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.
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Seconded!
With apologies to Anthony Aloysius Hancock, “Us Philistines must stick together. We could become a persecuted minority.”
Yes! It matters that there are examples in history of promiscuous people getting into positions of power and influence over others. The worrying thing is how the Romans solved the problem – and should we find a better way?
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Yeah, ‘promiscuous’ that was the word I was looking for.
Thank you for your wisdom. My father would have been able to amply describe this man as a … well, yes. I don’t seem to have inherited his eloquence. On the other hand, there seems to be something ethically, scientifically, medically wrong about doctors prescribing radical, harmful treatments for mentally ill or unstable people. Most of us think it’s better to accept people as they are, within reason, and occasionally to help people accept themselves as they are.
His sexuality and personality are irrelevant: he was a man, not a woman.
That’s a very important point: Even when taking these texts for granted, the supposedly shameful behaviour was a man dressing up as (parody of) a women to further sexual relationships with other men. That’s the equivalent of the present-day marketing of Thai Ladyboys by gay brothels, they just didn’t yet have hormone pills to spice this up somewhat more.
In 2019, some guy followed me down the street to the front door of the house my flat is in. Before I could open it, he grabbed and slammed me against it, which gave me a (slightly) bruised shoulder. He then threatened to knife me if I didn’t hand over my purse voluntarily and put his hands in my back pockets, presumably, in order to grab it. I stopped this by holding his hands in place with mine. We then stood in this rather silly position for some time (probably at most two minutes) until I decided that this couldn’t go on and that I needed to do something about this. Hence, I took my hands out of my pockets, grabbed him and slammed him into the door as well. This lead to short while of us wrestling in the process of which he drew the purse out of my back pocket, removed £30 from it, dropped it on the ground and ran away.
This was later abbreviated and summarized by a female police officer, presumably intent on finding a reason to let guy go (he being English and me a foreigner, this was obviously the obviously desirable course of action) as A guy approached me in the street, talked to me and snatched my purse while I was thus distracted.
Considering this, the reliability of an abbreviated summary of a text supposedly written by some historian created by a person with an unknown agenda centuries after the original is – in my opinion – zero. Especially if it refers to a juvenile leader of what adherents of the traditional religion regarded as an outlandish, ‘assyrian’ cult forcibly imported against the will of the gods.
Next time lift your knee forcefully between his legs. That will strongly distract him!
Other nice options would be: Punch him in the stomach or – that would be my preferred choice because it’s most easily executed – kick hard against his shin. Executed with suitable footwear¹, this will result in immobilizing pain. Unfortunately, the best ideas often only occur in hindsight.
¹ Weighing in at about 2kg (4.4 pound) each.
At the end of the day that diamond of the British museum sector, North Hertfordshire Museum, saw an opportunity for some much needed publicity given that its catchment area extends no more than one mile from its front doors – cue Elagabalus. And what better way to grab some column inches than to jump on the trans bandwagon.
Nothing more than a show of wokery by some administrators feeling left out because they haven’t been invited to the party. Quite pathetic.
I’ve recently been reading Gibbon’s Decline & Fall…can’t think why ;-). I’m still only 14% through it! Elagabalus was utterly decadent and a disaster for Rome. He lasted 4 years before he was assassinated by the Praetorian Guard. He came from a prominent Arab family – born in Homs, Syria. He forced his own religion on the Romans – that of the Sun God.
Gibbon describes his arrival in Rome: “As the attention of the new emperor was diverted by the most trifling amusements, he wasted many months in his luxurous progress from Syria to Italy … His numerous collars and bracelets were adorned with gems of an inestimable value. Six milk-white horses drew his chariot through Rome and the way was strewn with gold dust”
Gibbon describes him: “corrupted by his youth, his country and his fortune, he abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures with ungoverned fury, and soon found disgust and satiety in the midst of his enjoyments.”..”to sport with the passions and prejudices of his subjects, and to subvert every law of nature and decency, were in the number of his most delicious amusements.”
“Secure of impunity, careless of censure, the nobles of Rome lived without restraint in the patient and humble society of their slaves and parasites. The emperor, viewing every rank of his subjects with the same contemptous indifference, asserted without control his sovereign privilege of lust and luxury.”
Gibbon continues “It may seem probable, the vices and follies of Elagabalus have been blackened by prejudice. Yet, confining ourselves to the public scenes displayed before the Roman people, and attested by grave and contemporary historians, their inexpressible infamy surpasses that of any other age or country.
After his death, “His memory was branded with eternal infamy by the senate; the justice of whose decree has been ratified by posterity.”
Says it all really. Sorry to have gone on a bit, but Gibbon is a bit wordy!
Thanks for the excerpt. But this has to be taken with a grain of salt. According to the text, Elagabalus was a boy of 14 when he became emperor and murdered when he was 18. For our understanding of that, his career as emperor amounts to sexual abuse of a child/ dependent person and – that’s also an important point – Gibbon wrote this from the viewpoint of a society where homosexuality was both illegal and considered a mortal sin by the church. Neither was the case for the classic pre-christian pagan society, where it was always at least tolerated.
I acknowledge what you say about Gibbon’s writings being of their time. Gibbon, ironically, was no lover of the church. Remember though that life expectancy in Roman times (around 30 years) was considerably shorter and not just because the Praetorian Guard kept assassinating folk. Thus the age of 14 may well have been considered adult then and one opens oneself to the danger of applying modern day values to the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago. I’m sure the vestal virgin who was raped by Elagabalus was probably under age too.
So people who are or become powerful can be/probably are corrupt, dysfunctional, violent, and have extreme personality disorders/mental illnesses.
Are we supposed to be suprised?