[Sidenote: A.D. 221 (_a.u._ 974)] This is how it happened. He introduced
his cousin Bassianus before the senate, and, having stationed Mæsa and
Soæmias on either hand, adopted him as his child. Then did he
congratulate himself on being suddenly the father of so large a child
(as if he surpassed him in age) and declared that he needed no other
offspring to keep his house free from despondency.

Elagabalus, he said, had ordered him to do this and further to call his
son's name Alexander. And I for my part am persuaded that it came about
in very truth by some divine intention, and I base my inference not upon
what he said but upon what was said to him by some one, viz., that an
Alexander would come from Emesa to succeed him, and again on what took
place in upper Moesia and in Thrace. [Sidenote:--18--] A little before
this a spirit, declaring that he was the famous Alexander of Macedon,
wearing his appearance and all his apparatus, started from the regions
near the Ister, appearing there in I know not what way. It traversed
Thrace and Asia, reveling in company with four hundred male attendants,
who were equipped with thyrsi and fawn-skins and did no harm. The fact
was admitted by all those who lived in Thrace at that time that lodgings
and all the provisions for It were provided at public expense. And no
one dared to oppose It either by word or by deed,--no governor, no
soldier, no procurator, no heads of provinces,--but It proceeded, as if
in a daylight procession prescribed by proclamation, to the confines of
Bithynia. Leaving that point, it approached the Chalcedonian land and
there, after performing some sacred rite by night and burying a wooden
horse, it vanished. These facts I ascertained while still in Asia, as I
stated, and before anything at all had been done about Bassianus in
Rome.

¶One day the same man said this: "I have no need of titles