Origin of the Name Elagabalus
As emperor, Varius Avitus became known by the Latinized version of the name of his Syrian god El-Gabal. Elagabalus also established El-Gabal as the principal god of the Roman Empire.
Elagabalus Alienated the the Roman Senators
He further alienated Rome by taking honors and powers upon himself before they had been awarded him -- including substituting his name for that of Macrinius as consul.
In both the message to the senate and the letter to the people he styled himself emperor and Caesar, the son of Antoninus, the grandson of Severus, Pius, Felix, Augustus, proconsul, and holder of the tribunician power, assuming these titles before they had been voted, and he used, not the name of Avitus, but that of his pretended father, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the notebooks of the soldiers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . for Macrinus' . . . . . . . Caesar . . . . . . . . . to the Pretorians and to the Alban legionaries who were in Italy he wrote . . . . . and that he was consul and high priest (?) . . . and the . . . . . . Marius Censorinus . . leadership . . read . . . of Macrinus . . . . . . . himself, as if not sufficiently by his own voice able to make public . . . . the letters of Sardanapalus to be read . . . by (?) Claudius Pollio, whom he had enrolled among the ex-consuls, and commanded that it anyone resisted him, he should call on the soldiers for assistance;
Dio Cassius LXXX
Sexual Charges
Herodian, Dio Cassius, Aelius Lampridius and Gibbon have written about Elagabalus' femininity, bisexuality, transvestism, and forcing a vestal virgin to break vows that were so solemn any virgin found to have violated them was buried alive. He appears to have worked as a prostitute and may have sought the original transgendering operation. If so, he didn't succeed. When he tried to become a gallus, he was convinced to undergo circumcision, instead. To us the difference is immense, but to Roman men, both were humiliating.
Evaluating Elagabalus
Although Elagabalus killed many of his political enemies, especially supporters of Macrinius, he wasn't a sadist who tortured and put an inordinate number of people to death. He was:
- an attractive, hormonally-charged teen with absolute power,
- the high priest of an exotic god and
- a Roman emperor from Syria who imposed his eastern customs on Rome.
Rome Needed a Universal Religion
J.B. Bury believes that with the universal citizenship grant of Caracalla, a universal religion was necessary.
"With all his unashamed enthusiasm, Elagabalus was not the man to establish a religion; he had not the qualities of a Constantine or yet of a Julian; and his enterprise would perhaps have met with little success even if his authority had not been annulled by his idiosyncrasies. The Invincible Sun, if he was to be worshipped as a sun of righteousness, was not happily recommended by the acts of his Invincible Priest."The time for a unified religion may have been right when Elagabalus tried to institute it, but because of his flamboyance and failure to behave like a proper Roman, he failed. It was another century before Constantine could impose a universal religion.
J.B. Bury
Assassination of Elagabalus
Ultimately, like most of the emperors of the period, Elagabalus and his mother were killed by his soldiers, after less than four years in power. DIR says his body was dumped in the Tiber and his memory was erased (Damnatio memoriae). He was 17. His first cousin Alexander Severus, also from Emesa, Syria, succeeded him.
