anheim, de Usu Numismatum, Dissertat. xii. Herodian (l. iv. p. 154)
had seen very ridiculous pictures, in which a figure was drawn with one
side of the face like Alexander, and the other like Caracalla.]

After the extinction of the house of Severus, the Roman world remained
three days without a master. The choice of the army (for the authority
of a distant and feeble senate was little regarded) hung in anxious
suspense, as no candidate presented himself whose distinguished birth
and merit could engage their attachment and unite their suffrages. The
decisive weight of the Praetorian guards elevated the hopes of their
praefects, and these powerful ministers began to assert their legal
claim to fill the vacancy of the Imperial throne. Adventus, however,
the senior praefect, conscious of his age and infirmities, of his small
reputation, and his smaller abilities, resigned the dangerous honor to
the crafty ambition of his colleague Macrinus, whose well-dissembled
grief removed all suspicion of his being accessary to his master's
death. [41] The troops neither loved nor esteemed his character. They
cast their eyes around in search of a competitor, and at last yielded
with reluctance to his promises of unbounded liberality and indulgence.
A short time after his accession, he conferred on his son Diadumenianus,
at the age of only ten years, the Imperial title, and the popular
name of Antoninus. The beautiful figure of the youth, assisted by an
additional donative, for which the ceremony furnished a pretext, might
attract, it was hoped, the favor of the army, and secure the doubtful
throne of Macrinus.

[Footnote 41: Herodian, l. iv. p. 169. Hist. August. p. 94.]

The authority of the new sovereign had been ratified by the cheerful
submission of the senate and provinces. They exulted in their unexpected
deliverance from a hated tyrant, and it seemed of little consequence to
examine into the virtues of the successor of Caracalla. But as soon as
the first transports of joy and surprise had subsided, they began to
scrutinize the merits of Macrinus with a critical severity, and to
arraign the nasty choice of the army. It had hitherto been considered as
a fundamental maxim of the constitution, that the emperor must be always
chosen in the senate, and the sovereign power, no longer exercised by
the whole body, was always delegated to one of its members. But Macrinus
was not a senator. [42] The sudden elevation of the Praetorian prae