BOOK: Martijn Icks, "The Crimes of Elagabalus"

Martijn Icks: The Crimes of Elagabalus: The Life and Legacy of Rome's Decadent Boy Emperor. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2013. 9781780765501. xi + 276 pp.

Elagabalus was an early-3rd-century Roman emperor who, if he isn't quite as notorious as Nero or Caligula, it certainly isn't for want of trying. I'm not sure when I first heard of him, but it was probably in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (see the quotations at the end of this post). Later I encountered him again in Alma-Tadema's beautiful painting The Roses of Heliogabalus, which illustrates one of the ancient anecdotes about him: supposedly, as a sort of cruel prank, he had a massive pile of rose petals thrown upon some of his guests, some of whom actually suffocated before they could dig themselves out.

When I saw that someone wrote a whole book about this curious and bizarre figure, I naturally couldn't resist buying and eventually reading it. It seems to be based on the author's PhD thesis, and I was very glad to see that it exhibits almost none of the faults that such books usually have. Usually they end up being too pedantic and retaining too much of the irrelevant stuff that a PhD thesis is supposed to have but that isn't really of interest to anyone except perhaps the thesis committee (or, let's be honest, probably not even them :]). But there is nothing of that here; it's a pleasant and readable book, and perhaps the only trace of its origins is the careful way it's structured (for example, each chapter has a short conclusion at the end) and the amount of attention it devotes to changes in historiographical trends over the centuries.

The book is partly about Elagabalus himself, but partly also about his ‘afterlife’ — the way he was presented over the centuries since his death, both in fiction and in non-fiction. I found both aspects of the book very interesting. Elagabalus originated from the town of Emesa in Syria; his family had been locally prominent there for a while, but their big break came when the future emperor Septimius Severus married into it (pp. 50, 54, 58). Elagabalus became emperor at the tender age of 14 thanks to the machinations of his relatives, especially his ambitious grandmother Julia Maesa (Severus's sister-in-law), who passed him off as an illegitimate son of the late emperor Caracalla (Severus's son, who was actually a cousin of Elagabalus's mother; pp. 10–11).

Clearly the idea was for Elagabalus to be a puppet in the hands of his older relatives and various other people, but he got harder to control as he got older (p. 27). Like many members of his family, he was heavily involved in the cult of Elagabal, a local deity that had started as a mountain god (hence its name: El = god, Gabal = mountain) but later became a sun god (pp. 48–9). About two years after becoming emperor, Elagabalus tried to push a big religious reform with Elagabal becoming the main god of the Roman state religion, with Elagabalus as his high-priest (p. 29). He built two large temples to Elagabal in Rome and brought from Emesa a large black stone that represented the new god and was then moved periodically from one temple to another with great ceremony (p. 30). These and other similar outrages (such as marrying a vestal virgin; p. 31) made him increasingly unpopular with pretty much everyone, including the his relatives and the army, so that he was eventually killed (having reigned for only four years) and his younger cousin, Severus Alexander, installed as a new emperor. Elagabalus's reforms were reversed and his memory condemned (p. 43).

Icks pays a lot of attention not only to the story of Elagabalus's life and career, but also to how it can be reconstructed and what sources are available concerning it. I liked this aspect of the book a lot since it gives us a peek behind the curtains, so to speak, showing us how historians figure things out. There are three main written sources about him: the accounts of Dio Cassius and Herodian, contemporaries of Elagabalus, and a biography in the Augustan History, written one or two centuries later. Icks points out that each of these sources has certain biases, and in particular the last of these, since it was written so long after Elagabalus's time, could afford to embellish the story with exaggerations or even outright fabrications (p. 121). Another important source are coins and inscriptions, which give us an idea of what sort of image the emperor tried to promote to the public (chap. 3).

The second half or so of the book deals with Elagabalus's ‘afterlife’, and I was impressed by the amount of works mentioning Elagabalus that Icks has managed to dig up; many of them are quite obscure. Many authors, especially in earlier times, tended to rely too uncritically on the three written accounts mentioned earlier, repeating their most outrageous anecdotes as if they were solid, reliable facts. They mostly show Elagabalus as an example of a grotesquely bad ruler, a cruel tyrant, etc. (Icks points out that from the perspective of the empire as a whole, the administration during the four years of Elagabalus' rule wasn't unusually bad — the country was stable, etc. (pp. 88, 215). As long as you weren't in Rome, dodging rose petals (p. 112) and large felines (p. 110) at Elagabalus's dinner-parties, you might hardly even notice that there was anything particularly bad about him.)

One of the reasons why the Icks tends to be skeptical of many of the more outrageous anecdotes about Elagabalus is that they fit so neatly into well-established tropes (or “topoi” as he calls them; p. 93) of writing about tyrants, effeminate Orientals, homosexuals, etc. For example, he points out that Dio describes Augustus as an example of a nearly-ideal emperor early in his work, and that his description of Elagabalus is pretty much the exact opposite of this ideal on all counts (pp. 94–5).

A curious mention of Elagabalus in the Renaissance: the historian Leonardo Bruni wrote a fictional ‘Oration of Elagabalus to the harlots’ through which he “criticises the (perceived) decadence of Renaissance Rome. [. . .] Heliogabalus tells his audience that there is too much chastity in the capital. To remedy this unfortunate state of affairs, he introduces a new law, decreeing that all women will be public property from now on.” (P. 129.) Emperor of the incels :)))

As late as the 19th century, historians still portrayed him negatively. One Johann Schiller, writing in 1883, said that “his reign is verily a witches' Sabbath of fornication, excesses and luxury” (p. 153). Woo hoo :) A notable change in depictions of Elagabalus took place in the late 19th century with the Decadent movement, when artists started portraying him slightly more sympathetically. His “desire to be larger than life” (p. 159) appealed to the decadent sensibilities, and his excesses could be linked to the idea of ‘art for art's sake’ so beloved of the decadents (p. 170) — except that in the case of Elagabalus, I guess, his medium was not stone or paint, but life. A notable example is Stefan George's cycle of poems, Algabal, whose protagonist is a “monarch-artist” somewhat reminiscent of the ‘Mad King’ Ludwig of Bavaria (p. 173).

In the 20th and 21st century the range of portrayals of Elagabalus has expanded still further, and you can't help feeling that many authors just use him as a canvas on which they project whatever it is that they are personally interested in, often something having to do with homosexuality or androgyny (the latter is actually not associated with him by any ancient source, p. 217), or not fitting into society's established gender roles. He is no longer seen as a cruel tyrant or degenerate Easterner like before, but as a misunderstood individual who stands up to the unreasonable strictures of a conservative and intolerant society (most of these works seem to predate the rise of the modern clickbait websites, otherwise they would probably add: ‘and that's a good thing’ :P).

Frankly, I liked him better as a degenerate tyrant :)

An interesting-looking 20th-century appearance of Elagabalus: Heliogabalus, a Buffoonery in Three Acts (1920), co-authored by H. L. Mencken, sounds like a light-hearted play that pokes fun both at the emperor's desperately decadent excesses and on the prudish morality of his overzealous Christian contemporaries (and those of Mencken's own day); pp. 187–8.

Historians also take a greater interest in him than before; several monographs about him appeared (though judging by Icks' description, the quality of many of them leaves much to be desired; pp. 182–6), and they began to increasingly treat the ancient sources with due skepticism. The only thing I really disliked about these developments is the evident creep of political corectness into historians' views of Elagabalus. Like, before the late 19th century people would say: ‘Elagabalus was an effeminate, degenerate, greasy Easterner, and therefore the embodiment of everything that is bad and wrong.’ The Decadents said: ‘Elagabalus was an effeminate, degenerate, greasy Easterner, and that's awesome! That's just why we like him!’ But modern-day political correctness says: ‘How dare you even imagine that one culture could be inferior to another, you evil racist imperialist orientalist ist ist ist. . . ’

And this last stage, it seems, is where we are now. Ickes writes that “hostile rhetoric concerning ‘Orientals’, let alone Semites, has mostly gone out of scholarly fashion. As a result, the portrayal of Elagabalus in handbooks and reference books tends to be a lot more nuanced than it used to be.” (P. 187.) He quotes, as an example, the description of Elagabalus in two editions of Cambridge Ancient History, 1939 (featuring some fine, nearly Gibbonesque writing: “the obscenities of a Syrian cult”) and 2005 (where the worst thing they dare to say of him is that he was “undiplomatic”). Clearly Icks is on board with these developments, and buys into Said's orientalism thing and all that (p. 154), but I for my part can't help feeling that, if you can no longer call even Elagabalus a degenerate, things have really gone too far.

The book ends with an interesting list of appearances of Elagabalus in media (pp. 219–23). I was particularly impressed by the variety there — besides novels and the like, you can find plays, music albums, two operas (one from the 17th century (pp. 134–7) and one from 2003 (“like an ancient Michael Jackson”, p. 193), comics (one by Neil Gaiman!), even a nice oil painting, etc. The only thing missing is a video game :)

The author's delightful eclecticism in seeking out the references to Elagabalus also shows itself in the plates section. There are plates showing the coins minted during his reign, a few paintings including Alma-Tadema's (unfortunately in grayscale, which robs it of much of its charm), but finally there's a photo of an Italian store called “Eliogabalo”: they sell designer clothes, but “[a]ppropriately for an emperor who worshipped the sun, there is a tanning salon above” :)))

All in all, this was a very interesting book and I would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in Elagabalus.

ToRead:

• Leonardo de Arrizabalaga y Prado: The Emperor Elagabalus: Fact or Fiction (2010), another recent book about Elagabalus, seems potentially interesting. Icks wrote an interesting review of this book, and it seems that Prado adopted an excessively skeptical approach, the description of which sounded to me as something that would happen if you tried to replace the historians with the cyc inference engine :)) Prado later edited and published several volumes of “Varian Studies” (e.g. Vol. 3), named after Elagabalus' original first name (Varius).
• R. Gilman: Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet (NY, 1979). Mentioned here in the bibliography on p. 262

P.S. I went and re-read what Gibbon had written about Elagabalus in his Decline and Fall and here are a few of my favourite passages:

“The grave senators confessed with a sigh, that, after having long experienced the stern tyranny of their own countrymen, Rome was at length humbled beneath the effeminate luxury of Oriental despotism.”

“Elagabalus [. . .] corrupted by his youth, his country, and his fortune, abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures with ungoverned fury, and soon found disgust and satiety in the midst of his enjoyments.”

Gibbon on the “vices and follies of Elagabalus”: “their inexpressible infamy surpasses that of any other age or country”.

“The emperor [. . .] viewing every rank of his subjects with the same contemptuous indifference, asserted without control his sovereign privilege of lust and luxury.”

P.P.S. Some time after buying a printed copy of this book, I was pleasantly surprised to see that it is also available online: link. It seems to be a slightly earlier version than my paper copy; for example, the URL of Matt Hugher's painting on p. 222 of my printed edition is different and more recent (“accessed 9 August 2012”) than on the web page (“accessed 27 September 2007”). Interestingly, the description under that painting on Hughes' website now just calls it “Ceasar” (sic), without mentioning Elagabalus.