Sex, violence and depravity

Harry Sidebottom once told me the reason he set his bestselling Roman Empire novels (thirteen, and counting) in the third century AD was because its history was so full of holes he could drive a chariot and horses through it.

So it’s perhaps a touch contrary that in The Mad Emperor – Dr Sidebottom’s first mass-market non-fiction book – he sets out to overturn the idea “that the history of [Heliogabalus’s] reign is impossible to reconstruct with any accuracy.”

In April 217, at a time when “Roman Emperor” already didn’t quite mean what it once had, the incumbent, Caracalla, was killed by his own troops while taking a dump somewhere in Mesopotamia. He was succeeded by one of his prefects, Macrinus – a mere equestrian and wannabe Marcus Aurelius – who never even made it to Rome, but ruled for a little over a year before in turn being deposed and killed after the Battle of Antioch in June 218.

His successor was a fourteen-year-old Syrian boy called Sextus Varius Avitus Bassianus, who went by Varius other names (including, unhelpfully, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus), but later came to be literally synonymous with the minor, Near Eastern, black-stone deity Elagabal, of whom he had been – and remained – high priest.

There followed four years of “extravagant misrule”, during which Heliogabalus went slumming with all the worst facets of Roman society; promoted lower-class favourites to high rank; married multiple times, including to a sacred Vestal Virgin (twice, having divorced her in between); consorted “passively” with other men; threw murderous, camp dinner parties, like some James Bond bad guy; and generally exhibited a decadence and bloodthirstiness that makes Gore Vidal’s Caligula look like a Girl Guides jamboree.

The violence, sexual depravity, racism and staggering personal power are a challenge even for our supposedly open-minded 21st-century imaginations; in his own time, Heliogabalus alienated all the fundamental pillars of an Emperor’s power: the Senate, the military, the plebs and the imperial court.

He outraged conservative sentiment; didn’t go to war; had no time for Greek or Roman culture; spurned time-honoured ceremonies; spent catastrophic sums of money on his weddings and other entertainments; wore “barbaric” robes and make-up and danced in public in the service of his imported god, whom he promoted even beyond Jupiter; and for all the bread and circuses, behaved with unbecoming levity even by plebeian standards (Sidebottom has the grace not to allude to any counterparts in recent politics).

Being emperor was a “vertiginous balancing act” – and “no other Emperor failed quite so spectacularly as Heliogabalus.” In 222, he was overthrown, assassinated by the Praetorian Guards, dragged through the streets of Rome and dumped in the Tiber. (“So much,” as Richard Harris would have said, “for the glory of Rome.”) His memory was formally condemned, and his name chiselled off monumental inscriptions. “By every sort of wanton wickedness,” Aelian wrote, Heliogabalus “disgraced the Roman Empire.”

Harsh but fair? According to Sidebottom, this “worst of men” – and “best of subjects” – was so absurdly bad he “broke” one of his three contemporary biographers.

Such raw (sic) material certainly lends itself to Sidebottom’s boisterous, novelistic prose style; but he also argues strongly that “the transgressions of Heliogabalus… illuminated what was considered normal” at the time. So chapter titles alternate between the vaguely fantastical “Money, a Daemon, and a Scribe”, and the more academic-sounding, “The Passive Emperor: Petition and Response.” Chuck in a few explainers on the Roman attitude to money, slavery, beards (“a freight of meanings unimagined by contemporary hipsters in London sushi bars”), prosopography, and the importance of “cock size in politics”, and you’re away.

As for the core narrative, the sources are problematic even by late-Classical standards.

The “temptingly sensational” writings of Herodian, Cassius Dio, and the anonymous author of the “perplexing” and pranksterish Augustan History (“the most mendacious author in antiquity”), have to be navigated “like a climber crossing loose scree”.

Given the lack of “external corroboration” (one possibly central player exists only in the archaeological record as “…ATVS”), Sidebottom ultimately has little choice but to go along with some of what the ancient writers say; but after much commonsensical assessment of, say, scholarly opinions on the unique “horn” of Heliogabalus (options ranging from a solar ray to – inevitably – a dried bull’s penis), he often finds himself concluding, scrupulously: “we have no idea what it represents.”

Contra the book’s rather thirst-trappy title, then, Dr Harry Sidebottom, renowned author of sword-and-sandal epics full of romping, smut, and blood and guts, actually devotes the bulk of The Mad Emperor to sexing down the tale of Heliogabalus. I’m not sure the word “mad” appears once in the text.

That said, Sidebottom rejects the ivory-tower sneer that biography is little more than “the easy approach to history”, and argues (well, he would, wouldn’t he?) that the biographical approach “injects a narrative drive and engages the emotions of the readers,” especially when fleshed out with “carefully labelled imagination: what anthropologists call ‘thick description’.” In fact, long before reaching “The Afterlife of Heliogabalus: Tyrant, Aesthete, Queer Icon, Fashionista, in Art Criticism and as a Roman Lady, AD222 to AD2022”, I’d begun to suspect that The Mad Emperor was both evidence and product of a long-unscratched academic itch on the part of the author.

“Part forensic examination, part intuition”, the book is an exercise in what he calls “history with the top off”: a corrective investigative attempt at a biography, but also a demonstration of “what ancient historians actually do, and what makes it so enjoyable.” Several gaps are filled by stories of how he went about filling in the gaps. But fragmentary passages are the novelist Sidebottom’s stock in trade (“What can I say? History is an art not a science”), and he suggests that even the most notoriously florid texts be reconsidered carefully for their “plausibility”.

The Roman attitude to money, slavery, beards, prosopography, and the importance of “cock size in politics”

He repeatedly takes the present-day Classical establishment to task for their laziness, defeatism, arrogance (“knowing more than our sources”), and failing in historical imagination and empathy: “autocrats have a distressing tendency not to behave like Western academics.” Much serious fun is had thumbing his nose at the ancient chroniclers, erstwhile supervisors, and even fellow writers of historical novels.

Doubtless, contemporary Classicists will take a view on their colleague’s accusations of “extraordinary ingenuity in filling the gap[s]” and his own not-infrequent reliance on “may-well-haves” and phrases like “a narrative can be constructed…”. But Sidebottom’s deep knowledge of the Eastern Empire and its structures is undeniable: a least a dozen times I wondered at a throwaway line that had a PhD’s research behind it.

Entirely forgotten by the thirteenth century – unlike his predecessors Caligula and Nero – Heliogabalus resurfaced during the Renaissance, and had another revival in the Decadent Movement at the end of the nineteenth century (Wilde took a shine to him, inevitably). But in our own benighted age, “his name means nothing to most people in the English-speaking world,” except as an unlikely poster-boy for “some quarters of the LGBT+ community”.
Here’s hoping that’s now been corrected.

ASH Smyth is a writer and radio presenter, living in Stanley. He is a member of the Falkland Islands Defence Force, and previously served in the Honourable Artillery Company, in Helmand and Kabul