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The 20th century is full of gender nonconforming figures whom we’re only just starting now to give the respect and recognition they deserve.
But there are many more figures in transgender history if we go back farther than recent memory.
In case this is your first time, welcome. I’m Sophie, and this is We Have Always Existed. It’s a show where we explore some of the examples of transgender history that we see in the ancient Mediterranean.
Last time we explored the Scythians, and what life was like as a trans feminine person in their culture. But we didn’t have any examples of individual trans Scythians, just broader cultural ideas.
It’s not often that we get a detailed, in-depth account of a transgender individual’s life in antiquity. But in the case of Elagabalus, we do.
Elagabalus was Roman emperor from 218 to 222 CE, and many modern readings through a queer lens would call her an example of a historical transgender woman.
That’s right ladies, for four brief years, we were in charge of the largest, most powerful empire on the planet.
You know, that empire weirdo fascist white dudes obsess over? Well it turns out there was a lot more degeneracy than they’d like to admit.
Most of what we know about Elagabalus comes from old straight white guys, and I think she deserves more attention from a queer perspective.
I’ll be referring to Elagabalus with she/her pronouns, and I’m editing all the quotes I use from Roman sources to reflect that. I think it takes away a bit of the bite of her story to do so, since when I get to the point where we talk about her wearing women’s clothing it just doesn’t seem like that big of a deal as it does if I use he/him pronouns like some of our Roman sources did.
Because despite all the gender transgression, they saw Elagabalus as a degenerate boy-king. But the sources we have on Elagabalus make it very clear she was a lady and was to be treated as such. And I’m not going to be out here disrespecting a fellow trans person’s pronouns, even if she’s been dead for 1800 years.
And even if she wasn’t actually trans – we’ll get into that.
We’ll start with an account of her life, as best we know it, and then we’ll take a look at who told us about her and how trustworthy they are. Then, we’ll dig more into what it was exactly that gave Elagabalus her famously terrible reputation, the arguments against claiming her as a transgender figure, some of which are actually compelling, and explore how this relates to the lives of 21st century trans folks.
Chapter I: The Life Of Elagabalus
Before we dive right into Elagabalus, I want to talk a bit about the Roman state in general. There are a lot of other great series out there if you want to do a deep dive into Rome, but for our purposes I just want to spend a moment setting the stage, so you can have a better understanding of context, and because this is my series and I can do what I want. Cope.
We’ll get to the queer stuff soon though, don’t worry.
The city of Rome was founded in the year 753 BCE. It began as a kingdom, and then became a republic when the people overthrew the monarchy and decided they were done with kings forever, they were more trouble than they were worth. Instead they would have a Senate that made decisions for the people.
And that worked.
For a few hundred years.
In the year 27 BCE, though, after more than a century of civil war between various powerful generals, the Senate declared Octavian, the adopted son of Julius Caesar, to be the first Roman Emperor. We know him as the emperor Augustus.
But he was totally not a king! The Senate declared him princeps, which is where we get the word prince, but in Latin meant something more like “first citizen,” or “first among equals.” But I mean, it was a hereditary title. He held absolute power for life. If it quacks like a duck…
Augustus was the first emperor, but certainly not the last. After his death in the year 14 CE, the next four emperors were his relatives – Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero. We call these guys the Julio-Claudian dynasty. At the death of the emperor Nero, who died without an heir, they’d run out of Julio-Claudians, and four different guys would take power from each other in the year 69. The fourth guy was Vespasian, who actually managed to hold power and stick around. He’s the guy who built the Colosseum. He was the first outside of Augustus to establish a dynasty, but he wouldn’t be the last.
Fast forward a dozen emperors or so, and Septimius Severus takes over in the year 193. He was born in Lepcis Magna in modern-day Libya, making him the first African to rule as emperor, and it’s his dynasty Elagabalus is a part of. His sons Caracalla and Geta succeeded him as co-emperors in 211, then Caracalla murdered Geta and sat as sole emperor before his guard captain Macrinus murdered him and took the throne for himself.
Rather than executing Caracalla’s family, Macrinus exiled them from the city. Big mistake.
They fled to their estate in Emesa, in the Roman province of Syria, which today is called Homs. When they arrived, they raised an army to counter Macrinus, claiming the legitimate heir to the throne was a young priest named Varius Avitus Bassianus, whom we know as Elagabalus. They claimed this because they said Caracalla was Elagabalus’ father, which wasn’t true – but they were related. They were cousins, in fact.
There were some battles and a bunch of other boring junk – military history is the least interesting part of history as far as I’m concerned – but eventually, Macrinus and his son were both killed, and Elagabalus was installed as emperor in the year 218 CE, at just fourteen years old.
Now, I’m going to be skimming over quite a bit of nuance in this story, because if I did a detailed life of Elagabalus this video would be eight hours long, and I don’t have time to edit that and you don’t have time to watch that. Entire books have been written on exploring the nuances of her life, and they’ve done a much better job than I would, so I’m not even going to try. But if you do want to know more, I highly recommend the book The Crimes Of Elagabalus by Martijn Icks, who digs in really deep and explores some of the different descriptions of events from each source we have, and how likely each one is to be true.
Anyway, I already mentioned she was emperor until 222 CE – spoiler alert, Elagabalus isn’t emperor anymore – shocking, I know – so the mathletes among you might have figured out her reign ended when she was 18.
Now remember before that I mentioned Elagabalus has a famously bad historical reputation. That’s true, she does. But I’m in my 30s, and I try to imagine myself at, ahem, less than half of my age, taking care of anything more than my little slice of the world and the cats who live in it, and it’s just not happening. And I like to think of myself as one of the more functioning millennials out there
So let’s keep that in mind as we go.
Anyway, let’s talk about names. I mentioned above that her name was Varius Avitus Basianus, so why do we call her Elagabalus?
Before I answer that question, I’m going to make it even more complicated. When she became emperor, she took the name Imperator Caesar Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Pius Felix Augustus. So I’m sorry to have deadnamed you darling.
There’s a whole lot in that name, so let’s break it down. Imperator means leader, Augustus means “honoured one”, and Caesar just meant Caesar, the guy’s name – these were all honorary titles that a lot of emperors took on. Felix means fortunate, but like in a successful way, not in a happy go lucky way, Antoninus Pius was the name of a popular emperor in recent memory, and so was Marcus Aurelius. More important, though, Marcus Aurelius was Caracalla’s name, which excited the military since the previous emperor Macrinus wasn’t terribly popular with them, but Caracalla was.
So uh, if Caracalla’s name was Marcus Aurelius, why do we call him Caracalla?
There was never a clearly established path of succession for Roman emperors, and a lot of them who took power through more violent means were fully aware of how illegitimate their power might seem. As a result, most of them took the name of a previously popular guy to try and legitimize themselves.
But it can get confusing to keep track of it all. For example with Elagabalus – do we call her Antoninus Pius the third, or Marcus Aurelius the fourth, or Augustus the 26th, or do we spell out that entire alphabet soup of her name every time?
None of those options are great, so historians decided to just give each emperor their own unique name. It’s unlikely anybody ever referred to her as Elagabalus during her lifetime – same with Caracalla.
So where does the name Elagabalus come from? She was a priest of the eastern Sun god Elagabal. That’s it. The god has several names, including Elagabalus, but I’m going to refer to the god as Elagabal, and the human as Elagabalus, to make it easier on all of us, there’s enough confusion around names in this video as it is.
Anyway, it’s the year 218 CE, and Elagabalus is now the 14 year old emperor of the Roman Empire.
She spent the first winter of her rule in Nicomedia, a Greek city on the northwestern coast of Turkey, close to modern day Istanbul, and far from modern day Batman. While there, she sent word to Rome that the deceased Macrinus would suffer damnatio memoriae – a Roman practice of damning the memory of a previous emperor or senator. This was a little controversial, but certainly not the first time it happened – Macrinus was in fact the sixth emperor who got this treatment, and he would not be the last.
Elagabalus also declared all members of the senate would receive amnesty, which was a big deal since Macrinus got them to denounce Elagabalus just a few months prior, and it wasn’t unheard of for newly minted emperors to execute a whole bunch of senators who were loyal to the previous guy. But she didn’t do that. This gave her a pretty good reputation to start. The senate had a great feeling and believed it was the beginning of a good emperor’s reign.
Narrator: it was not, in fact, the beginning of a good emperor’s reign
It was clear right away that Elagabalus wasn’t a typical Roman. Her family held hereditary rights to the high priesthood of the cult of the Sun god Elagabal, which was tolerated within the empire but not particularly well respected. Rome was still thoroughly pagan at this point, so the Romans mostly worshipped their state pantheon – Jupiter, Juno, Mars, Venus, Minerva, and so on. Elagabalus worshipping her sun god would have been a big shift in what the people were used to, and she knew that. So she had a portrait of herself sent to Rome before she arrived so the people wouldn’t be surprised by her “eastern garb.”
What’s eastern garb? Our sources give us a little more information.
For example, the historian Herodian tells us Elagabalus:
wore the richest clothing, draping herself in purple robes embroidered in gold; to her necklaces and bracelets she added a crown, a tiara glittering with gold and jewels…suitable only for women….her face [was] painted more elaborately than that of any modest woman, dancing in luxurious robes and effeminately adorned with gold necklaces.”
She had all her body hair removed as well, and insisted on being referred to as a lady, not a lord.
Those of you at home following along have probably put the pieces together here – Elagabalus doesn’t seem to be wearing “eastern garb” – but rather, wearing women’s clothing and presenting as a woman.
But the people of the city of Rome might have actually accepted the “eastern garb” explanation – at least at first, since most of them would have had very little experience with the Eastern part of the empire. Syria was a popular tourist area for the upper classes, but so was Greece, Spain, Egypt, and Sicily, so even the senate might not have recognized it.
It’s hard to picture it today with so much mass communication and satellites and stuff, but imagine if I discovered some long lost continent where humans had built a civilization as advanced as ours, and told them that yes I’m a man, absolutely, this is just how men dress and act in the rest of the world. Would they buy it? Maybe.
However, there were also some well-worn racist tropes among Romans about easterners – that is, Greece and everything east of it – being weak and effeminate, so some modern historians suggest that our ancient sources were just painting Elagabalus with the same brush – we’ll get more into that later.
Interestingly, the way Herodian describes Elagabalus’ clothing is similar to how historians describe the Gallae, a group of trans feminine priestesses of the goddess Cybele. We’re going to do a deep dive on them in a future episode, but they were also known for wearing women’s clothing, heavy makeup, and tiaras on their heads.
RELATED: Introduction to the Gallae
RELATED: Worship Practices of the Gallae
Anyway, the following spring, Elagabalus and her entourage made their way to Rome, quelling mutinies and executing those loyal to Macrinus along the way.
One of the first things she did after assembling the senate for the first time was to grant both her mother Julia Soaemias and grandmother Julia Maesa senatorial titles. This gave the two the honour of being the first women in Roman history who sat in the Senate as equals, which would have been quite shocking to the poor frail sensibilities of the Roman senators.
The author of the Historia Augusta, which we’ll talk more about soon, says they “attended the senate like a man.” If we knew more about these two women, they might be an interesting topic, but unfortunately we don’t know much about them outside of Elagabalus’ life.
Next, she began her religious reforms. I’m going to do my best to explain why this was such a weird time for Rome, but I don’t think it’s possible to overstate it.
First, she declared her god Elagabal was the primary figure in the Roman pantheon, replacing Jupiter.
As well, she married a Vestal Virgin, a sworn virgin who had devoted herself to the worship of the god Vesta – very verboten.
She had herself circumcised – very unusual in Roman society – and refused to eat pork, built a temple to Elagabal on the Palatine Hill, and threw a festival for the god every summer solstice. This was the same hill where the temple of Kybele was built and where the Gallae spent their time, interestingly enough. It was a wild party where the emperor would distribute food to the masses and parade a statue of the god on a chariot through the city. This was popular with the lower classes, but offensive to the senate and military.
The biggest deal, though, was that she moved many important relics from various shrines around the city to the temple of Elagabal she had built. This way, if anyone were to pay tribute to another god, they’d have to pay tribute to Elagabal at the same time, including the Christian and Jewish god.
Alright, let’s take a step back. This stuff probably seems like might have been important on the surface, but out of context it doesn’t make a lot of sense, since nobody really cares about Jupiter anymore and there haven’t been Vestal Virgins for thousands of years.
So let’s get some context.
Before the emperors, the highest ranking officials in the state were the consuls. There were two of them at any given time, equal to each other, who served for a single year, and they handled both civil and military affairs. If you want to think of them as sort of co-presidents mixed with five star generals, that’s not the worst way to do it. There were still consuls under the emperors, but they were subordinate.
Another high ranking position was pontifex maximus, or highest priest, who was in charge of religious affairs. It’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like. If you want to think of them as ancient popes, that works too, especially since the papacy adopted that title and modern popes still use it today.
The emperor held the power of both these positions and more, for life, so whoever sat on the throne was a sort of combination between an absolute monarch and the pope.
So when Elagabalus made these decrees, she was correct, in a sense.
She did have the authority to do so, but it still deeply offended Roman society.
I’m going to describe an extremely bizarre but plausible scenario here to help you understand how weird this would have been to the Romans.
Imagine the Pope dies, and the next elected pope is an American. It’s never happened before, but there’s no rule against it. Popes get to choose their own pope names, and there’s no real rules about what they can and can’t call themselves, and this new American pope calls himself Pope Abraham Lincoln. Then he runs for president, and wins. Somewhere along the line, he marries a nun as well. So pope-president Lincoln sits down for his first presidential address, and announces that Jesus Christ is no longer the primary figure in Christianity, and instead he’s subordinate to the Prophet Mohammad.
He’s correct! Technically. But how much will the average American accept that?
So anyway, Elagabalus’ reign got off to an unusual start.
We know that Elagabalus had several marriages during her life. She had five marriages to women – twice to the same woman, the Vestal Virgin I mentioned before – but she supposedly had at least two marriages to men as well. This includes the athlete Zoticus and the charioteer Hierocles.
Now, Roman marriage worked a little differently than how we think of marriage today. It was still monogamous, but divorce and remarriage were both simple processes, and didn’t carry any social stigma. So even though it was unusual for Elagabalus to have seven marriages, it wasn’t that big a deal.
What’s unclear, though, is what Elagabalus wanted out of these marriages. She seemed to have been primarily attracted to men – a lot of Roman ink was spilled on this.
For example, the historian Cassius Dio tells us “she married many women, and had intercourse with even more without any legal sanction; yet it was not that she had any need of them, but simply that she wanted to imitate their actions when she should lie with her lovers,” ‘lovers’ here implying male lovers.
He continues, “she would go to the taverns by night, wearing a wig, and there ply the trade of a female huckster. She frequented the notorious brothels, drove out the prostitutes, and played the prostitute herself”
The emperor is a fifteen year old transsexual hooker. No big deal.
A couple of the more outrageous claims about Elagabalus’ sexuality come from the Historia Augusta, where the author says she:
…did nothing but send out agents to search for those who had particularly large organs and bring them to the palace in order that she might enjoy their vigour… she made a public bath in the imperial palace and at the same time threw open the bath of Plautinus to the populace, that by this means she might get a supply of men with unusually large organs.
The emperor is a fifteen year old transsexual hooker who’s also a size queen. No big deal.
Now, the Historia Augusta is not a reliable source – we’ll get more into that soon. But while these two claims are almost certainly wildly exaggerated, they do paint a picture of what Elagabalus’ reputation was like. The Cassius Dio claims are more likely to be closer to the truth, but even he tends to be a little dubious when it comes to Elagabalus – but more on that later.
But whatever, the emperor liked to get busy, good for her.
All that aside, it’s pretty clear Elagabalus was mostly interested in men. Roman emperors typically married, and in many cases it was for political reasons. Each of Elagabalus’ wives were members of powerful families, so that might have been the reason.
And the men… well, a girl has needs.
By the year 221 CE, just three years into Elagabalus’ rule, the military was getting fed up. Her religious reforms didn’t go over well at all, and Elagabalus seemed more interested in partying and… other activities… than ruling the empire. Grandma Julia Maesa noticed this, and she had the emperor declare her 13 year old cousin Severus Alexander as heir the following year.
He was given the title of Caesar, and served as co-consul along with Elagabalus that year. However, Elagabalus noticed Alexander was more popular among the military than she was. This got her worried the military might kill her and declare Alexander emperor. This wasn’t unrealistic; it had happened before, and would happen again.
So, Elagabalus tried to kill Alexander.
A bunch of times.
And it never worked.
So she started a rumour Alexander was dying.
Which I guess was kind of like wishful thinking on her part.
She was manifesting her dream life.
But the military rioted instead, and demanded to see them both. On March 11, 222, the emperor complied, and the soldiers cheered for Alexander while ignoring Elagabalus. So Elagabalus demanded they all be arrested, and they responded by murdering Elagabalus and her mother, and dumping their bodies in the river. Elagabalus was just 18 years old.
Following her death, Severus Alexander became emperor. He reversed his predecessor’s religious edicts, banned women from attending the Senate, and worked to erase Elagabalus’ memory from the public record. He would rule for another 13 years, before himself being killed by the military, which set off a period of fifty years of instability known as the Third Century Crisis.
But maybe if the only thing holding your empire together is two literal children, you might want to rethink what you’re doing.
Chapter II: Ancient Sources
So that was, broadly, the life of Elagabalus. But how do we know this? We have three surviving texts written by Romans.
We have Cassius Dio, Herodian of Antioch, and the Historia Augusta, none of which is particularly reliable.
Let’s take a closer look at our three Roman companions.
The Historia Augusta
The first is the Historia Augusta, a collection of stories about Roman political figures from 117 to 284 CE. Since Elagabalus’ reign was from 218 to 222, they fall smack dab in the middle.
Perfect!
However, most historians view the Historia Augusta as unreliable, for a few reasons.
Traditionally the text is said to have six authors, but modern analysis suggests it was just one person. The section on the life of Elagabalus seems to have been written for the emperor Constantine though, whom the author directly addresses several times.
Constantine was emperor from 306 to 337 CE, so about a hundred years after Elagabalus died. He was the first openly Christian emperor, and was largely responsible for paving the way toward making Christianity the official state religion of the empire. So Constantine would have had certain moral attitudes that Elagabalus’ life would have offended, and making her sound worse while talking up the emperors who demonstrated more Christian morals, even if they weren’t Christian themselves, would have been good for the author’s career.
Of course, the term Christian morals is pretty loaded today, but Constantine was not Joel Osteen. Christians at the time were more concerned with discrediting the old Roman pagan religion, which was still dominant in the empire even after Christianity became the official state religion.
RELATED: Transgender Christians in History
RELATED: Gender Transgression in Early Christianity
So when we look at some of the outrageous claims the Historia Augusta makes about Elagabalus, some historians figure it was just a matter of making pagans look as terrible as possible. One of the more wild ones is that they performed child sacrifices.
It says she sought out children
…of noble birth and beautiful appearance, whose fathers and mothers were alive, intending, I suppose, that the sorrow, if suffered by two parents, should be all the greater.
Now, it’s debatable if the Historia Augusta author was actually addressing Constantine personally. But I don’t think it matters either way if we’re questioning its reliability.
If the author was a contemporary of Constantine, they were likely sucking up to the boss. And if it was later, they might have been using Constantine as a literary device to talk about good Christians and the degeneracy of the past. Either way, this would have coloured their approach.
Besides, the fact that they were aware of Constantine means there’s no way they could have been a contemporary of Elagabalus.
Sometimes we think of the Romans as just this one time period where everyone lived, but the Roman state as we consider it stood for more than a thousand years until the city of Rome itself fell, and then nearly another thousand after that in the form of the Byzantine Empire. It’s not just one big historical blob.
In fact, the history of Rome is a lot longer than the history of any modern nation state, by far.
To think of it in modern terms, imagine somebody today writing a biography of, oh I don’t know, Otto Von Bismarck. I don’t care who wrote it, there’s no way they could know anything without relying on existing sources.
Even beyond that, though, there are so many inconsistencies in the text that we aren’t even sure the author/authors were trying to be truthful in the first place.
They make up a bunch of fake sources, then argue against the fake sources by using other fake sources. They also make up a lot of details about the lives of more minor figures, like co-emperors or usurpers.
In fact, some historians have referred to the Historia Augusta almost like a piece of ancient satire, or a mockumentary.
That certainly makes things more complex.
Imagine it’s a thousand years from now, and of only three sources that survive about the early 21st century, one of them is a collection of articles from The Onion. Might skew the way future historians see the modern era, huh?
That doesn’t mean it’s entirely worthless. It can still give us a bit of a window into Roman life and social values. But as a historical source, it’s dubious, and the claims it makes about Elagabalus are even more dubious.
Cassius Dio
Next is Cassius Dio, who actually was a contemporary of Elagabalus, so this means he’s our first primary source. He wrote his Historia Romana after 22 years of research, covering the time from Aeneas’ mythological arrival in Italy circa 1200 BCE, up to his time.
Cassius Dio wrote 80 volumes of work, and unfortunately part of it is lost, but the final volume, which covers the life of Elagabalus, mostly survives.
We know a bit more about his life as well. He was born the son of a Roman senator in Nicaea, a Greek city, a bit southeast of modern Istanbul, pretty close to Nicomedia, where we mentioned Elagabalus spent the first winter of their rule. He was a senator himself under the emperor Commodus, who died 20 years before Elagabalus’ rule, then governor of Smyrna, then proconsul in Africa, and eventually served as consul under Severus Alexander in the year 229 CE.
And there’s the rub. We know Severus Alexander was Elagabalus’ successor, and we also know he didn’t take too kindly to his predecessor. So again – how dedicated to the truth is Cassius Dio? For the most part he’s considered reliable, but when it comes to Elagabalus, I don’t think he can be. There’s just too much of an obvious conflict of interest. Showing Elagabalus in a positive light when his boss had so thoroughly damned her memory would have been dangerous to his career and possibly his life as well. In some ways, his account is just as over the top as the Historia Augusta, with historian T.D. Barnes calling it a “hysterical diatribe”.
In fact, throughout the whole text, he only calls Elagabalus by her name a couple of times. For the most part he calls her:
- The False Antoninus – that one’s obvious
- The Assyrian – to tie her to Roman prejudice about the east
- Sardanapalus – the name of a pseudo-historical Assyrian king who was famous for his self indulgent hedonism
- Tiberinus – to commemorate the fact that her body was tossed in the Tiber river after she was killed
Cassius Dio also admits himself that he wasn’t in Rome during Elagabalus’ reign, and had to rely on second hand sources.
“Hey, I was talking to my buddy who told me another guy told him that another guy told him that the emperor was doing some weird stuff, you should put that in your book”
“Okay!”
We can, however, confirm some of it.
Historian Clare Rowan took a look at the coins minted during Elagabalus’ reign – nerds call this numismatic evidence – and they show that at least the dates Cassius Dio gives us for Elagabalus’ marriages were accurate. But it’s hard to confirm the rest of it.
So yeah, Cassius Dio lived during Elagabalus’ reign.
And his historical reputation in general is better than the Historia Augusta.
But when it comes to the story of Elagabalus, there’s just no way he can be trusted.
Herodian of Antioch
Finally, we have Herodian of Antioch, who wrote his History of the Empire, about the emperors who reigned during his lifetime. It covers the period from the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180 CE to the beginning of the reign of Gordian III in 238 – and Elagabalus falls in there as well.
His historical reputation is a bit mixed. Historians have pointed out several inconsistencies and factual errors in his work, which means they usually, but not always, side with Cassius Dio whenever there are discrepancies. He also seems to rely quite a bit on Cassius Dio’s account, though he does mention some details that Dio does not.
That said, Herodian is interesting in that he’s one of the very few Roman historians who likely wasn’t part of the senatorial class. We know he served a minor role under the emperor Gordian III, but that was seven emperors and two decades after Elagabalus, by which point folks had largely moved on. This would have meant he was subject to less bias than Cassius Dio. And, it’s interesting to note, his account of the life of Elagabalus is by far the least hostile of our three Roman companions. He still doesn’t look terribly kindly on Elagabalus, but he focuses mostly on her controversial religious reforms.
So, Herodian may have less overt bias than Cassius Dio, but his work is sloppier.
These were definitely not the only Romans to have written about Elagabalus, but they’re the only ones that survive today.
As we can see, none of the ancient sources we have on the life of Elagabalus is particularly reliable. This doesn’t mean it’s all rubbish, of course, but we need to take what we know about her with a grain of salt. This is one of the issues with ancient research – the further back you go, the less reliable things become.
Chapter III: Why Was Elagabalus Hated?
Now, there are a lot of controversies about Elagabalus.
Our Roman companions have done a pretty good job of pointing them out.
The problem is in narrowing down exactly what it was that made her so hated.
She had male lovers, of course, but she was hardly the first emperor to have done so.
Hadrian did too, and the Historia Augusta actually specifically mentions you read about him as a sort of palate cleanser after reading about Elagabalus because his life was so virtuous.
So, it’s not that.
We know she condemned the memory of Macrinus, but that wasn’t the first time that happened either.
The emperors Caligula, Nero, Domitian, Commodus, and Geta all received this treatment, and Elagabalus would as well after her death.
So this also couldn’t have been it.
In fact, damning Macrinus might have been one of the least controversial things Elagabalus did.
Of course, there was the gender nonconformity, but even that in itself wasn’t the issue we might think it is today.
Modern Western society is the cultural inheritor of the Roman Empire, but we are NOT the Romans, and the Romans were not us.
So it’s easy to map our own cultural biases onto what the Romans did, but it’s not that simple.
For example, did you know there were no gay people in ancient Rome?
Lots of people had gay sex, of course, that’s always been a thing.
But the concepts of gay or straight as part of your identity just don’t exist in Latin. The closest we get is something like “penetrator” and “penetrated”, or top and bottom.
If you were a Roman man, and you fancied other men, you could bang as many of them as you wanted and nobody would bat an eye – so long as you were topping them.
There’s a well-documented bias against bottoms in the gay community today – just pop on Grindr and see how many dudes have “no fats no fems” in their bio. It turns out that bias is a lot older than we thought it was.
I wonder what Elagabalus’ Grindr profile would have looked like…
Anyway, if I were a gambler, I think the smart money would be on Elagabalus being a bottom. And yeah, that would have been a problem to the Romans. But is this the real reason the Romans hated her so much?
To get clear on this, we need to get a better understanding of the Roman concept of virtus. It’s a word commonly translated as virtue, but there’s a lot more to it than that.
Originally, virtus was associated with military prowess, but by the time of Elagabalus it had evolved quite a bit. It had to do with how an upper class Roman citizen ought to conduct himself. Justice, courage, temperance, self-control, foresight, and the ability to govern fairly were just some of the important elements of virtus. It was definitely a masculine ideal – in fact, the Latin word for man was vir. It’s pretty obvious Elagabalus was not a man, but her contemporaries clearly thought of her as such.
Now, our Roman companions don’t spend a lot of time on Elagabalus’ sexual and gender exploits. They do talk about them, of course, but they mostly focused on her religious reforms. And it’s clear that the wild parties Elagabalus threw, as well as her personal actions, didn’t display the elements of virtus Roman citizens were used to. And it’s that, I think, that cemented Elagabalus’ reputation as a terrible emperor among the Romans.
Beyond even that, though, was the fact that Heirocles was a former slave, and to get a better understanding of this we need to look at how Roman social class worked.
Unlike today, where it’s totally a meritocracy and people are where they are based on how smart they are and how hard they work, Roman society was very hierarchical and stratified, with many different factors at play that determined your role in society.
Without digging too deeply into it, the upper classiest of the upper class were the patricians.
These were rich people born into rich families.
On the other end of the ladder, of course, were slaves.
They were viewed as property and had essentially no rights.
However, you might not be stuck as a slave forever.
Above slaves were the liberti, usually referred to in English as freedmen, though it wasn’t just men of course.
These people became part of the plebeian class, sort of the unwashed masses of Roman society. They were citizens, but they had fewer rights and less political power than the patricians, and were actually looked down upon by other plebeians because of their former slave status.
Heirocles, being a freed man, would have been quite low in social class, as athletes tended to be. So Elagabalus being with him would have meant she was debasing herself, in a way – not because she was with a man, but because she was bottoming, and to a former slave no less.
Zoticus, on the other hand, is only mentioned by the Historia Augusta, so we’re not even sure he existed, let alone what his social class was. Being an athlete as well, though, it’s safe to assume he wasn’t a patrician.
Her religious reforms, of course, were a major issue too. But that can fall under the category of virtus as well. By deposing Jupiter, Elagabalus had betrayed the personification of the divine authority their people had to rule the world. If nothing else, that was a serious lack of foresight.
Of course, later historians would make a bigger deal over the sexy stuff, but that has more to do with Victorian prudery than anything the Romans would have cared about.
But it begs an interesting question that we can unfortunately never answer: would she have been so hated had she been as queer as she was but still displayed the other elements of virtus? (I’m not one of those gays, I’m one of the good ones) Unfortunately, the examples of gender nonconformity among Roman elites we have today were associated with those who did not display virtus – so we can never know.
Chapter IV: Maybe Not?
We already talked about how our sources for Elagabalus aren’t the most reliable. We also know that Roman historians had a habit of writing about emperors they disapproved of in wildly exaggerated terms.
Caligula, for example, almost certainly never made his horse consul or ordered his troops to attack the ocean. Nero almost certainly never played the lyre as Rome burned around him. These were made up by later sources in order to discredit them. Whether or not Caligula or Nero were good emperors is another subject entirely, but most scholars agree these stories are unlikely.
Because of this, some scholars will scoff at the idea of Elagabalus having been transgender. Historians and archaeologists are very quick to dismiss any evidence of queerness in the ancient world, and often it’s just outright silly, but with Elagabalus they do make some compelling arguments.
Let’s take a look at some of the arguments made in dismissing this idea, and how much water they hold. I’m not going to address every single one of them because this video is long enough as it is, but we’ll consider some of the more interesting ones.
Elagabalus Is Represented as a Male
Critics of the transgender emperor theory will point to the fact that Elagabalus took a masculine name, and was portrayed as masculine in most of the art that survives, including coins and the few sculptures we have. If Elagabalus, the most powerful person in the world as far as any Roman was concerned, was really transgender, why would she not have herself portrayed as a woman?
To understand this, we need to get a better understanding of the purpose of Roman state funded art in the first place. It’s easy to forget when we only see it today in museums, but it wasn’t just ars gratia artis. Public, government funded art in the Roman era was used for the same purpose that governments use art today – as propaganda.
Today, chances are everybody in your country knows what your leader looks like. You may have even seen them in person or met them at a public event. This is possible thanks to two things – mass media, and rapid mass transportation. Obviously the Romans had neither of those, so as a result, unless you actually lived in Rome and were part of the upper class, it’s unlikely you’d ever see the emperor or even know what they looked like. For the most part, the empire could pass from person to person several times, and if you lived in one of the further provinces, it wouldn’t affect your life even a little bit. You might not even know about a new emperor, and you might not care much if somebody told you about them.
This could be used to an emperor’s advantage. For an example of how, let’s take a look at the emperor Tiberius. He’s the second of Rome’s emperors and the son of Augustus. Looking at sculptures of the two, you can see the family resemblance.
But here’s the thing.
Tiberius was the adopted son of Augustus. His birth parents were Augustus’ wife Livia and another man from her previous marriage.
He had no blood relation to Augustus.
So it doesn’t make sense for there to be a family resemblance.
As a result some historians believe the images we have of Tiberius today don’t actually look like the man as he was, but rather an altered version designed to more closely resemble Augustus and make their dynasty look more legitimate.
It’s possible they did something similar with Elagabalus, changing her image to more closely resemble Septimius Severus and Caracalla instead of the femme queen image that was closer to reality.
Another reason they may have done this was to preserve an air of strength to the throne.
Elagabalus was not the first person to be killed in office.
Caligula was murdered by his own guards.
Galba was murdered by soldiers.
Domitian was murdered by his advisors.
Geta was killed by his brother Caracalla as we already talked about.
And of course Macrinus was killed by Elagabalus’ forces.
Plenty more would be killed in office after as well.
So becoming emperor didn’t necessarily mean you were going to remain emperor for long.
When new emperors came to the throne, one of the first things they sometimes did to secure their reigns was to have a whole lot of coinage minted with their face on it. That way people would eventually notice somebody new was on the throne when they bought their groceries. This is why coinage of emperors like Gordian III and Probus are so common despite their relatively short reign of just six years each.
And the senate itself had a hard enough time accepting the new femperor. The rest of the empire would have been even more confused.
If the emperor was portrayed as a woman, or as an effeminate boy, either way it would have been a signal to generals in the provinces that the throne was ripe for the taking.
So regardless of whether or not Elagabalus was trans, it would have been a wise strategic decision to represent her as a man.
I don’t think this idea is necessarily wrong, but I also think it’s less compelling than the transgender emperor theory. It’s just too easy to explain away.
Standard Slander of Unpopular Rulers
It was pretty common for unpopular emperors or other political figures to be derided as weak and effeminate. This comes up a lot in Roman history, but I think the closest parallel is with how the historical tradition treated Nero, so let’s take a closer look.
Briefly, Nero was the fifth emperor, succeeding Claudius, and the last of the Julio-Claudian dynasty that started with Augustus. He became emperor in 54 CE. During his reign, the Romans made peace with the Parthians in the east, faced rebellions in Britain and in Judea, saw the city of Rome itself burn, and obviously a whole lot more that I’m not going to get into because this isn’t a video about Nero. He committed suicide in 68 CE, kicking off the Year of the Four Emperors in the year 69 CE, nice.
There are some similarities with the lives of Nero and Elagabalus. Nero also took the throne while he was still a child – he was sixteen when he ascended to the purple. He was also largely disrespectful toward the senate, and to Roman tradition in general. Both had sex with men, and both had sex with a Vestal Virgin. Both came to violent ends as well – though that’s hardly uncommon for Roman emperors. And he supposedly married a man – a freedman, a former slave – with Nero acting like the bride. And remember how people would have felt about Elagabalus and Heirocles from a class perspective – same deal.
Both emperors are described as behaving like the lower classes too – in Nero’s case, he was an actor, and in Elagabalus’s, she was a prostitute. Neither were things upper class men ought to do. I know it’s weird to think about today, but in ancient times acting was considered something for peasants, looked down upon.
The surviving accounts we have of Nero are just as hostile toward him as the ones for Elagabalus, but the difference is we have no contemporary accounts of Nero’s reign. What we do know mostly comes from Tacitus and Suetonius, who wrote about fifty years after his death, and our boy Cassius Dio, who wrote about a hundred years after them. We’re told by Tacitus that there were some contemporary sources, but they were all extremely biased, either absurdly critical or absurdly praising of Nero.
So yeah, these guys are hostile to Nero, but they also mention some sources painted him as a competent emperor who was popular among the people. So much so, in fact, that some people refused to accept that he was dead and believed he would return. This was sort of an ancient conspiracy theory with some pretty wacky parallels to some of the conspiracies surrounding JFK’s assassination, and it’s wild to dig into. It led to at least three guys showing up claiming to be Nero and leading rebellions – during the reigns of Vitellius, Titus, and Domitian, and even Saint Augustine mentioned it in his writings as a belief people had nearly three hundred years later, suggesting he may even have been the Antichrist.
Modern scholarship suggests Nero may have been popular among the common folk, but clearly unpopular among the ruling class, which is why so many later accounts of his rule are so hostile. And yeah, that does sound like Elagabalus, doesn’t it? With all the parties she threw and food she distributed to the masses, it’s not hard to imagine she might actually have been fairly well liked among the commoners, even if the senate and the military hated her, religious quirkiness and obvious genderqueerness aside. But of course, the aristocracy hated her, and they hated Nero as well. So they besmirched the memory of both by calling them effeminate, weak, and lacking in virtus.
There is also a long history of Roman prejudice toward people who came from the eastern provinces. In particular, the Romans stereotyped them as weak and effeminate, which in case you couldn’t tell was sort of their standard insult. At least modern transphobes have two jokes – the attack helicopter one, and the did you just assume my gender one. But the Romans just had the one. So I guess we’re making progress?
Anyway, this attitude has to do with the idea of virtus we talked about earlier. The Romans believed they were the best because they displayed a perfect blend of philosophy and refinement as well as strength and military prowess. This made them natural at being the rulers of the world. If there was too much skill in the military side of things, your race would end up being brutish barbarians like the Gauls or Germans, and if there was too much in the refinement side, you’d become weak and effeminate like the peoples from the east.
And because Elagabalus was from the east, and there were already some well-worn stereotypes about easterners as being weak, effeminate, and sex-crazed, they slapped on the standard tropes and called it a day.
This one is actually pretty compelling, but I also don’t think it’s necessarily a knockout blow to the transgender emperor theory. Some of the claims made about her are just so oddly specific that it’s hard to dismiss it all as just slander. It’s clear that our sources aren’t super reliable, but to say that everything we know was entirely fabricated as a way to slander Elagabalus, I think is just as much a stretch as to uncritically accept the stories at face value.
Chapter 5: So, Was She Actually Trans?
Unfortunately, the answer to this question is maybe. I know that’s not very satisfying, but that’s what we have to work with.
There are some compelling arguments in favour of her being trans, but there’s no way to know for certain. And unfortunately, because of the unreliability of our sources, we’re stuck with that answer.
Elagabalus might have just been a cis boy who took his role as the high priest of the Sun cult a little too seriously for the Roman Senate to be comfortable with. Or she might have been the ancient equivalent to a transgender woman.
It’s tempting for us as modern day trans people to jump to the latter, because when I’m reading about the life of Elagabalus through our three Roman companions, I can’t help but relate with what they’re saying about her. Take some of these quotes, for example.
Cassius Dio tells us:
She had planned, indeed, to cut off her genitals altogether, but that desire was prompted solely by her effeminacy.
She asked the physicians to contrive a woman’s vagina in her body by means of an incision, promising them large sums for doing so.
When Aurelius addressed her with the usual salutation ‘my lord emperor, hail!’ [Elagabalus] bent her neck so as to assume a ravishing feminine pose, and turning her eyes upon him with a melting gaze, answered without any hesitation: ‘call me not lord, for I am a lady’
Herodian tells us:
She appeared in public with eyes painted and cheeks rouged.
The Historia Augusta author says:
She would model the expression of their face on that with which Venus is usually painted.
She used to have the story of Paris played in their house, and she herself would take the role of Venus.
But this one is the most heartbreaking:
[She] would ask philosophers and even men of the greatest dignity whether they, in their youth had ever experienced what she was experiencing.
As though she was trying to make sense of what she recognized as being clearly different, and was desperate to find someone who felt the way she did.
I think a lot of us can relate. They’re basically describing gender dysphoria.
She’s dressing like a woman, wearing makeup, insisting on her pronouns, and is planning her surgical transition.
From the perspective of a modern trans feminine person, it doesn’t get much more relatable than that.
But then I think about some of the outrageous things said about her. And I think a lot of us can relate to those as well.
How many times have you celebrated an advance in trans rights, only for some conservative group to show up and make some absurd claim with no basis in reality?
When we want trans kids to get access to gender-affirming treatments, it’s claimed we’re “forcing kids to be trans” or “feeding hormones to toddlers”.
When we want to be able to use the washroom without being harassed, we’re sneaking into women’s spaces to do unspeakable things.
When we access gender affirming treatments ourselves, we’re mutilating our bodies.
We just want to live our lives, and we’re made out to be absolute monsters by the people who have a vested interest in spreading information against us.
So is it any wonder that, when we’re given the history of a transgender figure from the perspective of those who found her existence distasteful, we hear stories about how she murdered babies on a regular basis?
Now look, Elagabalus was not a good emperor, obviously. But she was also just a kid. Would you have been able to run an empire as a fourteen year old? But a lot of her bad reputation has been tied up with her gender nonconformity, and that’s absolutely unfair.
Unfortunately, she was never going to get a fair shake because she didn’t display the virtues expected of a member of the Roman upper class. The gender nonconforming stuff should have been just a minor footnote, but more modern sensibilities made it out to be a much bigger deal than it ought to have been.
When I was doing my undergraduate, I remember one of my professors, an older white guy, speaking of Elagabalus with condescension, snickering and sneering at her behaviour.
That sort of attitude is really prevalent in the field, which is made up almost entirely of old straight white guys.
Fortunately that’s starting to change, but of course, change never comes fast enough for those of us who are most harmed by the status quo.
Was Elagabalus trans? In a way, it doesn’t really matter. Reading her story can give you a broader perspective on the attitudes toward gender nonconformity the Romans had, it can provide some oddly specific examples of what gender dysphoria might have looked like in the distant past, and it gives us one of the very few examples of a transgender person in a position of significant power in the ancient Mediterranean. Sort of like with the tales of Robin Hood, which also may or may not be true, the stories of the transgender emperor Elagabalus can still serve an important purpose to the transgender community regardless of their veracity. And short of discovering some previously unknown cache of writings that just happen to miraculously reveal a smoking gun, we’re unlikely to ever really come to a conclusive answer on the topic.
So even if we don’t 100% know for absolute certain if she was trans, we also don’t know that she wasn’t trans. And so long as we keep in mind that ambiguity, I don’t think it’s a problem to see yourself, and ourselves, in her story.
Ancient Sources:
►Saint Augustine. “De Civitate Dei Contra Paganos”. Translated by Rev. Marcus Dods. New York, T. & T. Clark, 1871.
►Dio Cassius. “Roman History, Volume II: Books 12-35”. Translated by Earnest Cary, Herbert B. Foster. Loeb Classical Library 37. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914.
►Herodian of Antioch. “History of the Roman Empire”. Translated by Edward C. Echols. Los Angeles, Berkeley University Press, 1961.
►”Historia Augusta, Volume II: Caracalla. Geta. Opellius Macrinus. Diadumenianus. Elagabalus. Severus Alexander. The Two Maximini. The Three Gordians. Maximus and Balbinus”. Translated by David Magie. Loeb Classical Library 140. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924.
Modern Sources:
►Agora Auctions, LLC. “Coins Of The Roman Emperors: Who’s Rarest?” Dirty Old Coins Blog. 16 December 2014.
►Barnes, T. D. “The Lost Kaisergeschichte And The Latin Historical Tradition”. 1970.
►Bartsch-Zimmer, Shadi. “The Romans, Just Wars, And Exceptionalism”. University of Chicago Blog. 28 September, 2017.
►Brooks, Thomas R, Stephen Reysen, and Jennifer Shaw. “Smashing Back Doors in: Negative Attitudes toward Bottoms within the Gay Community”. World Journal of Social Science Research 4 (2017): 129-139.
►Icks, Martijn. “The Crimes of Elagabalus: The Life and Legacy of Rome’s Decadent Boy Emperor”. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2011.
►Kemezis, Adam. “The Fall of Elagabalus as Literary Narrative and Political Reality: A Reconsideration”. Historia: Zeitschrift Für Alte Geschichte, vol. 65, no. 3 (2016): 348–90. JSTOR.
►Rowan, Clare. “Under Divine Auspices: Divine Ideology and the Visualisation of Imperial Power in the Severan Period.” New York, Cambridge University Press, 2012.
►Weisner, Lauren. “The Social Effect the Law Had on Prostitutes in Ancient Rome”. Grand Valley Journal of History, vol. 3, no. 2 (2014): 1-7.