Elagabalus

Elagabalus was Roman emperor from AD 218 to 222, acceded at about fourteen, and was killed at eighteen after attempting to install a Syrian sun god at the head of the Roman state religion. Born Varius Avitus Bassianus around 204 in Syria, he was a grandnephew of Julia Domna and hereditary priest of Elagabal, the deity of Emesa represented by a black conical stone. His grandmother Julia Maesa engineered his accession by putting about that he was Caracalla's illegitimate son, buying the loyalty of a legion near Emesa; the army defeated and killed Macrinus in 218. He entered Rome in 219 having sent ahead a portrait of himself sacrificing in Syrian priestly dress, so the Senate could accustom itself. He brought the black stone with him, built a temple for it on the Palatine, and made Elagabal the chief god of the empire, above Jupiter — an inversion no Roman audience would accept. He is said to have ceremonially married the god to Roman goddesses, and to have transferred the sacred objects of Rome into his own temple to subordinate them. The surviving sources, chiefly Cassius Dio and the unreliable Historia Augusta, describe him marrying a Vestal Virgin, marrying a chariot driver named Hierocles and calling himself his wife, prostituting himself in the palace, and asking physicians to give him female anatomy. How much is fact and how much is the standard rhetoric used against a defeated ruler cannot be recovered, though some modern writers read the accounts as evidence of a transgender identity. Maesa transferred her support to his cousin Severus Alexander. The Praetorians killed both Elagabalus and his mother in March 222 and threw the bodies in the Tiber.

• Lived: 204 CE – 222 CE
• Nationality: Syrian
• Roles: ruler