7

The modern prince

Mais c’est ici au contraire qu’Héliogabale montre tout ce qu’il est; un esprit indiscipliné et fanatique, un vrai roi, un rebelle, un individualiste forcené.

Antonin Artaud, Héliogabale ou l’anarchiste couronné (1934)

In the twentieth century, the study of antiquity was characterised by an increasing degree of specialisation. With more and more sources being found, catalogued and published, many scholars chose to concentrate on specific, relatively small subjects, working them out in depth rather than presenting grand narratives spanning centuries. This led to the first monographs on the reign of Elagabalus. In the decades following World War II, propaganda, representation and ideology started to draw scholarly attention. Ronald Syme (1903–89) was among the first to examine the ways in which emperors sent messages to influence their subjects, but it was Paul Zanker’s Augustus und die Macht der Bilder (1987) which really put representation and ideology on the agenda of ancient historians. The complicated relation between image and reality continues to occupy scholars to this day, and has encouraged some of them to look at Elagabalus from a new angle.

In the fields of art and literature, the twentieth century brought many innovations. After its infancy in the last decade of the nineteenth century, film quickly developed into a fully fledged art form. Comics rose to great popularity, and many new genres of music were invented. New media such as radio, television and, later, the Internet provided artists with a distribution network of unprecedented scale. Combined with mass production and the increase in wealth of the population, especially after World War II, films, books, music and other art forms became available to almost everyone in the Western world. Elagabalus turns up not only in novels, plays and paintings, but also in films, comics and pop songs. The priest-emperor seems to have sparked little attention in the interbellum years, with Antonin Artaud’s Héliogabale ou l’anarchiste couronné (1934) as a notable exception. During the second half of the twentieth century, however, he once again captured the attention of authors and artists, and in the first years of the twenty-first century, there appears to be even a small boom of art and literature concerning him.

Once again, the first part of this chapter will provide a general overview of images of Elagabalus in scholarly and literary works. Since attempting even a brief account of the developments of modern classical scholarship would be too ambitious a task here, I will restrict myself to a few important trends in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century study of antiquity and their effects on scholarly images of Elagabalus. As a starting point, I have chosen the year 1903, since this is when the first monograph on the emperor appeared. In the next subsection, several twentieth and twenty-first century pieces of art and literature on Elagabalus will be briefly discussed. As already stated in Chapter 6, I regard the outbreak of World War I as the breaking point with the fin-de-siècle.

The second part of the chapter will provide a closer look at some of the images of Elagabalus. Again, three works will be discussed in detail. The first of these is Artaud’s Héliogabale ou l’anarchiste couronné (1934), mentioned earlier. This French essay has attracted several later writers and artists to the colourful young ruler, and has probably been more influential than any other item in the emperor’s fictional afterlife. The other two works are written in English. Alfred Duggan’s Family Favourites (1960) is a British novel, Martin Duberman’s Elagabalus (1973) an American play. The latter represents a new and interesting development, namely that of the young ruler as a modern gay role model. The three selected works are spread over three countries, two genres and several decades. They present very different images of Elagabalus, testifying to the diversity of the emperor’s fictional afterlife in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

THE ‘MODERN PRINCE’: A GENERAL OVERVIEW

Elagabalus in historiographical works, 1903 to the present

In the twentieth century, the great work of collecting, cataloguing and publishing ancient sources such as coins, inscriptions and papyrus texts continued. The ever-increasing amount of available source material allowed scholars to focus their attention on small, specific subjects and to examine these in depth. Non-literary sources provided a welcome addition to ancient texts, putting their reliability into perspective. However, the first academic work on Elagabalus was still very much text-centred. In Héliogabale raconté par les historiens grecs et latins (1903), Georges Duviquet collected the most important literary accounts of the reign of the priest-emperor, although he also gave some short descriptions of coins, medallions and inscriptions. Duviquet does not draw any conclusions from the sources he has put together, but the famous literary critic Remy de Gourmont, who wrote a preface to the book, voices his opinion on Elagabalus.

According to Gourmont, the young ruler was ‘the emperor of extravagance’, but that was only to be expected from an adolescent boy. He notes that Elagabalus was not cruel, that the empire was at peace and that his reign was a time of plenty. On the other hand, Gourmont stresses that the emperor was not a Roman. He counts him among the ‘Oriental emigrants, corrupted by the hostility of nature, withered by the continuous fire of the sun’, thus expressing disdain for the ‘Orient’ and its people. He regards Elagabalus as a monotheist, striving for religious unity, ‘very much closer to Christianity than to Aryan paganism’. Likewise, the emperor is described as a ‘Jew-like Syrian’. The overall verdict is quite mild: although Gourmont mentions that Elagabalus did not concern himself much with governing, he is said to have been, ‘in his own way, a worthy emperor’.¹

The next work, Studies in the Life of Heliogabalus (1908) by Orma Butler, also dismisses some of the stories in the ancient sources, while retaining part of the hostile rhetoric. Although this book is primarily concerned with the Vita Heliogabali, rather than with Elagabalus himself, it contains an extensive section on the reign of the priest-emperor. Butler does not base her conclusions exclusively on literary accounts, but also makes use of coins, inscriptions and prosopography. She asserts that ‘one can not accept without question the sweeping statements of some of the writers who claim that [Elagabalus] was always hateful to the people.’ However, she makes no attempt to portray the emperor in an objective way, but adopts many of the negative opinions of the ancient authors. For instance, she speaks about the ‘fantastic fanaticism and incomprehensible folly’ with which Elagabalus devoted himself to Elagabal, criticising the ‘barbaric splendour’ of his dress and condemning the double marriage of emperor and god as ‘the climax of his folly’. The emperor, according to Butler, had a ‘cowardly nature’ and a ‘selfish spirit’, and surrounded himself with ‘evil counsellors’ and ‘unworthy favourites’. His effeminacy is not emphasised, but his Syrian background tempts the author to remark, ‘Considering the facts that Heliogabalus was an Oriental, and that he lived in an age of extreme superstition, it is not at all strange that he turned to those who practised magic.’² In short, Butler’s use of non-literary sources did not prompt her to overcome ancient and contemporary prejudice.

A very different, and rather surprising, image of Elagabalus is provided by John Stuart Hay in The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus (1911). Hay seems wary that the subject of his book may be frowned upon. In the preface, he writes about the Vita Heliogabali:

It is written in Latin, and has never been translated into English, to the writer’s knowledge, nor has he any intention of undertaking the work at this present or any other time, as he has no desire to land himself, with the printers and publishers, in the dock at the Old Bailey, in an unenviable, if not an invidious and notorious position.³

This indicates that, in 1911, the extravagances of Elagabalus could still be considered an unsavoury subject, with the potential to damage the reputation of the scholar who concerned himself with them. Nevertheless, Hay not only devoted a study to the controversial emperor, but even set out to salvage Elagabalus’s reputation. Although he admits that ‘the reign of Elagabalus is not a record of great deeds’, nor ‘an age of great men’, he deems the splendour of the age unsurpassed, remarking that ‘the glow of the purple reached its apogee’ during the emperor’s rule, which comprised the ‘last years of imperial greatness’. As for Elagabalus himself, Hay describes him as ‘an incredibly generous person, instinctively trusting, open-hearted and affectionate’. He admits that the boy had ‘a congenital twist towards the evil tendencies of his age’ – probably a reference to the emperor’s homosexual contacts – but stresses that his negative image is an ‘absurd, purely grotesque [...] caricature’, cooked up by his aunt Mammaea: ‘and for 1800 years no one has had the audacity to look below the surface and unmask the deception.’⁴

Hay tries to give a psychological analysis of Elagabalus in the tradition of nineteenth-century medical authorities such as Krafft-Ebing. He speaks about the boy’s ‘hereditary sexuality, neurotic religion, and love of life’, remarking that ‘in the body of the man resided the soul with all the natural passions of a woman. He was what the world knew as a Psycho-sexual Hermaphrodite.’ ‘Orientalism’ also plays a big part in Hay’s characterisation of Elagabalus. Both the emperor’s religion and his psychology are said to have developed ‘under the eastern sky and surrounded by the pomp and colour of the Orient’. The young ruler possesses ‘the weak softness of the Semitic races’, and his reign is ‘a record of enormous wealth and excessive prodigality, luxury and aestheticism, carried to their ultimate extreme, and sensuality in all the refinements of its Eastern habit’. Hay argues that Elagabalus was ‘far nearer to the worship and doctrines of Jehovah than to those of any Western mode of thought’. He depicts the emperor as a monotheist who dreamt of ‘the unification of churches in one great monotheistic ideal’. Contrary to Christianity, Hay assures us, the cult of Elagabal ‘was never cruel, it never persecuted’. He regards religion in general as an ‘effete neuroticism’, but makes it clear that he would have much preferred the worship of Elagabal, ‘the worship of life and light’, to the ‘obscure and impossible dogmas’ of Christianity.⁵ Apparently, what we have here is an author who was frustrated with the dominant religion of his times, and saw in Elagabalus a champion who could have directed history towards another, preferable, path.

After 1911, no new monographs on Elagabalus were published for several decades. Only in 1957 was the emperor once again deemed worthy of an extensive study. Roland Villeneuve published Héliogabale, le César fou. As the title indicates, this book does not even attempt to give an unbiased portrayal of Elagabalus. Although the author notes that ‘his family charged him with every crime, his detractors did the rest’, he does not approach the literary accounts with much scepsis. Like Hay, Villeneuve shows much interest in the emperor’s psychology. He diagnoses that Elagabalus suffered from ‘religious psychopathia’, remarking, As the victim of a neuropathia dominated by a quasi-unconscious exhibitionism, he would probably have ended in dementia.’ Artaud, whose surreal book on Elagabalus was apparently taken for a serious academic work by Villeneuve, is cited as an authority, as is Krafft-Ebing. In fact, many of Villeneuve’s ideas seem to come straight out of the nineteenth century. For instance, the author remarks that Elagabalus’s lack of sense of morality and justice was a sign of ‘degeneration’. He also comments upon ‘the Oriental origin and the lewd heredity’ which he sees in marble busts of the emperor, concluding that they are ‘closer to statues of Babylonian androgynes than to Greek ephebes, let alone Roman ones’. Equally curious is the remark that ‘Heliogabalus perhaps believed he glimpsed that within the Androgyne, the denial of one sex and the absolute of both, supreme perfection resided.’⁶

Two later monographs, G.R. Thompson’s unpublished PhD thesis ‘Elagabalus, Priest-Emperor of Rome’ (1972) and Robert Turcan’s book Héliogabale et le sacre du Soleil (1985), do not add new perspectives to the existing corpus of studies on Elagabalus. Thompson characterises his subject as an emperor who ‘was so occupied with sex and religion that he ignored the fact that he was the ruler of the Roman Empire’. He states that there was ‘nothing Roman nor even occidental’ about Elagabalus and his mother: ‘In them arose the old spirit of Canaan against which the prophets of Israel rose with great energy’ Turcan is equally biased in his portrayal of the emperor, reporting scandalous stories from Cassius Dio, Herodian and the Historia Augusta as fact. When speaking about Elagabalus’s concern for the prostitutes of Rome, he remarks that ‘in our day, Heliogabalus would have created a ministry of Prostitution.’⁷ Both authors subscribe to the idea that the emperor planned to unify the empire by instituting the cult of Elagabal as the universal religion. It was up to Martin Frey, author of Untersuchungen zur Religion und zur Religionspolitik des Kaisers Elagabal (1989), to look at the emperor’s religious policy in more detail. His book is arguably the first monograph that subjects the years 218–22 to a serious critical analysis, making an effort to avoid stereotypes and prejudice. However, Frey is exclusively concerned with the cult of Elagabal and the role it played during Elagabalus’s rule. He does not give an image of the priest-emperor himself.

A recent monograph on Elagabalus is Saverio Gualerzi’s Né uomo, né donna, né dio, né dea, published in 2005. Gualerzi argues that the emperor’s reputation was damaged not only because of his dubious morality and unrestrained display of luxury, but also because he refused to play the sociopolitical, sexual and religious roles traditionally expected of him. The author regards androgyny as a fundamental element of the Elagabal cult and argues that this caused tension with Roman religious tradition. He points out that Artaud had already said this in L’Anarchiste couronné, but historians had failed to pick it up. Amending this neglect, Gualerzi concludes that Elagabalus wanted to be associated with the divine and used his androgynous qualities to achieve this. As a result, the Roman people were dominated by ‘two bizarre figures’, namely the emperor and his divine protector, Elagabal, who were ‘homonymous, similar, and of an indefinite and indefinable sexual nature: neither man nor woman; god nor goddess’.⁸

Most of the works discussed so far have concentrated on the reality of Elagabalus’s reign; that is, they have tried to reconstruct what happened during the period 218–22 and what the motives and goals of the emperor were. However, the study of antiquity in the last decades has increasingly turned its gaze on another aspect: the imaginary. In his much-praised work, The Roman Revolution (1958), Ronald Syme called attention to the role of propaganda during the reign of Augustus, remarking, ‘The Princeps, now a monopolist of the means of influencing opinion, used all his arts to persuade men to accept the Principate and its programme.’⁹ The notion was picked up by Paul Zanker, who made Augustan propaganda the subject of his influential book, Augustus und die Macht der Bilder (1987). Jaś Elsner, the author of Art and the Roman Viewer (1995), focused on the audiences at which ideological messages were directed. In addition, scholars became increasingly aware that the images of emperors in ancient literature are likewise constructed to convey certain messages and ideas. A good example of this is Jaś Elsner and Jamie Masters’sReflections of Nero(1994), a volume devoted to the different portrayals of the last Julio-Claudian emperor in ancient literature and modern popular culture.

So far, the effects of these developments on the study of Elagabalus have been modest. As we have seen, Thompson and Turcan take much of the ancient accounts at face value. In contrast, Theo Optendrenk, author of Die Religionspolitik des Kaisers Elagabal im Spiegel der Historia Augusta(1969), is well aware that the Vita Heliogabali deliberately creates a negative image of Elagabalus. However, his primary concern is not with this image, but with the question of the extent to which stories about the emperor’s religious policy are true. Only Michael Sommer’s article ‘Elagabal: Wege zur Konstruktion eines “schlechten” Kaisers’ (2004) devotes itself entirely to the literary images of Elagabalus, rather than to the events of his reign or the reliability of the ancient texts. The self-representation of the emperor has been the subject of a handful of articles, most notably one by Erika Manders, who compares the coinage of Elagabalus to that of Severus Alexander.¹⁰

In general, though, most ancient scholars now seem aware that the negative image of Elagabalus is a construction and does not necessarily reflect historical reality. Moreover, the hostile rhetoric concerning ‘Orientals’, let alone Semites, has mostly gone out of scholarly fashion. As a result, the portrayal of Elagabalus in handbooks and reference books tends to be a lot more nuanced than it used to be. Compare, for instance, the 1939 edition of Volume XII of the Cambridge Ancient History with the revised edition of 2005. The 1939 edition condemns the emperor’s promotion of Elagabal as ‘an exhibition of childish egotism and of the contentiousness of Syrian baal-worship’, remarking,

The incongruity of a circumcised Augustus, who abstained from the flesh of swine to perform with a ritual purity the obscenities of a Syrian cult and who paraded in public tricked out in the effeminate finery prescribed by its ceremonial, offended a public opinion which was not exacting in morals but expected a traditional decorum from its rulers.¹¹

In contrast, the 2005 edition – which devotes considerably fewer pages to the reign of the priest-emperor – formulates things much more neutrally:

Eastern cults were acceptable in Rome, but the flaunting of the peculiar dress and rituals involved, and the appearance of the ‘most mighty priest of the invincible Sungod’ among the imperial titles, preceding Pontifex Maximus, were, at least, undiplomatic.¹²

As we see from this extract, Elagabalus is still being criticised. But the criticism concerns his ‘undiplomatic’ behaviour and decisions, rather than expressing moral disapproval. From a scandalous, effeminate pervert, Elagabalus has evolved into an emperor whose religious reforms were merely politically clumsy.

Modern images, 1914 to the present

The American play Heliogabalus, a Buffoonery in Three Acts (1920), written by Henry Louis Mencken and George Jean Nathan, shows a clear break with the Decadent interpretation of Elagabalus dominant in fin-de-siècle Europe. Instead of a bored, degenerate boy of androgynous beauty, the emperor we meet in this play is a man nearing middle age. He has sat on the throne for about two decades and has no fewer than 11 wives. Like his counterpart in the ancient sources, Heliogabalus leads a life of pleasure and plenty. When he meets the beautiful Lucia, he immediately marries her, banishing his other spouses from the imperial bedchamber to spend all his time with her. Lucia is a devout Christian and wants the emperor to give up his hedonistic lifestyle. Heliogabalus initially tries to understand and follow her ideals, but soon grows weary of her chaste kisses, longing for more. His complaint formulates one of the key points of the play: ‘Lucia, I can’t understand you or this Christianity either. What’s the idea of trying to make people miserable by forbidding them to do what they want to, and then, when they’re unhappy about it, telling them they’re awfully happy but don’t know it?’¹³

Even Lucia has to admit that kissing may be more pleasant than praying. However, the play not only pokes fun at the over-zealous chastity of (some) Christians; the excessive hedonism of pagans such as Heliogabalus is also mocked. Due to heavy drinking, the emperor suffers from a stomach ache. The doctors treating him remark that Christianity makes an end to the old diseases of intemperance, but replaces them with new vices: a fasting Christian eats too little and sleeps too much. A better alternative, it is implied, would be the middle road, between the exaggerated morality of Christianity and the rampant excesses of paganism. Perhaps we can read this message as a reaction to moralising novels such as Arthur Westcott’s The Sun God (1904), in which pious Christians fall victim to the cruelty of a pagan tyrant. Buffoonery presents a less black-and-white picture.

The tone of the play, as the word ‘buffoonery’ suggests, is light-hearted – a contrast with the heavy-handed tone of some Decadent pieces. There is no mention of the cult of Elagabal, nor are there any references to the emperor’s ‘Oriental’ background, except for one remark that he was born in Syria. In fact, hardly anything in the play is reminiscent of Elagabalus as presented in the ancient sources. Mencken and Nathan’s Heliogabalus is explicitly heterosexual and does not seem overtly interested in religion, although he remarks that he ‘was originally designed for the church’.¹⁴ He is presented as a remarkably smooth talker, an element which is absent from ancient accounts. Only his hedonism and his frequent outbursts of cruelty may recall the Elagabalus from the stories of Dio, Herodian and the Historia Augusta. However, the playwrights might as well have projected these characteristics on another notorious Roman emperor: it would have mattered little if the protagonist of Buffoonery had been Nero, Domitian or Caracalla.

The Heliogabalus in the play is often ruthless and capricious, but he can also be very amiable and charming, especially towards women he fancies. Mencken and Nathan present him as a comical, rather than a sinister, character. Finally, Buffoonery is unique in that it grants Elagabalus a happy ending: Lucia sets off to do God’s work elsewhere, leaving the emperor free to devote himself to his eleventh wife, the fair Dacia.

From the 1920s to the 1950s, Elagabalus hardly featured in art and literature. Antonin Artaud was one of the very few who devoted a work to him. Perhaps this hiatus in the emperor’s fictional afterlife was the result of the economic malaise of the 1930s, which caused a more serious and morally tight cultural climate. During the decade before and the years immediately following World War II, there may have been little room for such ‘perverse’ topics as the reign of Elagabalus. This changed in the 1960s, when the emperor once again inspired several authors. After Alfred Duggan’s 1960 novel, Family Favourites, which will be discussed in detail later, Elagabalus appeared in Child of the Sun (1966), written by Kyle Onstott and Lance Horner. Serious and morally tight are adjectives which certainly do not apply to this novel, which is primarily concerned with Elagabalus’s homosexual love life and may best be classified as an erotic gay novel. The emperor’s relationships with Zoticus and, especially, Hierocles, take centre stage, but the authors find ample opportunity to include other male beauties, who are often described in vivid detail.

When we first meet Elagabalus – then called Varius – in Emesa, it seems the authors are setting him up to become the next tyrant of Rome. The boy likes to lash out at slaves with his whip, and nearly drowns a young man in the pool for his own sadistic amusement. At the same time, he is a ‘snivelling sissy’, who screams for his mother as soon as his cousin Alexianus starts beating him.¹⁵ According to his aunt Mamaea, however, Varius is not to be blamed for what he is. She warns her son Alexianus,

Blame him not. His grandmother, his own mother, Comazon, the priest Zenotabalus and that debauched Gannys are all conspiring to make him as evil as possible in order to gain their own ends. Varius could have been as fine a person as you are but he has been taught to think of nothing but the pleasures of his own young body.¹⁶

Time and time again, it is emphasised that Varius is trained to be a pawn, indoctrinated into ‘the then fashionable vices of the East’ and kept away from politics. His ambitious family plans to make him emperor, but does not want him actually to reign. ‘Give him wine to drink and a man to bed with and he will be contented,’ Maesa states smugly. As a result of the spoiling and indoctrination of those around him, Varius has become a ‘simpering catamite’ and a ‘ridiculous little queen’; effeminate, vain, cruel, and interested only in pretty clothes and sex with men.¹⁷

Still, the boy proves capable of true love. He genuinely cares for the hunky Zoticus, whom he marries, and in Rome he immediately falls for the gorgeous charioteer Hierocles, the love of his life. This man changes Antoninus – as he is called after becoming emperor – for the better. ‘My beloved [...] is a boy who has starved for love without ever knowing what love really is and now that he has found my love, he glories in it,’ Hierocles explains to his mother. When he spends a week alone with the charioteer, Antoninus becomes ‘less petulant, more mature’, losing ‘some of his mincing walk and airy affectations’, and is ‘coarsened a bit by Hierocles’s masculinity’, becoming ‘handsomer’. In turn, Hierocles becomes ‘more tender’ in this ‘week of miracles’, so that ‘there was a blending between the two of them, each taking from the other the needed qualities he did not possess.’¹⁸ Thus, Antoninus becomes more masculine and Hierocles more feminine, both of them abandoning their stereotypical gender roles to come closer to each other. Nowhere in the novel do Onstott and Horner suggest that the relationship between the two is morally wrong or disgusting; on the contrary, it is consistently presented as genuine and affectionate, despite Antoninus’s occasional unfaithfulness and Hierocles’s tendency to jealousy and physical violence. Child of the Sun is the first novel to make the relationship of Elagabalus and Hierocles its main theme, and the first to put so much emphasis on the positive aspects of their love.

Later plays and novels would continue this tradition of Elagabalus as a positive gay character. Martin Duberman’s 1973 play Elagabalus, which will be discussed in detail later, is about a modern-day homosexual who has taken the emperor as his idol. The Canadian play Heliogabalus, a Love Story (2002), by Sky Gilbert, presents Heliogabalus and Hierocles – or at least their postmodern reincarnations – as a modern gay couple, living together in an apartment in an unspecified city. Hierocles functions as the narrator of the play, recounting his life with the beautiful boy who claims to be Elagabalus reborn. Hierocles is a strong but gentle guy who speaks lovingly about his ‘little emperor’, ‘prancing princelet’ and ‘favourite despot’.¹⁹ He has a lot to put up with: Heliogabalus is very domineering and constantly claims attention, as symbolised by his much-too-large chair, whereas his much bigger partner has to settle for a much smaller one.

The play switches between modern times – scenes of the lovers living together – and antiquity – scenes from the reign of Elagabalus, such as the emperor addressing the harlots of Rome (a role imposed on the play’s audience) and visiting his sexually voracious mother, Symiamira. The borders between past and present, between the ancient Heliogabalus and his reincarnation, are deliberately blurred, with one dialogue even starting in antiquity and continuing in the twenty-first century. The emperor is certainly not divested of negative characteristics. Sometimes, he acts like a tyrant, playing games of life and death with his subjects, although he claims that he does not ‘kill people regularly’, except in sacrifice to the God of the Sun. However, he can also be gentle and kind, especially to prostitutes, whom he regards as ‘the most important people in the Roman Empire’, since they are devoted to pleasure. His relation with the army – represented by three muscle-boys – is less amiable. The soldiers are not pleased with their emperor, ‘a flaming queen who wore dresses and eyeshadow’. As Hierocles emphasises, this is not ‘an ordinary case of straights against gays’: the muscle-boys are gay themselves, but they are ‘buddy fags’ who do not go around flaunting their homosexuality.²⁰ Ultimately, Heliogabalus makes a plea for tolerance – not tolerance of homosexuality, but of people who do not play the gender roles which society allots them. Heliogabalus tells Hierocles,

No, you don’t understand. No one could ever understand what it’s like to be a boy who looks and acts like a girl. I didn’t want to be like this, I didn’t try and be like this, but this is the way I am, and I’m perfectly happy with it, it’s just that people, people treat me strangely, I walk into a room and they say it’s a girl, it’s a girl in a boy’s body ulch. ughg. It’s as if I have a disease. [...] I’m never going to make any real money, or any real future, nobody wants to listen to what I say nobody takes me seriously, do you understand what it’s like? Not to be a masculine person in our culture?²¹

Jeremy Reed’s novel Boy Caesar, published in 2004, also has the emperor question the dominance of the masculine ideal. The novel has two alternating narrative strands. One is concerned with Jim, a young gay man living in twenty-first-century London, who is writing a PhD thesis on Elagabalus. Jim is aware ‘that Heliogabalus had become a fiction, a character in part invented by his biographers’. He wants to ‘recreate Heliogabalus incontemporary terms’, ‘making him live now’. In his interpretation, the emperor ‘had attempted to overthrow the system’, substituting ‘the heterodox with the unorthodox, the heterosexual ideal with its homosexual counterpart and the regenerate with the degenerate’.²² This is confirmed in the other narrative strand, which describes the reign of Heliogabalus from the emperor’s own point of view:

His imagination had needed little prompting. Already he saw himself dragging it in front of the Senate. It was his plan to affront their machismo by insisting that women should be introduced into the governing body. He had it in mind to subvert the whole gender-bias on which Roman society was founded.²³

However, the Heliogabalus in this narrative is not supposed to be ‘genuine’, not even in the context of the novel; we see him filtered through Jim’s imagination. This becomes clear from the many obvious anachronisms in the text, such as references to AIDS, computer mouses, and other distinctly modern concepts. Jim imagines Elagabalus as an explicitly gay emperor who became ‘the victim of a homophobic assassination’.²⁴ As in Heliogabalus, a Love Story, Elagabalus is presented as an ideologue, advocating acceptance of gay people and challenging traditional gender roles – causes to which he becomes a martyr. This reflects the struggle for gay rights in Europe and the US from the 1960s onwards. ‘Orientalism’ plays no significant part in these pieces: the authors are interested in the emperor’s sexual contacts with men, his effeminacy and his cross-dressing, not in his Syrian background. Remarkably, both A Love Story and Boy Caesar mirror the ancient Elagabalus with a modern counterpart: Gilbert’s play has Heliogabalus and Hierocles living together as a twenty-first-century couple, while Jim in Reed’s novel meets a reincarnation of the emperor in Rome. In this way, a relatively unknown character from distant times is integrated into and made relevant for the gay subculture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Another interesting, distinctive image of Elagabalus is presented in the 2003 opera Heliogabal, scripted by the German author Thomas Jonigk and put to music by the Belgian musician Peter Vermeersch. Jonigk turns the emperor into an ancient pop star, complete with his own manager, the senator Claudius, who keeps track of the sale of Heliogabal posters and biographies. The opera starts with the body of the murdered Macrinus, displayed on a table; at the end, the dead Heliogabal occupies the same position. Stars come and go, is the message; they only last as long as they capture the imagination of the public, by whose whims they are made or broken.

In an introductionary text for the opera, Jonigk states that ‘having, like Michael Jackson once did, a fanbase of millions, the fourteen-year-old boy emperor Heliogabal has overwhelmed Rome.’²⁵ However, his popularity dwindles when he is accused of blasphemy, provocation, arrogance, political treason, nepotism, sexual excesses, prostitution and homosexuality. Jonigk remarks that superstars walk a tightrope: being too common bores the fans, being too extreme frustrates and alienates them. It is between these two extremes that idols have to find a middle ground.

Because of his young age, short reign, alleged good looks and supposedly flamboyant lifestyle, Elagabalus makes for a good protagonist to demonstrate these ideas. During much of the opera, Heliogabal seems to be on top of the world. Like an ancient Michael Jackson in his glory days, he is adored and worshipped by everybody. In reality, however, he is no more than a plaything, a doll, at the mercy of the capricious attention of the public and the cold calculations of his manager. ‘Heliogabal – that’s a worthwhile investment,’ remarks Claudius, summarising exactly what the imperial superstar means to him. The boy’s grandmother, Maesa, says to him, ‘That’s how an emperor must be. Like me. You are like me. Immortal. I through you and you through me.’ However, when Heliogabal is killed, she is quick enough to support Alexander as the new star, exclaiming, ‘Time for the emperor!’ Significantly, Heliogabal himself has almost no speech in the piece. Although he is at the centre of everything, his opinion does not count. Only in a scene near the end does the boy open his mouth to tell the audience how he has been butchered by the Romans. The public which used to worship him has turned against him, looking for a new thrill. Thus, the young emperor becomes an example of the fleeting nature of fame: raised to the stars in an instant, plunged into infamy the next. As Jonigk concludes in his introductionary text, ‘That was the way it was for Heliogabal. And that is the way it is everywhere.’²⁶

Since Elagabalus returned to the attention of artists and authors in the 1960s, he has never left. The fictional afterlife of the emperor in the past decades has been particularly rich and varied, with appearances in many genres and many countries. For instance, we encounter Elagabalus in the British novel Family Favourites (1960), the Italian movie Necropolis (1970), the French play Héliogabale (1971), the Italian ballet Phaidra-Elagabalus (1981), the German poem ‘Bericht von der Ermordung des Heliogabal durch seine Leibgarde’ (1999), the British pop song ‘Heliogabalus’ (2001), the Canadian play Heliogabalus, a Love Story (2002), the French comic series La Dernière prophétie (2002–7) and the American painting Heliogabalus’ Remorse (2005). Apparently, the priest-emperor appeals to modern authors and artists from many different cultural and artistic backgrounds.

It would be too much to state that Elagabalus has become a popular figure, known and adored by the masses. Although he has found his way into several genres associated with popular culture, such as comics (Neil Gaiman’s Being an Account of the Life and Death of the Emperor Heliogabolus; Gilles Chaillet’s La Dernière prophétie), movies (Necropolis) and pop music (among others, the song ‘Heliogabalus’ on the album Folktronic by Momus), the emperor usually appears outside the mainstream, in art niches with a particular, limited audience. Franco Brocani’sNecropolis, for instance, is described on the Internet Movie Database as a ‘bizarre art movie’ and has never captured the attention of large crowds.²⁷ However, the fact that mainstream audiences are not acquainted with Elagabalus does not mean we cannot regard the emperor as part of modern pop culture. According to cultural studies scholar Simon During, popular culture can be defined as ‘all culture that is not regarded as, or does not consider itself, elite culture’. It includes mass-produced culture, but is also ‘riddled with art niches’.²⁸

Contrary to the fin-de-siècle, when most images of the emperor fitted (to a greater or lesser extent) into the Decadent tradition, twentieth and twenty-first century interpretations of Elagabalus show little coherence. The most influential twentieth-century author who wrote on the emperor was undoubtedly Artaud, whose essay on Elagabalus will be discussed later in this chapter. As we will see, Artaud imagined the emperor as a rebel against Roman society, prompting the Italian author Alberto Arbasino to write Super-Eliogabalo (1969). In this so-called anti-novel, which consists of loose fragments rather than a continuous narrative, Elagabalus is likewise imagined as a rebel. Arbasino, basing his text on the ancient literary sources and L’Anarchiste couronné, uses the emperor to present an ironical, critical view of the massive student protests of 1968. Artaud’s name is mentioned in the works of Sky Gilbert and Jeremy Reed, and clearly influenced the French play Héliogabale (1971) by Pierre Moinot. His theories on theatre were a source of inspiration for the Italian theatre group Fanny & Alexander, whose 2006 play Heliogabalus portrays a young man trying to embody the myth of Elagabalus. The protagonist wants to devise a language without words, just as Artaud favoured mise-en-scène over textual theatre and wanted to subordinate words to physically articulate signs. Despite their connection to Artaud, however, the pieces mentioned above give quite distinct images of Elagabalus, with the rebellious, innovative character of the emperor as the only common factor.

Other works are just as diverse in their interpretations. As we have seen, several of the novels and plays from the 1960s onwards portray Elagabalus as a positive gay character. In Chaillet’s La Dernière prophétie, the young ruler is an evil tyrant, cruel and bloodthirsty. Jonigk interprets him as an ancient Michael Jackson, whereas Moinot combines Artelian concepts with notions from Decadence, such as the accusation that the emperor embodies ‘deformity, hideousness, degradation’.²⁹ Twentieth- and twenty-first-century images of Elagabalus cannot be classified as variations on a theme, such as the evil tyrant or the Decadent emperor. They branch out in many directions, turning the emperor into an anarchistic rebel, a pop star, a martyr for gay rights, and other interpretations never envisaged by the ancient authors. This diversity seems to fit with sociologist Frank Webster’s ideas about postmodern society, which, he argues, no longer accepts the opinions of experts as the truth ‘Against this the postmodern mentality celebrates the fact that there is no “truth”, but only versions of “truth” which makes a nonsense of the search for “truth”. In its stead the advocacy is for difference, for pluralism, for “anything goes”.’³⁰

From this statement, we could conclude that modern images of Elagabalus are no more than random evocations, void of meaning. This, however, would be taking things too far. Like their earlier counterparts, modern interpretations of the priest-emperor are taken out of context and adapted to make them relevant to contemporary issues, such as modern gender roles. The authors doing so still have points to make, which they may well feel are ‘absolute’ truths. Therefore, the increased diversity of images in the Nachleben of Elagabalus does not signify a loss of meaning; it only indicates that twentieth- and twenty-first-century authors and artists allow themselves more freedom to deviate from the sources.

Often, modern authors do not try to hide that the Elagabaluses they present to their audiences are fictional constructions. On the contrary, many of them play with this notion. Just as scholarship has become increasingly aware that much of our knowledge about Roman emperors does not rest on hard facts, but on consciously constructed images, modern literature often presents Elagabalus as a purposely constructed character. Jonigk’s pop-star Heliogabal is an artificial idol, carefully designed by his manager. In Duberman’s Elagabalus and Fanny & Alexander’s Heliogabalus, we do not meet the eponymous ruler himself, but somebody who aspires to be like him – in other words, an imitation of the original. Likewise, Gilbert’s play and Reed’s novel both give us a modern reincarnation of the emperor. Moreover, the many anachronisms in Reed’s description of the reign of the ‘historical’ Elagabalus make it clear that we see these episodes filtered through the mind of a twenty-first-century student: the emperor is the product of Jim’s imagination. Arbasino’s ‘anti-novel’ Super-Eliogabalo also makes extensive use of anachronisms. In all these cases, we are dealing with images drawing attention to their own artificiality.

The French philosopher and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard argues that the twentieth century has seen such an increase in images – in art, popular culture, commercials, television – that they have started to form a reality of their own. Images are no longer thought to refer to reality, Baudrillard argues, but to other images. As a result, the underlying reality disappears, leaving only representations.³¹ Elagabalus’s fictional afterlife could be interpreted as a case in point. The illusion that we are reading a book or watching a play about the ‘real’ emperor is often deliberately broken by the author. Although elements from the ancient accounts are still used to portray Elagabalus, the pretence of authenticity is discarded. Like Jim, the PhD student in Boy Caesar, the works mentioned above acknowledge that they are recreating the emperor in contemporary terms, ‘making him live now’.³²

Since 2000, the attention for Elagabalus has been remarkably strong. In the last years, the emperor has played a significant role in at least four plays, one opera, two novels and one comic series. In addition, he has been depicted on the oil painting Heliogabalus’ Remorse (2005) by Matt Hughes, has inspired Martin Bladh to a series of paintings (2007), has been the subject of Momus’s song ‘Heliogabalus’ (2001) – in which the singer asserts to us that ‘he was beautiful and sexy and completely without guilt’ – and has inspired two musical albums: John Zorn’s Six Litanies for Heliogabalus (2007) and Rorcal’s Heliogabalus (2010).

Possibly all this attention for the emperor is caused by the growing number of people with a fast connection to the Internet, where information about him is easy to find. There are certainly many websites mentioning Elagabalus, as well as images of ancient coins and modern depictions. A quick search reveals the existence of ‘Heliogabby’s Homepage’ and ‘HelioGabby’s Bath House’, whose ‘Electronic Library’ features English translations of the relevant passages in Cassius Dio, Herodian and the Historia Augusta, as well as Gibbon’s description of the young ruler’s escapades and large chunks of Hay’s The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus. Elagabalus is also graced with an entry in ‘Joan’s Mad Monarch Series’.³³ Numerous other websites could be mentioned. At the start of the third millennium, it seems, the third-century emperor still fascinates.

THE ‘MODERN PRINCE’: SELECTED WORKS

Elagabalus in Artaud’s L’Anarchiste couronné (1934)

The life and career of Antonin (originally Antoine) Artaud (1896–1948) are characterised by an alternation of energetic, creative peaks and deep personal tragedies. Born in Marseille as the son of a shipbuilder at the end of the nineteenth century, Artaud was a sickly, nervous child. He grew up to be an actor and writer, and co-founded the short-lived Alfred Jarry Theatre, which was to present a new, physical form of theatre, meant to give the audience a ‘hysterical sensory overload’.³⁴ Artaud had to battle depressions and an opium addiction, and spent the final years of his life in several asylums, where he received electroshock treatment. He died in Paris in 1948, probably from an overdose of chloral.

The ‘theatre of cruelty’ is undoubtedly Artaud’s greatest legacy. As he explained in Le Théâtre et son double (1938), a collection of his letters, manifestoes, lectures and articles, Artaud objected to the predominantly textual and psychological nature of European theatre. He rejected the idea that theatre should hold up a mirror to humanity; in his eyes, this only made it false, an illusion. Instead, he argued for ‘le théâtre de la cruauté’, which would subordinate text and the narrative, and would give a central place to the body and non-verbal signs: ‘It is therefore necessary to create a metaphysics of the word, the gesture, the expression for the theatre, with the aim of tearing down its psychological and human pounding.’³⁵ Audiences had to be fully submerged in the performance, and would thereby break through the illusions conjured up by traditional theatre, seeing reality for what it was. They would reconnect with metaphysical primeval forces which, at the time, Artaud thought, were only to be found in the ‘pure’ theatre of the ‘East’. As he states in his manifesto: ‘Without an element of cruelty at the base of every spectacle, theatre is not possible. In the degenerate state we are in, we will return the metaphysical to the minds through the skin.’³⁶

The term ‘cruauté’ does not primarily signify ‘cruelty’ in the sense of bloodthirst and sadism; it expresses that this is theatre without mediation, since it does not represent reality, but is a deed, an event in itself. Artelian cruelty, in the words of Stephen Barber, should be regarded as ‘an elaborated version of the intentional and hostile Surrealism’ which Artaud had promoted earlier in his career.³⁷ The term ‘double’ is also important: it indicates that the theatre should become the double of the primeval forces, and vice versa. Like many Artelian concepts, it is a contradictory term, since Artaud also wanted the theatre to coincide completely with these forces, eradicating duplicacy.

Artaud wrote Héliogabale ou l’anarchiste couronné (1934) when he was developing his ideas about the ‘theatre of cruelty’. In his book, he applies these ideas to Elagabalus. The choice for this emperor was not his own: Artaud was commissioned to write the book by the publishing house Éditions Denoël-Steel. He took the job because he needed money, but soon warmed to the subject. L’Anarchiste couronné may best be classified as an essay, although it crosses genre boundaries and also contains elements of a novel, such as vivid invented descriptions of characters and places. The essay consists of three parts, followed by three short appendices with additional information on esoteric subjects.

It could be argued that L’Anarchiste couronné is more about the author’s ideas concerning anarchy and androgyny than about Elagabalus: only the last third is devoted to the emperor and his reign. In the first part, Artaud gives his idiosyncratic interpretation of the background of the future ruler: he discusses Syria, Elagabalus’s family and the cult of Elagabal. The small but crucial middle part concerns itself with ‘la guerre des principes’, the war which, according to the author, is being waged between opposing divine principles, such as the masculine and the feminine. Artaud connects this centuries-long metaphysical war to the worship of the sun, particularly Elagabal: ‘And this war is wholly within the religion of the sun, and one finds it in some degree, sanguinary yet magical, in the religion of the sun practised at Emesa.’ This, according to him, is the key to understanding the actions of Elagabalus: ‘it’s not so much in his own personal psychology, but rather in the religion of the sun that they [i.e. historians discussing the emperor] should have sought the origin of his excesses, his follies and his highly mystical lewdness.’³⁸

Contrary to such authors as Louis Couperus – or John Stuart Hay, for that matter – Artaud is not interested in a psychological portrait of the emperor. To him, Elagabalus is the embodiment of opposing principles, whose constant struggle is described in the second part of the book. His Héliogabale is androgynous, ‘flesh plump as a woman’s, [...] features waxen-smooth’, combining a male sex with female characteristics.³⁹ As Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons points out, androgyny in L’Anarchiste couronné depicts the coexistence of blended male and female principles in one being.⁴⁰ As in Le Théâtre et son double, Artaud seems fascinated with the double. Nearly every character in the book is doubled: Domna with Moesa, Gannys with Eutychian, Héliogabale with Alexandre, although the emperor scornfully regards his cousin as ‘a poor imitation of himself’. An important appendix to L’Anarchiste couronné expresses the view that everything that exists is double at its source. However, a few lines further, Artaud states that ‘beyond that there’s only pure essence, unanalysable abstraction, the indeterminate absolute, “The Intelligible”, finally’, apparently contradicting his earlier statement.⁴¹ This ambiguity about the original nature of reality – one or double – is maintained throughout the main text and is never resolved.

The androgyne represents the double united in unity: it is both male and female, yet one. The counterpart to androgyny, according to Artaud, is anarchy, the disorder that arises when separate principles are at war with one another, preventing unity. Intriguingly, Héliogabale is not only an androgyne, but also an anarchist: ‘The initial anarchy was within him and ravaged his organism.’⁴² The emperor is tormented by the polarities he embodies: not only man and woman, but also god and man, human king and sun king, the man crowned and uncrowned. Even his name, El-Gabal (or its variants), is made up out of the names of many gods or opposing principles.

‘Héliogabale was a born anarchist, and one who ill bore with kingship, and all his acts as king were acts of the born anarchist, the public enemy of order, who is an enemy to public order,’ Artaud states. He regards Héliogabale not as a madman, but as a rebel against ‘the Roman polytheistic anarchy’ and ‘the Roman monarchy’. All his gestures are double-edged: they generate order and disorder, unity and anarchy, generosity and cruelty, etc. The author reinterprets many stories from the ancient sources, such as Herodian’s account that Elagabalus walked backwards during a procession to keep facing his god. In L’Anarchiste couronné, this walking backwards is transferred to the scene where the emperor first enters Rome, to show that ‘at the outset he’s had himself buggered by the whole Roman empire’.⁴³ Accounts from the Vita Heliogabali about Elagabalus’s licentious and excessive lifestyle become deliberate attempts to subvert the Roman order. Artaud remarks,

To restore poetry and order to a world whose very existence is a threat to order, is to bring back war and the permanence of war; it is to bring in a state of enforced cruelty, to arouse a nameless anarchy, anarchy of things and appearances which awaken before sinking anew and melting into unity.⁴⁴

What this passage seems to indicate is that anarchy, or war between the principles, is ultimately necessary to bring the opposing forces closer together and merge them completely, establishing unity. This is confirmed by an earlier passage: ‘It was in order to cut short this separation of principles, to reduce their essential antagonism, that they [i.e. men] took up arms and fell upon one another.’ Indeed, the emperor’s ‘marvellous ardour for disorder’ is said to be ‘merely the application of a metaphysical and superior idea of order – of unity, that is’.⁴⁵

According to Artaud, Héliogabale, ‘not content with taking the throne for a stage, [...] proceeded to take the very soil of the empire for a stage’. He introduces ‘theatre and, through theatre, poetry to the throne of Rome, into the palace of a Roman emperor, and poetry, when it’s real, is worthy of blood, it justifies the shedding of blood’.⁴⁶ What Héliogabale does, in other words, is to apply Artaud’s ideas about the ‘theatre of cruelty’ to the governing of the Roman Empire. All his acts are deliberate attempts to break through the superficial order of Roman society and reveal the opposing principles which lie beneath it. His subjects (his audience) are actively involved in this ‘play’ and are ‘cruelly’ brought into contact with the metaphysical forces that their ruler unleashes. As Boldt-Irons remarks, this philosophy seems to indicate that Artaud favours anarchy over androgyny, war over harmony, since the latter holds the danger of inertia and non-being. However, she points out, we should not forget that Héliogabale becomes a martyr to his own cause: he cannot control the anarchy he has unleashed, and dies a gruesome death. Moreover, the emperor was ultimately striving for a superior, metaphysical unity.⁴⁷

Artaud places great emphasis on Héliogabale’s ‘Oriental’ background, especially in the first part of the book. He describes Syria as a place of ‘sanguinary excesses’ and ‘violent spirituality’, where blood, sperm and sweat flow freely. The land has ‘a feeling for a certain natural magic’, and ‘an idea of the magic that is not natural’. The ‘West’, in contrast, has forgotten these things. It is the opposite of the ‘East’, its double; patriarchal where the ‘East’ is matriarchal; static where the ‘East’ is vibrant and dynamic. Addressing his readers directly, Artaud speaks about ‘we people of the Occident’, who associate ourselves with civilisation and regard all others as barbarians. However, he points out, ‘all the ideas which enabled the Roman and Greek worlds not to die immediately, not to sink into a blind bestiality, came from precisely this barbarian fringe.’⁴⁸ Following Artaud, input from the ‘East’ allowed the ‘West’ to maintain contact with tradition.

On a superficial level, Héliogabale seems to undermine patriarchal authority: the emperor is an androgynous figure, brought up in a matriarchal society and dominated by four women. In his family, ‘the men assumed all the malice and weakness, and the women the virility.’⁴⁹ Father figures, as John Stout points out, are either ineffective, absent or castrated (like Héliogabale’s foster father, the eunuch Gannys).⁵⁰ In addition, the emperor ‘banishes men from the senate and replaces them with women’. However, Artaud represents Elagabal as a phallic god, speaking about his ‘vigorous prick’, and notes that Héliogabale, ‘the pederast king who wanted to be a woman, was a priest of the Masculine’.⁵¹ So, just as the emperor is stimulating anarchy in order to achieve a new unity, he is undermining the patriarchal structure of Roman society in order to achieve the triumph of the phallic Elagabal. Stout concludes, ‘Ironically, Artaud’s Héliogabale dethrones the Father the better to reinstate His power in a new form.’⁵²

David contrasts Elagabalus as portrayed in L’Anarchiste couronné with images of the emperor from Decadent authors, such as Lombard, Jourdan and Mirande. She remarks that Artaud rejected their interpretation of the young ruler as an extravagant, derailed soul, plagued by ennui and wishing to outdo Nero. The traditional signs of a decadent society – taverns and brothels, circus games, torture, orgies and sexual inversion – are absent from Artaud’s Rome. Instead, the author of L’Anarchiste couronné concentrates exclusively on the sexual extravagance of the emperor himself, which is sacralised: it serves a higher purpose. ‘Artaud is interested in deep motivations and in the consequences of an act dictated not by the individual fantasy of an esthete, but by a political and religious will,’ David points out.⁵³ Artaud’s Héliogabale may appear to incorporate the height of imperial Rome’s decadence, but he also represents an element of regeneration. The author repeatedly states that Héliogabale let blood and sperm flow freely during his reign, but also notes that the young ruler hardly killed anyone, except for Gannys and the cronies of Macrinus. This remark stresses once again that the emperor’s intentions are essentially benevolent. We could even compare him to Jesus Christ, who likewise set out on a spiritual mission to save mankind and was killed as part of his efforts.⁵⁴

Ultimately, Artaud refuses to instill in his text one definite meaning. Stout remarks, ‘The narrator’s elaborately structured sentences and paragraphs move from one opposition or paradox to another, aggressively claiming the reader’s assent while violating his or her sense of logic and order.’⁵⁵By being deliberately self-contradictionary, the author applies the principles of anarchy to his own narrative. In a letter to a friend, Artaud stated that Héliogabale was a self-portrait: ‘in the conception of the central figure [...] I have indeed described myself.’ Since L’Anarchiste couronné hardly explores the psychology of the emperor, we can assume that Artaud was first and foremost referring to the values and ideas he shared with Héliogabale. Like the crowned anarchist, he probably considered himself ‘a spirit undisciplined and fanatical, [...] a rebel, a crazed individualist’ – pursuing contact with the roaring primeval forces behind the veil of everyday life.⁵⁶

Elagabalus in Duggan’s Family Favourites (1960)

Alfred Duggan (1903–64), the son of a rich Argentinean landowner of Irish descent, was born in Buenos Aires. After his father’s death, he and his family moved to England. Duggan was a productive writer, but only published his first novel – Knight in Armour, about the First Crusade – in 1947. A whole range of historical novels would follow. Without exception, these were set in antiquity or medieval times. Duggan had a preference for obscure historical periods and places, such as the founding of Rome or the autumn days of Roman Britain, since, he claimed, these required the least research. Evelyn Waugh admired Duggan’s oeuvre, which he described as ‘accurate and infused throughout with a dry irony that is peculiarly his own’, commenting that the author’s talent was ‘certain to attract more and more admirers in the future and to establish him safely in a high place among the writers of his period’.⁵⁷

In Family Favourites (1960), Duggan set out to describe the rise to power, the reign and the downfall of Elagabalus. The narrator of his story is Duratius, a praetorian guard who becomes closely acquainted with the emperor and his family. Five years after Elagabalus’s death, while living in northern Britain, Duratius writes his memoirs for his two sons, ‘so that when they are grown up they will know they come of good stock’.⁵⁸ He recounts how he first met Elagabalus after Macrinus was defeated in battle; since he was the first soldier to change sides and declare for the boy, he is rewarded with a job at court. Duratius trains the new emperor in swordfighting and, because of his frankness and sensible mind, soon wins the affection of Elagabalus and his grandmother, becoming a ‘family favourite’. He travels with the imperial company to Rome and experiences the major events of the priest-emperor’s reign up close. When Elagabalus is eventually murdered, Duratius is knocked out in the skirmish, but not killed. Instead, he is allowed to retire to a remote corner of the empire and live out his remaining days in peace, which brings the story full circle.

From the moment that Duratius first meets Elagabalus, he has a favourable impression of the boy. After the defeat of Macrinus, when the new emperor first addresses the troops who have just come over to his side, he says ‘exactly the right thing’, taking their loyalty for granted while at the same time reminding them of their privileged position. ‘He was the kind of Emperor we needed,’ Duratius notes.⁵⁹ Like all the soldiers, he is ‘struck by the superhuman beauty of this marvellous boy’, who ‘radiated happiness and wellbeing’.⁶⁰ The picture he presents of Elagabalus is that of a brave, confident and intelligent young ruler, who does not fail to charm his subjects. After the reign of the uninspiring Macrinus, everybody has high expectations of Caracalla’s heir. Duratius reminisces about those early days of Elagabalus’s rule, when the imperial company was still in the East:

Our ruler was all that could be desired, beautiful and intelligent and high-spirited and merciful. If he was not yet very wise that hardly mattered. The Emperor leads the army, but we were at peace with all our neighbours. [...] Best of all, we felt secure. Elagabalus did not turn against his friends, and if he tried to his grandmother would stop him. Throughout the world his rule was accepted; all the pretenders were dead, nowhere did a province rise in arms. During that autumn civilisation was at peace.⁶¹

Cruelty, Duratius stresses, is not part of Elagabalus’s character. Whereas Cassius Dio claims that the emperor gloated over the dead body of Macrinus, Duggan has him take pity on his unfortunate rival. In Family Favourites, Elagabalus, having received word that the previous emperor has been captured, orders him to be killed immediately, ‘to put him out of his misery’. The deed is done ‘painlessly and without torture’. Moreover, Duratius assures his readers that Elagabalus ‘never harmed any of his subjects’ and ‘had a kindly heart’. In contrast to Dio’s account, in which the emperor is the first to strike a mortal blow against his tutor, Gannys, Duggan has Duratius do the killing: the soldier intervenes when Gannys draws his dagger in a heated argument with his young pupil. Duratius nearly beheads the man, after which Elagabalus finishes the job, cutting the head off completely from the body and holding it up. Amazed, he remarks, ‘It’s not difficult to kill a man, is it? But it’s not nearly so much fun as I had expected.’⁶²

Though Elagabalus in Family Favourites may not be an evil tyrant, that does not mean he is without flaws. Following the Historia Augusta, Duggan portrays the emperor as someone who is very fond of playing practical jokes and giving absurd orders. He serves his dinner guests fake food and orders the police and watchmen of Rome to gather a thousand pounds of cobwebs. As Duratius regretfully remarks, ‘at seventeen he was still in love with the pranks that had amused him when he was fourteen.’ Even so, the soldier concedes, it could have been a lot worse. The emperor’s fondness for jokes is essentially harmless: ‘He tried so hard to be a wicked debauchee, after the manner of Nero or Caligula; but it is difficult to earn a reputation for wickedness if you have sworn an oath never to give pain to an innocent subject.’⁶³ Other hobbies of the young ruler include acting and disguising himself to mix with the commoners. At the heart of these apparently frivolous pleasures lies a deep longing:

‘No, I can’t have everything,’ he answered wistfully. ‘But if only I could control my mind I might be able to experience everything. That’s what I try to do. I want to be the Emperor, and the high priest of Elagabalus. But I want also to be a porter on holiday, and a poor man selling cabbages, and a virgin bride, and an ardent young husband, and a poor old harlot working when she’s ill because the rent must be paid. I want to be all my subjects, a painted Briton and a black Ethiopian and a Cappadocian wrapped in yards and yards of linen trousers. I want to feel the whole civilised world beating in my heart.⁶⁴

This is reminiscent of the Decadent notion of the emperor regarding the whole world as his stage, but there is an important difference: rather than regarding all his subjects as extras in a play starring himself, Duggan’s Elagabalus wants to be them. His primary drive is not megalomanic self-indulgence, but a desire to experience all the shades of human life, from the high to the low, from the familiar to the exotic.

Contrary to most interpretations of Elagabalus, the emperor in Family Favourites is usually not at all effeminate or androgynous. Although his looks are stunning, ‘his perfect beauty had in it nothing of the feminine; even the long embroidered gown could not conceal his manliness.’ Duratius recalls how anxious the young ruler was to learn swordfighting from him – a ‘manly’ interest which the emperor certainly did not have in the accounts of ancient authors.⁶⁵

Sexually, however, Duggan’s Elagabalus is (almost) exclusively interested in men. ‘I shall never touch a woman for my own pleasure,’ he stubbornly declares, when his grandmother wants him to marry. For procreational purposes, he agrees to marry Julia Paula, but rather than spending his wedding night with her, he organises a private party for some intimate friends, including Duratius. At this party, the emperor plays the role of a woman: he appears dressed as a maiden bride, with his golden hair in elaborate curls, his arms depilated and powdered, wearing bracelets and a transparent silk veil. In this guise, he takes the charioteer Gordius for a husband. After sharing the latter’s bed, he returns wearing a bridegroom’s wreath, taking on the masculine role in a marriage with Hierocles. In contrast to just about any other interpretation of this character, Duggan’s Hierocles is a frightened, effeminate boy, rather than a big, muscular man. He does not become the emperor’s husband, but his wife. This emphasises that Elagabalus can choose to play a female role (as he did with Gordius), but that his homosexuality does not make him unmanly. In fact, the marriage with Gordius is the only instance where the emperor presents himself as feminine. Later, he even falls in love with a woman, Annia Faustina, although it is explicitly stated that ‘his affection for Hierocles was unimpaired’ by this.⁶⁶

Although Duggan was a conservative Catholic, Family Favourites does not condemn the homosexual contacts of the emperor. Duratius’s remark, ‘I am a Gaul, with the Celtic distaste for unnatural love’, does not stop him from appreciating the beauty and charms of the young ruler, albeit in a platonic way. The soldier feels that ‘the Emperor’s private life was his own affair, and it seems to me ridiculous to hold that it is more wicked to love boys than girls.’ Elsewhere, he calls his master’s homosexuality ‘a fancy which nobody seriously condemns’, which is ‘at bottom harmless enough’.⁶⁷ Considering that this sentiment is repeated several times throughout the novel, and taking the generally positive portrayal of Elagabalus into account, no irony on the part of the author seems to be involved.

Stereotypes about the ‘East’ are also challenged, up to a point. When he first hears about Elagabalus, Duratius asks if he is a eunuch. When he sees the boy in person, his assumptions about ‘Orientals’ are challenged. Although Elagabalus ‘did not look like a Roman neither did he resemble a feeble oriental. He seemed a fair servant of the gods, come down from Olympus to supervise their worship.’ On the other hand, there is his foster father Gannys, ‘a flashy, soft, handsome man who wore too much jewellery’, who seems to embody precisely those characteristics which the soldier associates with the ‘East’: softness and luxury. Nevertheless, Elagabalus is an ‘Oriental’ through and through. He ‘knew nothing of Roman etiquette or even of Roman daily life’ and wears ‘the most elaborate vestments’ as high priest of Elagabal, causing Duratius to remark, ‘There is a limit to what even an Emperor can wear as the dress of everyday without being considered mad; but what the high priest should wear had been decreed by the god long ago.’⁶⁸

The soldier grows used to the emperor’s outlandish appearance, but many Romans take offence. When Elagabalus first enters the capital and is greeted by the Roman elite, Duratius suddenly realises how scandalous the emperor and his entourage must appear to them: Elagabalus in his splendid priestly robes looking ‘more like an image than a human being’, his mother and grandmother ‘Syrians bedizened with facepaint such as only whores use in Rome’.⁶⁹

Things only get worse from this point onwards. The Augusta does her utmost to make her imperial grandson fit into Roman society, but the senate does not accept him. ‘I tried so hard to make them like us,’ Moesa complains, ‘[...] and after all that they still despise us as Syrians and foreigners.’ The emperor reacts angrily: ‘They despise us, and we despise them. Henceforth they shall feel my contempt.’ He vows to ‘show these fusty pedants how their traditions are valued by the soldiers who rule the Empire, and by the Emperor who rules the soldiers’. The sun god Elagabal, kept in the background at first, is now proclaimed the ruling god of Rome. Resentment against Elagabalus grows when one Roman tradition after the other is violated. Ultimately, Moesa and her confident Eutychianus conspire to get rid of Elagabalus, whom they feel has become ‘impossible’.⁷⁰ The young man is killed and replaced by the more malleable Alexander.

Family Favourites gives a favourable portrait of an oft-scorned emperor, seen through the gaze of a loving servant. Rather than describing a monster who gets what he deserves, Duggan interprets Elagabalus as a kind boy whose cultural background and deviant sexual orientation make him unacceptable to the conservative Roman elite. ‘My dear lord will never take his rightful place among the gods,’ Duratius finishes his account, ‘[...] But even if demons surround him his beauty and charm will make them his servants.’⁷¹

Elagabalus in Duberman’s Elagabalus (1973)

Martin Bauml Duberman (1930–) was born in New York City as the son of a Jewish garment manufacturer of Ukrainian descent. He studied at Yale and Harvard, earning a PhD in American history, and became Distinguished Professor of History at the City University of New York in 1971. Since he came out of the closet in 1970, Duberman has become an active proponent of the gay cause, taking a public stance against homophobia and making homosexuality a major theme of both his academic and his fictional work, which includes a historical novel and many plays.⁷²

Seven of Duberman’s plays have been collected in Male Armor (1975). Each of these plays is concerned with the construction of masculinity as an ‘armour’, used by men to protect themselves from their own sexuality and emotions. The last play in the volume is Elagabalus, originally performed in a different, but unpublished, version in 1973. Despite its title, the priest-emperor from Emesa does not make an appearance in the piece. Instead, the focus is on Adrian, a young homosexual who lives in contemporary New York with his new boyfriend, Danny. Adrian comes from a rich and ambitious family – an obvious parallel to the maternal family of Elagabalus. His Uncle Paul, who never appears onstage, is making a bid for a high, but unspecified position in Washington. Julia Donner, Paul’s mother and the matriarch of the family, wholeheartedly supports her son’s ambitions. Adrian, however, constitutes a problem: the young man refuses to adjust his behaviour to conventional social norms and causes scandalous rumours in Washington. He acts out the role of Elagabalus, copying scenes from the emperor’s life in word and deed. Thus, we see the absent Elagabalus reflected in Adrian. Likewise, the people around him resemble figures from the imperial court: for instance, his mother and grandmother resemble Julia Soaemias and Julia Maesa respectively, while his boyfriend resembles Hierocles. However, only Adrian consciously models his life on that of his historical counterpart.

At the start of Elagabalus, Adrian is turning the knobs of a huge stereo system. According to the author’s instructions, the young man is ‘dressed in a loose-fitting, white linen shirt – just long enough to suggest a tunic’, and wearing ‘a large, cone-shaped black onyx ring’ on his left hand. A voice from the stereo (Adrian’s) declares, ‘Elagabalus, you dance too much!’, followed by statements that the army, the senate, and the people of Rome will not stand for it. It is the start of a self-made radio play on Elagabalus, which Adrian will keep expanding and revising throughout the piece. He seems obsessed with the third-century emperor, with whom he completely identifies. He worships his onyx ring as Baal, nicknames his boyfriend Hierocles, and often speaks in anachronisms and non-sequiturs. For instance, he remarks to Faustina, his Puerto Rican housekeeper, ‘I do wish you spoke Aramaic. I’m so bad at Latin, my tutors despair.’ To his mother, he says, ‘Our line goes back to the Divine Severus.’ And when Dominick, his grandmother’s chauffeur, enters his apartment, Adrian enquires, ‘Did you come by way of Tyre or northward from the Aegean? What news from the capital?’⁷³ He even takes up the plan to re-enact Elagabalus’s marriages to Hierocles and Annia Faustina, intending to wed both Danny and Faustina in a double marriage, much to his grandmother’s and Uncle Paul’s dismay.

According to Duberman’s instructions in the list of characters, Adrian has a manner of ‘simplicity and guilelessness’. Indeed, the young man’s lines in the play indicate a positive outlook on life and those around him. He accepts everybody for who they are, treating his stableboy and his Puerto Rican housekeeper with as much respect as he does everybody else. Adrian is impulsive, dynamic and full of energy, often surprising – and, in some cases, shocking – others with his wild, unconventional ideas and weird, unexpected remarks. His grandmother Julia, representing traditional morality, blames him for pressing ‘too hard against the boundary of form’, and even seems to question his sanity. Adrian laughingly reassures her: ‘I do know that this is Nueva York, Gran’mère. Not Emesa.’ Selena, his laid-back mother, has a better understanding of her son: ‘Adrian is not delusional. It’s a calculated conceit. The boy wants more than one life. So should we all.’ In a later scene, she underlines this sentiment: ‘One makes choices. Somewhere along the way. That’s why I adore Adrian: his refusal to choose.’⁷⁴

The idea that we are not necessarily stuck to one role in life is a key theme of Elagabalus. Similar to the emperor’s wish in Family Favourites to experience the lives of all his subjects, it is Adrian’s professed ambition to ‘experience everything. However unpleasant.’ ‘You have to learn to play against type,’ he tells Danny. ‘That’s how you discover there aren’t any types.’ In contrast to the other male characters in the play, Adrian refuses to play the traditional masculine role: rather than acting like a reserved, emotionless macho man, he follows his impulses and openly shows his affection for others. Danny, who is very much stuck in his ‘male armour’, reacts negatively towards his boyfriend’s gestures of affection, wriggling free from a hug and responding to a spontaneous declaration of love with a matter-of-fact ‘Pour the fuckin’ coffee.’⁷⁵

Significantly, Adrian does not fit the stereotype of the effeminate homosexual, either. In the character’s description, Duberman stresses that the young man is ‘strikingly beautiful, but has no trace in voice or gesture of what is called “effeminacy”’.⁷⁶ Adrian is meant to be a new sort of man, who defies traditional gender categories. That does not mean, however, that he is an ideal type who cannot be criticised. As the author expounds in the introduction to Male Armor,

I’m certain that many readers will find Adrian merely tiresome, in no way more appealing than the more obviously armoured men in the other plays. He may seem to choose and alternate his personae with greater freedom and from a far wider repertory than most people imagine is available to them, but his style, many may feel, is unfettered only in comparison with those around him. And perhaps not even then; for Adrian is driven by his own imperatives, ones derived from the newest social dicta about the necessity for androgyny, and profoundly reliant for their implementation on the privileges available to those with leisure and wealth.⁷⁷

Nevertheless, Duberman points out, ‘Adrian is playful and daring’, and, unlike the other men in Elagabalus, ‘he is moving toward an unarmoured territory, moving out so far that finally he’s left with no protection against the traditional weaponry brought to bear against him.’⁷⁸ The main antagonists of the young man are Julia Donner and the invisible Uncle Paul, both of whom are presented in an unflattering light by the author. Julia, who is constantly criticising her grandson for his unconventional behaviour and regards her daughter’s wild sex life with acid disapproval, turns out to be a hypocrite: while constantly striving to keep up the family’s good name in public, she secretly engages in S&M with her chauffeur. As for Uncle Paul, he is so focused on his (unspecified) political goals that he has become a slave to his own ambitions. For the sake of his career, he has to act as the perfect traditional role model. Moreover, he perceives any unconventional behaviour by a family member as a threat which could damage his political chances, and which therefore needs to be suppressed. Uncle Paul never appears on stage because he is hardly a person at all; his every act is dictated by conventional morality. In the words of Adrian, ‘Uncle Paul? Mon chère – il n’existe pas. He is too important to exist.’⁷⁹

Julia Donner and Uncle Paul are ruthless in their ambitions, banishing Adrian’s mother Selena to the countryside and going so far as to consider castrating the young man. When Uncle Paul decides against the idea, it is ‘entirely on pragmatic grounds: Adrian would promptly decide he was Cleopatra and the wedding ceremonies would be shifted to a barge in the Hudson.’ Ultimately, the young man succumbs to his family’s pressure: he calls everybody together under the pretence that he will call off his double marriage to Danny and Faustina. When all are gathered in his apartment, Adrian and Danny, both wearing elaborate priestly costumes, perform a ceremony in honour of Baal. Adrian’s self-made radio play is playing in the background, describing how the Romans slaughtered the Carthaginians. The others gather around the young man, speaking to him in turn. Dr Anscombe, the family physician, tells him that ‘the family will not stand for it’. Julia Donner, her chauffeur Dominick, and Danny repeat the phrase, speaking for the senate, the army and the people respectively. Each line is echoed by Adrian’s voice on the stereo. At a piercing volume, it concludes, ‘ELAGABALUS: YOU DANCE TOO MUCH!’ Suddenly, Adrian plunges a knife into his groin, killing himself. His grandmother reacts with relief to this unexpected suicide: ‘Every expert in the land will agree: self-mutilation is the one sure sign of madness.’⁸⁰ Only Faustina seems genuinely grief-stricken, mourning Adrian’s death.

In Duberman’s interpretation, both Elagabalus and Adrian are tragic victims of their conservative surroundings, in which there is no room for those who deviate from conventional standards. Considering the emperor’s reputation as a controversial eccentric, full of weird but original ideas, it is not hard to see why Adrian has chosen him as a role model. The way in which Elagabalus is imagined in the play is primarily based on the Historia Augusta. Like the Vita Heliogabali, Elagabalus places much emphasis on the emperor’s eccentricities, his homosexual preferences and his refusal to conform to traditional masculine standards (with the significant difference that, contrary to the ruler in the Vita Heliogabali, Adrian is not supposed to be effeminate). Moreover, both pieces somewhat downplay the importance of Elagabalus’s ‘Oriental’ background. Adrian makes some references to the Syrian roots of his alter ego – for instance, by remarking, ‘in Syria we prefer indirection in all matters’ – but Duberman seems not overtly interested in portraying the emperor as a stereotypical ‘Oriental’.⁸¹ Only the elaborate costumes that Adrian and Danny wear in the final scene recall the notion of typical ‘Oriental’ splendour, as found in Herodian.

More important is the association of Adrian with Carthage, Rome’s ancient enemy. Adrian explains to Danny how the Carthaginians were slandered by the Romans, who ‘spread the lie that they sacrificed live babies’, adding, ‘Only Rome could invent such a story. Rome demanded three hundred children from Carthage as hostages – and then burnt the city to the ground anyway.’ To him, Rome symbolises the enemy, the forces of convention and tradition. ‘We should hire a scribe for tonight, Danny,’ he declares before the final family gathering. ‘Otherwise, our history, too, will be written by Rome. Another chapter in Carthaginian treachery. More babies burnt for Baal.’⁸²

In the end, of course, this is exactly what happens: Adrian kills himself and his family is able to write him off as insane, thus preserving the precious family name. Nevertheless, as Duberman writes in his introduction, there is a positive element to Adrian’s suicide. It is ‘a choice he makes – in defiance, and in the conviction that Carthages will everywhere continue to rise against Rome.’⁸³

Conclusion

What is immediately striking about the images of Elagabalus in the works of Artaud, Duggan and Duberman is that all three authors present the emperor as a positive figure, deliberately deviating from the social mores of the Romans. Artaud’s protagonist is an anarchist (in the author’s idiosyncratic use of the term), martyring himself to stir up dormant energies in a stagnant society. The emperors in Duggan’s and Duberman’s works do not seek to stir up controversy per se, but likewise meet a violent end because they refuse to conform to the traditions and morals of the Roman establishment. The authors count this trait a point in the emperor’s favour: Elagabalus’s refusal to be put in a moral straightjacket establishes him as an independent individual who makes his own choices. He is not a Decadent figure, signifying decay – although Artaud’s version preserves some Decadent elements – but rather an inspiring character, breaking free from the restraining bonds of society.

Of the three authors, only Artaud preserves the concept of Elagabalus as a cruel tyrant. However, the cruelty of the crowned anarchist serves a higher purpose and is therefore not objectionable. Duggan and Duberman present him as a kind, caring person who does not deserve his cruel fate, completely shattering the tyrant image. Nor do any of the authors hold the emperor’s Syrian background against him, as some ancient sources do. For Artaud, the ‘East’ was a dynamic place which could vitalise the stagnant ‘West’, as Héliogabale attempts in L’Anarchiste couronné. Duggan devotes much attention to the clash between ‘East’ and ‘West’ in Family Favourites, but – despite some bemused remarks by his narrator, the Gallic Duratius – does not present one as better than the other. His Elagabalus perishes because the two cultures cannot understand and accept each other’s different habits and morals. In Duberman’s play Elagabalus, the emperor’s Syrian background does not play a major role. Instead, Carthage is set up as the counterpart and opposition to Rome. Adrian, Elagabalus’s modern representative, sympathises with the African city.

None of the authors present the homosexuality of the priest-emperor as a negative characteristic. For Artaud, the young man’s effeminacy and affairs with men are just another means by which he deliberately goes against Roman morals. Duggan’s narrator, Duratius, constantly stresses that he does not share the emperor’s taste for men, but does not condemn it, advocating a tolerant attitude. Duberman goes even further, setting the young ruler up as an exemplary figure who has dared to shed his ‘male armour’. Significantly, both Duggan and Duberman emphasise that Elagabalus is not effeminate, thereby challenging traditional gay stereotypes and proposing a more broadminded perspective.

In contrast to Couperus and George, Artaud, Duggan and Duberman do not let us experience things from the emperor’s point of view. Artaud’s Héliogabale hardly has any personality at all: he is a vehicle for the author’s ideas concerning anarchy, cruelty and theatre, and his feelings are sparsely and distantly described. Duggan’s Elagabalus is focused exclusively through Duratius, who reminisces about him years later. Nevertheless, the emperor in Family Favourites is a rounded character who comes fully alive to the reader. As for Adrian in Elagabalus, here we have the interesting complication that the young man is not actually Elagabalus, but merely aspires to be him; the emperor figures in the play only to the extent that he is interpreted and re-enacted by the protagonist.

The resulting images of Elagabalus in L’Anarchiste couronné, Family Favourites and Elagabalus are quite distinct from each other, but all three works reject the ancient sources’ hostile approach to the emperor’s Syrian background, homosexual preferences and alleged effeminacy. Rather than condemning the young man’s failure to meet the moral standards and expectations of the Roman establishment, they call these standards and expectations into question. Whether as a crowned anarchist, a gay ‘Oriental’ or a new, ‘unarmoured’ type of man, Elagabalus is admired for his courage to make different choices – to rebel against a society which refuses to accept him.