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

The four years of Elagabalus’s rule have generated two millennia of attention, from salacious rumor to scholarly analysis to novels casting him as a gay hero avant la lettre. Here, Icks succeeds in distinguishing the reality of the emperor’s brief life from the myth that clouds it—and in tracing the meaning of that myth to the present day.

This is not a routine imperial biography, but a much wider study of the nature of religious belief, culture, and ethnicity in the Roman Empire, on the staging of the emperor's image and the subsequent response throughout the Empire. In this accessible and lively study, Icks sheds new light on the dissemination of classical culture and the reception of Rome in later periods by following the evolving figure of Elagabalus in opera, drama and fiction through the centuries.
--Brian Campbell, Queen's University, Belfast