Hello and welcome to Season 7, Episode 4 of Bad Gays, a podcast all about evil and complicated queer people in history. My name is Ben Miller. I'm a writer, researcher, and member of the board of the Schwulis Museum in Berlin. And my name's Shilemi. I'm a writer and artist. And last week we talked about Ahebe Ugbabe, who was a female king in British Nigeria who...
accumulated huge quantities of wealth and power and helps us understand some of the dramatic differences between the sex gender system of that time and place and our own time and place. Who are we talking about this week, Hugh? Oh, have I got a twink for you, Ben? Better or worse than Jacques de Bechet, evil twink lover of Karl Lagerfeld. Well, maybe it's a toss-up, but I'd put money on mine, to be honest.
He does, after all, have everything. He's a tyrannical little boy king dictator who wants to overthrow the Roman pantheon and install a meteorite as a new god. Work. Has prostitution. Work. Vestal virgins. Work. And drowning his party guests in rose petals. Work. Or did he? So today's subject is Sextus Varius Avitus Bassianus and various sexes he did Avitus in his Bassianus.
Hugh, that pun. I am never forgiving you, ever. You lost hosting privileges. Give me the mic back right now. We're replacing you with the cat. He ruled under the name of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. But he is much better known to history as the unspeakably depraved Elagabalus. Oh, yes. I've been excited for this one for a while. So there's Elagabalus Alive and Elagabalus Alive, but let's start with Elagabalus Alive.
So before we start, a quick word on pronouns and names. So as I think we'll discuss in some depth later there are accounts of Elagabalus displaying gender variant behaviour of various types. And I considered quite deeply when making this episode whether Archie is the pronouns he.
or she, or even they, in discussing Elagabalus. Isn't there a museum somewhere that started using she, her pronouns to talk about Elagabalus? Yeah, and that's kind of what I was thinking about, and... making a judgement I guess and in the end I've decided to go with he for reasons I think we can discuss later regarding both how Elagabalus' behaviour interacted with sexual and gender norms and vice versa but also the motivations behind how and why that behaviour was chronicled after his death.
As always, I actually think that the conversation will be more interesting and enlightening than any actual just, like, fixed attempt to definitively assign a sort of contemporary gender identity to him anyway. Gee, it's almost like that's a thing we come back to in almost every episode of this show.
And so in that spirit, you might decide that they or she are more appropriate pronouns to use when talking about Elagabalos. And I think that's completely fine. Like you said, there's this museum in the UK that recently decided to use she as a pronoun. And I think that's very legitimate in some ways. It raises an interesting conversation, if nothing else.
And then on names, as I discussed, he had various names that he was known as in his life, but he's also often referred to as Heliogabalus, as well as Elagabalus, which is what I'm choosing to call him. But in some of the sources I quote, he's referred to as Eliagabalus. And in those instances, we're just talking about the same person. So Elagabalus was born around 203 AD, probably in Roman Syria in the city of Emesa in modern day Homs to aristocratic parents of the equestrian class.
So when you say of the equestrian class, do you mean that Elia Gabalus was a horse girl in his youth? Are we thinking Lisa Frank Trapper Keepers? Lots of pictures of horses, drawing horses. The equestrian class was just a rank and an ability that provided cavalry officers, hence equestrian. But it was very high. It was just underneath the highest sort of rank of the nobility. So they are horsey taffs.
So they are horsey-toffs, yeah. And they were pretty well-off powerful horsey-toffs. Home counties types, maybe. Actually not. We can discuss how people perceive them later. But his father, who was about 20 years older than his mother, was a very astute politician who managed to rise to roles quite a lot more, higher than his class above his station, really, including being in charge of the Roman aqueducts.
A very important job. A very big job. People go thirsty. Yeah. Riots. And then he was a prefect of Britain and then a prefect of the Praetorian Guards, the sort of elite bodyguard of the emperor, and eventually a governor of a Roman province in North Africa.
So Elagabalus was their second son and he was born maybe in Rome but probably in Syria and sex scandal really was in his blood. So there were rumours that were later acknowledged by his mother that he was actually the secret son of the Emperor Caracalla. Caracalla or Caracalla? No. I'm going for Caracalla. Go for Caracalla. If any native speakers of Latin are listening to the podcast and want to correct us, then please write us and let us know.
So Caracalla was also his mother's cousin. Yikes, Romans. So Caracalla is... And it's Karakala. Actually, I looked it up, and it is Caracola. Sorry, Hugh. So Karakala is generally acknowledged as a tyrannical ruler who massacred his domestic enemies and wage war against the foreign ones. And he was also very imprudent. He debased the Roman currency by paying out these huge bonuses to his soldiers to buy their loyalty. Good thing. Leaders like that no longer exist in our world.
Yeah, for that very reason, of course, he commended the respect of the army and he also massively expanded the number of people considered Roman citizens with a new constitutional order.
Yeah, in 217, he was stabbed to death by a disgruntled soldier, probably while he was taking a piss by the side of the road. That's elegant. And this soldier had been put up to the job by Macrinus, who was a prefect of the Praetorian Guard. So Macrinus or Macrinus Macrinus uh sees the throne and he um he ruled as a sort of regent emperor for his own 10 year old son
And he was accepted by the Senate despite also being of the equestrian class, so not actually too low to theoretically rule. Largely because he commanded a loyalty army and also because he got rid of the tyrant. A whole empire of royal scrolls. So he stayed in the Middle East to wind up these walls of the Parthians, and he exiled Caracalla's family, including his mother, Julia Domna, and her sister, Julia Mesa, to their estates in Syria.
Julia Domner, the one-time empress, died by suicide after being put under house arrest for plotting. But Julia Maesa, Elagabalus' grandma, wasn't prepared to let her family's power be given up like that. I sense a powerful woman behind the evil twink beginning to take shape and level up. At this point, perhaps, so we'll see if that holds out really. So, as well as being politicians, the family also fulfilled this religious role in a Mesa, this town and the city they're from.
Sometime in the first century after the collapse of the Emocene monarchy, this religion emerged in the area which worshipped a deity they called Elagabal. You see why this is going... I do see where this is going. So Al-Agabal derives its name from the Arabic, which means god of the mountain. And this god found a form in this large conical black meteorite, which served as the object of worship, not the god itself, but the totem to which you worship.
And Elagabalus' ancestors, they built this temple there to honour the god. And in a local region, it became a big focal point for pilgrimage and worship. And it was a form of sun worship, really. At this temple, the hereditary rites to the priesthood had been inherited by the 14-year-old Elagabalus, And he performed the rites. And so the local Roman legion, the third legion, Gallica, would attend. And they were clearly very impressed by the god and by this high priest.
And to be fair, if a giant black conical meteorite fell out of the fucking sky and you were living in this time and place, you would probably start worshipping it too.
Yeah, and like within the Roman Empire, there were lots of different cults and gods and stuff that existed within a sort of pantheon of gods. It was a pantheistic religion. It was a polytheistic religion. Julia Mace leveraged... this fame of her grandson to her advantage and she declared that her grandson was none other than the son of the soldier's favourite emperor, Caracalla.
And so, with the help of some pretty healthy bribes and a Roman general on her side, Gannis, she announced that it was Elagabalus, who was a rightful emperor, and the legion backed her up on her claim, so her revolt had begun within the army. Now, do we know what the actual truth of these rumors was? Like, was he actually the son of Caracalla?
Difficult to know. It's quite interesting that in the initial years of his reign, a lot of the statues that are produced of him look exactly like his supposed father. and then later in his reign when he has a bit more power the statues sort of change and he doesn't look quite so much like his supposed father so no statues he does but
And the family themselves play up this claim, but I don't know, it's probably unlikely. It's interesting that the family would actually play up the claim to illegitimacy. To illegitimacy and incest. Work. These are a few of my favourite things. So this revolt had begun within the army and Macrinus' very prudent fiscal reforms didn't actually serve him very well because much of his army then defected to the rebellion. So Macrinus had also stayed in Syria after winning power.
which actually was quite a bad movie. It didn't actually endear him very much to the Senate, but he was at least ready to meet the rebels with his own army, and he G'd them up with a big fat bonus before they went into battle.
and so his Praetorian guard were much better drilled and more experienced than Gannis' force, and so they routed him in this battle. But Gannis sort of jumped on his horse and rode headlong into the advance, and also at the same time, Elgabalus' mother and grandmother joined him on the field of battle.
And so the soldiers were buoyed by this physical courage, and the route was reversed, and Macrinus, despite actually having the advantage, ended up fleeing the field of battle, which ended his chances at remaining emperor. Both Macrinus and his young son were soon caught and killed and therefore Anagabalus, who was just 14 years old,
declared himself the emperor of all Rome, and the Senate really had no choice but to accept him. That kind of decision-making sounds like the source of a whole lot of psychological and political good news. Well, yeah, it's very impressive. very early on. in some ways. Do you remember being 14? Well, 14 year old boys should not be in control. 14 year old boys should not be in control of like a suburban kitchen for more than a half hour period. Nevermind the entire Roman fucking empire. Jesus.
Jesus Christ. But he wasn't a puppet emperor, that's one thing to say. He was very headstrong. Okay, yeah, that makes it worse, not better. As I'm sure we both were at that age. And... It's kind of impressive how quickly he indulged his most basic whims and fantasies and hatreds. He did actually, like, he respects his mother and grandmother, theoretically. He honoured them as members of the Senate, so they were the first imperial women who were allowed to enter the Senate.
the sort of original girlbosses of ancient Rome, and they played a sort of advisory role to him, but he also wasn't above threatening to kill his own grandmother if she defied him. I mean, given that this woman made him emperor by riding into battle, maybe he could... Again, 14-year-old boys. And he also didn't follow that advice very often. He had this painting sent ahead of him to Rome of himself.
because he had spent the first year of his reign sort of suppressing these rebellions in Syria. But rather than having him sent, you know, as a Syrian and so on from the east, rather than sending him dressed as a Roman, which would ingratiate himself to the Romans, Rather, he sent this painting of himself in the robes of the high priest of Elagabal, which was this very strange Eastern faith of which the Romans were completely ignorant, if not highly suspicious at the very least.
And he hung this painting in the Senate, so they had to all sort of look to him and pray to him. here's your new emperor he's 14 years old worships a god you've never heard of and he doesn't have the sense he was born with and he was like very capricious about um loyalty and stuff so even though um ganis this general had run into battle and won him his
his empire on a trip back to Rome. Gannis was advising him to maybe be a bit more temperate about his desires. And, uh, so he, he, uh, sent him to be executed. and when he could find no soldier in the army willing to execute their general, he did it himself. So he arrived in Rome and the young emperor spent very little time arranging things to his liking and his liking was basically sports, circuses, parties and men.
I mean, who among us hasn't? Let's just say that it's a good thing that no one made me emperor when I was 14. I probably would have been worse so he lived in this huge suburban estate a sort of palace where he built a new amphitheatre and that was where his relative Karakula had built this Circus Varianus which was a racing circus named after his family So Elagabalus was obsessed with chariot racing so much so that he'd actually frequently ride himself in the circus and go around on his chariot.
And from this position in this new amphitheatre, in this palace that he was doing up, he engaged this one characteristic that would mark his reign, which was the absolute transgression of all Roman norms. To the Romans his first transgression was in religion. As its high priest, Elagabalus bought the deity Elagabor with him from Syria to Rome, literally bought the rock with him.
This in itself wasn't actually deeply transgressive. We have to remember, of course, the Romans were pantheistic, with many complementary and competing cults and deities. which sort of sometimes married each other or et cetera, et cetera. And some found favor in certain regions, some among certain classes, certain jobs or with certain emperors. the value of your god can really fall as well as rise though but
Some cults and gods played such integral roles in Roman society, Roman culture, that they sort of ruled the pantheon. So the first among the gods was Jupiter, who was the king of the gods equivalent to Zeus in Greek religion. And in many ways, he represented sovereignty within Rome, the power of Rome. He'd been the dominant god figure from the time of the monarchy for thousands of years, right through the Roman Republic and into the imperial era.
Now let me guess what this 14-year-old boy decided to do. Yeah, I mean, this was so transgressive because really Jupiter was kind of like the reason why Romans felt they were who they were. We are like this because of Jupiter. But Elagabalus was perhaps understandably himself devoted to the god of whom he was the high priest.
So he built this new ornate temple, the Elagabalium, on the Capitoline Hill to house the Elagabal rock, this rock he'd bought. And then he brought all the other holy relics of the other gods into this new temple. like the fire from the Vesta where the Vestal Virgin's locked up to the hearth of the sort of center of Roman society, or the shields from the Temple of Mars, the god of war. So anyone who wanted to worship them had to do so before Elagabal. So he's literally placing his own god who...
most people in Roman society have not ever heard of or worshipped at the center of the religious system and displacing the god that's been at the center of the religious system for thousands of years and he's the first emperor to do this in thousands of years absolutely and he's 14 and he's 14 yeah Oh, boy. So Elagabal was a sun god, and Elagabalus horrified the Roman populace by elevating him to the head of the pantheon of gods higher than their own main god, Jupiter.
And then he declared his god Sol Invictus, which means the unconquered sun. which literally translates as the highest priest of the unconquered god, the sun, elegable, supreme pontiff. And at this point he's 14. Yeah, so he's Pope of the Sun. At the age of 14. Um... But this actually is where we get his other name, his other moniker, Heliogabalus. That's a contraction of Helios from the Greek for sun and agabalus, obviously. Right.
So this very strange Syrian god was now the highest god in Rome, and El Agarbo was a foreign god, but even worse than that, he was an Eastern god. And Elagabalus adopted many of the characteristics of this Eastern religion, Eastern meaning in this case what we would call the Middle East, but the Eastern Roman Emperor. And he had himself circumcised, which was regarded by Romans as a mutilation. And he refused to eat pork. And then he'd bring the senators to the Elagabalium.
And then he made them sort of watch as he performed his rites in front of, you know, with their gods there, like Jupiter and stuff, but his main god there and he'd perform his rites in front of their gods.
where he'd wear these super centrist robes and he'd dance around and then strip naked in front of the stone. And as he's stripped naked... he'd he'd tucked like he'd pulled his cock under him and had it tied to his leg sort of thing so he was like uh you know dancing without a cock but time has come for you to lip sync for your life um i mean what on earth.
Quick question here. These prohibitions on pork eating and circumcision, are these things that Eastern religions are adopting from Judaism are these things that are like regional characteristics that are shared by Romans. in that area and also by the Abrahamic religions that emerge from those areas like what
Where is that stuff coming from? Do we know? Yeah, I think it was part of like a varied set of practices that were held by different religions, not necessarily related. Like it's not that this is like a Jewish religion even though this is coming you know after you know it's also something that yeah it can be something that's kind of shared regionally that kind of jews pick up and islam later picks up but then romans in the region also picked up yeah and of course there's of course
an argument within theology that some of these things are actually practical, lifestyle things are made into religious beliefs. Yeah, if you live in the high desert, it's probably a great idea to not eat pork and shellfish. Exactly. If anyone's ever had a bad clam, we'll tell you. Anyway, so we have our 14-year-old boy emperor who has reorganized the entire Roman religious system and is lip syncing for his life in front of the Roman emperors.
Fully tucked. And it gets even worse. I mean, in some ways he did try to make some concessions. For example, he married his god to a Roman goddess, or maybe three Roman goddesses, or maybe he merged these three Roman goddesses. including Minerva, into one new god who he married to his god. So there was an attempt at some sort of synchronicity there.
But it didn't really work for her because he also did stuff like he married this woman called Aquilia Severa, who was the high priestess of the Vestal Virgins. So if you're anything called a Vestal Virgins, that's an intense thing to say. Yeah, they're not supposed to get, isn't that the whole point? The virgin part of Vestal Virgin? Yeah. I think I remember being in Rome earlier this, or last year now, and in the forum and reading that the
If the Vestal Virgins were found to not be Vestal Virgins, they were sealed alive and buried alive in a tomb or something? They were buried alive and they were supposed to willingly let themselves be buried alive as a punishment. And now the Emperor has married one of them. And he's having sex with all his people around watching him. And also the... He's 14. Yeah, and it's not just that
The role of the Vestal Virgin, so the Romans had in the center of Rome this shrine to Vesta who was like the god of the hearth. It's the center of what makes you a family, a society. We have this burning... thing of the heart and it's like an eternal flame that always has to be lit and the Vestal Virgins maintain and the Vestal Virgins maintain it and if it's if it ever goes out then the city is unprotected and disaster will come you know so
Yeah, it was so blasphemous to commit this crime, and normally if anyone else had sex with a vestal virgin, they would have been whipped to death, and yeah, like you said, the virgin. Barry's alive. They're no longer a virgin. Why were people just sitting around and watching this? Why didn't people immediately...
He was the emperor, and he still had the loyalty of the Praetorian Guard. That was the loyalty of the Praetorian Guard that kept us. Yeah, and there was no challenges really at that point to his throne. But these acts, as well as obviously being blasphemous, they're very symbolic because they kind of show that he's not from around here. He doesn't get it, and the Romans really hated that.
Do we think that he's doing this stuff in a kind of intentional effort to be as shocking as possible? Or do we think that this is a... like he doesn't really know quite how bad this is or right is there some level of unawareness i think he's doing intentionally i think transgression becomes like a very big part of his personality and his identity which we can discuss later when it comes to sex and gender as well which is an interesting story
The original edgelord. Yeah. So the later Roman historian Cassius Dio, well, he was actually contemporary. He was actually older, but he was writing after most of the stuff he wrote about Elagabalus. He wrote after Elagabalus' reign. So you have to put that into context. But he said that, quote, he was,
frequently seen even in public, clad in the barbaric dress which the Syrian priests use. Yeah, so actually, this might be an interesting point to discuss. Elagabalus is perceived of the nest as Eastern-ness within Roman society and how that's influenced much of the history that's been written about him.
So in his excellent biography, The Mad Emperor Heliogabalus and the Decadence of Rome, the author Harry Sidebottom suggests that racism has been a powerful influence in the portrayal of Heliogabalus since his death.
But while some scholars sort of describe a proto-racist tendency within the Roman emperor, Sidebottom's very clear in pointing out how racism and racial prejudice structured much of the Roman understanding of what lay outside its borders or even within its borders but outside of Italy and Rome. To the north, the tribes to the north, the Germanic and Celtic tribes, they were regarded as barbaric, uneducated and sexually lascivious, for example.
While there's also a very strong anti-black prejudice that's recurrent in Roman writing, it doesn't appear very frequently, but when it does, it's very clearly racist.
And Sidebottom mentions as well that when discussing Caracalla, Elagabalus' purported father, the historian Cassius Dio, from whom we do actually get most of our information about the emperor, says that he, quote, belonged to three races, and he possessed none of their virtues at all, but combined in himself all their vices, the fickleness, cowardness, and recklessness of Gaul. the harshness and cruelty of Africa, and the cunning of Syria, whence he was sprung on his mother's side.
You absolutely see a lot of kind of the racialization of these different groups there, the way that they're characterized, the different qualities. And yeah, it's interesting how sometimes these things can be so consistent. Through time, the way that people are, not the way that races are constructed, but the way that certain kind of characteristics are assigned to people from different areas. Yeah. It's fascinating, the continuities as well as the differences.
Amesa, the city from which Elagabalus and his family came from, had been Roman for over a century when he was born, and his family would have had roots in both Roman and Greek cultures. which at this point included a lot of interchange and exchange between those two cultures anyway. Yeah, but his family were rooted in Syria and they had influence from Phoenician and Assyrian cultures too. Sometimes he's called the Assyrian in Roman sources, which is a pejorative.
So while the Romans generally had a positive view of the Greeks as a culture to be emulated in some way, they were much more suspicious of the Phoenicians regarding them as clever but untrustworthy, cruel and most despicable of all. They were practitioners of cunnilingus, not his eating pussy. Wow. And that's like a huge, huge no-no in Roman terms. This was a degenerate sex act to do, but not necessarily to have done.
Unto you. Does this lead to then wealthy Roman women importing Phoenicians to eat them out? Yeah, maybe, yeah. So when Cassius Dio refers to Elagabalus as the Assyrian, it's these sort of qualities of cruelty and sexual licentiousness that he's implying.
And what's interesting, as you say, is how these attitudes were really picked up on in the 19th century by Western European historians and artists and writers, as they amplified their own prejudices about the Middle East that were a mix of sort of projected desire and colonialist anxiety. Right, and the Romans, who had sort of governed these people before and who were sort of the model for European Empire, then their views become ours again. Yeah.
In his very famous book, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, for example, the 18th century English historian Edward Gibbon, describes how a later emperor, immediately after his accession, fell into the hands of his mother's eunuchs, that pernicious vermin of the East, who, since the days of Elagabalus, had infested the Roman palace. So visions of the Middle East as this sort of sexually permissive place prone to rule by despot.
both justified later colonialist ambitions, but also allowed Westerners to indulge their own orientalist fantasies under the cover of outrage in the 18th and 19th centuries. And while some artists focused on a portrayal of a sultan's harem or the so-called white slave trade, others looked much further back. In the Victorian era, artists like Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema helped create this sort of visual language that we now have for classical antiquity.
And one of his most famous paintings is called The Roses of Heliogabalus. All right, so let's take a look at this painting, Hugh. Oh my god. So this is an enormous painting. It's over two meters wide. Wow. And it features a very pretty and aloof Elagabalus.
notably darker in his complexion than anyone else. Yeah, he really does. They really did paint him to look sort of stereotypically like Middle Eastern. Yeah, and he's laying on one of those sort of Roman dining couches in a gold robe, drinking wine while in the foreground is very fair. and ruddy-faced dining companions are quite literally drowning in a sea of rose petals that he's released from a hidden ceiling. Yeah, he's pouring rose petals in there.
oh wow yeah they're literally drowning yeah this was a story although in the helmets and then There's one of them who's just looking straight out at us. What is this one doing while everyone next to him is like drowning in a sea of rose petals? There's also this very sort of blonde fair one down here.
oh yeah oh wow yeah almost hidden in the rose petals but looking extremely calm this is this is this is kind of the point like no one and like not even that rose rosy rosy blonde girl is particularly bothered about the fact that they're about to drown in a sea of rose petals. You know that the Weimar era bisexual actress Anita Berber actually, this is true, died from an overdose of heroin, or opium rather, which she consumed by dipping rose petals into it and eating them.
Well, that's an interesting story to go along with, actually, because I think and Harry Sidebom says this like the message is a very common one for Victorians and it's actually one that still penetrates very deeply into our culture today is sort of a sexual licentiousness and immorality makes
an empire decadent and weak and without values and so it sort of collapses without these rigid puritanical moral values and that's what's happening these people don't even care that they're being drowned in rose petals Right, yeah, there's this sort of, yeah, the empire has been penetrated by the effeminate Oriental and now is, you know, yeah, there's no more. And this is what people mean, right, when they talk about the end of Rome or the collapse of Rome or something like this.
And it's the very same ideology as we have in our society, like the Proud Boys or Pat Buchanan or any number of conservatives or fascists in our own society. which is a Victorian myth, really. It ignores the obvious truth, which is that Rome was at its most powerful under the arch-faggot patron. who sort of sailed around the Mediterranean on holiday off his tits on hallucinogens and banging his unfeasibly cute god boyfriend, Antonus.
And the Western Roman Empire actually collapsed within 80 years of adopting Christianity as its state religion. It's Christianity that collapsed. That is a very ever simplistic reasoning, but...
I'll go with it I like it yeah my point is that these depictions of the east as this sort of licentious and cruel and despotic place are very much a projection of the anxieties of the later western culture in modern society but also in Rome itself And therefore we should take these depictions of Elagabalus and especially of his sexuality with a very large pinch of salt.
But now that we've taken it with a pinch of salt, can we please get some juicy stories? We've already had lip syncing for your life in front of the Senate. Well, actually, in this biography, Sidebottom features a really interesting statue, a photograph of a statue of Elagabalus, which I think really sheds a lot of light on this. It's this portrayal of Elagabalus that was made during his reign.
And it was discovered in the Roman city of Carnuntum, which is on the modern day, the border of the modern day Austria and Slovakia. So it's not close to his Syrian homeland. It's not made for Syrians. And... It's probably actually made for him to see, like when he was on a visit, to see his troops in the Danube. And yet it still depicts him in this Eastern clerical garb.
So according to Sidebottom quote, the Eastern apparel evoked effeminacy and thus the passive role in male-male sex for traditional Western viewers. It has been suggested that the statue deliberately goes further. The pose and the see-through costume, both emphasizing the exposed thighs, have been thought to sexualize the image. The thighs were a zone of key neurotic interest in ancient male-male sex, which is true.
I mean, is it not true now? But what's interesting here that Sidebottom suggests is that this is a depiction that is, for this depiction to be made, it must not have been offensive. either to Adagabalus himself or to the Romans, soldiers and citizens of the small Roman outpost. which I think suggests that this abhorrence with which later Roman historians painted the emperor was not felt fully contemporaneously with Elagabalus.
right yeah that makes sense even if someone is um yeah you don't you don't make a giant statue of someone looking a certain way unless Unless the emperor wants to look that way. Yeah. And it can be quite difficult to wipe the sources, of course. The Augustan Histories were published hundreds of years after Elagabalus' reign, and they're clearly very richly embroidered.
if not fabricated. And then we do have histories of men like Cassius Deo, who was a contemporary, but they're written, again, after his reign when he'd fallen out of favour. Right, and so the history is now trying to talk about how bad the old guy was, and now we're on the new. So those histories from which we get the story of Elagabalus' immorality were all about his transgression of the norms of the Roman sex-gender system, often contradictory tales as well.
So in one, for example, Alagabalus is depicted as purely interested in men, while Cassius Dio sees him married five or six times, including to Aquilia Severa, the Vestal Virgin. Right, right, right. But according to Cassius Dio, he was fucking women, but purely as a sort of Roman version of Cosmo's sex tips for girls. He wanted to do it so he could see how women acted when they were fucked so that he could act like that when he was getting fucked by men.
Oh, my God. Okay, I want to believe this so badly, and I don't care if this is not a reputable source. It's not entirely... I think there's some truth to it. You know, our book was actually put on Cosmo magazine list of top 10 ways to blow your man's mind. No, it was on their top 10 list of summer books or queer history books or something. We're very grateful for it. Yeah, seeing myself in a Cosmo magazine, this was a wonderful psychological experience.
All the sources do actually agree on one thing, which is that Elagabalus loved cop. So one day he was attending the chariot races when a charioteer was flipped from his chariot in front of him and he landed spread eagles on the ground. and he sort of got up and his helmet had come off on the accident so this handsome charity had picked himself up and brushed himself off and he
I see this in slow motion, the sort of waving hair and his unlightened bronzed skin. Cassius Dio specifically mentions his full head of golden locks and the fact that he had no facial hair. He was clean shaven. Okay. And so Elie Gabler sees him and has him taken to his palace. So this man was a slave by the name of Pierocles and Elagabalus was so infatuated with him that he then married him. which is obviously a disturbance of the norm of a Roman sex gender system on so many levels.
not just in terms of homosexuality, in fact, not in terms of homosexuality, because as we've discussed before, like men, powerful men, even emperors, were not just allowed but expected or even encouraged to fuck other men the issue was the idea the taboo really was the idea of being penetrated so
Being the penetrating partner had no implications for how you were seen as a man. It had no implications on your gender. But to be the receptive partner, to be the one who was being fucked in much the same way as to be the one who was eating pussy. was shameful.
So in other words, the fact that he was bottoming for a slave who he was married to as opposed to topping a slave was a huge issue. Which we've seen before that Julius Caesar was mocked because he was seen to be a bottom but for another king. But to be bottoming for a slave is like next level. Right. So, you know, you could, you were allowed to fuck slaves or servants or those at a bottom of the class system, but not other aristocratic men.
And so to have married, for a woman to marry a freedman, like a former slave, was also dodgy ground, because there was no guarantee that he hadn't been, the likelihood was he'd probably been fucked by a man before, so he'd lost all status as a man by his old master.
So choosing as the emperor to be the receptive partner and the receptive partner to a slave was one of the deepest transgressions. Yeah, Elagabalus seemed actually to be like doing on purpose, like making a mockery of the whole system, not just by getting fucked by him, but actually marrying him. implying that his desires are, like, worthy of the social purpose, the social function of marriage. Right, right, right. So, what was he doing? Elliot Gabalus, welcome to the Human Rights Campaign.
Was he, like, debasing himself there, or was he, like, satirizing these institutions and norms and doing it? Right. Yeah, it's interesting. I see what you mean. There is a way in which this is all... I mean, we should say, and of course our own sex-gender system is all ridiculous, but this is a ridiculous sex-gender system. There's no reason why...
Topping or bottoming is more or less shameful or more or less masculine. Right. But also so much of what Elagabalus is doing is like a performance on other people. That's what's really interesting about it. So this is quite disturbing.
like telling scene he orchestrates a scene in the palace where he orchestrates it so he is caught by his husband Heracles getting fucked by another man and then makes his husband, in a sort of parody of heterosexual marriage values at a time, he makes his husband beat him.
so he makes himself a victim of domestic abuse and then in the following days he sort of parades around the palace showing off his black eye to his courtiers as if to sort of prove that it's a genuine marriage like you were saying you know this is a real marriage because my husband beats me Oh my god. It's consummated by domestic violence. So what's being parodied there? And also my husband is a real man. Like it's, it's like my husband's a real man. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Interesting. Um, So...
Also for his own sexual pleasure, he really craved big cocks. So to modern ears, that might not sound particularly unusual because generally in our society, for various reasons, mostly fucked up, big cocks are fetishised still. But in Roman society, as if we're around, a small cock was seen as the ideal in general. I mean, it was, it was true.
There is actually an account of this bathhouse where this guy comes in and he takes his towel off and he's got a big cock and everyone gives him a round of applause and starts laughing. But in a way, generally, small cocks were really ideal and big cocks were... also in a way racialized, I guess, in much the same way as I think they are today in our society. In much the same way, you know, the same values as well, because they symbolized the sort of sexual potency that was supposed to be.
outside of the control of the owner of the cock. Right, whereas the ideal here is sort of a very early version of Cartesian, where like the... animal body is supposed to be under the control of the rational mind. Yes. To some extent. Big cocks essentially belong to barbarians, but the rational, civilized... Oh yes, they do. The rational, civilized subject of the Roman citizen possessed a rational, dignified small penis.
So, no comment. He's again, like, he's disturbing this very accepted sex-gender system by seeming to valorise the barbaric as the form of desire. Like, he wants the barbaric. And this wasn't some private preference that he had, but it was actually a matter of state policy. He had this team of agents send out all across the empire to visit public baths and gyms and stuff, specifically looking for the men for the biggest cocks.
And according to the Augustan histories, which we should take a bit of a pinch of salt, but I'm not going to here. They even actually built a special bathhouse advertised for big cocked guys to come and use in order to scout them out. And does this place have an address? No, I can't. Anyway. Goodness gracious me. I mean, it sounds kind of like a bizarre fairy tale, like Prince Charming scouring his kingdom for exactly the right size car.
No, it's like the Madeline Kahn scene in History of the World Part One. When she brings in the garden, they lift up the kilts and she's like, no, no, no, yes, no, no, no, yes, no, no, no, no, yes. Well, eventually they found a man with a suitably enormous cock and balls. He was an athlete from... Aren't we all trying? I'm going to stop now, I promise. No, I don't promise. Sorry, the dick jokes are just going to keep coming in this one. He was an athlete from...
Smyrna, which is a Greek city, but it's in modern-day Turkey, called Aurelius Zoticus. So they've gone all over the empire to find this car. So Xoticus was brought to Rome in this large armed procession. And on a way, he was actually made a chamberlain, which is like a sort of big important role in the palace. And on arrival, he was heralded with like his parade and great honours. The big hot guy has finally come to fuck our emperor. My God. And now something happens.
That's very interesting, and as I mentioned earlier, is one of the main claims as to why a lot of people have started to refer to Elagabalus with female pronouns. So according to Cassius Dio, Xoticus, announced himself to the emperor with quote with the usual salutation my lord emperor hail he bent his neck so as to assume a ravishing feminine pose and turned his eyes upon him with a melting gaze answering without any hesitation call me not lord for i am a lady
Oh my god. But is this like... trans energy or is this like femboy bottom energy or is this like fuck me like a real woman energy well yeah this is what we can discuss in a bit I think but I think I think it's kind of a mixture of all of them which is why I think
you know, when talking to like a friend of mine who's a trans woman, she's like, I recognize, I recognize this as a doll. I recognize this is like a, it's like a, big bossy bomb yeah there's a gay boy to there is there is a gay boy to doll yeah a gay boy to doll uh continuum yeah i think we can all sort of recognize and
Maybe the precise differences where you land on that is less important than understanding that there is a continuum. There is a continuum, you're right. And also, these are also contemporary gender nonsense. The Roman sex gender system, as we've discussed, is different. So this is going to have a different implication to be like. I want to get fucked like a woman means something different then than it does today.
Yeah, so I mean, but it is a violation of imperial masculinity, right? You know, you're the emperor, you should be fucking with, you know, someone like a woman, not being fucked like a woman by the man with the biggest dick in the entire Roman Empire he actually sent. out a patrol to find the biggest dick the athlete with the biggest dick in the roman empire to have sex with him oh my god um yeah so so work the evening progresses and um elagabalus um takes a bath with him
Alice, please discover the story is a trove. It's a trove donkey deck. is it well and so um they uh they they dined together and uh they prepared to fuck whatever that means. But while Exoticus was sort of preparing... A dick like that, not like that, unless he's eating dinner. Um... Take that out. No, that's fine. I was thinking, how's he preparing? This is a deep dish.
So the animals of ancient Roman douching technology are not historically substantiated, but we can only speculate on this podcast. Um, about what kinds of water pressure What have the Romans ever done for us? Some sort of, you know, goat's bladder attached to it. So they died and prepared to fuck. But while Zoticus was presumably eating dietary fiber, while Zoticus was preparing, um, He was dressing up or whatever.
Heracles, Elagabalus' husband, obviously feared his position in the court. That would be a risk now that Elagabalus had a new giant dick to play with. So he slipped something into Xoticus's drink that in Cassius Dio's words, quote, abated the other's manly prowess.
So, so he like gave him a, you know, they got him too drunk so he couldn't get it out. He gave him some, slipped him something. Uh, I think it's suggested as, I don't know what it is. Marijuana or something. Slipped him something. But anyway, uh, he, he couldn't get a boner.
So Zoticus was then cast out of the palace and then cast out of Rome and Italy, which obviously probably saved his life in the long term. Oh, good God. Yeah, you don't want to be the biggest dick in the Roman Empire, brought to your emperor, and then not be able to get it up at the crucial moment. Right.
So, basically, whatever was appropriate in Roman sexual mores, he upturned with dramatic effects. And I mean, I quite literally like all these descriptions of his sex life, I've noticed, are all about sex happening very much in public as like a role play. in order to scandalize the Romans. So according to Cassius Dio, he also decorated a room in the palace as a brothel and a street. And then he would dress himself up in the costume of a Roman prostitute.
and then he had these men brought to the palace, and then he would stand, like, by the door, like, sort of out half in half outside the curtain sort of trying to seduce induce these men to come like role playing like acting like a role playing as a sex worker as a as a as a prostitute and then he would then And Juicy is meant to come in and pay him to fuck him.
Uh, and then with all this money, he'd then go and like flash the money at his other fake, well, the other real prostitutes in his fake brothel and then show off to them saying like that he'd made more money than them. And therefore he was more desirable and they weren't taunt these actual prostitutes. which is pretty incredible.
Please describe the face that I've been making for the past ten or so seconds to our audience. You look like you've just walked in and seen Elagabalus sticking his ass out from under the curtain. My jaw is on the floor. Oh my god. And then Cassius Dio also even claims that the end point of this process of what he calls effeminacy was Elagabalus asking a surgeon to make him a vagina. Oh wow, so... That being said, why have we discussed Elagabalus using he, him pronouns?
Right. In her book, The Transgender Issue, Sean Fay wrote, quote, If the classical historians Cassius Dio and Herodian are to be believed, he painted his eyes, plucked out his beard, and insisted on being addressed as a queen. And of course, call me a lady and give me a vagina sounds like pretty clear statements of being a woman. Yes. However, I noticed that in Sean's trans-affirming book, The Transgender Issue, the quote, she said he, plucked out his eyes. Yeah, because I think...
And in the book also, there's other instances where Sean uses the pronouns she to refer to, for example, certain types of religious eunuchs. And I think it's because it's to do with this performance as a transgression rather than as an identity claim so Yeah, let's see if I can get this. But first off, are the sources in Phase Wars to be believed? And does this gender transgression have the same meaning then as that gender transgression would have today?
So, clearly, Elagabalus' quote-unquote effeminacy in the eyes of Roman historians is partly an extension of what he's bringing to his role, which is his easternness, his decadence. and his rejection of the fundamental moral, religious, and gender norms of Roman society, of what it means to be a real Roman masculinity is. Right, I mean, it's like...
You know, the one way of reading these things, and maybe you're about to get here, but you could read all of this as like a fever dream of what would a male Roman historian trying to describe the worst. person ever. come up with in order to and is like, okay, the emperor literally pretending to be a whore and whoring himself out to commoners. The emperor bottoming for a huge barbarian dick.
yeah exactly it's like a sort of nightmare visions of what all the sort of wrong sorts of things will end up looking like yeah he doesn't respect anything he doesn't respect the class system the religion or the sex gender system And so many scholars, as you say, would regard these stories of like extreme quote unquote degeneracy as this Latin word topoi.
which is like this Roman concept of a sort of literary trope that's applied to an emperor after his death to illustrate the type of man he was in order to discredit him. And it's about that as a metaphor as much as a literary truth. But... That said, so Harry Sidebottom in his biography, I think very cleverly, he complicates that idea. I think he's really onto something because he says, quote, if Topoi were meaningless and indiscriminate pieces of invective against the dead,
We would expect Heliogabus to be condemned for incest of his mother, like so many of the other ones were. Yeah, even the lurid fiction of the Augustan history does not make that claim. Topoi played a powerful symbolic role in the Roman imaginative economy. End quote. End quote. So what he's saying is that these insults are not random.
While they might not be literally true, they contain a solid nugget of truthiness. Right, and they take us in the right direction, even if some of the most lore and details may unfortunately be... Formatted to fit your screen. Right. And I'd suggest that the sort of truthiness at the center of this topo is that Elagabalus was involved in a lot of gender non-conforming behavior, not conforming to Roman concepts of gender norms, that is.
That seemed to obtain a very basic understanding of what a civilised behaviour could be. And that the stories that he loves massive cocks and that he played as a prostitute, that he wanted a vagina, they describe that mode of a sort of Eastern rock worshipping, unmasculine, un-Roman transgression. The top eye seemed, I think, to suggest that we should remember Elagabalus as a faggot. That's kind of what it's saying in our
And I say that with a caveat, as we said before, I think then as now that being a faggot is probably as much about gender as it is about sexuality. Oh, it is. Absolutely. And there is like a, I mean, even very, very recently, right? that there is a coherent thing called a gay man, which includes... Both the penetrated and penetrative partner or the idea of like verseness is really recent, like mid 20th century recent. And there are, of course, antecedents to that.
But really, for the majority of people, male-male sexual behavior before then in Western society... has there's a kind of bottom to doll continuum of effeminate takers and then there's trade right men who can be convinced to or maybe even prefer to have sex with those people than with women. Right. And so once we come down on the side of, for example, using male pronouns, using he as a pronoun, is that
There's also these contemporary depictions of Elagabalus like on coins or in official statuary. And so presumably depictions are intended to flatter his self-image. and they obviously make no attempt, well, not obviously, but they make no attempt to portray him at all as a woman. So earlier in his reign, I said he's depicted as looking suspiciously like his alleged father. in order to sort of prove his paternity. But once he's more in control, he's depicted much more probably accurately. Um,
And there he's, you know, like I said before, sometimes he's depicted in this way that is controversial, you know, like they're not afraid of depicting him as controversial. He wears these sort of sexy, slightly faggy Eastern priest clothes with his thighs out. but he's still always portrayed with these long sideburns and sometimes even with this sort of wispy bum fluff moustache.
facial hair so it doesn't appear that for all his colossal power and his desire to shock he ever tried to actually present himself like as a woman outside of this sexual context of like sex and bottoming and right so it seems more like a kind of femboy bottom roleplay fuck me like a girl yeah but even though maybe then some you know as a way to think about it now but even then that's still applying the same things like I think what I'm saying is that I do think Elagabalus was trans.
I think that's a way of thinking and talking about it. And I do think that Elagabalus was challenging the gender norms and displaying gender variance in a very deep and meaningful way within his own society. But the terms of that gender variance was not on a basis of the...
The transgression was not on a basis of the male, female gender binary that we... sort of exists in western society today but rather on a basis that a gender norm was based upon passive and active roles and citizen and non-citizen and a part of the parody of these sexual power dynamics was done through portraying himself as a woman. So rather than it being, let's say, an identity claim as we don't understand it today.
So yeah, it's for this reason, as I mentioned at the start of the episode, that I used the contemporary English pronouns of he and him rather than opting for they, them, or she, her. Not because Elagabalos wasn't trans, but rather because I think I'm saying... I think that saying like Alagabalos was a trans woman or by saying that Alagabalos should use the pronouns she her fits fits it into a contemporary framing of a gender model which is actually
disingenuous or not disingenuous but just inaccurate it doesn't actually help us understand what's going on there to say Elagabalus regarded himself as a as a woman and therefore as a trans woman Right. It's a different gender system that he's transgressing, and within that gender system, I think he is trans. You know what I mean? Yeah. Makes sense. Not being sad.
I am just showing my working here, and I am, you know, a cis guy. I would absolutely be open to hearing other people's interpretations or framings of Elagabalus' life. I also don't think that referring to Elagabalus using she-her pronouns would be inaccurate and incorrect. I hope I've done that justice, because I do think that just having this conversation and talking about what it means, what Elagabalus' behaviour means,
and leaving it open for discussion regarding gender identity is probably a more productive intellectual exercise than attempting to claim definitively that we know the answer to this question. Right, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Anyway, so What happened next? Well, nothing good really. This transgression, of course, deeply shocked the Romans, including the army. And Elagabalus, of course, relied on the army for his power. And his mother, Julia Mesa,
She saw which side her bread was buttered on, really. So she introduced his cousin, the young Severus Alexander, into the mix. So this younger cousin was, only a few years younger, was named as Caesar, his heir and also his adopted son. And soon young Alexander became increasingly popular with the Praetorian guard. So Elagabalus was sort of increasingly jealous and he even tried to have Alexander killed.
And then he sort of figured that he wasn't really very popular, so he pretended that his cousin was ill, and then the Spiritorian Guard rioted and demanded to see his cousin. because they suspected they'd been murdered. So eventually they were bowed before him and these two boys were bowed before him and Alexander was cheered and Elagabalus was ignored even though he was the emperor.
So he demanded the execution of all those who were insubordinate to him by ignoring him and not cheering, and they, of course, revolted. And he was caught trying to escape Rome, locked in a chest, and he was killed, and his corpse was thrown into the Tiber. And his mother and his husband, Heracles, were also executed. and the religious reforms he's introduced were withdrawn, and his stone, the El Agable, was sent back to the east.
And this process of damning his memory, the complete erasure of his life from the record, his image from public began. And so at his death, after four short years of rule, he was just 18 years old. He got all that done in four years. Yeah, I was like, well, I've been taking my time. Oh, my God. Jesus Christ. Oh, 14 to 18. Man.
You're listening to Bad Gaze, a podcast all about evil and complicated queer people in history. And we'd just like to take a moment to thank all our supporters over on Patreon. Yeah, it wouldn't be possible without you, and that's why we now have for Patreon supporters and Apple Podcast subscribers a new monthly podcast called Extra Bad Gays, and that's where we have more informal but still informed conversations about hot topics, current issues, current events, current culture.
But we do it with that same analysis that makes the show. So this last month, we just talked about this new gay fire island nightmare community that they want to build in the Mediterranean.
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And if you still feel like you haven't had your fill of bad gays, why not check out our book, which is available now. Bad gays are from a sexual history in hardback or paperback. And it's also now available in Italian translation and coming soon in Thai and in Spanish. And that's at badgayspod.com slash book. And our Patreon is patreon.com slash badgayspod. Or click subscribe in Apple Podcasts. Back to the show. Well, thank you for telling us that story, Hugh. That's...
Quite something. We did a lot of kind of crosstalk and backtalk and got into a lot of the issues, I think, during the episode. But the first one, that first question I want to ask you is, about the degree to which we should take all this seriously. A friend of the show and friend of mine, the artist Elijah Berger, is currently working on a
big kind of artistic research project about L.A. Gabalis that we've actually been talking about him a lot and he has a show up actually at the moment in Chicago and we've linked in the show notes to some documentation if you're interested in seeing the work that's come out of that. Yeah, so one of the things that he and I had been talking about was the degree to which this story is potentially apocryphal, right, was the kind of, were all these tales of lasciviousness and sexual immorality.
constructed as part of a kind of defense of Roman religion and Roman masculinity from this perceived threat from the East, or do we think that um, where there's bottom smoke, there's bottom fire. Um, I mean, I think, I think side bottom has a very good interpretation of it, which is that these things, these, these topo, these tropes, these, metaphors are supposed to tell a story is kind of what we're getting at.
they're supposed to yeah of course they're supposed to be these horrifying stories that reassure Romans they've got rid of this thing and they're tackling this threat from the east Those are probably built on some sort of nugget of truth that was understandable to the Roman public. So Cassius Dio is writing this matter of years after Elagabalus' death. He writes this long history of Roman emperors, but Elagabalus is the last one he deals with.
and he was 20 or 30 years older than Elagabalus. So the people who are reading this would have probably been alive during Elagabalus' reign, so he can't surely veer too much from the truth. I don't know. I mean, he could be veering from the truth quite a bit because he could be just right off this four-year religious deviation.
as a period of like when as soon as we kind of displace Jupiter um all hell broke loose and whatever i mean look no one wants to believe all of this more than i do i'm just playing devil's advocate and saying couldn't we imagine this being a way of kind of describing um
You know, all of the kind of hell that breaks loose when you displace the Roman Patriarch God from the center of the pantheon. Yeah, but what Sidebottom's saying is that if that's the case, why is he not discredited in a way that most of the other ones are discredited, which is saying, like, he fucked his sister and he fucked his mother.
Like, maybe saying, oh, he fucked his sister and he fucked his mother would not be believable to the Romans who'd lived through his reign who were like, he seemed like a fag. so why is he gonna fuck his mom yeah i mean so he builds these stories on something else which is this like other sort of gender transgression which i think is probably a smart reading of it yeah that seems smart to me um
Awesome. So, yeah, other than that Harry Sodbottom book, what sources would you recommend people go to if they wanted to learn more about this unbelievable human being? So yeah, like I said, I'd recommend that side-bottom book, The Mad Emperor, and one of the reasons I think it's really interesting is because he examines both these written and these material sources, that he looks at the coins and the statues and things like this as part of it.
So he doesn't just take those written sources as read. The other thing about Cybomb is he's a historical novelist. It's also extremely engaging and readable. It's a fun, weird book to read. I can't imagine this story being anything fun. I think if you managed to write the story in a way that wasn't fun, you were just a bad writer. Sorry. But he does come down to the side that, yeah, we should take the whole thing with a pinch of salt.
regarding the actual veracity of the sexual claims. That said... A lot of those claims come from the classical sources, so Cassius Dio's Roman history, of course, and then the Augustan history, which I mentioned. And then I also was talking about this early modern source I referred to, which was Edward Gibbon's decline and fall of the Roman Empire. which was like a big, big publishing feat, sort of big literary feat.
that sort of publicised and popularised a lot of discussion about the Roman Empire, but especially popularised this idea of the fall of the Roman Empire being about dismalate moral values Yeah, and speaking of dissolute moral values, Hugh, I know that you've traveled extensively around the area of the former Roman Empire and all. refrain from asking you on air what bathhouses have found the biggest coxswain, but maybe after we stop recording we can have that chat.
So that's our show. I'm Ben Miller. You can find me on the internet at BenWritesThings and at BenWritesThings.com. And you can find my newsletter at hugh.substack.com. And until next week, see you. Bye. Bye. Bye.