The Worst Roman Emperor?

Bust of Elagabalus at the Capitoline Museums in Rome.

In 218 AD, the Roman Empire was taken over by a teenage boy we know as Elagabalus. Four years later, the young Emperor was murdered by the Praetorians and thrown in the Tiber. Elagabalus’s reign is reported to have been marked by scandal on nearly every front, and he would acquire perhaps the worst historical reputation of any Emperor—combining the lurid depravity of a Caligula or a Nero, the cruelty of a Domitian or Caracalla, and the disaster-inducing incompetence of a Commodus or Maximinus Thrax. But is it true?

BREAKDOWN OF THE REPUBLIC AND THE AUGUSTAN PEACE

Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in January 49 BC, igniting a period of civil war that—with various periods of uneasy truce—would last for the next twenty years. When the dust settled, Caesar’s adopted son, Octavian, was the victor. The old Roman Republic had been swept away in the chaos, but Octavian, probably the most skilled politician in Western history, understood that the Roman people, raised on the stories of their rise out of servitude to a King half-a-millennium earlier, would not accept monarchical autocracy, so the façade of republican government was carefully preserved.

Octavian had “extinguished the flames of civil war”, by his own account,¹ and people were so grateful they did not dwell on his role in stoking the inferno. Octavian then made a great show of laying down his powers—over the army, provinces, and laws—and handing them back to the Senate on 1 January 27 BC.² There followed a highly contrived spectacle of Senators—some fearing Octavian, some fearing his departure would reignite civil war—begging him to stay, and Octavian’s dramatic reluctance in acceding to their demands. A few days later, the Senate voted to make Octavian Princeps Civitatis (“First Citizen”), a title we usually translate as “Emperor”, and then named him Augustus (“Revered One”), a mark of Octavian’s role in mediating for the Roman people with the gods.³

The outward appearance of constitutionalism—of the Princeps serving at the behest of the Senate—veiled Octavian’s revolution as a Republican restoration. Caesar was assassinated and his regime disintegrated less than two months after being named Perpetual Dictator. Octavian died in his bed in 14 AD and the Principate endured, sustaining the Augustan peace for more than two centuries.⁴

The breakdown of the Principate began with Commodus (r. 180-92), the hateful Emperor best-known in popular culture from Gladiator (2000).⁵ Commodus had been increasingly paranoid since his sister tried to assassinate him two years into his reign, and in fairness to him they really did all have it in for him. Commodus’s murder on 31 December 192, the first assassination of an Emperor in a century, set off a process that destabilised the Empire: seven of the eight Emperors over the next forty years were assassinated. After the demise of the eighth, in 235, the Empire collapsed into a fifty-year spiral of anarchy and nearly fell apart entirely.⁶ The refashioned system at the end of the third century was far more structurally militarised and the autocracy stylistically largely dispensed with the Augustan pretence of republicanism. The system thereafter tends to be called the “Dominate”.

Elagabalus appears in this story as the seventh of the eight Emperors during the forty-year slide into chaos.

THE SEVERAN DYNASTY

Six months after Commodus’ downfall, with two successor Emperors in Rome having been assassinated and two more soldiers in the provinces claiming the throne, the Libyan-born General who had been the prefect of Commodus’ Praetorian Guards, Septimius Severus (r. 193-211), marched on the capital and secured the support of the Senate. Severus soon dealt with his rivals, and went on to rule for nearly two decades; he was the only Emperor in the pre-crisis period of the third century to die of natural causes. It was the collapse in 235 of the dynasty Severus established in 193 that plunged Rome into bellum omnium contra omnes (the war of all against all).

Severus had married Julia Domna, a native of Emesa (now Homs), in 187, meaning Rome had its first Syrian Empress. Domna took on genuine, if relatively minor, roles in Imperial administration. Of crucial importance for our story: Domna was scion of a dynastic (and previously Royal) priestly family devoted to the sun god Elagabalus or Elagabal, also known as Heliogabalus, the “Lord” (Ba’al) of Emesa. The reign of the Emperor we know as Elagabalus is the record of this provincial family taking centre stage in Rome.

Severus led a successful war against the Parthian Persians, expanded the Roman domains in Africa, and then went to Britain, looking to complete the conquest of the island by taking over Caledonia (basically modern Scotland). On 4 February 211, however, Severus died of illness in York,⁷ and his sons—who had already been proclaimed co-Emperors—took over the Empire. The eldest of the two new rulers was 23-years-old, known by the nickname Caracalla (r. 198-217),⁸ and the younger was the 21-year-old Publius Geta (r. 209-2011). The brothers, who had despised each other from a young age, gave some consideration to dividing the Empire between themselves, East and West, with the Bosporus as the border.⁹ Before the end of the year this had been rendered moot: Caracalla murdered Geta by luring him unarmed to a reconciliation meeting mediated by their mother.¹⁰

Bust of Caracalla at the Museo Nazionale Romano in Rome.

Caracalla’s reign is notable for three things: (1) the completion of the largest public baths in Rome; (2) the issuance of an Edict (Constitutio Antoniniana) that granted Roman citizenship to all free provincials or peregrini (lit. “foreigners”) in the Empire, except conquered peoples who had unconditionally surrendered to Rome (dediticii) and most freed slaves (liberti); and (3) being one of most severe periods of official cruelty.

The Baths of Caracalla, started in 212 and finished c. 216, were not merely a place where Romans could wash, but a sprawling complex near the Aventine Hill—in the centre of Rome—that contained shops, gardens, walking trails, fountains, gyms, and lecture halls. It was a space for socialising and leisure activities, part of the “bread and circuses” expected of rulers since the establishment of the Principate.¹¹ After killing his brother, Caracalla was in particular need of prestige and popularity—the intertwined pillars of an Emperor’s legitimacy. Vast public baths were a tradition that went back to Augustus and had most recently been seen with Trajan and Hadrian; any association Caracalla could foster with the deified founder and the more glorious of Augustus’s successors was to Caracalla’s benefit. The jobs created in building baths and the new aqueduct to feed them provided material prosperity to a large number of people, and once the edifice was completed it provided a permanent monument to Caracalla’s authority and greatness.

Caracalla’s 212 Edict granting Roman citizenship to free provincials has sometimes been dismissed as a tax heist; this is a decidedly modern, secular, and cynical reading. It is not that there were no financial or material considerations,¹² but Marxian reductionism is an inadequate paradigm to explain the ancients. “Secular” matters were not separable in the minds of any Roman from the divine ordering of the State.

Caracalla was obsessed with Alexander the Great (d. 323 BC), presenting himself, and perhaps coming to believe, he was the reincarnation of the great conqueror.¹³ Caracalla was ideologically committed to Alexander’s ideal of harmony under a universal Empire, an idea Rome had substantially made a reality and Caracalla’s Edict now completed. Integrally linked was Caracalla’s profound desire to bring more worshippers to the gods and work towards his “dream of uniting all his subjects under the protection of one divinity”,¹⁴ in his case the Graeco-Egyptian god Serapis, whose temple would be Caracalla’s base when he was in Alexandria.¹⁵ Christianity eventually triumphed in matching the one God with the one Empire, but as Emperors sought to entrench the growing stability later in the third century a number made efforts, following Caracalla’s lead, with pagan gods,¹⁶ starting with Aurelian (r. 270-75) and the Unconquered Sun (Sol Invictus), a god often wrongly said to have been brought to Rome by Elagabalus and known mostly (where it is known any more) because of the popular myth that it was the cult festivities around Sol that were annexed by Christians as the basis for Christmas.¹⁷

In December 215, Caracalla went to Alexandria in northern Egypt to visit Alexander’s tomb, the last definite mention of the crypt in the historical record. While there, Caracalla unleashed his army on the Alexandrian population in a terrible bout of indiscriminate rape and massacre. There is little reason to doubt that the humourless Caracalla was annoyed by the Alexandrian crowd’s derisive view of the majesty of his office and the popular jokes about him personally, specifically for his emulation of Alexander.¹⁸ At the same time, it does seem Alexandria was in some disorder and Caracalla needed Egypt stabilised,¹⁹ since he was about to go east: retracing Alexander’s steps meant war with the Persians.

By the time Caracalla left Alexandria and arrived in Antioch in the spring of 216, he already had an Alexander-style eastern conquest to point to, having eliminated the buffer States with Persia.²⁰ This military preparation was joined to political preparation as Caracalla manufactured a pretext for war.²¹ From Antioch, in late May 216, Caracalla’s army invaded the Persian Empire. The Romans began by ravaging the Media area in northern Mesopotamia, pointedly starting with the important Persian city of Arbela (modern Erbil), where Alexander had inflicted the decisive defeat on Darius III half-a-millennium before.²² The Romans “sacked many fortresses, won over Arbela, dug open the royal tombs of the Parthians, and scattered the bones about”.²³ The Parthian internal disarray that had tempted Caracalla into this venture meant the Persians were in no position to mount a serious counter-offensive.²⁴ For reasons unclear, Caracalla paused the invasion,²⁵ and departed from his troops, heading west to Emesa in Syria.

The sources again leave us largely in the dark about why Caracalla went to Emesa and what he did there. One solid fact we have is that Caracalla’s mother, Julia Domna, was born in Emesa to the dominant Elagabalan priestly family. While Domna was in the East in 216, she was ill by this point—probably dying of cancer—so was likely incapable of the frequent travel necessary to stay at Caracalla’s side. It seems Domna stayed in Antioch, handling some (an important detail as we shall see) of Caracalla’s mail and other administrative tasks.²⁶ Further solid ground: Caracalla continued his father’s policy of close relations with Domna’s family. Caracalla had upgraded Emesa to a colonia, and minted coins displaying the black stone (baetyl) thought to contain Elagabal that was worshipped at the temple in Emesa.²⁷ (“Domna” means “black”, a reference to this cult stone.) Piecing everything together, it seems Caracalla was in Emesa as part of his strategic preparations with the heavens and his subjects—represented in the Elagabalan priestly class—for the second phase of the invasion of Persia, and to celebrate his vicennalia (twenty years in power).²⁸

A third-century coin showing Elagabal’s Emesa temple with the baetyl at centre.

An African seer in Rome had said that one of Caracalla’s prefects, Marcus Macrinus, would displace him. A soldier wrote a letter informing the Emperor of this, which was diverted to Domna in Antioch, and another letter on the same subject, from the official censor Ulpius Julianus, went to Caracalla’s mail-handler in Emesa, who was none other than Macrinus. This was days after Serapio, an Egyptian soothsayer devoted to Serapis, had told Caracalla to his face Macrinus would soon wrest the purple from him. Caracalla laughed this off and threw Serapio to lions. But there were signs Caracalla had taken this more seriously—some of Macrinus’s close allies had been suddenly removed, apparently promoted to distant postings—and Caracalla was capricious and superstitious, endlessly relying on horoscopes and omens. Macrinus did not think Caracalla would ignore a second portent. Thus, having probably never harboured seditious thoughts, Macrinus now feared for his life if the Emperor saw the letter, and felt he had no choice but to act out the seer’s prophecy.²⁹

Macrinus was again lucky in having to hand a manipulable proxy: Justin Martialis, a centurion overdue for promotion whose brother Caracalla had murdered. Martialis was easily persuaded to take his revenge. During a trip across the desert, on 8 April 217, to the temple of the moon god Sin in Carrhae (later Harran, the last holdout of paganism in Islamdom), Caracalla stopped to urinate, and Martialis stabbed the Emperor.³⁰ Martialis may not have struck the fatal blow. By some accounts, once Martialis started, the Praetorians took the chance to finish with Caracalla.³¹ In either event, Martialis was killed in the melee.

THE BRIEF USURPATION

Days after Caracalla was killed, the army proclaimed Macrinus to be Emperor, the second of just three Africans to hold the position.³² Macrinus also has the more dubious distinction of being the first Emperor not to visit Rome during his reign. In the late Republic era, Rome had added to its patrician (senatorial) class and plebians (commoners) a new class, the equestrians, which is sometimes loosely described as a “middle class” but should be understood as much closer to the Senators than the plebs.³³ Macrinus was the first eques to become Emperor, a fact bitterly resented by the Senate. Senatorial hostility was an important reason why Macrinus never bothered visiting the capital.

Caracalla’s mother, Julia Domna, committed suicide in Antioch soon after her son’s downfall, perhaps at the instigation of Macrinus.³⁴ Domna’s older sister (Caracalla’s aunt), Julia Maesa, a wealthy and politically influential woman in her own right, who had been living with Domna for years—in Rome and then in Antioch—moved back to Emesa in Syria, probably as a result of an order for exile by Macrinus.³⁵ Maesa’s husband, Gaius Julius Avitus Alexianus, had been a consul under Caracalla and had been with Caracalla during the Persian expedition. Avitus had possibly fallen afoul of Caracalla in some way, which is why in been sent to a remote ambassadorship, to advise the Governor of Cyprus in early 217. At all events, Julius Avitus never made it to the island, dying, it seems genuinely of natural causes, on the way, either just before or just after Caracalla’s demise.

The reign of Macrinus was short.

In the summer of 217, Roman troops were defeated by the Persians at Nisibis (now Nusaybin on the Turkey-Syria border), in what would prove to be the last Roman encounter with the Parthians. Macrinus repudiated the campaign as Caracalla’s war and sued for peace.³⁶ To return to the status quo ante bellum, Rome released all prisoners taken, withdrew from occupied territories, and paid for the damage therein, amounting to 200 million sesterces.³⁷

Macrinus tried to shore-up his position in the capital—or at least to reduce his opposition there—by writing to the Senate, making the case for his own integrity, the wisdom of ending the Persian war, and promising to restore Senatorial rule after a particularly harsh period of autocracy.³⁸ This letter hardly eliminated Senatorial snobbery, but none could deny the relief at being liberated from Caracalla, and Macrinus acquired goodwill as the instrument of deliverance. Macrinus was awarded honours by the Senate, and things were set right in Rome, as the patricians saw it. Officials loyal to Caracalla were purged, and the fallen Emperor’s intrusive espionage network was dismantled, with uncovered spies—many of them slaves in the households of the great and the good—crucified. The bloodletting played out across the Empire.³⁹

For a combination of reasons—a dread of being exposed to the condescension of patrician Senators, a desire to imitate Marcus Aurelius (r. 161-80) by being ostentatiously deliberative, and discipline problems in the army after the withdrawal from Persia—instead of returning to Rome in triumph, Macrinus “loitered at Antioch, cultivating his beard”, as one historian put it.⁴⁰ The problems with the legions, the ultimate source of an Emperor’s power, were daunting: Macrinus’s Persian peace was not only humiliating; it ended opportunities for war booty and necessitated pay-cuts. Salary reductions in peacetime were one thing; soldiers sleeping in tents and struggling for food because “their” money had been paid to the Persians was quite another. Inflaming things yet further, Macrinus was said to be appearing in bejewelled broaches and at one too many pantomimes. Such extravagance and dissolution contrasted sharply with the austere Caracalla, who lived the daily routine of his legionaries.⁴¹

THE RISE OF ELAGABALUS

The Third Gallic Legion, led by Publius Valerius Comazon, stationed at Raphana—probably near Damascus, about 100 miles south of Emesa—was seduced into rebellion against Macrinus. The key player was Julia Maesa, Caracalla’s aunt. She was able to give the soldiers the money Macrinus could not, and she implicitly offered them a path to restoring Caracalla’s military policy. Maesa had two daughters and two grandsons: she let it be known both daughters had slept with Caracalla, and the eldest, Julia Soaemias Bassiana, had a son by the deceased Emperor, the 14-year-old Varius Avitus Bassianus, the boy we know as Elagabalus. This is almost certainly not true,⁴² but “it soon became common knowledge throughout the army” that Bassianus/Elagabalus was Caracalla’s bastard.⁴³ For many soldiers, this added ideological legitimacy to a coup to replace Macrinus with Bassianus: there was no harm in doing the right thing just because it was also in their interests.

Bassianus was the high priest of the Elagabal cult, and this does not seem to have been irrelevant in Roman legions rallying to his cause. The Elagabalan temple was frequently visited by Romans who came to Syria. Between the temple’s grandeur and social significance—people around Emesa travelled to it and other Syrian cities gave tribute to its priests—there was the attraction a modern tourist might feel. But the religious aspect was operative for Romans.

“Paganism” was not about doctrinal belief or ethics, and it was not exclusivist. There was no such thing as “conversion”: to worship a new god did not mean abandoning an old god. The heart of paganism was cultic practice to appease the gods. Favour could be won from some gods, but in the main sacrifices were offered as part of a transaction to avoid your life being disturbed by divine wrath. When travelling, pagans made offerings to local gods as insurance.⁴⁴ As such, Roman legionaries in Syria would always have been regular worshippers at the black stone of Elagabal. It does seem, though, that Bassianus provided a particular attraction, both as a spectacle—soldiers are said to have watched him “performing his priestly duties, dancing about the altars in barbarian fashion to the music of … every kind of instrument … with more than ordinary curiosity”—and because he “was the handsomest lad of his time”.⁴⁵

Maesa seems to have had help in her conspiracy, notably from Gannys, possibly Bassianus’s tutor and possibly a eunuch, and from a broader anti-Macrinus discontent in the local elite, among “men of the equestrian order and Senators of Emesa”.⁴⁶ Given the discomfort of many in having an equestrian as Emperor, some patricians in Rome must have seen the appeal in restoring (what was believed to be) bloodline legitimacy by putting Bassianus on the throne. There is insufficient evidence to say if any of them did anything about it.⁴⁷

Maesa and Bassianus were smuggled into a camp of legionary deserters, where Bassianus was saluted as “Son of Caracalla” and wrapped in a purple cloak. Having gathered supplies from neighbouring villages and fields to endure a siege, should that be necessary, on 16 May 218 the mutineers declared Bassianus was Emperor. Macrinus sent a squad to suppress the revolt, only for the soldiers to be won over by the promise of being ruled by Caracalla’s son—and Maesa’s money. The soldiers turned swords on their officers, and sent the head of their commander, Ulpius Julianus, the former censor for Caracalla, to Macrinus in Antioch. The Senate obliged Macrinus’s request in declaring war on “the False Antoninus” (Bassianus) and Macrinus prepared to go into battle himself. Before that happened, the army of Bassianus, its morale sky-high and swollen with Julianus’s men and other deserters, marched out from Emesa against Antioch,⁴⁸ led apparently by Gannys.⁴⁹

Bassianus’s troops prevailed in the Battle of Antioch on 8 June 218, and Macrinus fled. This was seen as cowardice, and the Roman army en masse declared its allegiance to Bassianus. Macrinus was trying to—at last—get to Rome, but he never did. Cornered in Chalcedon two weeks or so later, Macrinus was cut down by legions and his head sent to Bassianus as a prize. Macrinus’s unfortunate son, the 10-year-old Diadumenian, had been named co-Emperor soon after the Elagabalan uprising began. The boy was quickly found—by some accounts on his way to Persia—and Bassianus kept his severed head, too.⁵⁰

ELAGABALUS FROM THE SOURCES

Photorealistic reconstruction of Elagabalus || image source: Daniel Voshart

Bassianus was never known as “Elagabalus” during his life, nor for a long time afterwards. He took the Imperial name Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, which was Caracalla’s real name, underlining the claim that Elagabalus had a blood right to the throne.

The image ancient historians paint of Elagabalus’s reign is not a flattering one. The story runs as follows:

The Roman Senate had its misgivings about Elagabalus without knowing more about him than that he was Syrian, but Macrinus was adjudged feeble and indolent, and more to the point there was nothing the Senators could actually do except to hope for the best. Elagabalus, avoiding a repetition of Macrinus’s error, set out quickly from Antioch to Rome, shadowed by his grandmother, Julia Maesa,⁵¹ the single most important actor in bringing Elagabalus to power, and later the central figure in bringing him down.

Elagabalus arrived at Nicomedia, near what would become Constantinople, in late 218, and was forced by the weather to spend the winter in the town. Elagabalus “immediately … plunged into his mad activities, performing for his native god the fantastic rites in which he had been trained from childhood. … He loathed Greek and Roman garments because they were made of wool, in his opinion an inferior material; only the Syrian cloth met with his approval. Accompanied by flutes and drums, he went about performing, as it appeared, orgiastic service to his god.”⁵²

Maesa, understanding the problem with Elagabalus entering Rome in dress that was so “obviously foreign and wholly barbaric”, begged the boy to wear Roman garb, but Elagabalus thought she was an old (she was about 60) and foolish woman. Rather than trying to fit in with Roman expectations, Elagabalus “wished the Senate and the Roman people to grow accustomed to seeing him in this costume”, so had a “full-length portrait painted, showing him performing his priestly duties in public”. The sun god Elagabal appeared in this picture, which was sent ahead to Rome and “hung in the centre of the Senate House, high above the statue of Victory”. Senators were obliged to burn incense and pour wine to Elagabal as they entered the Senate, and Roman officials were ordered to perform public sacrifices to Elagabal “before all the other gods”.⁵³

Once in Rome in the spring of 219, after having the Senate rehabilitate Caracalla and subject Macrinus to damnatio memoriae,⁵⁴ Elagabalus built a massive temple to Elagabal on the Palatine Hill. This Elagabalium was surrounded with altars, and every morning he sacrificed dozens of bulls and sheep, whose carcasses were placed on the altars with heaps of spices, and “the oldest and finest wines” were poured out in streams to mingle with the blood. Elagabalus then danced around these alters, accompanied by Syrian women with cymbals and drums. Senators watched proceedings, which concluded with praetorian prefects and high magistrates, in splendid dress except for their “linen shoes customarily worn by Eastern prophets”, carrying away the entrails in golden vessels, a task usually reserved for plebs.⁵⁵ In due course, the black stone embodying Elagabal was brought to Rome, hauled two-thousand miles from Emesa and deposited where once the shrine of Orcus had stood.⁵⁶

Roman contempt for provincial customs was a given, but patricians preferred Elagabalus to Caracalla or Macrinus, and the pagan plebs had a framework to accommodate alien cults. Indeed, it is said that Elagabalus’s painting of what the Roman people should expect had done its work in providing fair warning.⁵⁷ The Romans might even have left the Emperor to it when he decided to stop eating pork and have himself circumcised so his worship of Elagabal was pure. Where a line was drawn was when Elagabalus “compelled many of his companions to undergo mutilation in like manner” and decreed—apparently in late 220—that Elagabal be worshipped “above Jupiter”.⁵⁸ Elagabalus proposed to “transfer the emblem of the Great Mother, the fire of Vesta, the Palladium, the shields of the Salii, and all that the Romans held sacred [into the Elagabalan temple], purposing that no [other] god might be worshipped”.⁵⁹

The most alarming part of the circumcision imbroglio was that Elagabalus had initially “planned … to cut off his genitals altogether”, a desire “prompted solely by his effeminacy”, unrelated to the sun god cult.⁶⁰ Later, Elagabalus is said to have “asked the physicians to contrive a woman’s vagina in his body by means of an incision, promising them large sums for doing so”.⁶¹

When Elagabalus’s Court was not taken over by him playing at being a woman, it was dominated by actual women. Elagabalus was said to be wholly controlled by his mother, Julia Soaemias, who, shockingly, was allowed to attend the Senate like a man. Still reeling from that, Elagabalus, at Soaemias’s instigation, tried to set up a Women’s Senate on the Quirinal Hill. And all the while Soaemias “lived like a harlot and practised all manner of lewdness in the Palace”. There was speculation that Elagabalus’s original name, Varius, “was given him by his school-fellows because he seemed to be sprung from the seed of ‘various’ men”.⁶²

At some point in late 219, Elagabalus married Julia Cornelia Paula, as upstanding a Roman woman, from as noble and ancient a family, as could be found. Elagabalus had already begun emptying the treasury with projects like building an enormous gold statue of himself, and the marriage ceremony drained the coffers yet further: gladiatorial shows killed an elephant and fifty-one tigers, and vast amounts of cash were given to attendees, the masses, and the legions.⁶³ In early 220, Elagabalus divorced Paula and started sleeping with a Vestal Virgin, Aquilia Severa, traditionally a capital crime for both of them. Elagabalus married Severa and announced, “I did it in order that godlike children might spring from me, the high priest, and from her, the high-priestess”,⁶⁴ before—it seems under pressure from his grandmother—Elagabalus divorced her and sent a letter to the Senate saying it was the kind of manly transgression that could happen to anyone.⁶⁵ A third wife, Annia Faustina, was brought in, and the imprint of Julia Maesa is all over this match: Faustina was the great-granddaughter of Marcus Aurelius. The Severan dynasty had always worked to establish links with the Antonines and now there was a direct connection. Except there wasn’t, because Elagabalus divorced her and remarried Severa.⁶⁶

Appalling as these shenanigans were, the true horror of Elagabalus’s womanising, we are told, was that he never had “any need of [women] himself, but simply … wanted to imitate their actions”.⁶⁷ The masculine excesses covered up yet more feminine deviances. Some soldiers in Nicomedia, realising Elagabalus’s fondness for “being penetrated by men” and “conducting everything in the most disgraceful manner”, had regretted turning on Macrinus, but by then it was too late.⁶⁸ Once in Rome,

[Elagabalus] would go to the taverns by night, wearing a wig, and there ply the trade of a female huckster. He frequented the notorious brothels, drove out the prostitutes, and played the prostitute himself. And he set aside a room in the Palace and there committed his indecencies, always standing nude at the door of the room, as the harlots do, shaking the curtain which hung from gold rings, while calling out in a soft and melting voice to entice passers-by.⁶⁹

When taking a break, Elagabalus would get into arguments with the other prostitutes by “claiming that he had more lovers than they and took in more money”.⁷⁰ During productions staged at the Palance of the life of Paris—the one whose elopement with Helen caused the Trojan war—Elagabalus “would take the role of Venus, and suddenly drop his clothing to the ground and fall naked on his knees”.⁷¹

The religious outrages continued. The Palladium, the statue of Pallas Athena that had descended from heaven to Troy and then been kept out of sight in Rome in the temple of Vesta, only seen once when the temple caught fire, was brought to Elagabalus’s bedroom and he proposed to marry her. Deciding Elagabal was displeased by a god so heavily dressed, less dressed statues of gods were wheeled in. Roman plebs were not impressed to see Elagabalus running backwards from a chariot while holding the reins of the horses, looking at an image of Elagabal. The elites were not impressed with the cost of this being done on a route strewn with gold dust. Any adoration gained from the crowds when Elagabalus threw out gold and silver at the end of this ceremony was tempered by people being crushed to death in the ensuing scramble or speared by soldiers trying to protect public property in the rioting.⁷²

Live animals—lions, moneys, snakes—were kept in the Elagabalium, and Elagabalus, stood adorned with amulets, threw “in among them human genitals”, presumably to feed them. Human sacrifice was viewed with extreme distaste by the Romans—a barbarian practice of some of their worst enemies, like Carthaginians and Druids—thus the reaction was pure horror when Elagabalus started sacrificing young boys.⁷³ Elagabalus’ taste for child sacrifice was such that he drew up a register of “noble and handsome boys from across Italy” and had his magicians start working his way through them—but only those whose mother and father were alive because “the sorrow, if suffered by two parents, should be all the greater”. Before the daily sacrifices, Elagabalus would personally torture the children for fun.⁷⁴

Elagabalus refused to uphold the Augustan illusion Emperors held power jointly with the Senate: he ruled as a tyrant and openly reduced the Senate to irrelevance. If there were breaks in the terror, the humiliation was constant. Sometimes this was political. As early as 219, Elagabalus asked for the Senate to condemn two officials who had defied him, Silius Messalla and Pomponius Bassus, only to publicly write to the Senate: “I did not send you the so-called evidence of their conspiracy because it would have been pointless to read it, as the men are already dead”.⁷⁵ On good days, the humiliation was personal and more private. Elagabalus would engage Senators in “filthy conversation”, telling them of his exploits with his male favourites, and asking if they “had ever experienced what he was experiencing”. The older Senators would tend to blush and keep silent; Elagabalus would declare this confirmation, and when he tired of embarrassing them moved on to predatory conversation with the younger ones.⁷⁶

When Elagabalus opened up “the bath of Plautinus” to the public for free—a gesture that appeared to be in the populist tradition of appealing to the plebs and appalling the patricians—it turned out to have a far darker motive than anything Caligula or Nero could conceive. Elagabalus rigged the pools to see people naked below the waterline so “by this means he might get a supply of men with unusually large organs”.⁷⁷ Elagabalus’s only interest in Imperial conquest turned out to be a ruse to try to go to war with some of the Germans who had become Rome’s allies because of a prophecy made by one of Elagabalus’s astrologers.⁷⁸

There was no end to Elagabalus’s extravagance, depravity, cruelty, and just plain weirdness:⁷⁹

• Foreshadowing Imelda Marcos, Elagabalus would never wear the same pair of shoes twice.

• Elagabalus would eat peas laced with gold flecks and rice mixed with pearls. The Emperor’s food bills were always extreme, and he delighted in the profligacy: “he loved to hear the prices of the food served at his table exaggerated, asserting it was [only] an appetiser for the banquet”.

• At banquets, Elagabalus would sometimes impose a uniform theme, either by serving food of only one colour—blue, green, whatever—or inviting eight men who were all bald, one-eyed, suffering gout, tall, dark-skinned, tall, or fat. Elagabalus was especially amused by inviting fat guests because they could not all fit on the dining couches.

• At other banquets, Elagabalus would bring his pet lions and leopards into the room and laugh at the panic that ensued, knowing the animals were harmless, since he had taken all their teeth out.

• “Some of his humbler friends he would seat on air-pillows instead of on cushions and let out the air while they were dining, so that often the diners were suddenly found under the table.” Whoopee cushions featured quite regularly at Elagabalan parties.

• Sometimes Elagabalus would serve guests dessert made of wax, wood, ivory, marble, or stone, while he ate real food. Guests were encouraged not simply to watch the Emperor eat, but to go through the motions of eating themselves, and then to wash their hands after the course.

• A less innocuous practical joke at dinner parties: Elagabalus liked to drop petals from violets and other flowers, and while guests were admiring the beauty, he would speed up the sprinkling from the ceiling until the room filled up with petals: some guests suffocated to death.

• Sometimes the harmless lions and leopards were introduced into the bedrooms of guests so they woke up with a fright; at least one died of a heart attack.

• Guests at the Imperial Palace could find themselves locked in a room for “the night with old hags from Ethiopia”, or similarly repulsive males.

• Elagabalus created the gameshow of chance: either people could win ten pounds of lettuce or ten pounds of gold—or ten harmless dormice or ten bears.

• The competitive ethos transposed to the banquets involved guests making a sauce to liven up the food. If Elagabalus liked the sauce, he gave grand prizes, occasionally a “silk garment—then regarded as a rarity and a mark of honour”. If the Emperor did not like the sauce, “the inventor was ordered to continue eating it until he invented a better one.”

• “He never had intercourse with the same woman twice except with his wife, and he opened brothels in his house for his friends, his clients, and his slaves.”

• “When adultery was represented on the stage, he would order what was usually done in pretence to be carried out in fact.”

• At one point, he gathered together all the city’s female prostitutes and, while dressed as a woman “with protruding bosom”, addressed them as “comrades” and gave a speech “as one might to soldiers”, before “discoursing upon various kinds of postures and debaucheries”. Once the ladies were led out, Elagabalus changed into “the garb of a boy who is exposed for prostitution” and had an army of “catamites [passive partners in male-male sexual relations] collected together from all sides … After his speech he announced a largess of three aurei each, just as if they were soldiers, and asked them to pray the gods that they might find others to recommend to him.”

• One night, Elagabalus “visited every prostitute” while in disguise, this time not to “gratify his passions”, but to give them each an aureus (gold coin), telling them, “Let no one know it, but this is a present from Antoninus”.

• At the Imperial summer home, Elagabalus would have snow shipped in from the mountains to his pleasure-garden.

• Near the coast, Elagabalus would never eat fish. In the interior of Rome, “he regularly served all manner of sea-food”.

• Elagabalus “constructed swimming pools filled with sea-water in places especially far from the coast”.

• After sleeping most of the day, Elagabalus would stay awake through night “until morning”.

‘The Roses of Heliogabalus’, oil painting by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema.

Elagabalus’s corruption was total, putting the State in the hands of people who were at best incompetent. Any office could be obtained by bribery.⁸⁰ The magistracies that Elagabalus did not sell were awarded to men who had either joined the rebellion that brought him to power or “committed adultery with him”. Elagabalus “wished to have the reputation of committing adultery, so that in this respect, too, he might imitate the most lewd women”.⁸¹ The beginning of the end for Elagabalus was one of these dalliances, with Hierocles, a charioteer in his service, a former slave from Caria (what is now the Turkish side of the Aegean).

“It seems that in a certain race Hierocles fell out of his chariot just opposite the seat of Sardanapalus”, one of the chronicles records. Sardanapalus, the mythical last King of Assyria, was the epitome of Eastern effeminacy, vice, and corruption to the Romans, and it was Sardanapalus many Romans had in mind when they called Elagabalus “the Assyrian”. Hierocles lost “his helmet in his fall, and, being still beardless and adorned with a crown of golden hair, he attracted the attention of the Emperor and was immediately rushed to the palace. There, by his nocturnal feats, he captivated Sardanapalus more than ever and became exceedingly power­ful. Indeed, he even had greater influence than the Emperor himself”.⁸²

Elagabalus announced Hierocles was his “husband”, and the Emperor took on the titles of “wife, mistress, and Queen” or Empress (Basilis). Elagabalus “sometimes wore a hair-net and painted his eyes”, and once shaved off his beard at a festival. “Thereafter, he continued to pluck out his facial hair, making himself even more womanlike.”⁸³ The sources are insistent that Elagabalus “had no desire to sin in secret, but appeared in public with eyes painted and cheeks rouged”. One ancient source says “these cosmetics marred a face naturally handsome”,⁸⁴ almost the only kind word about Elagabalus anywhere in the record.⁸⁵ “Such was [Elagabalus’s] passion for Hierocles​ that [on a public stage] he kissed him in a place which it is indecent even to mention, declaring that he was celebrating the [fertility] festival of Flora”.⁸⁶ Nonetheless, Elagabalus continued sleeping with other men and “he would often allow himself to be caught in the very act, in consequence of which he used to be violently upbraided by his ‘husband’ and beaten, so that he had black eyes.” Elagabalus did not resent being beaten by Hierocles; “on the contrary [he] loved him the more for it”.⁸⁷

One of Elagabalus’s “partners” outside this “marriage” was Aurelius Zoticus of Smyrna (modern Izmir), who was also known as “Cook” (Mageiros) because of his father’s trade. The meeting between the two is described thus:

This Aurelius not only had a body that was beautiful all over, seeing that he was an athlete, but in particular he greatly surpassed all others in the size of his private parts. This fact was reported to the Emperor by those who were on the lookout for such things, and the man was suddenly whisked away from the games and brought to Rome … He was appointed cubicularius [manager of the Imperial bedchamber] before he had even been seen by the Emperor … [Elagabalus], on seeing him, sprang up with rhythmic movements, and then, when Aurelius addressed him with the usual salutation, “My Lord Emperor, Hail!”, he bent his neck so as to assume a ravishing feminine pose, and turning his eyes upon him with a melting gaze, answered without any hesitation: “Call me not Lord, for I am a Lady”. Then [Elagabalus] immediately joined him in the bath, and growing more infatuated, after finding him when stripped to be equal to his reputation, lay on his chest. At dinner, he [Elagabalus] reclined in his embrace like some beloved concubine.⁸⁸

Zoticus quickly acquired significant power and was treated at the Court as Elagabalus’s “consort”, a status ratified when Elagabalus staged a “nuptial ceremony” with Zoticus.⁸⁹ Hierocles, understandably concerned at being replaced and/or murdered “as often happens in the case of rival lovers”, engineered Zoticus’s fall from grace in the only way that was possible with Elagabalus: “[Hierocles] caused the cup-bearers, who were well disposed toward him, to administer a drug that abated [Zoticus’s] manly prowess. And so Zoticus, after a whole night of embarrassment, being unable to secure an erection, was deprived of all the honours that he had received, and was driven out of the Palace, out of Rome, and later out of the rest of Italy”. On the plus side, it meant that when the denouement arrived Zoticus was safe.⁹⁰

The Praetorians’ view of this carry-on can be imagined. The final straw was Hierocles becoming politically dominant over Elagabalus, and the announced intention to make Hierocles a Caesar. Elagabalus’s grandmother, sensitive as ever to political reality, begged the boy Emperor to see sense. When Elagabalus instead threatened Julia Maesa, she realised he was a lost cause and moved to condition what would follow her wayward grandson.⁹¹

Maesa needed a way to get rid of Elagabalus while preserving her own power and the security of her family. The answer was her other grandson, Alexianus, son of Maesa’s other daughter, Julia Avita Mamaea. The far-sighted Maesa had already somewhat prepared the Alexianus contingency. The boy had been renamed Alexander Severus, creating an association with Alexander the Great—and what more capable ruler was there? Additionally, Maesa had told the legions before the 218 revolt that Caracalla had slept with both of her daughters,⁹² and there is just a hint of an effort in 221 to get into circulation rumours Alexander was Caracalla’s son, to repeat what was done with Elagabalus. Elagabalus was aware Maesa favoured Alexander and knew the Praetorians agreed with Maesa, though apparently believed the Senate, people, and legions outside Rome were with him. Elagabalus initially tried to neutralise Alexander by adopting him as his son.⁹³

It might seem absurd for an 18-year-old Emperor to claim to be the father of his 13-year-old cousin, but in Rome adopted children were seen, legally and socially, as identical to biological children, with all the rights that gave a male citizen over the child. Elagabalus assumed this manoeuvre would give him physical control over Alexander, and the ability to shape his education and so on. Neither was true. Maesa had helped persuade Elagabalus into the adoption because, for an Emperor, adoption was the mechanism for designating an heir. The legitimist case for Alexander’s succession was now in place, and Elagabalus’s effort to get the Senate to withdraw the title of “Caesar” from Alexander failed.⁹⁴ Alexander was kept clear of Elagabalus’s sun god worship, his “dancing in luxurious robes and [being] effeminately adorned with gold necklaces”.⁹⁵ Instead, Alexander was given a classical Greek and Roman education, raising his political popularity with the masses, the Senate, and, most importantly, the Praetorians.⁹⁶

Recognising the momentum building against him, Elagabalus made an attempt on Alexander’s life. It was thwarted by Maesa and the Praetorians, who now eliminated all of Elagabalus’s male “favourites”, except Hierocles, spared after a pitiable display of tears and wailing from Elagabalus.⁹⁷ Elagabalus retreated for a time, and tried to secure his position by purging possible enemies and filling the State with loyalists. Slaves and freedmen “notorious for disgraceful acts” were appointed Proconsuls in the provinces. Charioteers, comedians, and mime artists were given important Imperial postings. And in Rome, the top State positions were occupied by the lowliest of all, people no better than prostitutes: actors.⁹⁸

Soon, Elagabalus began formulating a second plot to kill Alexander. It was discovered by the Praetorians, and this time they had had enough.⁹⁹ In March 222, Elagabalus was murdered by the Praetorians after being asked—compelled, really—to visit the Guards’ headquarters with Alexander. Elagabalus tried to flee, but did not get far before he was found in a latrine and hacked to death. Elagabalus’s body was stripped, dragged through the streets, and thrown in the Tiber after a failed attempt to stuff it into a sewer.¹⁰⁰ Elagabalus’s mother, Julia Soaemias, was destroyed alongside her son, her body discarded somewhere in the streets of Rome—the mob lost interest before they reached the Tiber. The Praetorians hunted down and killed Hierocles and Aurelius Eubulus, an old Emesene friend (and apparently more) of Elagabalus’s. Many of Elagabalus’s prefects were liquidated, though interestingly not General Comazon, leader of the legionary revolt that brought Elagabalus to power and thereafter Urban Prefect for virtually Elagabalus’s whole reign.¹⁰¹

Alexander Severus became Emperor. The boy at first answered to his grandmother, Julia Maesa, until she died two years later. His mother, Julia Avita, was the domineering presence at Court after that, but her desire to make a Philosopher-King of the boy gave openings to others like the Tyrian jurist Domitius Ulpianus and, it seems, elements of the Senate. In the course of events, it mattered little. Alexander’s reign was racked with internal turmoil—Ulpianus was killed in a riot in 228, for example—and even greater external trouble. The eastern frontier had not been properly fortified after Caracalla’s war, and with the fall of the Parthians in 224, a new Persian dynasty, the Sassanids, arose that was much more menacing. Alexander tried to staunch the Persian invasion in 231 and gave up in 233, moving to try to secure the western frontier, where the Germans were threatening in a way they had not for some time. Alexander perished as Elagabalus had, alongside his mother at the hands of mutinous soldiers, this time on the Rhine. Maximinus Thrax nominally became Emperor, but the Crisis of the Third Century had begun, soon to be compounded by the worst plague the world had yet known.

WHAT DO WE KNOW OF THE REAL ELAGABALUS?

The stories about Elagabalus come from three sources:

First: Historia Romana (“Roman History”), written in Greek between c. 191 and 229 AD, by Cassius Dio, a Senator of Greek descent. Dio’s work is published in eighty volumes and covers from the founding of the Republic in 509 BC up to his own day (he died c. 235 AD). Dio lived through Elagabalus’s reign, though it is clear he was not in Rome, so he was not an eyewitness, and Dio’s biography of Elagabalus was written during the reign of Alexander Severus, whose legitimacy derived in no small part from blackening Elagabalus’s name and claiming to have rescued Rome from this nightmare. A lot of Dio’s earlier books are lost and the later books only survive in Byzantine summaries, with the sections for Elagabalus and Alexander being particularly patchy.¹⁰²

Second: History of the Empire from the Death of Marcus, written in Greek between c. 240 and 250 AD, by Herodian, a civil servant, a rare example of a Roman historian not from the senatorial or even equestrian class. It is possible Herodian came from the Greek-speaking Eastern half of the Empire, perhaps Syria—he is sometimes referred to as “Herodian of Antioch”—but we just do not know. Herodian’s work, in eight books, covers from the end of Marcus Aurelius’s reign in 180 AD until 238. Herodian also lived through Elagabalus’s reign, but there is no sign he was in Rome either, and it is evident that Herodian draws on Dio for his account. The whole of Herodian’s work survives.

Third: Historia Augusta (“Imperial History” or “History of the Emperors”), written in Latin, probably completed c. 390 AD, with possible revisions and additions made up to c. 420. The work comprises thirty biographies—most of them individual, some paired—from Hadrian (r. 117-38) to Numerian (r. 283-84). The surviving work as we have it appears complete, but there are internal textual clues suggesting the end is missing—the original might have finished with Diocletian (r. 284-305)—and that some profiles of minor usurper Emperors from the third century have been lost.

The Historia Augusta is one of the strangest works of Classical literature to survive. The problems begin with its authorship. While the Historia Augusta claims to be written by six named authors working at the end of the third century—the Elagabalus chapter is signed by “Aelius Lampridius”—it was actually written by a single (anonymous) author a century later. The Historia August is both in the tradition of Suetonius’s De vita Caesarum (“The Lives of the [Twelve] Caesars”) and a satire of that tradition: the events it describes are a mix of possible truth, exaggeration, and outright fantasy, while most of the documents and speeches it claims to rely on are self-evidently fabricated.

The Historia Augusta is funny, clearly intentionally so, with much of the comedy derived from shock or surrealism. But it is not aimed at a lowbrow audience. The allusions in the Historia Augusta are learned—to Cicero, Virgil, Tacitus, Pliny the Elder—and the biographers who are parodied, like Suetonius, Plutarch, and Marius Maximus, are mocked in a very knowing and sophisticated manner. The author does not lack the ability to write history: some of the more reliable sections seem to make accurate use of Ammianus Marcellinus, for example. It was a deliberate choice to write the Historia Augusta in a tone reminiscent of Juvenal, another figure alluded to. What none of the textual analysis can tell us is what the work was for.

To put it simply, the timing and nature of the Historia Augusta mean it cannot be considered a credible source for anything. The manuscript itself opens with a statement of apparent hesitancy about “committed to writing the life of Heliogabalus”, such is the disgrace,¹⁰³ mischievously adding later that a number of the anecdotes about the Emperor are “beyond belief” and the author feels they must have been “invented by those who wished to vilify Elagabalus in order to curry favour with Alexander”.¹⁰⁴ The book is useless in providing a realistic picture of the reign of Elagabalus, but it seems unlikely that was ever its intent. The clue is that, while the author does not spare on Elagabalus’s sexual misbehaviour, the focus is more on the extravagance and bizarreness—it is in the Historia Augusta we get most of the food- and dining-related stories—and the misgovernment. Elagabalus’s biography is paired with that of Alexander, the symmetry of their lives forming competing models of good and bad Emperors. We will return to this.

Dio and Herodian have more credibility in their timing, but there is the immediate problem of interdependence and the further issue that neither was an eyewitness and neither specifies their sources, which is a general problem in ancient history. We will return to this as well. Dio is a political moraliser and in his narrative Elagabalus functions as the end-point of Rome’s degradation, hence his intense focus on the femininity of the man at the top of the Imperial structure. Herodian’s narrative is somewhat more clinical, its focus more drawn to high politics, which is why he dwells on Elagabalus bringing an “Oriental” god to Rome. Both are agreed that Elagabalus disrupted the order of nature, and they make their case in ways that are recognisably formulaic, even if they are pushed to extremes. Why they pushed them to such extremes, we will get to.

To the extent Elagabalus is known at the present time, it is because of claims he was transgender. It is in Dio’s biography we are told Elagabalus wanted to remove his penis, and even asked for surgeons to “contrive a woman’s vagina in his body”, and this is the basis of claims Elagabalus was a “trans woman”. There is an obvious problem in back-projecting a socio-psychological construct of this kind onto someone who lived 1,800 years ago, and that would be so even if these details were true, which they plainly are not. For one thing, the section of Dio about the surgical demands is incomplete. But the issue is that these details, in context, are part of a mosaic Dio is constructing to portray Elagabalus as womanly, and dominated by women, based on an ingrained Roman stereotype of Easterners generally and Syrians specifically as effeminate. This depiction of Elagabalus, moreover, has been garlanded in the literature and popular imagination by Enlightenment and nineteenth-century historians, who brought the racial presumptions of their era to the ancient sources.¹⁰⁵ In short, to label Elagabalus trans is to engage in an anachronism that relies on a Roman prejudice reinforced by obsolete European racialist ideas.

Similar issues of anachronism and decontextualization arise with narratives of Elagabalus being, or being killed for being, homosexual. “Homosexuality” is a word and concept of very recent vintage.¹⁰⁶ Male same-sex relations were not a basis for Roman identity and were not per se of any moral concern to the Romans,¹⁰⁷ though they were disgusted by men who played the passive part, seeing them as unmanly and diseased, and often associating them with Eastern decadence, servility, and religious excess,¹⁰⁸ so it went with Roman moral-political prejudice to throw that in against Elagabalus. The impetus underlying the accusation that Elagabalus became the slave of his “husband” Hierocles has little to do with sex at all, though. What is being targeted is Hierocles’s “identities”, to put it like that, as a freedman and a provincial,¹⁰⁹ and Elagabalus’s alleged attack on the natural hierarchy in subordinating himself—and the State—to such a man.¹¹⁰ This was not new. Senatorial and Praetorian perception that “foreigners” and ex-slaves were really pulling the strings behind an Emperor had been a source of resentment sufficient to incite rebellion since at least the time of Claudius.¹¹¹

Related reconstructions of Elagabalus wherein he is “gender fluid” and/or a political radical challenging “gender norms”, and Marxist reinterpretations of the lurid sources as cover for class warfare and other factional struggles, all fall into the same category of telling us about the historian writing them and not about the history ostensibly being dealt with.

The notion that Elagabalus bringing an Eastern god to Rome contributed to his downfall might be thought to be on better footing: he was, after all, high priest of a foreign cult and put the Elagabal Baetyl on the Palatine. The glaring problem with this is the temple to the Syrian “Great Mother” (Magna Mater) or Cybele in the Forum, just a few hundred yards from the Palatine. Whatever Elagabalus and his priests got up to, the antics of the cross-dressing and self-castrating galli of Cybele put far greater strain on religious sensibilities, “gender boundaries”, and the rest of it. If the Romans objected so strenuously to “Eastern” gods in the capital, it begs the question of what Cybele was still doing there after four-hundred years.

The reality is Cybele was absorbed into the fabric of Roman society, her festivals marked in the official calendar and her worshippers protected by soldiers as they carried out their ecstatic rituals in the streets, even as the galli became “the ultimate scare-figure of Roman masculinity”, a byword for deviancy and the object of ridicule for the poets.¹¹² The same story, mutatis mutandis, of “foreign” gods being simultaneously adopted and rejected by Romans can be told of Dionysus, Isis, and Serapis—all Eastern-origin cults well-subscribed in Rome.¹¹³ It is this matrix of devotional habits and social prejudices the Historia Augusta is making play with in claiming Elagabalus “also adopted the worship of the Great Mother”.¹¹⁴

As to the supposed Elagabalan religious revolution, this is hard to square with the fact that sun god worship in Rome goes back as far as there are records, seven centuries and more before Elagabalus. When Romans needed an acceptable replacement for the 100-foot Colossus of Nero after 68 AD, the monument was reworked into a statue of Sol Invictus, which had stood adjacent to the Palatine for nearly two centuries when Elagabalus came to power. Even during Elagabalus’s reign the distinction between Sol and Elagabal was fading.¹¹⁵ Whatever Romans thought of Syrian rites, worship of the sun was not a wrenching revolutionary imposition, and the contrary view that held sway for such a long time seems to be based mostly on European ideological assumptions.¹¹⁶ Such a conclusion is not merely deductive.

The narratives of a major religious upheaval during Elagabalus’s reign are simply not reflected in the hard evidence.¹¹⁷ There does seem to have been an Elagabalium, but the archaeology shows its scale was not what Herodian suggests or would be expected if it marked a comprehensive transformation of the Roman pantheon. The official promotion of Elagabal on coins was not an innovation—Caracalla had already done it—and went hand-in-hand with the promotion of the traditional gods, including the allegedly-toppled Jupiter. Indeed, there is no indication in inscriptions or dedications that Elagabalus attempted to suppress any gods, not even in the sense later seen with Aurelian and Sol Invictus of virulently promoting one god and neglecting the others. To the extent there is a shift in Elagabalus’s coinage, it is not towards more “exotic” religious imagery in his last year or two; it is away from the gods altogether, and towards military themes unobjectionable to the civic public.¹¹⁸ The “harder” literary evidence, i.e. State documents, tell the same story. For example, in-keeping with tradition, Elagabalus joined the Arval Brotherhood—the priests who protected the harvest—and performed the rituals with them every year.¹¹⁹

Mary Beard argues that what Dio, Herodian, and the Historia Augusta are really doing is giving expression to Roman anxieties about autocracy, the “worry that the Emperor was an actor and that the Empire—the autocratic system—was all about fakery”.¹²⁰ The personal and religious stories about Elagabalus, supposedly staying awake at night and linking the sun god cult to the sacred flame of Vesta by the tawdry means of marriage to a virgin priest, indicate that the laws of nature and social convention are being broken, but it is more than that, says Beard. When looked at closely, the stories about Elagabalus—the snow in the summer gardens, never eating fish on the coast, filling inland swimming pools with seawater—seem less random: there is a common theme, a portrait of a world turned upside down. A man claiming to be a woman, tame lions that lead to people’s deaths anyway: nothing is as it seems. In the serving of fake food to everyone but Elagabalus and actors of adultery actually having sex on stage, the actual turns out to be symbolic and the symbolic is literalised. Reality itself is being destabilised, and at the centre of the transgressions is Imperial power.

That the anecdotes surrounding Elagabalus are confusing, practically implausible, and “larger than life” is the point, in Beard’s telling: we are being pointed beyond one man to the darkness at the heart of the autocracy, the shrouding of events in secrecy, such that Romans—whose ancestors were born expecting participation in res publica (“public affairs”)—now have no idea what is going on. This is why some of the stories about Elagabalus are so familiar from the biographies of Emperors like Caligula and Nero, because it is the office that breeds “the wildest freaks of cruelty and rapacity”,¹²¹ albeit these themes are heightened to novel extremes with Elagabalus because his biographers are writing two centuries on.¹²² The purpose of Dio et al., Beard concludes, is to address the core issues of Romanitas—history, culture, the gods—and illustrate the dystopia Romans are living in.

There are hints within the sources that Beard is correct they are not really about one Emperor. The uncertainty about Elagabalus’s very name feeds into the sense of depersonalisation.¹²³ And Dio effectively spells out the core of Beard’s argument:

In earlier times, all matters were reported to the Senate and the people, and … everyone was able to learn about events … But from that time [when Octavian took power] onward, most affairs began to be conducted secretly and behind closed doors. And even if something was made public, it was unverifiable and unreliable, since everything was suspected of being said or done according to the will of those in power and their inner circles. Because of this, many false rumours circulated about things that never happened, while many actual events remained unknown. In fact, almost everything is reported differently from how it actually occurred.¹²⁴

A sense of the purpose of the Historia Augusta takes shape if we follow the implications of Beard’s argument. Rather than a whimsical in-joke for the literate classes, it begins to look more like a deadly serious work of political satire, a sort of meta-commentary on the dystopia of Imperial Rome, where nothing can be trusted to be what it appears to be.

Of course, interesting as all this is, it gets us no closer to the historical Elagabalus, and the truth is that quest is impossible. Except for the faintest outline of Elagabalus’s biography—his birthplace, likely family tree, priestly status, rough age, and years as Emperor¹²⁵—we know nothing about him and never will. Disturbing as it is to have to accept a nearly blank space in the timeline, the truly disturbing thing is that all this time later Elagabalus can destabilise reality more broadly, to be precise what we think is reality when it comes to Roman history, specifically about the Emperors.

It is well-understood that the ancient biographies of the Caesars are imbued with Roman prejudices, and conform to literary formulae and stereotypes of “good” and “bad” Emperors, as judged by patrician Romans, who mostly wrote the history and influenced the rest. The whole project of Classical historiography is to sift these sources, and there are many techniques: triangulating chronicles covering the same events, prioritising sources from nearer the time, filtering out the fantastical, toning down tropes, detecting bias, putting sources in context, and so on. The basic idea is to get at “the reality behind the sources”. The challenge of Elagabalus is that there are three, mutually-reinforcing sources, two of them contemporaneous, yet the contents are so prima facie absurd that every scholar regards extracting anything credible from them as extremely difficult, and a sizeable body of scholarly opinion favours disregarding them entirely. It raises awkward questions about the general methodological approach, and how much of the timeline might unravel if other sources were treated like those for Elagabalus’s reign.

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REFERENCES

1. Adrian Goldsworthy (2014), Augustus: First Emperor of Rome, p. 217.

2. “Who could be found more magnanimous than I … who more nearly divine?” the 36-year-old Octavian asked Senate rhetorically, somewhat unclear on the concept of modesty. Noting that he held “supreme” power as Consul and ruled a populace “content to yield obedience”, Octavian concluded that with his mission complete—his father avenged and “you are all at peace”—his virtuousness required him to “give up so vast a possession”. See: Goldsworthy, Augustus, pp. 231-32.

3. Octavian avoided the pitfall of many autocrats in creating a system that was not dependent on his qualities—that could be passed to another. Nonetheless, Octavian’s place within that system was special, and not simply because he was its father. By the time Octavian was named Augustus, he was already known as “divi filius” (son of a god) because his father, Julius Caesar, had been deified. Octavian had a status never afforded to any other Roman—not Sulla, not Pompey, not Caesar. See: Goldsworthy, Augustus, p. 236.

4. The brief civil war after Nero’s death was the exception that proved the rule: it was a personnel contest for control of the system, not a dispute about the nature of the system itself, which was set upon such firm foundations it weathered the disorders unscathed.

5. Commodus did indeed compete as a gladiator, shocking the Roman people and contributing to a popular belief that his father was a gladiator, rather than Marcus Aurelius (r. 161-80). Commodus appeared dressed in a lion skin, claiming to be the reincarnation of Hercules. He expended vast amounts of money on pointless vanity projects, hardly unknown for a Roman Emperor, but a source of annoyance as he clashed with the Senate over his methods, particularly his habit of leaving the governance of the Empire in the hands of a former slave, Marcus Aurelius Cleander. Commodus’ megalomania peaked when he declared himself Romulus reborn, and renamed the city of Rome, the months of the year, and even the Roman people themselves.

6. “The Crisis of the Third Century” (c. 235-85) was very nearly terminal for the Roman Empire. It took the military proficiency of Claudius Gothicus (r. 268-70) and particularly Aurelian (r. 270-75), and the political guile of Diocletian (r. 284-305), to knit the Empire back together.

7. It was in York (known to the Romans as “Eboracum”) nearly one-hundred years later, in 306, that Constantine was named Emperor, the first Christian to hold the office.

8. “Caracalla” is a nickname acquired towards the end of the first decade of the third century related to “a type of Gallic hooded tunic that he was prone to wear and made fashionable”. (This kind of nickname was not unique. For example, “Caligula” means “little boots”, a name derived from the footwear worn by the soldiers in the legions of his father, Germanicus, during his campaign on the Rhine. Caligula was formally known as Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus.) Caracalla was born Lucius Septimius Bassianus in April 188, and at age 7 (c. 195) renamed Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, an effort by his father, Septimius Severus, to associate his dynasty with the Antonine Caesars (r. 96-192), specifically Antoninus Pius (r. 138-61) and Marcus Aurelius (r. 161-80), already recognised as model Emperors and duly remembered to history as two of the Five Good Emperors. In office, therefore, Caracalla was formally known as Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Caesar. See: Simon Elliott (2023), Great Battles of the Early Roman Empire, p. 129.

9. Adrian Goldsworthy (2009), How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower, p. 70. The proposal by Caracalla and Geta to divide the Empire at the Bosporus—between the Latin-speaking West and the Greek-speaking East—was based on a “natural” fracture point that had been reflected in the previous civil wars between Pompey and Julius Caesar, and Octavian and Mark Antony. Later in the third century, in 286, the Roman Empire was first formally divided—precisely along this boundary—by Diocletian. “Constantine the Great” re-established unified rule over the Empire in 324, but this unity did not last long. After Constantine’s death in 337, the Empire was divided among Constantine’s sons and relatives, then other successors in various bouts of civil war. The last Emperor to rule alone over both halves of the Empire was Theodosius I (r. 379-95), but even that was very brief—about three months.

10. Cassius Dio, Historia Romana: 78.2.2-4. Available here.

11. The phrase belongs to the poet Juvenal (d. 128), written c. 100 in his Satire X, which was a commentary on the changing expectations of the Roman people after the Republic had been swept away: “They shed their sense of responsibility long ago, when they lost their votes, and the bribes; the mob that used to grant power, high office, the legions, everything, curtails its desires, and reveals its anxiety for two things only, bread and circuses.”

12. The inherent tension of ruling an Empire whose population was 80%-plus “foreigners”, labouring under legal disabilities, had been obvious for some time, and Caracalla’s solution was to some extent following the logic of Rome’s generous approach to citizenship dating back to the foundation of the Republic. That this had the happy side-effect of giving Emperors political power-bases beyond the dynastic elites in Rome was, of course, an incentive, as was the effect in rationalising Imperial administration, yes on taxation, and on issues like military recruitment.

13. Caracalla is said to have written to the Senate that Alexander “might live on once more in him, having had such a short life before”. Caracalla wore clothes that Romans believed Alexander had worn; kitted out his legions with equipment, weapons, and even cups used by Alexander’s Macedonians; and created a Macedonian-only division of 16,000 men he called “Alexander’s phalanx”. See: Cassius Dio, Historia Romana: 78.7.1-2.

14. William H.C. Frend (1965), Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church: A Study of a Conflict from the MacCabees to Donatus, p. 312.

15. Serapis was formally defined as a major god by Ptolemy I Soter (r. 305-282 BC), the general in Alexander the Great’s army who established the Hellenic dynasty in Egypt that lasted until Cleopatra VII’s demise in 30 BC. Serapis was a deliberately syncretic god, meant to fuse Greek and Egyptian traditions to ease the tensions as native-ruled Pharaonic Egypt transitioned to a polity dominated by in effect a Greek colony based in Alexandria.

Ptolemy was not working from a totally blank slate. For nearly three millennia, Memphis had been the site of the Apis cult, wherein sacred bulls were believed to incarnate the creator god Ptah (who was also the patron of architects). Over that time, Apis had become blurred with Osiris, the green-skinned, Pharoah-resembling god of fertility, life, the dead, and resurrection (and vegetation and eventually the moon). By the time Ptolemy arrived in Egypt, Osiris-Apis was a widely-subscribed funerary deity, headquartered at the Serapeum at Saqqara where the sacred bulls were buried.

Ptolemy transformed the image of this “Osorapis” into a distinctly human shape, as opposed to that of a bull, making it acceptable to Hellenic sensibilities, and enabling Greeks to associate the god with Zeus, Hades, and Asclepius, while maintaining much of the mythos that Egyptians had known. The cult was steadily promoted, the god’s name gradually changed to Serapis, and the sacral centre moved to Alexandria, where an enormous temple or Serapeum was eventually built, it seems under Ptolemy III (r. 246-22 BC), becoming one of the primary sites of cultic devotion for the whole Hellenic world.

16. Probus (r. 276-82) continued Aurelian’s effort with Sol Invictus. The great Imperial saviour Diocletian (r. 284-305) continued to promote Sol, but emphasised Jupiter as primus inter pares guardian of the State, while his long-serving co-Emperor Maximian favoured Hercules. Constantine (r. 306-37) himself cycled through a number of divine patrons: Hercules was dabbled with for a time (Maximian was his father-in-law), he had a Milvian-like vision of Apollo in Gaul in 310, his devotion to Sol was particularly warm, and Mars was appearing on Constantine’s coins in London as late as 312. In the end he found them all wanting, and never wavered from Christianity after his conversion, even as it took him some time to fully work out his new creed. See: Raymond Van Dam (2011), Remembering Constantine at the Milvian Bridge, pp. 156-57; and, Stephen Dando-Collins (2021), Constantine at the Bridge, chapter five.

17. Tom Holland deals with both myths on this episode of the Rest is History. Holland has dealt with the “pagan Christmas” myth separately in written form, and Tim O’Neill gives it a comprehensive treatment here.

To briefly summarise, there is no pagan connection to Christmas, not in the choice of the 25 December date, nor the traditions and practices of the day, nor the meanings believers ascribe to it, and this is as true whether the argument concerns Sol Invictus, Saturn, the Persian god Mithras, or the derivative god of the Roman Imperial legions Mithras (who, just to keep things interesting, had “Sol Invictus” as one of his titles).

With regard to the idea sun-worship in Rome was an innovation of Elagabalus’ reign, there is a (literally) monumental problem with this: the Colossus of Nero, the hundred-foot statue Nero built of himself, was reworked into a statue of Sol shortly after Nero’s downfall in 68 AD. How can this be if sun-worship only came to Rome in the late 210s? The answer given for a long time was that there had been a much smaller indigenous cult in Rome around a sun god, Sol Indiges, but this had died out, and then Elagabalus’ “oriental” (Syrian) version had been imported, which failed initially—falling with the boy-Emperor in 222—only to be revived half-a-century later by Aurelian. Steven Hijmans, a Dutch-born Classicist at the University of Alberta, who has done yeoman’s work on this subject, concluded emphatically that this simply is not true: “the extensive archaeological, iconographic, epigraphic, numismatic, and literary evidence … documents the continuous presence in Rome of the sun-god … from as far back in history as we can trace Roman religion at all”. As Hijmans spells out, a lot of the earlier historiography was freighted with racialised, and indeed racialist, nineteenth-century assumptions.

18. Andrew Chugg (2007), The Quest for the Tomb of Alexander the Great, pp. 116-17.

19. Alan Bowman, Averil Cameron, and Peter Garnsey [eds.] (1970), The Cambridge Ancient History: Volume 12, The Crisis of Empire, AD 193-337, p. 19.

20. Caracalla successfully annexed one buffer State between Rome and Persia, Osrhoene, whose capital was Edessa (modern Urfa), a vital strategic city. Caracalla was unable to fully subdue the other buffer State, Armenia, but he had reduced its utility to the Parthians by leaving it in anarchy. See: Peter Edwell (2020), Rome and Persia at War: Imperial Competition and Contact, 193–363 CE, chapter two.

21. Caracalla’s initial pretext was that the Persians were holding hostages-cum-terrorists. The pretext evaporated when the Parthians surrendered Tiridates, a pretender to the Armenian throne, and Antiochus, a Roman defector, a Cynic philosopher who had attached himself to Tiridates. See: Cassius Dio, Historia Romana: 78.19.1-2 – 78.21.1.

Undaunted, Caracalla manufactured another pretext by asking to marry the Persian King’s daughter, knowing this would have to be refused since it was a blatant attempt to seize Persia by legal-political means, and this could be presented as an insult to Rome requiring vengeance. See: Cassius Dio, Historia Romana: 79.1. Available here.

Herodian (4.10.1 – 4.11.8), writing just a little later than Dio in the middle of the third century, said the Parthian King, Artabanus IV, was eventually worn down by Caracalla’s request for his daughter’s hand, and arranged a celebration for the Roman Emperor to attend in Persia, where the Roman legions massacred everyone present and then began invasion. The consensus is that Herodian’s account is incorrect, and might well be a garbled rendering of Caracalla’s carnage in Alexandria. See: Andrew G. Scott (2018), Emperors and Usurpers: An Historical Commentary on Cassius Dio’s Roman History, pp. 29-30.

22. Michael Kulikowski (2016), The Triumph of Empire: The Roman World from Hadrian to Constantine, p. 102.

23. Cassius Dio, Historia Romana: 79.1.

24. Peter Edwell (2021), Rome and Persia at War: Imperial Competition and Contact, 193–363 CE, p. 50. As Caracalla could not know—and would not live to discover—the sickness he had detected in the Parthian realm was fatal: within a decade, the dynasty was gone, replaced by the Sassanians.

25. The theories for Caracalla pausing the Persian invasion are numerous. Some suggest the pause was what might be called strategic patience: waiting to see if the brutality in an outlying region would intimidate the Parthians into surrender, or allowing the reverberations of the defeat at Arbela to play out within Persia in case the already-disintegrating Persian edifice collapsed entirely without the need to risk Roman soldiers. Another possibility—not mutually exclusive with those mentioned—is that Caracalla was testing whether he could complete the victory with political warfare, namely by reopening negotiations with Artabanus IV about marrying his daughter. Other theories suggest Caracalla’s troops were already in some trouble, needing time to solve a logistical overstretch by consolidating supply lines and/or to restore discipline among the legions (numerous reasons for unrest are proposed).

26. Cassius Dio, Historia Romana: 79.4.

27. Julia Hoffmann-Salz, Matthäus Heil, and Holger Wienholz [eds.] (2024), The Eastern Roman Empire under the Severans: Old Connections, New Beginnings?, pp. 66-67.

28. The Triumph of Empire, p. 102.

29. Cassius Dio, Historia Romana: 79.4.

30. The Quest for the Tomb of Alexander the Great, pp. 117-18.

31. Martijn Icks (2011), The Crimes of Elagabalus: The Life and Legacy of Rome’s Decadent Boy Emperor, p. 10.

32. Septimius Severus had been the first (Libya), Macrinus (Algeria) was the second, and the last was Marcus Aemilius (Tunisia), who held the office for all of three months in 253. Sometimes a fourth is counted, Clodius Albinus (Tunisia), one of the claimants whom Severus killed after taking the throne.

33. Lesley Adkins and Roy Adkins (1994), Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome, p. 39.

34. Herodian, History of the Empire from the Death of Marcus: 4.13.8 (translation by Edward C. Echols (1961), p. 130).

35. The Crimes of Elagabalus, p. 10.

36. In the negotiations, it is said Macrinus and the Persian King agreed on a premise that the war was Caracalla’s alone, and with the aggressor Emperor dead, justly punished for his crimes, amity should be restored between them. See: Herodian, History of the Empire from the Death of Marcus: 4.15.7-9 (Echols, p. 134).

37. Cassius Dio, Historia Romana: 79.27.

38. In ending the war against the Parthians, Macrinus claimed to have achieved the “critical” goal of “safety” for the whole Empire: “we made a loyal friend instead of a dangerous enemy of a Great King”. Addressing the Senators directly, Macrinus wrote: “I did not approve of [Caracalla’s] actions. Indeed, I frequently risked my life on your behalf when he listened to random charges and attacked you without mercy.” Macrinus made a lengthy defence of his equestrian rank, saying that nobility of birth was no guarantee of a “beneficent and kindly nature” such as he had. Commodus and Caracalla had, after all, been high-born, and had acted as if the Empire was their personal property. Macrinus, by contrast, had become Princeps by “toil” and the will of Fortune, and would, therefore, “treat the post with respect”. Claiming “uprightness of character” and “moderation”, Macrinus said Senatorial rule would be restored: “You shall live in freedom and security, enjoying the privileges of which you were deprived by your nobly born Emperors”. See: Herodian, History of the Empire from the Death of Marcus: 5.1.1-8 (Echols, pp. 135-37).

39. Herodian, History of the Empire from the Death of Marcus: 5.2.1-2 (Echols, p. 137).

40. Herodian, History of the Empire from the Death of Marcus: 5.2.3 (Echols, p. 138).

41. Herodian, History of the Empire from the Death of Marcus: 5.2.4-6 (Echols, p. 138).

42. Elagabalus’s father was Sextus Varius Marcellus, a Roman of the equestrian order from Apamea in north-west Syria, who had risen to become Procurator—a position normally reserved for patricians—for the aqueducts in Rome in 205 AD. Marcellus thereafter went to Britain as a Procurator managing finances. After Caracalla came to power, Marcellus was made a Senator, and then spent his last years in Africa, again as a treasurer. Marcellus died c. 215.

43. Herodian, History of the Empire from the Death of Marcus: 5.3.10 (Echols, p. 140).

44. Bart Ehrman (2018), The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World, pp. 81-84.

45. Herodian, History of the Empire from the Death of Marcus: 5.3.6-9 (Echols, pp. 139-40).

46. Cassius Dio, Historia Romana: 79.31.

47. The Crimes of Elagabalus, pp. 11-12.

48. Herodian, History of the Empire from the Death of Marcus: 5.3.12 – 5.4.6 (Echols, pp. 141-42).

49. Cassius Dio, Historia Romana: 79: 38.

50. Herodian, History of the Empire from the Death of Marcus: 5.4.7-12 (Echols, pp. 142-43).

51. Herodian, History of the Empire from the Death of Marcus: 5.5.1-2 (Echols, p. 144).

52. Herodian, History of the Empire from the Death of Marcus: 5.5.3-4 (Echols, p. 144).

53. Herodian, History of the Empire from the Death of Marcus: 5.5.5-7 (Echols, pp. 144-45).

54. Historia Augusta, Elagabalus: 3.3. Available here (English).

55. Herodian, History of the Empire from the Death of Marcus: 5.5.8-10 (Echols, pp. 145-46).

56. Historia Augusta, Elagabalus: 1.6.

57. Herodian, History of the Empire from the Death of Marcus: 5.5.7 (Echols, p. 145).

58. Cassius Dio, Historia Romana: 80.11.1. Available here (English).

59. Historia Augusta, Elagabalus: 3.4.

60. Cassius Dio, Historia Romana: 80.11.1.

61. Cassius Dio, Historia Romana: 80.16.7.

62. Historia Augusta, Elagabalus: 2.2.

63. Cassius Dio, Historia Romana: 80.9.1-2.

64. Cassius Dio, Historia Romana: 80.9.3.

65. Herodian, History of the Empire from the Death of Marcus: 5.6.2 (Echols, pp. 146-47).

66. Cassius Dio, Historia Romana: 80.9.4; and, Herodian, History of the Empire from the Death of Marcus: 5.6.2 (Echols, pp. 146-47).

67. Cassius Dio, Historia Romana: 80.13.1.

68. Historia Augusta, Elagabalus: 5.1-2.

69. Cassius Dio, Historia Romana: 80.13.2-3.

70. Cassius Dio, Historia Romana: 80.13.4.

71. Historia Augusta, Elagabalus: 5.4.

72. Herodian, History of the Empire from the Death of Marcus: 5.6.3-10 (Echols, pp. 147-48).

73. Cassius Dio, Historia Romana: 80.11.1.

74. Historia Augusta, Elagabalus: 8.2.

75. Cassius Dio, Historia Romana: 80.5.2.

76. Historia Augusta, Elagabalus: 10.6-7.

77. Historia Augusta, Elagabalus: 8.6-7. The word used in the text for those Elagabalus was trying to recruit is “onobeli”, meaning literally “like an ass in this respect”, or more loosely “men hung like donkeys”.

78. Historia Augusta, Elagabalus: 9.1-2.

79. Historia Augusta, Elagabalus: 18.4 – 32.9. Available here (English).

80. Historia Augusta, Elagabalus: 6.2.

81. Cassius Dio, Historia Romana: 80.15.3.

82. Cassius Dio, Historia Romana: 80.15.1-2.

83. Cassius Dio, Historia Romana: 80.14.4.

84. Herodian, History of the Empire from the Death of Marcus: 5.6.10 (Echols, p. 148).

85. The much later Byzantine chronicler, John Malalas (c. 491 – 578), in his Chronographia, a narrative of world history from creation up to his own time, does not offer a kind word for Elagabalus, exactly, but his concise, relatively neutral account of Elagabalus—concentrating on his overthrow, describing his alleged religious reforms and political measures without abuse, and omitting any extensive commentary about the Emperor’s personal behaviour—is probably the least hostile surviving account of Elagabalus. See: Warwick Ball (2000), Rome in the East: The Transformation of an Empire.

86. Historia Augusta, Elagabalus: 6.5.

87. Cassius Dio, Historia Romana: 80.14.3-4.

88. Cassius Dio, Historia Romana: 80.16.2-5.

89. Historia Augusta, Elagabalus: 10.2 and 10.5.

90. Cassius Dio, Historia Romana: 80.16.6.

91. Cassius Dio, Historia Romana: 80.15.4.

92. Herodian, History of the Empire from the Death of Marcus: 5.3.10 (Echols, p. 140).

93. Historia Augusta, Elagabalus: 13.1; and, Cassius Dio, Historia Romana: 80.17.2.

94. Historia Augusta, Elagabalus: 13.2.

95. Herodian, History of the Empire from the Death of Marcus: 5.8.1 (Echols, p. 150).

96. Herodian, History of the Empire from the Death of Marcus: 5.7.4-5 (Echols, pp. 149-50).

97. Historia Augusta, Elagabalus: 14.1 – 15.6; and, Cassius Dio, Historia Romana: 80.19.2-4.

98. Herodian, History of the Empire from the Death of Marcus: 5.6.6-7 (Echols, p. 150).

99. Cassius Dio, Historia Romana: 80.20.1; and, Historia Augusta, Elagabalus: 16.1-5.

100. Historia Augusta, Elagabalus: 17.1-3.

101. Cassius Dio, Historia Romana: 80.20.2 – 80.21.3.

102. The first thirty-five books of Dio’s history up to 69 BC are almost entirely lost, with only some fragments preserved in excerpted quotes in Byzantine chronicles. Most of books thirty-six to sixty, covering 69 BC to 47 AD—from the end of the Republic to halfway through Claudius’s reign—are largely intact. The last twenty books, from Nero to Alexander Severus, we have as Byzantine summaries.

103. Historia Augusta, Elagabalus: 1.1.

104. Historia Augusta, Elagabalus: 30.8.

105. A famous example: Edward Gibbon, in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in the late eighteenth century, wrote of Elagabalus suffering “weakness and effeminacy from the soft climate of Syria”.

106. Tom Holland (2019), Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, pp. 507-509.

107. “[A]n ancient allusion to a man’s observable inclination toward sexual partners of one or the other sex is comparable to a contemporary [Western] (or even ancient Roman) description of a man as being inclined toward women of a certain physical type or particular hair color”. See: Craig A. Williams (1999), Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity, p. 172.

Suetonius gives an example of this Roman view of “sexuality” in his Lives of the Caesars. Suetonius remarks that Claudius was “very strongly attracted to women [and] altogether uninvolved with men” (33.2), while Galba favoured “full-grown, strong men” (22.1). Suetonius mentions these things in passing as interesting details, writing of them in the same tone—and attaching to them the same moral significance—as he does when he elsewhere describes an Emperor’s favourite food.

108. Williams, Roman Homosexuality, pp. 135-37, 174-78.

109. Leonardo de Arrizabalaga y Prado (2010), The Emperor Elagabalus: Fact Or Fiction?, p. 248.

110. William Linn Westermann (1955), The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, p. 111.

111. Barbara Levick (2015), Claudius, pp. 82-89.

112. Williams, Roman Homosexuality, pp. 128, 177.

113. Prado, The Emperor Elagabalus, p. 169.

114. Historia Augusta, Elagabalus: 7.1. The same dynamics are being nodded to with the claim (28.2) Elagabalus actually called himself the “Great Mother”—and, on at least one occasion, Dionysus.

115. The Crimes of Elagabalus, pp. 70-71.

116. The Crimes of Elagabalus, pp. 159-62.

117. We have an idea what sorts of evidence should show up when there has been an imposed religious revolution that was subsequently rejected because we have counter-examples from the ancient world, most famously the effort by the Pharaoh Akhenaten, in the fourteenth century BC, to reorient Egypt to what seems to have been a form of monotheism—based around a sun god, interestingly.

118. The Crimes of Elagabalus, p. 71.

119. The Crimes of Elagabalus, p. 81.

120. Mary Beard (2021, Feb. 27), ‘Imperial Transgressions: Satire and Subversion in the Life of Elagabalus’, Sather Classical Lectures, University of California, Berkeley. Available here. The lecture in part builds on the work of Carlos F. Noreña about the ethics of autocracy in the Roman world.

The idea of the Emperors as actors was captured in the story told by Suetonius that Octavian’s last words (99.1). Augustus, as he was by then, gathered his friends around him to ask if he had played his part well. Informed that he had, Augustus said, “Since the play has been performed so well, give it your applause, and send us off with joy.”

‘Actor’ was a term of abuse in general to Romans, and its application to the Emperors was a running theme in the criticism of autocracy, durable in part no doubt because it contained so much truth.

121. Lord Macaulay (1832), ‘Burleigh and His Times’, in Thomas Babington Macaulay (1843), Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, p. 124.

122. Suetonius’s life of Caligula describes savagery towards the Senate and relentless humiliation of the traditional elites, a kind of despotism closely mirrored in the biographies of Elagabalus. Caligula declaring he was a living god, ordering a statue of himself to be put in the Judean Temple in Jerusalem (possibly a significant act in the writing of the Christian Gospels), and gathering statues of Jupiter and others from across the provinces so their heads could be replaced with his own is thematically similar to claims Elagabalus toppled the traditional gods, imposed his own as Priest-Emperor, and gathered all the other cults’ idols in his Elagabalium. Elagabalus’s sexual and financial extravagances are echoes of stories told about Caligula to some degree as well, particularly turning the Palace into a brothel, albeit the stories about Caligula only mention female partners, rather than the Emperor being used like a woman, and are tailored to stereotypes about Claudians, so Caligula is accused of incest.

Suetonius’s life of Nero provides for even more direct comparisons: “Besides abusing freeborn boys and seducing married women, he debauched the Vestal virgin Rubria. … He so prostituted his own chastity that after defiling almost every part of his body, he at last devised a kind of game, in which, covered with the skin of some wild animal, he was let loose from a cage and attacked the private parts of men and women, who were bound to stakes, and when he had sated his mad lust, was dispatched​ by his freedman Doryphorus; for he was even married to this man in the same way that he himself had married Sporus, going so far as to imitate the cries and lamentations of a maiden being deflowered” (28.1, 29.1).

Relations with Vestels, “barbarian” sexual antics, and “marrying” a man to whom he played the passive part: in all of this, the accounts of Elagabalus follow those of Nero. Likewise, there is a foreshadowing of Elagabalus in the stories surrounding Sporus, the young slave boy whom Nero castrated, dressed up as his deceased wife Poppaea Sabina, and called his Empress. According to Suetonius, Nero “actually tried to make a woman of [Sporus]” (28.1), generally presumed to mean having sought surgeons capable of implanting a womb in the luckless boy.

The key difference is that Nero was trying to turn another man into a woman and treat him as his Empress, whereas in the Elagabalus narratives it was an Emperor doing (or wishing to do) these things to himself, which is obviously more shocking.

123. The Historia Augusta, as mentioned, suggests (2.2) Elagabalus’s birth name derives from the “various” men his mother slept with, and while the author generally refers to Elagabalus as “Antoninus”, it is made clear (2.3) this was Caracalla’s name—and it was not even his real name; he had been renamed to associate him with the Antonine Emperor. Elagabalus’s “life was as false as his name”, the Historia Augusta pronounces (33.8). And the very first line in Cassius Dio’s biography is a list of Elagabalus’s nicknames.

“Avitus” is the most neutral name Dio uses for Elagabalus. He also lists: “the False Antoninus”, “the Assyrian”, “Tiberinus” (a posthumous “appellation … after he had been slain and his body had been thrown into the Tiber” (79.1.1)), and, as mentioned, “Sardanapalus”, believed to be the last Assyrian King, ruling at the end of the seventh century BC. (By some Roman accounts, Sardanapalus was King when the Babylonians captured Nineveh in 612 BC and absorbed the Assyrian Empire.) Whether Sardanapalus existed or not, his name was connotated for Romans with Eastern decadence, including specifically dressing as a woman and unnatural acts with male concubines.

124. Cassius Dio, Historia Romana: 53.19.2-4. Available here (English).

125. We do not even know the exact date of Elagabalus’s death: it is variously given as 11 March and 13 March 222. The nature of the source is, once again, part of the problem here, plus the difficulty of mapping Roman dates onto the Christian calendar.