Elagabalus
Did you know there was a transgender Roman emperor? Meet Elagabalus.
In 217 AD, the tyrannical emperor Caracalla was assassinated. Caracalla's scheming aunt, Julia Maesa, convinced the soldiers of the Third Legion, who were loyal to Caracalla, that her grandson, Elagabalus, was Caracalla's illegitimate child (he wasn't). They defeated and deposed Caracalla's short-lived successor, and in 218 AD, Elagabalus was declared emperor. He was 14 years old.
His reign was noted for sex scandals and religious controversy, resulting in a reputation as one of the worst emperors, but some modern historians consider him not evil but just incompetent. At age 14, he was too immature to be given absolute power over the Roman world.
I like to think that the bust above, now in the Capitoline Museums in Rome, is a good likeness. It's from c. 221 AD, when he was 17 years old, and it shows a youth just starting to grow his first mustache.
No complete statues of Elagabalus have survived (you'll see why later). The statue above is said to have once been a statue of Elagabalus, but the head had been replaced by that of the next emperor. I photoshopped the head of Elagabalus onto the statue to show how it might have looked originally.
So, what was so bad about Elagabalus? He outraged religious Romans by replacing the head god Jupiter with a Syrian god Elagabal. The god's name then became attached to the young emperor, whose original name was Varius Avitus Bassianus. He married a Vestal Virgin (a priestess of the goddess Vesta), which was sacrilege; tradition held that a non-virginal Vestal Virgin should be buried alive.
The contemporary historian Cassius Dio (a juicy source, though probably not reliable) refers to Elagabalus as "she" and says that she married a man, a chariot driver named Hierocles, calling herself Hierocles' queen, and offering huge sums to any physician who could provide her with a vagina. Of course, transgender surgery didn't exist in those days. Another contemporary source, the Historia Augusta, says that Elagabalus appointed officials based on the size of their penis. Must have been an interesting civil service exam! We don't know if these accounts are true or not, but it's possible that Elagabalus was the first (and only) transgender emperor.
It didn't last long. In 222 AD, at the age of 18, Elagabalus was assassinated, and the Roman Senate ordered all images and records of him (or her) to be destroyed.
4 comments:
Ah, what pain power?
it is a case of damnatio memoriae (take a look here to konw a bit more)
Yes, and it happened to other emperors, too, including Nero, which is why so few statues of them have survived.
The use of feminine demonstratives (ea, illa, istud, haec) is probably deliberate propaganda, especially since emperor (imperator, one who gives orders) is a masculine noun, and grammatical gender has nothing to do with social gender or physical sex. So basically consider this the equivalent of "Obama wasn't born here" or "Trump's really poor".
The funny thing about the Roman Empire, adopted emperors were generally considered better than biological relatives; they're literally called the Good Emperors.
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