entertain the genius,' quotes Johnson, 'and strengthen it by the noble
ideas which they give of things; but they corrupt the truth of history.'

Professor Lanciani, who is probably the greatest authority, living or
dead, on Roman antiquities, places the site of the temple of the Sun in
the Colonna gardens, and another writer compares the latter to the
hanging gardens of Babylon, supported entirely on ancient arches and
substructures rising high above the natural soil below. But before
Aurelian erected the splendid building to record his conquest of
Palmyra, the same spot was the site of the 'Little Senate,' instituted
by Elagabalus in mirthful humour, between an attack of sacrilegious
folly and a fit of cruelty.

The 'Little Senate' was a woman's senate; in other words, it was a
regular assembly of the fashionable Roman matrons of the day, who met
there in hours of idleness under the presidency of the Emperor's mother,
Semiamira. AElius Lampridius, quoted by Baracconi, has a passage about
it. 'From this Senate,' he says, 'issued the absurd laws for the
matrons, entitled Semiamiran Senatorial Decrees, which determined for
each matron how she might dress, to whom she must yield precedence, by
whom she might be kissed, deciding which ladies might drive in chariots,
and which in carts, and whether the latter should be drawn by
caparisoned horses, or by asses, or by mules, or oxen; who should be
allowed to be carried in a litter or a chair, which might be of leather
or of bone with fittings of ivory or of silver, as the case might be;
and it was even determined which ladies might wear shoes adorned only
with gold, and which might have gems set in their boots.' Considering
how little human nature has changed in eighteen hundred years it is easy
enough to imagine what the debates in the 'Little Senate' must have been
with Semiamira in the chair ruling everything 'out of order' which did
not please her capricious fancy: the shrill discussions about a
fashionable head-dress, the whispered intrigues for a jewel-studded
slipper, the stormy divisions on the question of gold hairpins, and the
atmosphere of beauty, perfumes, gossip, vanity and all feminine
dissension. But the 'Little Senate' was short-lived.

Some fifty years after Elagabalus, Aurelian triumphed over Zenobia of
Palmyra, and built his temple of the Sun. That triumph was the finest
sight, perhaps, ever seen in imperial Rome. Twenty richly caparisoned
elephants and t