Elagabalus

• 1. Introduction

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  Elagabalus became Roman emperor at fourteen years old, declared so by a single legion at sunrise on the 16th of May 218. He would be dead before he turned nineteen. In the four years between, this Syrian teenager managed to install a foreign sun god above Jupiter at the top of the Roman pantheon, marry a Vestal Virgin, and so thoroughly disgust the Senate, the soldiers, and his own grandmother that she arranged his murder herself. His body was dragged through the streets of Rome and thrown into the Tiber.

  He was born with the name Sextus Varius Avitus Bassianus, probably in the year 204, to a family that held hereditary rights to the high priesthood of the sun god Elagabal at Emesa in Syria. That priesthood would give him both his historical name and his undoing. What drew a fourteen-year-old priest from the Syrian borderlands to the throne of the Roman world? And who really was the boy behind one of antiquity's most lurid reputations?

• 2. A Family Built for Power

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  Julia Maesa, Elagabalus's grandmother, was not a woman who accepted exile quietly. When the emperor Macrinus came to power after the assassination of Caracalla, he exiled Maesa, her two daughters, and her eldest grandson Elagabalus to their family estate at Emesa. Almost upon arrival, Maesa began plotting with her advisor and Elagabalus's tutor, a man named Gannys, to overthrow Macrinus and put the boy on the throne.

  Maesa's standing was formidable. She was the widow of the consul Julius Avitus Alexianus, the sister of Julia Domna, and the sister-in-law of the emperor Septimius Severus. Her other daughter, Julia Avita Mamaea, would later mother Severus Alexander, who would eventually succeed Elagabalus. The women of this Syrian family exercised influence few Roman women had ever wielded. Under Elagabalus, Maesa and her daughter Julia Soaemias became the first women permitted into the Senate, and both received senatorial titles: Soaemias the established Clarissima, and Maesa the unorthodox Mater Castrorum et Senatus, meaning Mother of the army camp and of the Senate.

  The claim that secured the throne was a calculated rumor. Maesa spread word that Elagabalus was the illegitimate son of Caracalla, a claim his mother Soaemias publicly supported. Soldiers of the Third Legion Gallica at Raphana, who had enjoyed greater privileges under Caracalla and resented Macrinus, chose to believe it. Publius Valerius Comazon, the legion's commander, declared Elagabalus emperor at dawn. To shore up that legitimacy further, the boy adopted the imperial name Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, the same name Caracalla had borne.

• 3. The March to Rome

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  Gannys commanded the legionaries who defeated Macrinus and his son Diadumenian at the Battle of Antioch on the 8th of June 218. Macrinus fled the battlefield, and when his own troops saw him run they broke ranks too. He was caught near Chalcedon and executed in Cappadocia. Diadumenian was captured at Zeugma and also executed.

  Elagabalus wrote to the Senate that same month, claiming imperial titles without waiting for senatorial approval. He offered amnesty and condemned the administration of Macrinus. The Senate fell into line: they recognized him as emperor, accepted his claim of Caracalla's paternity, deified Caracalla and Julia Domna, elevated Maesa and Soaemias to the rank of Augustae, expunged the memory of Macrinus, and named Elagabalus Pater Patriae before the 13th of July 218. The day after, he was inducted into every Roman priestly college and named pontifex maximus.

  He did not arrive at Rome itself until August or September 219, having spent the intervening period suppressing mutinies in Antioch and wintering in Nicomedia in Bithynia. Along the way, Elagabalus and his allies executed several prominent supporters of Macrinus, including the Syrian governor Fabius Agrippinus. His entrance to Rome was marked by the ceremonial adventus. Comazon, the commander who had first declared him emperor, was rewarded handsomely: he became praetorian prefect, then consul in 220, then prefect of the city on three separate occasions through 222. Cassius Dio regarded all of this as a violation of Roman norms.

• 4. The God Above Jupiter

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  At the end of 220, possibly on the winter solstice, Elagabalus elevated Elagabal to the chief deity of the Roman pantheon. His official titulature reflected the new order: in sacerdos amplissimus dei invicti Soli Elagabali, pontifex maximus. For Romans accustomed to Jupiter's supremacy, the installation of a foreign solar deity in the top position was a genuine shock.

  The god was represented by a large black conical meteorite, a baetyl, which Elagabalus brought from Emesa to Rome. Herodian described the stone: it was worshipped as though sent from heaven, with small projections and markings that worshippers interpreted as a rough image of the sun. A lavish temple, the Elagabalium, was built on the east face of the Palatine Hill to house it. The most sacred objects of Roman religion were transferred there from their shrines: the emblem of the Great Mother, the fire of Vesta, the Shields of the Salii, and the Palladium, ensuring no other god could be worshipped without reference to Elagabal.

  Dio records that Elagabalus had himself circumcised and swore to abstain from swine to heighten his piety as high priest. He forced senators to watch while he danced around the altar of Elagabal to the sound of drums and cymbals. Each summer solstice he held a public festival featuring free food for the masses. During it, he paraded the black stone through Rome on a jewel-encrusted, gold-adorned chariot drawn by six enormous white horses. No one held the reins. Elagabalus ran backward in front of the vehicle, facing the god, holding the horses' reins, making the entire journey in reverse.

  As a concession to Roman feeling, Elagabalus joined the goddess Astarte, or Minerva, or Urania, or some combination of these, to Elagabal as consort. There may have been a plan to introduce Elagabal, Urania, and Athena as a new Capitoline Triad, replacing Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva entirely. He also married the Vestal Virgin Aquilia Severa, Vesta's high priestess, on the grounds that their union would produce godlike children. Roman law prescribed burial alive for any Vestal who engaged in sexual intercourse.

• 5. Marriages and Identity

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  Cassius Dio states that Elagabalus married five times, twice to the same woman. His first wife was Julia Cornelia Paula, whom he married before the 29th of August 219. Between then and the 28th of August 220, he divorced Paula, took Aquilia Severa as his second wife, divorced her, and took Annia Aurelia Faustina as his third, a descendant of Marcus Aurelius and widow of a man Elagabalus had recently ordered executed, one Pomponius Bassus. In the final year of his reign, he divorced Faustina and remarried Aquilia Severa.

  Dio also names Hierocles, an ex-slave and chariot driver from Caria, as another "husband" of Elagabalus. The Historia Augusta adds that Elagabalus married a man named Zoticus, an athlete from Smyrna. Dio says Zoticus held only the role of cubicularius. Dio also records that Elagabalus wanted to marry Hierocles and name him caesar, and had previously wanted to do the same with Gannys.

  Some historians have suggested that Elagabalus may have identified as female or been transgender. Dio states that after marrying Hierocles, Elagabalus came to be called woman, lady, and empress. According to the sources, the emperor wore makeup and wigs, preferred to be addressed as a lady rather than a lord, and supposedly offered large sums of money to any physician who could provide a vagina by surgical means, a claim recorded at Cassius Dio's Roman History, 80.16.7. Classicists including Mary Beard, Zachary Herz, and Martijn Icks treat these accounts with caution, because the sources for Elagabalus were overwhelmingly hostile and are widely considered unreliable.

• 6. The Grandmother's Reversal

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  Julia Maesa had built Elagabalus's path to power, and she dismantled it with the same cold efficiency. When she judged that popular support for the emperor was failing, she identified replacements: her other daughter, Julia Avita Mamaea, and Mamaea's fifteen-year-old son, Severus Alexander.

  Maesa pressured Elagabalus to adopt Alexander as his heir and give him the title of Caesar. Alexander was elevated to Caesar in June 221, possibly on the 26th of June. Both Elagabalus and Alexander were named consul designatus for the following year, probably on the 1st of July. Elagabalus took his fourth consulship for 222, sharing it with Alexander.

  Elagabalus grew suspicious that the Praetorian Guard preferred his cousin. He ordered attempts on Alexander's life after failing to get the Senate's approval to strip Alexander of his shared title. Dio records that Elagabalus then invented a rumor that Alexander was near death, to test how the Praetorians would react. A riot followed, and the Guard demanded to see both cousins at their camp.

  On the 13th of March, Elagabalus brought Alexander and his own mother Julia Soaemias to the camp. The soldiers cheered Alexander and ignored Elagabalus. He ordered the arrest and execution of anyone who had shown insubordination. The Guard responded by attacking the emperor and his mother. Elagabalus tried to escape by hiding in a chest. He was found and killed at the age of eighteen. Soaemias, who had embraced him, was killed alongside him. Their heads were cut off, their bodies stripped and dragged through the city. Soaemias's body was discarded somewhere in Rome; Elagabalus's was thrown into the Tiber. The assassination plot had been devised by Julia Maesa herself.

• 7. Contested Sources

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  Three principal ancient accounts describe Elagabalus's reign, and none of them is fully trustworthy. Cassius Dio lived from the second half of the second century until sometime after 229. He was a senator under Commodus and served as governor of Smyrna, suffect consul around 205, and proconsul in Africa and Pannonia. His Roman History spans nearly a millennium, from the arrival of Aeneas in Italy through the year 229. He was in Rome during part of Elagabalus's reign, but by his own admission spent much of the relevant period elsewhere and relied on second-hand information.

  Dio served under Severus Alexander, who held him in high esteem and made him consul a second time. That relationship colored his account. He consistently referred to Elagabalus by the name Sardanapalus, partly to maintain the damnatio memoriae decreed against the dead emperor and partly to associate him with another autocrat notorious for a dissolute life. Historian Martin Icks concluded that Dio was not attempting an accurate portrayal, a judgment seconded by Josiah Osgood.

  Herodian, a minor Roman civil servant who lived from around 170 until 240, wrote an independent account that agrees with Dio more often than not. Scholar Clare Rowan considers Herodian's account of the religious reforms more reliable than Dio's, partly because his lack of literary pretension makes him less prone to bias. Archaeological and numismatic evidence has confirmed several of his claims about the religious changes of the reign.

  The Historia Augusta, the third major source, was most likely composed toward the end of the fourth century, during the reign of Theodosius I. Much of it is regarded as fictional. Its own author conceded in the text that some stories were "invented by people who wanted to depreciate Heliogabalus to win favour with Alexander". Edward Gibbon, whose History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire shaped how modern readers encountered Elagabalus, accepted the ancient accounts largely at face value and may have added invented details of his own; he was the first historian on record to claim that Gannys was a eunuch.

• 8. Legacy and Reinterpretation

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  Damnatio memoriae was applied systematically after Elagabalus's death. His religious edicts were reversed, the stone of Elagabal was returned to Emesa, and women were again barred from the Senate. Several statues of him were re-carved with the face of Severus Alexander, including an over-life-size image of him as Hercules now held in Naples. His name became a common word for glutton in Spanish: heliogábalo.

  Despite the official erasure, his story proved irresistible to artists and writers. The Pre-Raphaelite Simeon Solomon painted Heliogabalus, High Priest of the Sun in 1866. Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema's The Roses of Heliogabalus from 1888 depicted a notorious dinner-party scene in which guests were smothered under cascading violets and flowers dropped from above. Antonin Artaud's 1934 work Héliogabale ou l'Anarchiste couronné blended biography, essay, and fiction into an idiosyncratic portrait that went on to inspire Marilyn Manson's 2015 album The Pale Emperor and an Argentine rock album by Pescado Rabioso in 1973. Francesco Cavalli set the subject as an opera in 1667. Gilbert and Sullivan mentioned him in the Major-General's Song in 1879: "I quote in elegiacs all the crimes of Heliogabalus".

  Modern historians have pulled in different directions. Martijn Icks, in Images of Elagabalus published in 2008, argued that it was the emperor's unorthodox religious politics rather than his personal conduct that alienated Rome's power elite and convinced Maesa to eliminate him. Leonardo de Arrizabalaga y Prado, in The Emperor Elagabalus: Fact or Fiction? also published in 2008, went further, suggesting neither religion nor sexuality drove the fall and that Maesa simply outbribed her grandson for control of the Praetorian Guard. Warwick Ball, in Rome in the East, offered an apologetic reading: that the emperor's ritual processions represented sound political and religious policy, and that Elagabal's eventual absorption into Sol Invictus roughly fifty years after the emperor's death represents a kind of posthumous vindication, with Ball arguing that Sol Invictus went on to shape the monotheist beliefs of Constantine. J. Stuart Hay's 1911 biography, the first full-length study, subtitled its subject The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus and described his reign as one of enormous wealth, prodigality, luxury, and aestheticism carried to their ultimate extreme, setting the tone for a century of fascinated ambivalence.