Overview

A Financial Times, BBC History, and Spectator Book of the Year On 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. Rumors 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.

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Harry Sidebottom is lecturer in ancient history at Merton College, Oxford, and part-time lecturer in classics and ancient history at the University of Warwick. He has written for and contributed to many publications, including Classical Review, Journal of Roman Studies, and War and Society in the Roman World. Saul Reichlin is an actor, known for The Knock, Ali and the Lamp, and War and Peace.

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