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Review of the Mad Emperor: Heliogabalus and the Decadence of Rome
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- boomboomsubban 4y agoThe worst thing he did was worship a different god? Never would have guessed there'd be a pro-Jupiter bias in 2022 literary review.
- Apocryphon 4y agoSame crime that Akhenaten did as pharaoh.
- WangComputers 4y agoElagabalus was of Arab heritage and he was a priest who worshiped a representation of Baal, the very controversial and very foreign God he wanted to make #1. It's no surprise that people were upset.
- pencilguin 4y ago... and ancient trolling followed naturally.
- boomboomsubban 4y agoYeah, 2000 years ago. I don't expect a modern publication to call it the worst thing he did
- ogogmad 4y agoIt may have been the "worst thing" he did politically. Do you not understand that?
- boomboomsubban 4y agoThe article is a book review, that is not the context I see when I read that condemnation. Maybe the book makes that case, but the review does not. And, referencing your other post, I don't think the scenario in seventeenth century England is comparable to third century Rome. The Roman pantheon was already on the downswing, allowing a priest of Elagabalus to become emperor. A century later Constantine would make a similar move, leading to the still dominant Christianity. Had Heliogabalus been a competent man the move may have been a huge success. Finally, the personal attacks aren't necessary.
- ogogmad 4y agoYeah, sorry about the attack.
- joemazerino 4y ago.. Did you miss the part about mixing amber with beans at his dinner parties??
- pencilguin 4y agoEasy to make up, impossible to corroborate. It tells us that Romans disapproved of messing with food almost as much as with religion.
- riffraff 4y agoI think mixing jewels with food or medicine was not uncommon in the antiquity, or at least I've heard of it often. Even today it's not that odd to have gold foil in food. Also a documented kind of bread in Rome was made with clay.
- boomboomsubban 4y agoNo, the article specified his religious beliefs were worse than that. I find drowning people with flower petals to be the most objectionable act listed.
- ogogmad 4y agoIt's not about our moral opinion of him, which is irrelevant, because he's dead. It's about how he failed politically. Committing a religious sacrilege so offensive to people that they killed him for it is politically incompetent. Our moral judgement of that fact -- as readers of HN in the year 2022 -- is irrelevant to his political fortunes in the year 222. Let's say that you're an English king in the year 1680. You're openly Catholic in a fanatically Protestant country; and for that, you get deposed. From our moral opinion in the year 2022, that king did nothing wrong.* From a political point of view though, he was terrible. And his "terribleness" was caused by him being an openly Catholic king in England in the year 1680. It was the worst thing he did politically because it ended his political career. If you don't understand, then you should stop commenting about politics or history, because you're too naive. * - I'm guessing you have the same moral opinion as me about this.
- taneq 4y ago
- pencilguin 4y agoSo, not very different from subsequent Christian emperors, except they kept better control of their posterity. The debauches sound wholly fabricated. I don't know why historians imagine they can pick out anything true. Even if an appointed official's name is corroborated somehow, there seems no reason to believe whatever was written about him or about why he was appointed. We can be fairly sure Elagabalus was not well-liked by the literate class, and we can see what sort of activities they thought people would or ought not approve of. We see similar behavior by historians on whether Jesus ever existed as a physical person. Almost all received documentary evidence is either obvious fabrication from often centuries later, or (e.g. in Pliny) acknowledged hearsay. The overwhelming majority of material represented as "early church", on any aspect, is clumsily forged. The star exhibit supporting existence is a single paragraph in Josephus that every historian agrees was at least clumsily doctored by apologists. Many earnestly believe they can pick out bits of it not doctored, but the whole passage it appears in reads better with it omitted entirely. The most favorable judgment of it that can be supported is that nobody can prove none of it was in the original manuscript, and the "reconstructed" version reads a lot like Josephus. There is no information to suggest why it would have been thought necessary to corrupt the original text, if it existed and read as "reconstructed". Statistically, the fraction of historians doubting existence is monotonically increasing, with no change in the evidence. That is actually progress.
- ogogmad 4y ago> The debauches sound wholly fabricated Seems plausible to me. If you allow a horny 14 year old boy to get anything he wants, this is what happens. Any system that enables this to happen though is stupid.
- pencilguin 4y agoA horny teenager is easily satisfied without public spectacle. A resentful chattering class, less so.
- ogogmad 4y agoIt's not inconceivable that people back then were sincere about their religious beliefs. Imagine going to St Peter's Basilica and replacing a crucifix with a statue of Baal. Or placing a statue of Krishna on top of the Kaaba. These could start a war.
- xref 4y agoHuh never seen it spelled that way, takes me back to the History of Rome podcast days https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elagabalus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elagabalus https://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/the_history_of_rome/2010/08/104-here-comes-the-sun.html https://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/the_history_of_rome/201...
- billfruit 4y agoGibbon spells it as Elagabalus too.
- robbiep 4y agoGibbon was probably the primary source for much of HoR
- boomboomsubban 4y agoThough definitely a major influence, Duncan describes reading through the work as a child, I don't think it was his primary source. He had learned enough about history to doubt Gibbon, and tried to read available primary sources as much as he could.
- edflsafoiewq 4y ago> Elagabalus's family held hereditary rights to the priesthood of the sun god Elagabal [...] The god was later imported to Rome and assimilated with the sun god [...] In Greek, the sun god is Helios, hence Elagabal was later known as "Heliogabalus", a hybrid of "Helios" and "Elagabalus".
- hermitcrab 4y agoHe sounds perfect to be next Conservative British Prime Minister.
- thom 4y agoReminds me of my favourite Pope, Benedict IX, who sold the papacy to marry his cousin, among other things if you believe his vociferous critics: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Benedict_IX https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Benedict_IX