The Mad Emperor : Heliogabalus and the Decadence of Rome

£20.00

Order
Online

Click &
Collect

Free Local
Delivery

Author: Sidebottom, Harry

Ancient Rome

Published on 6 October 2022 by Oneworld Publications in the United Kingdom.

Hardback | 352 pages
163 x 242 x 37 | 558g

'Buy the book; it's very entertaining.' David Aaronovitch, The Times A Financial Times, BBC History and Spectator Book of the YearOn 8 June 218 AD, a fourteen-year-old Syrian boy, egged on by his grandmother, led an army to battle in a Roman civil war. Against all expectations, he was victorious.

Varius Avitus Bassianus, known to the modern world as Heliogabalus, was proclaimed emperor. The next four years were to be the strangest in the history of the empire.

Heliogabalus humiliated the prestigious Senators and threw extravagant dinner parties for lower-class friends. He ousted Jupiter from his summit among the gods and replaced him with Elagabal. He married a Vestal Virgin - twice. Rumours abounded that he was a prostitute. In the first biography of Heliogabalus in over half a century, Harry Sidebottom unveils the high drama of sex, religion, power and culture in Ancient Rome as we've never seen it before.