I greatly enjoyed Steven Tucker’s very amusing piece about the Roman emperor Elagabalus (218-22) and the attempt by North Hertfordshire Museum to present this strange young man as a transgender and gay icon. On the face of this falls into the same nonsensical area as recent claims that Black Death London was a nightmare where people of colour were more likely to die thanks to the embedded racism of medieval England based on skull measurements (Inaya Folarin Iman has written an excellent piece on that in the Mail).
However, in Elagabalus’s case, I’m not so sure the story is so easily rubbished. I covered him in my book Domina: The Women Who Made Imperial Rome (Yale University Press, 2018). Elagabalus, actually born Varius Avitus Bassianus, was the grandson of Julia Maesa, sister-in-law of the emperor Septimius Severus (193-211). Maesa and her sister Domna were members of a Syrian aristocratic family from Emesa (Homs). After Severus died in York in 211 on campaign in Britain, the Roman Empire was inherited by his sons Caracalla and Geta. Caracalla killed Geta in their widowed mother’s arms in 212 and proceeded on a bloody and tyrannical reign that ended in his murder in 217. Bereft of status and power, as well as being afflicted by (probably) breast cancer, Domna committed suicide.
Caracalla had been murdered in a conspiracy led by Macrinus, praetorian prefect. Maesa was disgusted by this low-born man taking power and her own loss of status once her sister was dead too. A widow herself, she dreamed up an idea – she had two widowed daughters, each of whom had a young son. With no adult men in the way Maesa decided they could serve as an heir and a spare while the women did the ruling.
In 218 Maesa mounted her own conspiracy to get rid of Macrinus and present her grandson, still only 14 years old, as the new emperor. The young Avitus Bassianus was a fanatical priest in the cult of the sun god Heliogabalus (hence his nickname Elagabalus) which wasn’t a great asset. However, he was said to be fantastically good-looking, and bore a convenient resemblance to Caracalla. This made it easy to sell him to the army because Caracalla had paid the soldiers well. Macrinus was done away with, and the Syrian family set out for Rome.
Eventually in 219 the new emperor reached Rome, bringing with him the sacred stone (probably a meteorite) of his eponymous cult. As it entered the city the new court and its entourage must have looked and sounded like an avalanche in a seraglio. At least Elagabalus had the wit to travel to the Senate in his grandmother’s company, on the basis that she would enhance his own lack of authority.
He’d also sent a picture of himself in advance to let the Romans know what to expect. They were less shocked than they might have been and meekly accepted Elagabalus’s accession donative. A new temple was built and the theatrical cult rituals instigated, which involved vast numbers of animals sacrificed daily and Phoenician women dancing and playing instruments.
Overnight Rome started looking like the headquarters of a supercharged oriental despot from some outlandish myth. Appropriately enough the Romans nicknamed him ‘The Assyrian’. Elagabalus compounded his weirdness, according to Cassius Dio, by considering having his genitals amputated as part of his preference for effeminacy but decided in a moment of uncharacteristic restraint to desist. He contented himself instead with circumcision of himself and his cult associates as part of the rituals. Dio adds a number of other lugubrious details of Elagabalus’s antics, recounted with suitable prurient outrage, such as “he would go to the taverns by night, wearing a wig, and there ply the trade of a female huckster”. On other occasions he stood naked at the door of his palace rooms and solicit passers-by. Despite allegedly sleeping with numerous women he is supposed to have done everything possible to look like and go about as a woman. Eventually he took up with a charioteer called Hierocles and posed as Hierocles’s wife.
He had three disastrous marriages, including one to a Vestal Virgin, but otherwise indulged in a succession of homosexual and heterosexual liaisons.
That’s just one aspect of his peculiar behaviour reported by the senator Cassius Dio who was a contemporary. What’s more, Dio was probably in Rome. He certainly had the right contacts. Dio was no fool and at other points in his long history he is at pains to tell his readers when he had been an eyewitness to events of his own time. But he was influenced by subsequently being honoured by Elagabalus’s cousin and successor, Severus Alexander (222-35). Moreover, we don’t actually have Dio’s original account. What we have instead is an epitome – a summary – written up centuries later in abbreviated form and with some gaps.
Another contemporary, an imperial official called Herodian (but whose whereabouts in 218-22 cannot be determined), reported how Elagabalus, whose formal name as emperor was Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Pius, designed to give him a spurious lineage from famous emperors of the past) relished the most expensive clothing. This allegedly infuriated his grandmother Maesa, who could see her plans were going to end in tears. The young Emperor obsessively and extravagantly pursued his cult as well as driving a chariot. But “he used to go out with painted eyes and rouge on his cheeks, spoiling his natural good looks by using disgusting make-up”, said Herodian.
Maesa knew this would revolt the soldiers. She had already been on the receiving end of the young popinjay’s fury when she criticised him. She started lining up his cousin, Severus Alexander, to replace him. The soldiers (which means the Praetorian Guard in Rome) were disgusted “by the sight of the emperor with his face made-up more elaborately than a modest woman would have done, and effeminately dressed up with golden necklaces and soft clothes, dancing for everyone to see in this state” (Herodian again).
Around a century later, in a biography of Elagabalus, the tradition had endured. It reports that “he wished to wear also a jewelled diadem in order that his beauty might be increased and his face look more like a woman’s; and in his own house he did wear one”.
The upshot of it all is that in 222 Elagabalus and his hapless mother were murdered by the Praetorian Guard. His body, at least, was thrown into the Tiber. Severus Alexander was made emperor and lasted thirteen years until he and his mother Mamaea were murdered too. Lucky old Maesa had already pegged it from old age.
Now, it is undoubtedly true that in Roman tradition any hint that a man had become ‘effeminated’ was treated as evidence of unhealthy influence of women and male weakness. Mark Antony was seen as having become enslaved to Cleopatra after being softened up in advance by his previous wife, the dominant and fearsomely effective Fulvia. Cassius Dio, and before him the historian Tacitus a century earlier, had perceived the British tribal heroine Boudica (who led her revolt in AD 60) as possessing all the qualities of leadership and courage that Nero (whose army defeated her) lacked with all his perversions and corruption. Both Tacitus and Dio presented Nero and Boudica as diametric opposites and paradoxes, a literary motif which ancient historians liked to deploy.
So, on the face of it one must accept the possibility that Cassius Dio, Herodian and the fourth century biographers, had all set out to run Elagabalus down, precisely because it made others – in this case Severus Alexander – look better. But in this case we are dealing with two historians who lived at the time. That by no means guarantees the veracity of their accounts but it does mean that they were almost certainly reflecting the way Elagabalus was perceived at the time. And that’s important. Their versions of Elagabalus are so extreme that they go way beyond what would have been necessary to give him a bad press and big up Severus Alexander.
His coins, I’m afraid, are neither here nor there. They belong to a long-established tradition of Roman male imperial portraiture and imagery. The portraits of Elagabalus do indeed show his wispy adolescent beard, but they also resemble those of his cousins Caracalla and Geta and that would have been deliberate because it enhanced his spurious legitimacy. The coins were the visible manifestations of the state, an aspect of his reign controlled by his mother and grandmother. Not surprisingly, his sartorial habits and enthusiasm for cosmetics did not make it onto the issued designs just as Nero’s murder of his mother and Edward VII’s partying were omitted from theirs.
Occam’s Razor tells us that the simplest explanation for the stories about Elagabalus is the most likely to be true, or at least to have some truth in them. Dismissing all the ancient accounts as mere fiction, propaganda that had been contrived to paint Elagabalus as the antithesis of what an Emperor was supposed to be, leaves one having to invent an alternative version of events for which there is no evidence. And that’s a tricky solution.
Exaggeration and deliberate emphasis may well have played a part and there is no question that Dio and Herodian were themselves disgusted by Elagabalus’s reputation. However, my instinct in this case is that the stories about Elagabalus and his gender fluid behaviour must have had some foundation or else both Dio and Herodian would have been come up against contemporaries who knew they were not true. Their versions would have had no currency. The fact is that Elagabalus was murdered in short order and replaced by his cousin, which requires an explanation since it can hardly have been the desired outcome four years earlier.
However, where the truth ends and fantasy begins for Elagabalus is not now possible to determine. North Hertfordshire Museum’s decision to take Dio and Herodian at face value is probably as inappropriate as rejecting Dio and Herodian outright too. In that sense, the Elagabalus story is an allegory for all history and events in our own time. This wider question of the reliability of historical evidence and eyewitness testimony, and the effects of selective perception, especially in the light of the Covid Inquiry and other events of our era, is a source of fascination to me. I plan to look at it in a forthcoming piece, linking it also to how modelling and probability are utilised today to fabricate a version of the future, leading to a manipulation of the past in the light of how things turn out.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
I doubt they are at all interested in covid per se, just in the opportunities it presents, same as everywhere else but in spades as they have form. Why would we believe official figures from China about covid, more than any official figures? The idea that they could succeed in suppressing covid to the extent they claim, in a populous, connected country, in simply absurd, as is the idea that it spread around the world from Wuhan but not internally in China.
As a plandemic it worked rather well
Exactly. Most struggle to understand the motivation behind it. Why would anyone care what I’m up to? I have nothing to hide.
But the control freakery used to be understood better. Some people are broken. The unrelenting void in their own minds can only be healed by controlling the world. Many of them gravitate to government and it’s associated organizations.
Almost every single Chinese student I have spoken to over the years has wanted to work for their government or an agency thereof.
Only the wildest dream of an alternative, escaping to America to earn their fortune in the private sector.
Most of them, by far, take rubbish degrees like Business Administration which they pass by learning the “correct answer” by rote. This does not bode well for the future of the Chinese economy or built environment.
Won’t rote learning always be a big part of Chinese culture (whatever political regime they have) because there is no other way to learn how to read Chinese script with its thousands of logograms?
‘They contained it because they were so wonderfully authoritarian, brilliantly barbaric, admirably oppressive and decisively decisive!’
A. Guardian reader.
The sealed countries, including China and New Zealand, will be where omicron mutates as it spreads when it achieves its breakthrough there. The rest of the world will have dropped most or all restrictions and moved on. The danger is then of a highly pathogenic mutant variant appearing in one of these sealed countries. And so, the prospect of China being the source yet again….
What is leaving me completely stunned is that “the west” is passing up a golden opportunity to get one over China big time. All we would need to do is collectively rally behind the idea that covid is over, that it’s just a flu, get rid of literally every single restriction and return to full normality.
China (and whoever wanted to copy it) would then be left completely stuck. Our economies would boom, theirs would languish. Better still, their people, who aren’t idiots and do get outside info, would start getting very restless.
And that’s when I know the WEF, Davos, “conspiracy” narrative is spot on. Because that open approach would be great for the ordinary people, regular businesses. But that is not the priority of people in authority. Their priorities are control of the population and nurturing a cosy relationship with the giant corporations. i.e. The Chinese model.
I have no doubt that the oligarchs, politicians and technocrats running western nations fantasise about implementing Chinese style governance, and see themselves as a westernised, marginally more enlightened CCP.
They don’t want to beat China with western liberal values, they want to copy China and partner up with them.
Precisely. Western liberal values are a bothersome beast – people get such funny ideas about freedom.
They openly talk about the post democratic age, have done for years.
Poor hamsters.
First they came for the hamsters, but I did not speak out
Because I was not a hamster, but my Mother was a hamster so I ought to have spoken out.
Then they came for the elderberries…
It’s a Monty Python meets Martin Niemöller world we live in now. Soon they’ll be coming for Pepper Pig…
It’s time to send Michie to China on an extended research trip; possible duration about 30 years, with no home leave. As Head of the mission, she might include Ferguson, Whitty and Vallance in her entourage, along with any other deserving persons.
Back in the day when Philby, Burgess, Maclean and all that lot were actively pursuing the agenda of a foreign communist power, they had to keep it quiet because it was considered treasonous. These days, it’s done in the open, be it the CCP or the ‘you’ll own nothing and be happy’ WEF.
The Chinese don’t need Michie or Ferguson so after maybe receiving a few CCP honours they will end up like Kim Phillby, cooped up in a tiny flat ekeing out two bottles of Chinese vodka over a week.
The very nature of Zero Covid policy means that countries following it don’t admit immigrants, so it’s unlikely that any of its advocates in the West would be able to go into exile in a country more amenable to their values.
Not at all like Philby (who eventually found a home in the Soviet Union) or even the Nazi war criminals who found refuge in South America.
I, rightly or wrongly, have now mentally filed the last two years under ‘Virus Hoax – Morons Inc. 2020-2022’, where it will join many other compressed files, for reference purposes only.
2022 – you must be a glass half full type.
Good line. I’m going to nick it.
It was only the epilogue I’m afraid.
Hubris and hamsters – ummm – USA, UK, most of mainland europe for two years and at least a handful for the other 198 (at least).
The key lesson is to convince those immersed in BBCland that the Covid virus was to usher in the passports and associated social control measures, not the other way around. In this china has succeeded, although they already had their evolving social control methods already in place.
I don’t hold out much hope for this as I recall how many people around me only got injected with experimental drugs so they could book a holiday not because they lived in mortal fear of a deadly pathogen. That is the truly depressing part of this, how cheaply they were bought. How readily they embraced astonishingly poor propaganda. Like most people I literally don’t know anyone who died from this thing, and know only two people who got it and had heavy colds with zero longterm effects. Despite my own energetic maskless attempts to expose myself I never succumbed. My Vitamin D and zinc, magnesium and K2 regimen unfortunately saddled me with a robust immune system
What to do? For me the only meaningful takeaway is to understand some people will always be immune to the propaganda. That’s all. Most will succumb. That is the real virus.
Yes, we desperately need a propaganda vax to prevent contagion, it’s not enough just to turn off the tv.
Exactly greenpass was extended by a year in EU!
Vitamin D.
Note the first ‘linked article’ on the Dail Mail article above this one. GoFundMe
“Vitamin D works after all !”
Wow, thanks DM, who else knew?
(Well it was a couple of hours ago but it’s gone now. Can’t imagine why.)
They were like Esau and, in effect, sold their birthright for a mess of pottage.
There’s an increasing number of articles here in the UK reporting about dogs catching convid.
The regime has followed the communists every step of the way over the last two years, let’s hope they don’t even think about suggesting animals need to be culled.
Ferguson already has a horrifying track record on using his dodgy stats to cull enormous numbers of healthy animals in the past.
Avian flu outbreaks in areas that just coincidentally have 5G masts installed, with warning posters on them saying that radiation exposure causes flu-like symptoms.
Avian Flu spread prevention orders are commonplace in the UK; last year it spread from S/W England to cover the whole country but were never revoked so remain in place.
5G installation also spread over the last 2 years….
Evidence for a connection between coronavirus disease-19 and exposure to radiofrequency radiation from wireless communications including 5G
That would really throw a spanner into the brains of the modern, metro person. If dogs were suddenly considered a major spreader of covid, would they finally accept to live with the virus rather than culling them?
What am I saying… they’d plug them with 3 doses of Moderna and pretend that there is nothing unusual about young dogs dying of heart attacks.
If they go after people’s dogs, then that really would cause a revolution!
That would be a dream come true for me. I hate dogs, they are noisy, irritating and shit everywhere.
A bit like peolpe.
You’d think that it would have occurred to someone in China to create a Vaccine whilst it was creating a virus wouldn’t you? I love the “It was in a letter” bit, brings a whole new meaning to Viruses being in the Mail! That kind of thing has made me laugh all the way through with ideas like “YOu won’t catch it sitting down, it only gets you as you go the loo” and “You’re safe in the swimming pool but on the side of the pool”.
I’ve a strong suspicion that any lockdowns in China were strictly performative and staged in fairly random locations for the benefit of the idiot Western media. The CCP would have had the data early on and I simply don’t believe that a regime of this nature would wreck its economy over a possible 10% max increase in all cause mortality over a short period of time. Given the brutality of its one child policy (nice name for mass infanticide and millions upon millions of forced abortions), it just doesn’t make sense.
The argument against that I suppose is that the CCP right back to the sparrows campaign and the Great Leap Forward has a long history of insane, hugely damaging policies of self harm. We’ll never really know.
Indeed – why would anyone think the CCP leadership care much about notionally saving a few lives?
It’s never made any sense to me on those terms. Spreading the foul, insane and evil doctrine of lockdown to the West had its uses though. This is worth a read:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/china-covid-lockdown-propaganda
Looks like the CCP downtick bots are on the case
They’re famous for snooping and spying on everything.
Up yours you lying sneaky bastards!!!! Snoop on that
No, no. The lockdowns were real.
Beijing had pretty substantial restrictions for several months and work from home guidance for many months.
Absolutely. Many think the CCP are geniuses. They are but much in the same way that Mao was. A genius at taking control, keeping it and abusing the population without them saying a peep.
My hunch is that there is also a strong incentive to hide any infections in the municipalities. The CCP has made it clear that any hint of a breakout will be considered a failure and result in a destructive containment strategy. Therefore, any right thinking citizen or member of the CCP is going to do everything they can to hide infections from the central authority.
Started watching the winter olympics but had to switch off as I could stand seeing mass masking.
I saw a snippet of Women’s Ice Hockey and it was dismal – empty arena. Even in Canada I imagine no-one is much interested in it, so perhaps it was empty because it’s not very appealing to locals, but maybe the whole thing will largely be spectator-free. Elite sport in general is unwatchable for me now – virtue signalling, politics, corruption, whingeing, entitled athletes. corporate bollocks, and now covid nonsense.
Just reading about Nadal’s win made me want to throw something.
Just been for a walk in a University city that has a lot of chinky students, well over 90% of them masked up just walking around outside. They must be reveling in bringing their pathetic “culture” here
Read the book ‘Hidden Hand’ about the slow stealthy CCP takeover of the west. It amplifies the brief details here.
It’s sometimes hard to know whether a particular person is reporting to the CCP or the WEF.
I’ve read it and it just confirms what I’ve been saying for 2 decades. I use to travel with my job and I was concerned 20 years ago about the influence of China around the world. In Pakistan I use to go to the Chinese restaurants as the quality of the food was much better than in local restaurants.
I guess Pakistan’s bitter rivalry with India (of course one of the baleful legacies of British colonialism) will have made it easier for China to puppetize Pakistan…
Clean North Sea Gas v Dirty Russian Gas
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2022/02/05/clean-north-sea-gas-v-dirty-russian-gas/
by Paul Homewood
Saturday 5th February 2pm
Windsor Great Dog Walk for Freedom
behind one simple sign
“Covid Rules Are Barking”
All Canines and Humans welcome
Even if you don’t own a dog please come along
meet Alexander Park (near Bandstand) Barry Rd/Goswell Rd
Windsor SL4 1QY
Stand in the Park Sundays 10am make friends, ignore the madness & keep sane
Wokingham Howard Palmer Gardens Cockpit Path car park Sturges Rd RG40 2HD
Henley Mills Meadows (at the bandstand) Henley-on-Thames RG9 1DS
Telegram Group
http://t.me/astandintheparkbracknell
Zero covid policy is a hybrid economical warfare against the rest of the world! Just look how many items and raw materials we are dependent on. So in name of covid they limit export and collapse the supply chain.
I think in the long run, they’re doing us a favour, tbh.
As I’ve been saying for nearly two years; in his goterdamerung moment bozo will command the slaughter of all newborn domestic pussycats.
This will be his revenge against those who failed to save him at the ballot box out of some ‘pussyfooting’ concern about him eating cake in No.10s Rose Garden.
Constitutional experts and later historians will be living off that for ages as Mirror Group News buys up the husk of Myspace for archive photos of Cute Cats to.print some every day by way of illustration.
“The U.S. Defense Dept developed SARS-CoV-2 in North Carolina. The 4th Branch (Intelligence Community) wanted to use it. The Pentagon restarts funding for development of SARS-CoV-2 in partnership with Wuhan, China – setting up the cover story. The 4th Branch (Intelligence Community) then uses the virus by releasing it in/around Wuhan. Everything after that is simply part of the 4th Branch covering their tracks. Wuhan, China becomes the patsy.”
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2021/10/02/did-the-fourth-branch-of-government-release-sars-cov-2-then-blame-china/
Ron Unz articles supporting and predating most of the above and the main articles series all listed here.
https://www.unz.com/runz/is-the-tide-finally-turning-on-covid-as-an-american-biowarfare-attack/
I hate the Chinks with a passion, people are waking up far too slowly to what they’re all about and cutting them too much slack.
When I think it’s bad in England at least I be glad I don’t live in China, (or Scotland haha). A good article worth reading in full just for the song lyrics at the end. Made me smile, something I definitely need these days.