Heliogabalus reigned from his fourteenth to his eighteenth year and has come down to history as a byword for depravity. Hay questions the hostile Augustan History and reconstructs the reign from coins and other evidence: the Syrian family of Julia Maesa, the overthrow of Macrinus, the winter at Nicomedia, the worship of the sun god Elagabal, and the rivalry with his cousin Alexander.
A revisionist portrait of a strange imperial episode, for readers of the late Roman Empire. Download the free EPUB.