The Roman world had wearied of Macrinus and his pretensions, just as it had wearied of Claudius ; both were fantastic, vacillating, abstracted, and cowardly tyrants, declaring themselves to be of the opinion of those who were right, and announcing that they would give judgment in favour of those whose reasons appeared the best. Slipshod and tattered they both went through life ; Emperors whom no one obeyed and at whom every one jeered ; men who, when they heard that conspirators were abroad, were not indignant, but merely frightened. Perhaps it was the purple which had driven so many Emperors mad, that made Macrinus an idiot ; certainly he acted like one, and made way for yet another Phaeton for the universe : a prince for whose sovereignty the world was too small, as Tiberius had remarked of his nephew Caius, nicknamed Caligula, the man without whom neither Nero, Domitian, Commodus, Caracalla, or Elagabalus could have existed. The lives of all are horrible, yet analyse the horrible and you find the sublime. The valleys have their imbeciles, from the mountains poets and madmen come. Elagabalus was both, sceptred at that, and with a sceptre that could lash the earth, threaten the sky, beckon planets, and ravish the divinity of the divine.
