Dovahhatty – Unbiased History of Rome XIII: The Severan Dynasty
(7) WORST: ELAGABULUS –
SEVERAN DYNASTY
(218 – 222 AD: 3 YEARS 9 MONTHS 4 DAYS)
With great power comes great degeneracy.
Certainly one of the weirdest emperors, Elagabulus is what happens when you let an omnisexual teenager of dubious mental stability loose with absolute imperial power AND his own cult. It’s like Elagabulus read Suetonius’ The Twelve Caesars with its lurid depictions of imperial depravity and said hold my beer.
And so “Elagabalus developed a reputation among his contemporaries for extreme eccentricity, decadence, zealotry and sexual promiscuity” – “his short reign was notorious for sex scandals and religious controversy”.
It does however make for entertaining reading – indeed one of the most entertaining entries in either my top ten worst (or best) emperors. It’s a pity Suetonius wasn’t around to write the tabloid history of Elagabalus.
Elagabalus was his god name – literally. He was born Sextus Varius Avitus Bessianus, a relative (by marriage) of the Severan dynasty – a family connection which his grandmother (and emperor-maker) Julia Maesa boosted further by spreading the rumor that he was the illegitimate son of the emperor Caracalla. His family held hereditary rights to the priesthood of the syncretized Syrian-Greek-Roman sun of the same name (or variants of it) he adopted, having served as high priest from his early youth.
So naturally he brought his god with him to Rome, in the form of his pet rock – again literally, a black conical meteorite from the temple of the god in Emesa, Syria.
The new god of itself was not so weird, since it was readily assimilated to the Roman sun god Sol – the worship of whom had become increasingly prevalent under the Severan dynasty, becoming known as Sol Invictus or the Unconquered Sun (and which would be redeemed by far superior emperors).
What was weird was Elagabalus installing his god as the chief deity of the Roman pantheon and suborning that pantheon to his god – compounded by equivalent of forcing Roman Senators to go to his church and watch him as he danced around the god’s altar, which was hardly conducive to imperial dignity.
Speaking of the Severan dynasty, it’s something of a running theme in my top ten worst Roman emperors, with Elagabalus as the second entry from that dynasty – and I haven’t finished ragging on them yet.
Perhaps the most entertaining part of this emperor’s history are the lurid tales of his sexuality. However, “the question of Elagabalus’s sexual orientation and gender identity is confused” due to the salaciousness of the sources, which includes accounts of him asserting and adorning himself as a female, to the point of reputedly seeking out sex changing surgery. Hence some have asserted or claimed him or her as the transsexual Roman emperor.
I am not sure that one should want to claim Elagabalus as one’s poster boy or girl, but moreover, I am not sure that these accounts are accurate to that extent, smacking as they do of Roman hyperbole to characterize someone of, ah, unmanly conduct – un-Romanly conduct that is. However, I do think that the historical sources are clear enough to say that Elagabalus swung every which way, hence my omnisexual quip.
Which has gone down a treat with historical writers. As per Edward Gibbon – Elagabalus “abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures with ungoverned fury” – and Barthold Georg Niebuhr – “the name Elagabalus is branded in history above all others” because of his “unspeakably disgusting life”.
Even Sir James George Frazer, author of The Golden Bough, got in on the act – “The dainty priest of the Sun [was] the most abandoned reprobate who ever sat upon a throne … It was the intention of this eminently religious but crack-brained despot to supersede the worship of all the gods, not only at Rome but throughout the world”.
A more neutrally stated modern assessment is by Adrian Goldsworthy -“Elagabalus was not a tyrant, but he was an incompetent, probably the least able emperor Rome had ever had.”
Interestingly, some have sought to reclaim his reputation. It’s a running theme throughout my top ten worst emperors that almost every entry – or at least almost every entry of major significance – has some advocate for them, as indeed it is for my top ten best emperors to the converse of people querying their legacy or reputation, arising as it does for figures that lack the comprehensive documentation of their contemporary counterparts.
In particular, modern historian Warwick Ball has picked up the Elagabalus ball (heh) and run with it, describing him as “a tragic enigma lost behind centuries of prejudice” – and one whose religious syncretism was ultimately successful in the long term, “in the sense that his deity would be welcomed by Rome in its Sol Invictus form 50 years later” and “came to influence the monotheist Christian beliefs of Constantine, asserting that this influence remains in Christianity to this day”.
RATING: 1 STAR*
F-TIER (WORST TIER)
MAXIMUS:
No victory titles as such but he did claim the title of Pontifex Maximus as high priest of his god – and did have something of a regular annual triumph for his god, parading his pet rock about the city.
DEIFIED AND DAMNED:
It was a fine line between the divinity he claimed for his god and that for himself. When marrying a Vestal Virgin – outraging Rome yet again – he claimed the marriage would produce god-like children. And of course after the usual assassination by the Praetorian Guard, the Senate rolled out a damnatio memoriae on him.
EMPIRE DEBAUCHER
No surprise there, surely?
SPECTRUM RANKING COMPARISON: I’m not quite as hard on him as Spectrum, who ranks him as THE worst emperor before 395 AD, possibly the worst of all Roman emperors (although Spectrum seems to hint that he ranks two subsequent emperors as even worse).
Dovahhatty had one of his tongue-in-cheek portrayals of Elagabalus as a chad in drag.