'Buy the book; it's very entertaining.' David Aaronovitch, The Times A Financial Times, BBC History and Spectator Book of the Year On 8 June 218 AD, a fourteen-year-old Syrian boy, egged on by his grandmother, led an army to battle in a Roman civil war. Against all expectations, he was victorious. Varius Avitus Bassianus, known to the modern world as Heliogabalus, was proclaimed emperor. The next four years were to be the strangest in the history of the empire. Heliogabalus humiliated the prestigious Senators and threw extravagant dinner parties for lower-class friends. He ousted Jupiter from his summit among the gods and replaced him with Elagabal. He married a Vestal Virgin – twice. Rumours abounded that he was a prostitute. In the first biography of Heliogabalus in over half a century, Harry Sidebottom unveils the high drama of sex, religion, power and culture in Ancient Rome as we’ve never seen it before.

Excerpt from The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus Religion may be neurotic in itself, but the scheme of Elagabalus was not essentially so. Certainly the course Of action by which he purposed to effect his ideal was not that of a mere sensualist. It Showed understanding, persistency, and dogged determina tion; it was not popular, because in the general incredulity, the earlier deities had lost even the immortality of mummies. Yet another reason which forced one to disagree with the usual summary of the character under discussion was that, despite (1) the awful accounts Of the imperial orgies; (2) the accusations brought against the cruelty and incompetency of the govern ment (3) the announcement that all good men were exterminated in the general lust for destruction Of such worthies; (4) the account of the class and calibre of the men employed in all state offices; (despite all this) the authors inform us that the state did not suffer from the effects of the reign. This was obviously an impossibility at the outset, and the terminological inexactitude became even more ap parent when all the known good men were mentioned as peaceably holding Office, not only during the reign in question, but in that of Elagabalus' lsuccessor; either they had been resurrected or had never been exterminated. Again, the account given Of the military policy is not that which would be the work of a weakling. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The first study to subject the life and reign of the so-called Emperor Elagabalus to a thorough historical investigation.

he Emperor who is studied in this volume has commonly been treated as if his reign had no significance, unless it were to show to what deep places the Roman Empire had sunk when such a monster of lubricity could wield the supreme power. If the chronicle of his naughty life has been exploited to illustrate the legend that the pagan society of the Empire was desperately wicked and infamously corrupt, he has not been taken seriously as a ruler. Yet Elagabalus (Heliogabalus) appeared under too ominous a constellation to justify us in dismissing his brief attempt to govern the world as unworthy of more than a superficial description and a facile condemnation. His reign lasted less than four years; but those years fell in a period which was critical for the future of European civilisation, and he was brought up in a circle intensely alive to the religious problems which were then moving the souls of men. Mr. Hay has broken new ground, and he has done history a service, in making Elagabalus the subject of a serious and systematic study.