A Very Bad Emperor Indeed: An Exclusive Guest Post from Mary Beard, Author of Emperor of Rome

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My least favourite Roman emperor?

At first sight, this isn’t a difficult choice. It has to be the early third-century emperor Elagabalus (on the Roman throne from 218 to 222 CE). Although not a household name today, he’s the kind of ruler who, by all accounts, would make the emperor Nero look like a pussy-cat. 

The stories told about him include a streak of sheer sadism (he was supposed to be keen on child sacrifice), but they focus more often on excessive and perverted luxury. He had an Imelda-Marcos-style shoe habit (he never wore the same pair twice), and he fed his pet dogs foie gras (an indulgence to his animals not unlike that of Queen Elizabeth II, whose corgis were reputed to have eaten out of silver bowls). 

His nasty habits were most vividly on view at his dinner parties. He would serve fake food in wax or wood to his least important guests, so that, tummies rumbling, they would simply have to look on, while their “betters” tucked into an edible banquet. In an early version of the whoopee cushion, he had some of his guests seated on inflatables, leaving them on the floor at the end of the evening, after his slaves had gradually let the air out. His most flamboyant, and deadly, trick was to shower rose petals over the assembled company — in such limitless profusion that the guests were smothered and died. 

Elagabalus was an extreme version — almost a caricature — of a very bad Roman emperor indeed.

But when I came to write my new book Emperor of Rome, I began to think about Elagabalus rather differently. It’s not that I decided he had been terribly maligned and was probably a decent kind of chap after all. But I did see that many of the stories told about him were more pointed than just random tales of capricious misbehaviour on the part of a teenaged emperor — he was about 18 years old when he was, predictably, assassinated in 222 CE.

True or not (and many, I suspect, were not), these flamboyant anecdotes often highlight the fears and suspicions that the Roman population had of their rulers. The story of the rose petals is a good example of that. Its moral is not just that the emperor was capable of thoughtless destruction. More precisely it is a chilling reminder that imperial generosity can be deadly. Other anecdotes point to similar anxieties. Elagabalus was supposed to have worked by night and slept by day, to have eaten fish only when he was inland, never by the seaside, and to have decorated his summer gardens with snow and ice. In other words, the emperor turned the natural order of things upside-down. When you were in his orbit, you could never quite believe what you saw (think about that fake food).

This was one of the starting points for my book. Elagabalus helped me see that there were more profound critiques of imperial power buried in these quirky anecdotes. And I set out to tell the story of what they were really saying.

So, I have a lot to thank him for. But I still don’t think that I would be accepting one of his dinner invitations.