He sacrificed a lot of animals to the sun god in front of the French tickler stone at the altars of the temple, with the senators in attendance and a lot of important officials made to wear Phoenician clothes and linen shoes. This was NOT appreciated. I wouldn't wear Phoenician clothes, would you? And what ARE Phoenician clothes anyway? I know what linen shoes are. They give them to psychiatric patients who eat leather ones. I've never worn them. Well, once, but I won't go into that.
To make matters worse as far as his reputation was concerned, he tried to make the sun god the only god in Rome. He said that the Eastern god would have precedence even over Jupiter himself. He attempted to create a kind of monotheism where all other gods would be slaves to his sun god. He tried to remove sacred symbols of other religions to his sun god temple and forced Christians and Jews to worship at them.
Then for his next trick he married a statue.
The plan was to marry the statue of Pallas, a sacred statue brought from Troy (so they said). It was kept in the temple of Vesta and guarded by the Vestal virgins. Part of Gabby's plan involved marrying one of the vestals, scandalous in itself. Such a ruckus and hullabaloo ensued that poor Gabby had to content himself with marrying a different statue, Urania, the moon goddess. This is the first recorded instance of the use of a love doll by a deranged head of state.
Then he built a huge eastern style temple of the sun on the edge of Rome (none of these buildings survive today) and had a grand procession every year to the temple with the French tickler stone riding in a chariot and Elegabalus running backwards in front of it so as not to turn his back on the stone.
Gabby's bizarre sex life is well chronicled by the ancient historians. I have already mentioned his marriage to the vestal virgin Julia Aquillia Severa. Vestals were supposed to remain virgins for their tenure. Sexual intercourse was punished by being buried alive. Four vestals had been executed in Caracalla's reign alone, which had only been a few years before. Elagabalus, however, defended himself on the grounds that marriage between priests could only lead to godlike children.
He was to have three wives in the four years he was emperor. He was also to have at least one husband.
"The husband of this 'woman'", writes Cassius Dio (LXXX.15), "was Hierocles, a Carian slave once the favorite of Gordius from whom he learned to drive a chariot," as if driving a chariot explained everything.
Homosexuality, though practiced in ancient Rome, was not considered respectable, least of all in the flagrantly spine-tingling form it was practiced by Gabby. He would dress up in a wig like a woman, go to taverns and work as a prostitute, then went to brothels and threw out the whores so he could have his pick of clients. At home he dressed in women's clothes and a tiara and allowed his "husband" Hierocles to beat him if he were a bad girl. Large sums of money were offered to palace physicians for a method of introducing a vagina into his body by means of incisions. He also sent agents out all over Rome to canvass for men with giant penises so they could be brought back to do the nasty snake dance with him. I wonder if Hierocles beat him for being a slut, too.
Back on the political front, Elagabalus was giving everyone apoplexy by appointing common people to positions of enormous power. His praetorian guard, for example, was the son of a dancer. This may not be so scandalous now but in ancient Rome it was tantamount to giving the job of police chief to one of those guys at a traffic light on the bowery who cleans your car window with gobbets of thick spittle and a filthy piece of cheesecloth.
Needless to say there were rebellions almost from the first year of his reign. By 221 his own family jumped on the bandwagon of discontent. They persuaded Gabby to adopt his cousin Bassianus Alexianus. Late in 221 the cousins became bitter rivals and Elagabalus tried to have Bassianus, later to become the emperor Alexander Severus, murdered. The plot failed. On March 11 222, during a visit to the praetorian camp he went into a tizzy because of the preference and support being shown to his cousin. He ordered arrests and executions of anyone and everyone involved with Bassianus. The soldiers had had enough, though. They chased him into the bathroom and murdered him (another account says he was hiding in a box). They killed his mother as well and joyfully dragged their bodies through the streets of Rome and later threw them into the Tiber.
So what good did he do? Well, if you're a fan of Screw magazine I guess you could say that Gabby was the father of modern perversion. He surely stretched the limits of what cheap thrills you could get if you've got a good job, connections and a love doll made out of stone.
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