As the story goes, a grandfather was trying to help his young grandson with some history homework for school. The boy was frustrated and asked gramps if he had to study it when he was in school. When the Old said ‘yes,’ the boy replied, “I’ll bet it was easier for you because there wasn’t so much of it back in the olden days.”
As a short-cut through history, one of the things we often do is make some comparisons situations or events to the past, both good and bad. We also will look at a modern figure and make a favorable or unfavorable comparison to someone out of the past. It is a way of attempting to better understand our own world. In part, we do it because with the passage of time our memories get distorted, and things don’t appear to be as bad as they were when they happened. In a greater part, however, we do it because we want to see if we can predict what will happen in the future. That is because we believe the phrase, history repeats itself.’
In a television interview professor of ancient history at Cambridge University, Mary Beard, warns it is a very dangerous thing to compare a contemporary leader with someone out of the past. She believes we usually get it wrong. Then, halfway through interview in late August, she was asked which Roman emperor was most like President Trump, she laughed and spilled the proverbial beans.
No, he is not at all like the well-known trio of wicked emperors: Caligula, Claudius, Nero.
There were several more, but none of them are as well-known as the Big Three. However, even they are small potatoes compared to her favorite bad boy. Professor Beard said we should consider a comparison between President Trump and Emperor Sextus Varius Avitus Bassianus. He is better known by his nickname, Elagabus. Suffice to know that this was not a term of endearment. I had never heard of him, so that led to a few wonderful hours of research.
Elagabus was from an important Syrian family that had close connections with many of the emperors. However, no one expected very much of him, and for the first years of his life he was shuffled off to serving as a priest of the Syrian sun god. He was not yet a teenager when, thanks to the right connections and his very pushy Aunt Julia, he was made the chief priest of the cult.
Four years later, his aunt Julia engineered a coup to overthrow the emperor Caracalla and may have had a direct knife hand in assassinating him. A fairly incompetent man, and not a member of the Senate, Macrinus became the new emperor. He managed the one accomplishment no other emperor could claim: he never once visited Rome. Instead, he preferred to stay out in the in the country, making his courtiers come to him. Then again, perhaps the reasons he did not visit Rome was that the royal coffers had been completely drained by Caracalla, and there was no money to pay for a state visit. Military parades and banquets are expensive, as we know.
He attempted to reform the imperial finances but got nowhere, and when his ideas threatened the financial well-being of the lethal Julia, she promptly organized another assassination. By this time her nephew Elagabus was fourteen years old, and she stage-managed things to make him the emperor.
If Elagabus was out of his depths as the chief priest of a religion, he was all the more so as emperor of the great Roman Empire. The young man completely lacked the one important personality trait for all Romans: ‘gravitas’ which is Latin for seriousness. His downfall began when he rejected the ancient Roman pantheon of deities. In a great ceremonial procession into the city, he brought the BAETYL stone (probably a meteorite) which members of his religious cult proclaimed to be the house of the god. To nobility and peasant alike, it was as if he announced, here is your new god, of whom you nothing, that you WILL worship. To compound his inauspicious beginning, he ordered all of the Senators, their families, and the leading citizens of Rome to participate in the cult’s rituals.
Then, he made matters worse. With his hormones in overdrive and seeing the entire empire as his personal playground, he married one of the vestal virgins. For centuries, such an act was unthinkable. Just to engage in a bit of canoodling with a Vestal Virgin was a capital offense, but Elagabus justified it by saying he and Vestal Virgin Aquilla Severa would have beautiful “god-like babies.’
He soon divorced her, and then married three more wives in quick succession, lavished expensive gifts of male courtesans, and went so far as to work as a prostitute in some of the city’s brothels.
His personal life aside, Elagabus went on a vendetta against his enemies. Many of them were executed in retribution for some real or alleged offense, or so their wealth could be legally confiscated by the emperor. He appointed unknown individuals to high office, removed senior officers in the Praetorian Guard, and then, when no one cautioned him to be more discreet, he made his aunt, Julia, and another woman a Senator. To demonstrate his power to do whatever he chose to do, he had their likenesses put on the obverse side of gold coins. Once that was done, he entitled his aunt “Mother of the Army Camp,” and then debased the purity of gold and silver coins by at least 5 %, thus doing tremendous damage to the national economy when the currency was devalued and inflation soared.
To demonstrate his unlimited power, on one occasion the emperor invited guests to a banquet. All of them had either expressed their doubts about his ability to rule or had not very discreetly opposed him. The dinner was served, and then a trickle of rose petals came down from the ceiling. Soon the trickle became a deluge that panicked his guests, all the more so when they could not escape. According to legend, all of them suffocated under the weight of the flowers.
True story or not, the whispering campaign soon got out of hand. Elagabus made matters all the worse with his strange religious practices, including making the Senators watch as he danced naked around the Baetyl rock, then announced circumcision would be required on the spot. In short, there was no end in sight to his audacity.
Realizing that Elagabus was a danger to the empire, his grandmother Julia (another lethal woman by the same name) made arrangements to be rid of him. The emperor and his mother (yet another woman named Julia) were lured into an ambush, and upon her signal, grandmother and the Praetorian Guard pulled out their daggers and killed the emperor and mother. Aunt Julia was whacked a short time later. He was barely eighteen years old when he was murdered. Their heads were hacked off and paraded through the streets of Rome, their bodies stripped and thrown into the Tiber River, and that was the end of them.
Almost immediately, the Senate, the emperor, and Praetorian Guard set about to erase the name of Elabalus, under the ancient tradition of damnatio memoria. Every public record of him, every likeness of his face, was removed; every statue pulled down and broken.
As I wrote at the beginning, Professor Beard makes a good point when she advised against trying to compare contemporary politicians and leaders with their ancient counterparts.
