e Sun, beheld
with veneration and delight the elegant dress and figure of the young
pontiff; they recognized, or they thought that they recognized, the
features of Caracalla, whose memory they now adored. The artful Maesa
saw and cherished their rising partiality, and readily sacrificing her
daughter's reputation to the fortune of her grandson, she insinuated
that Bassianus was the natural son of their murdered sovereign. The
sums distributed by her emissaries with a lavish hand silenced every
objection, and the profusion sufficiently proved the affinity, or at
least the resemblance, of Bassianus with the great original. The young
Antoninus (for he had assumed and polluted that respectable name) was
declared emperor by the troops of Emesa, asserted his hereditary right,
and called aloud on the armies to follow the standard of a young and
liberal prince, who had taken up arms to revenge his father's death and
the oppression of the military order.

Whilst a conspiracy of women and eunuchs was concerted with prudence,
and conducted with rapid vigor, Macrinus, who, by a decisive motion,
might have crushed his infant enemy, floated between the opposite
extremes of terror and security, which alike fixed him inactive at
Antioch. A spirit of rebellion diffused itself through all the camps and
garrisons of Syria, successive detachments murdered their officers, and
joined the party of the rebels; and the tardy restitution of military
pay and privileges was imputed to the acknowledged weakness of Macrinus.
At length he marched out of Antioch, to meet the increasing and zealous
army of the young pretender. His own troops seemed to take the field
with faintness and reluctance; but, in the heat of the battle, the
Praetorian guards, almost by an involuntary impulse, asserted the
superiority of their valor and discipline. The rebel ranks were broken;
when the mother and grandmother of the Syrian prince, who, according to
their eastern custom, had attended the army, threw themselves from
their covered chariots, and, by exciting the compassion of the soldiers,
endeavored to animate their drooping courage. Antoninus himself, who, in
the rest of his life, never acted like a man, in this important crisis
of his fate, approved himself a hero, mounted his horse, and, at the
head of his rallied troops, charged sword in hand among the thickest
of the enemy; whilst the eunuch Gannys, * whose occupations had been
confined to female cares and the