The Crimes of Elagabalus: The Life and Legacy of Rome's Decadent Boy Emperor - Softcover

Martijn Icks

3.39

92 ratings by Goodreads

9781780765501: The Crimes of Elagabalus: The Life and Legacy of Rome's Decadent Boy Emperor

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1780765509 ISBN 13: 9781780765501

Publisher: I.B.Tauris, 2013

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Elagabalus was one of the most notorious of Rome's 'bad emperors': a sexually-depraved and eccentric hedonist who in his short and riotous reign made unprecedented changes to Roman state religion and defied all taboos. An oriental boy-priest from Syria - aged just fourteen when he was elevated to power in 218 CE - he placed the sun god El-Gabal at the head of the established Roman pantheon, engaged in orgiastic rituals, took male and female lovers, wore feminine dress and was alleged to have prostituted himself in taverns and even inside the imperial palace. Since his assassination by the Praetorian Guard at the age of eighteen, Elagabalus has been an object of fascination to historians and a source of inspiration for artists and writers. This immensely readable book examines the life of one of the Roman Empire's most colourful figures, and charts the many guises of his legacy: from evil tyrant to firebrand rebel, from mystical androgyne to modern gay teenager, from decadent sensualist to ancient pop star.

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Review:

Icks' book [is] an excellent overview, worth adding to the Roman history shelves of anybody's library. But it's the second half of The Crimes of Elagabalus that makes the book truly remarkable. In those later chapters, Icks completes his careful, detailed narrative of the boy-emperor's brief reign and turns to the surprisingly vast literary legacy that reign generated. Play by play, pamphlet by pamphlet, novel by novel, Icks painstakingly traces how centuries of non-historians have characterized Elagabalus. This will be the standard account in English for the foreseeable future.

This is a clear and well-organized account written in a lively and approachable way. It is not a routine imperial biography, but a much wider study encompassing the nature of religious belief, culture and ethnicity, the presentation of the imperial image and the response to this in Rome and the provinces. An important and original aspect is the description of the dissemination of classical culture and the reception of Rome in later periods, and in particular the changing image of Elagabalus in opera, drama and fiction.

Eminently readable.

... [a] racy biography. --Steve Donoghue Open Letters Monthly (03/01/2012)< br />
Brian Campbell, Professor of Roman History, Queen s University Belfast< br />
The Historical Association< br />
Christopher Hart, The Sunday Times

About the Author:

Martijn Icks is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of D�sseldorf, Germany. He obtained his PhD cum laude at the University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands in 2008.

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