentleness expressed in that lady's portrait, which is to be found in the Rotondo at the Vatican, but there is a real resemblance between the two. Both, though Syrian by race, are remarkably Western in type, whereas the features of Julia Soaemias — in the statue representing her as Venus Coelestis, also in the Vatican museum — are distinctly of a more Oriental cast. Soaemias' form is most beautiful, though it must be confessed that her head and arms would have pleased Rubens' taste better than they do our present pre-Raphaelite ideas of attractiveness. Soaemias' history, however, leaves no doubt in our minds that all men considered her the more attractive at the time ; and certainly, if but a tittle of the stories concerning her be true, she must have been as fascinating as the goddess in whose form she has been portrayed.

We have now before us the main personages in the political revolution of the year A.D. 218, a revolution which displaced the Moor, the beloved of the Senate, and replaced the house of Severus, the beloved of the army, upon that peak whereon