Rome's most reviled teenage emperor may have been smeared by hostile historians
Elagabalus became emperor at 14 and was murdered at 18, and for centuries writers ranked him among Rome's worst rulers. But almost everything scandalous about him comes from a senator who loathed him and a much later, unreliable history. Modern scholars suspect politics and prejudice against Easterners coloured the portrait.
He was born around 204 into a powerful Syrian Arab family at Emesa, modern Homs, which held the hereditary priesthood of a sun god called Elagabal, meaning God of the Mountain. As a boy he served as its high priest. His grandmother Julia Maesa was sister-in-law to the emperor Septimius Severus, and when the new emperor Macrinus exiled the family to Syria, she set out to put her grandson on the throne.
Her plan relied on a rumour, publicly backed by the boy's mother, that he was the secret son of the murdered emperor Caracalla. Soldiers of the Third Legion, who had done well under Caracalla and resented Macrinus, proclaimed him emperor at sunrise on 16 May 218, perhaps helped by Maesa's money. He took Caracalla's official name, and within weeks his forces defeated Macrinus near Antioch. Oddly, he became known by the Latinised name of his god only after his death.
In Rome he broke with tradition by installing his god, represented by a large sacred stone, at the heart of the city's religion, and by making senior officials join rites he led personally. Cassius Dio and the Historia Augusta add lurid stories: four marriages, including one to a Vestal Virgin, male favourites, and worse. His conduct alienated the Praetorian Guard, the Senate and ordinary Romans alike, and in March 222 guardsmen acting on a plot by Maesa herself killed him and installed his cousin Severus Alexander.
Later verdicts were brutal. Edward Gibbon described him as surrendering to the grossest pleasures, and the historian Adrian Goldsworthy judged him no tyrant but probably the least capable emperor Rome ever had. A minority view is kinder: the Byzantine chronicler John Malalas praised his religious reforms, and historian Warwick Ball calls him a tragic enigma buried under centuries of prejudice.
Source: Elagabalus
