The guests that wine
overcame were carried to bedrooms. When they awoke, there staring
at them were tigers and leopards--tame, of course; but some of the
guests were stupid enough not to know it, and died of fright.
All this was of a nature to amuse a lad who had made the phallus
the chief object of worship; who had banished Jupiter, dismissed
Isis; who, over paths that were strewn with lilies, had himself,
in the attributes of Bacchus, drawn by tigers; by lions as Mother
of the Gods; again, by naked women, as Heliogabalus on his way to
wed a vestal, and procure for the empire a child that should be
wholly divine.
It amused Rome, too, and his prodigalities in the circus were such
that Lampridus admits that the people were glad he was emperor.
Neither Caligula nor Nero had been as lavish, and neither Caligula
nor Nero as cruel. The atrocities he committed, if less vast than
those of Caracalla's, were more acute. Domitian even was surpassed
in the tortures invented by a boy, so dainty that he never used
the same garments, the same shoes, the same jewels, the same woman
twice.
In spite of this, or perhaps precisely on that account, the usual
conspirators were at work, and one day this little painted girl,
who had prepared several devices for a unique and splendid
suicide, was taken unawares and tossed in the latrinae.
In him the glow of the purple reached its apogee.
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