Page:The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus.djvu/177

taken. It must have been a great blow to the boy, thus to relinquish his hold on one of the chief parts of his scheme, but he had seen that it would do Elagabal no good to slight the religion with which the destinies of Rome were inextricably mixed up, and that he had merely thrown open the way to his grandmother's machinations. Again, as Borghesi has pointed out, probably Eutychianus was back at his side as City Praefect, in which position that officer would be better able to judge of the feeling which Antonine's action had created, than as Consul. The result was that the Emperor published a statement, by no means conciliatory in character, which announced, that his God liked not so martial a wife, in consequence of which he had decided to return her to her own shrine, and send for Astarte from Carthage instead. Tanit of the Carthaginians, Juno Coelestis or Magna Mater as she was called in Italy, where she had grown in importance from the third century B.C., when she was first introduced, was probably a Phoenician Goddess with a cosmopolitan tendency. Cumont tells us that this maiden divinity was identified with Diana, Cybele, and sometimes with Venus. Generally she was called a moon goddess, certainly she possessed a twofold nature — as queen of the heavens she directed the moon and stars, and sent down life-giving rains on the earth, and as the personification of the productive force of nature, she was the patroness of fertility. Latterly in Rome she had been identified with the cult of Mithra, which had taken such a hold on the popular mind and was