Nero, Caligula, Elagabalus... Who?
Most of us will not know the third of these notorious emperors, whether as Elagabalus, Heliogabalus, or any other name (he had many). Yet the boy who ruled Rome for just under four years has had an afterlife in art, literature, drama, opera, ballet, pop music, and other realms that reaches the present.
First the background.
When the Emperor Caracalla was murdered in AD April 217, en route to battle in what is now eastern Turkey, he left no obvious heir. Seizing the moment, Macrinus, a prefect of the Praetorian Guard, and possibly the man behind the killing, had himself proclaimed emperor though he had only equestrian rank. It did not last. An alternative arose in May 218 in the strange figure of a 14-year-old high priest in Emesa (what is today, alas, familiar as the besieged Syrian city of Homs). The boy, born Varius Avitus Bassianus, was known as Elagabalus, after Elagabal, the local sun god whose cult he served. Roman forces near Emesa were beguiled by the boy-priest’s ritual dancing and appealing looks, writes Martijn Icks, a postdoctoral fellow at Germany’s University of Heidelberg. But they were more than intrigued by his noble grandmother’s claim, probably untrue, Icks says, that Elagabalus was the bastard son of her nephew, the dead Caracalla, The soldiers named Elagabalus emperor, encouraged by promises of new bounty to the military. The forces backing Elagabalus were successful in the civil war that ensued, Macrinus was killed, and the label of emperor stuck.
Elagabalus stayed in Syria for a year, consolidating his power, then traveled to Rome accompanied by his family and indeed by his god, represented by a large conical black stone. He ruled until March 222, when he too was murdered, by the Praetorian Guard. His body was dragged headless through the streets and thrown into the Tiber. Elagabalus was succeeded by a younger cousin he had adopted, a boy who would also be proclaimed the bastard son of Caracalla.
Confused yet?
Readers of Icks’s The Crimes of Elagabalus: The Life and Legacy of Rome’s Decadent Boy Emperor (Harvard University Press) may be forgiven if they are dizzied by the array of names and lineages and events that fill the first part of the book. Interspersed, we get to the scandal, the crimes, or maybe we do not. What is key to Icks is the problem of what can be known about a figure so throttled by history. After his murder in 222, Elagabalus suffered damnatio memoriae, an erasure from inscriptions and papyri. Icks sorts through what’s left, including coins and a few busts, but focuses on the writings of three ancient authors united in stern condemnation.
Cassius Dio and Herodian in the third century, and the anonymous author of the Vita Antonini Heliogabali, probably in the fourth century, set the stage for later historians, says Icks, but are they reliable? Even if the first two were contemporaries of Elagabalus, they never experienced his rule in Rome.
Politically, Elagabalus’s reign was something of a snooze. No new wars were fought, Icks points out. Government proceeded apace. The roads got built. Ordinary Romans may have even liked the boy emperor, judging from his budget for periodic public largess.
Yet his brief rule has come down as one of the most scandalous in history. Gibbon in his Decline and Fall wrote that the youth’s “vices and follies” surpassed “that of any other age or country.”
Among the youth’s alleged offenses were, in bureaucratic language, excesses of favoritism, luxury, and sexual impropriety, three categories he often overlapped. A handful of specifics: The emperor, it was written, appointed actors, chariot drivers, and other men to high positions based on the size of their sexual organs rather than on any rank or ability. Despite busts portraying him as a soldierlike figure, Elagabalus grew his hair long, dressed gaudily in colorful costumes of the East, depilitated his body, wore heavy makeup, and supposedly expressed a desire to have a vagina carved into his flesh. On occasion, Elagabalus was said to combine both cruelty and luxury, for example smothering some banquet guests to death with an avalanche of flower petals. More, Elagabalus prostituted himself, beckoning, naked, in palace doorways. In this, Icks writes, he outdid Caligula, who had pimped aristocratic women and children but “had not taken up the role of harlot himself.” Finally, in an outrage that doesn’t feel like an outrage, Elagabalus created a female version of the Senate.
But what was infinitely more serious to the Roman establishment were two offenses to religion.
Abandoning a first wife, the young emperor broke Roman taboos by marrying a vestal virgin, in fact the high priestess of the vestals. Even more damning for Romans, he elevated Elagabal to the highest point in the Roman pantheon, displacing Jupiter. He created a temple in which Elagabal would be foremost, but where all rites, including, intriguingly, those of Jews, Samaritans, and Christians, would be represented.
Icks finds in these acts a key glimpse of the true Elagabalus. If the youth was brought in as a puppet, he writes, then “it is obvious that the plan backfired.” Elagabalus’ decision to elevate Elagabal reveals the genuine religious zeal of the priest-emperor.
These affronts to Roman religious sensibilities may be distinguished, the author suggests, from the standard topoi used to condemn bad emperors—the excesses of luxury, cruelty, patronage, and sex. In any case, Icks writes, with Elagabalus, real or imaginary “excesses have never ceased to haunt his memory.”
Drawn from the three ancient chroniclers, that memory was generally negative for far more than a millennia.
What altered things for Elagabalus was the sticky embrace of the Decadents of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who saw the emperor as a piquant androgyne and reveled in his ennui. For example, in Henry Mirande’s novel Élagabal, the youth is heard complaining: “I want everything, perhaps because everything disgusts me. I dream of new pleasures, of impossible passions. I’m jealous at Nero who set fire to Rome ... I’m bored!”
Favorable portraits of Elagabalus as androgyne and rebel continued. The most notable, Icks says, was “Heliogabalus or the Anarchist Crowned,” when one enfant terrible, Antonin Artaud, limned another. The French avant-gardist’s 1934 essay has been so influential, Icks laments, it has “repeatedly been mistaken for a scholarly work.” Once again, “fact blurs with fiction.”
