The problem, as he sees it, is that “I just don’t think it really happened.” “The quote-unquote biographies” written under Elagabalus’s successor are “hit pieces”, he says. “I would be inclined to read [them] as basically fictional.”
Martijn Icks, a lecturer in classics at the university of Amsterdam and
author of a book about Elagabalus’s life and posthumous reputation, agrees that the stories about the emperor should be taken with “a large pinch of salt”. The same “effeminacy narrative” that has made Elagabalus a queer icon “was meant to character assassinate the Emperor, to show that he was completely unsuitable to occupy this position,” he says, adding that other so-called “bad emperors” including Nero and Caligula were described in very similar terms.
Racial prejudice also played a part, says Icks: before coming to Rome to rule it, Elagabalus was a priest in an obscure cult in Syria that venerated a black stone meteorite – a culture that would have been deeply strange to the Romans.
“And the stereotype that Romans had of Syrians … is that they were very effeminate and not real men like the Romans were.”