The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus 1911

The life of Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, generally known to the world as Heliogabalus, is as yet shrouded in impenetrable mystery. The picture we have of the reign is that of an imperial orgy—sacrilegious, necromantic, and obscene. The boy Emperor, who reigned from his fourteenth to his eighteenth year, is depicted amongst that crowd of tyrants who held the throne of Imperial Rome, with the help of the praetorian army, as one of the most tyrannical, certainly as the most debased. The present writer started this study with the view that the Syrian boy-Emperor was, in all probability, what his biographers have painted him, and what all other writers have accepted as being a substantially correct account of the absence of mind, will, policy, and authority which he was supposed to have betrayed, along with other even more reprehensible characteristics.

Varius is the nomen of the Roman emperor misnamed Elagabalus or Heliogabalus. These are names of the Syrian sun god Elagabal, whose high priest Varius was while emperor. There is no evidence that he was ever so called when alive. Thus named, his posthumous legendary or mythical avatar thrives, in academic prose and popular imagination, as a Semitic monster of cruelty, depravity, fanaticism, mockery and extravagance. Recently, this monster has metamorphosed into an anarchist saint and martyr of gay liberation. This volume explores the historical individual behind Elagabalus and Heliogabalus. Varius was probably born AD 204 in Rome, to Syro-Roman parents linked to the Severan dynasty, and brought up at the imperial court, which spent 208–211 in Britain. After his father’s death in Numidia or Italy, sometime between 214 and 218 Varius went to Syria, where, like a maternal ancestor, he became a priest of Elagabal. In Syria in 217, Macrinus murdered and succeeded the Severan emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, even then known by his nickname, Caracalla. In 218, in a coup against Macrinus, Varius, fourteen, was proclaimed emperor, on the basis of the lie, launched by his grandmother, Caracalla’s aunt, and abetted by his mother, Caracalla’s cousin, that he was Caracalla’s bastard. Varius’ grandmother intended to rule while he reigned. But Varius, now Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, had other ideas. Taking the god Elagabal, a meteorite, to Rome he sought to combine the incompatible personae of Roman emperor and High Priest of Elagabal. He was murdered in 222 before reaching eighteen by his praetorian guards, under the orders of his grandmother and aunt, to make way for his younger, more docile cousin, Alexianus, who reigned as Severus Alexander. Rhetorical invective against Varius was promptly launched to justify his murder. It grew into his mythical or legendary avatar: Elagabalus or Heliogabalus. That avatar came completely to overshadow the historical Varius. This book serves to rescue Varius for history from eighteen centuries spent in fantasy and fiction.

This book presents a selection of the most important scholarship on Augustus and the contribution he made to the development of the Roman state in the early imperial period.

Heliogabalus and Elagabalus are names given since late antiquity to the mythical or legendary avatar of Varius Avitus Bassianus. Varius was Roman emperor AD 218–222, ruling as Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. He was simultaneously High Priest of the Syrian sun god Elagabal. Heliogabalus and Elagabalus, names derived from Elagabal, are often used as misnomers for Varius himself, but more properly designate his avatar, who is far better known than Varius. The Varian avatar, under these and other names, survives and thrives in historiography, as well as in more avowedly creative literature, music, dance, the visual arts, and popular culture. This book, the third in Varian Studies, is partly based on the Varian Symposium, held in Cambridge in 2005. It contains studies of the historical Varius, of some of his courtiers, of his god Elagabal, and of his avatar, Heliogabalus or Elagabalus.

Elagabal is the name of the Syrian sun god whose high priest Varius was, at the same time as Roman emperor, AD 218–222. Because of this connexion, Varius was misnamed Heliogabalus or Elagabalus long after his death. Second in the series Varian Studies, this book discusses Elagabal’s architectural and sculptural artefacts in Rome. These are represented by the Palatine site of the Varian Temple of Elagabal in Rome, and by relief sculpture on column capitals found in the Roman Forum, showing Elagabal with other deities, in a scene of sacrifice here reconstructed as Elagabal’s Idyll. The Varian Temple of Elagabal in Rome confirms on topographical grounds an hypothesis regarding the site of that temple on the Palatine, concurring with current archaeological opinion based on other grounds. It also shows that the site in question has definite astronomical implications. Elagabal’s Idyll gives a full account of scholarship concerning the three column capitals and the debate about their origin and function. It then goes on to analyse the iconography of one of them in order to explore the cosmology, theology and ritual of the cult of Elagabal.