So, 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.
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.
It'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.
Elagabalus 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.
The 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.
No, the article specified his religious beliefs were worse than that. I find drowning people with flower petals to be the most objectionable act listed.
It'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.
I didn't read that as literally asphyxiating them, just dumping a bunch of petals on them. I can imagine it might not be as funny to the guests as it was to him, though.
> 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".
Though 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.
