The Mad Emperor

Heliogabalus and the Decadence of Rome

By: Harry Sidebottom

Narrated by: Saul Reichlin

A Financial Times, BBC History, and Spectator Book of the Year

On 8 June 218 AD, a fourteen-year-old Syrian boy, egged on by his grandmother, led an army to battle in a Roman civil war. Against all expectations, he was victorious.

Varius Avitus Bassianus, known to the modern world as Heliogabalus, was proclaimed emperor. The next four years were to be the strangest in the history of the empire.

Heliogabalus humiliated the prestigious Senators and threw extravagant dinner parties for lower-class friends. He ousted Jupiter from his summit among the gods and replaced him with Elagabal. He married a Vestal Virgin—twice. Rumors abounded that he was a prostitute. In the first biography of Heliogabalus in over half a century, Harry Sidebottom unveils the high drama of sex, religion, power, and culture in Ancient Rome as we've never seen it before.

©2022 Harry Sidebottom (P)2023 Tantor

History is in the eye of the writer(s)

the author has to deal with the subjective nature of historians and their subject, a deposed Emperor. When history becomes political narrative, it becomes a trope with completely different meanings as politics and culture changes. The author does a good job of emphasizing the relationship between reader, writer and culture.