Explanation: The Roman Emperor Caligula, sometimes said to be mad, once threatened (or joked, depending on who you ask) to make his horse consul, one of the two leaders of the Senate. Caligula was a tyrant, a dick, impulsive, and petty, but one can argue he wasn’t mad. Just… well, a tyrant, a dick, impulsive, and petty. And with a cruel sense of humor.
The Roman Emperor Elagabalus had a much more discernable form of madness - youth mixed with ultimate power. Elagabalus was a teenager when they (as their gender identity is a matter of perpetual debate) were oh-so-wisely granted absolute autocratic power over a continents-spanning Empire by the political machinations of their grandmother. Two of their more notable offenses were proclaiming themselves to be the Syrian sun god, and having young women hitched to their chariot like horses to pull them around Rome, whipping them all the while.
While you can say teenagers fulfilling all their most wild teenage fantasies with no one to stop them isn’t ‘real’ madness, it seems closer to it than flexing on Senators and daring them to defy you as a petty show of power!
Two of their more notable offenses were proclaiming themselves to be the Syrian sun god, and having young women hitched to their chariot like horses to pull them around Rome, whipping them all the while.
Neat. Now I just gotta find a chariot and young women into this sort of thing
Edit: because I’m obviously the Syrian Sun God
Oh I was thinking more of being one of the women… heh…
…I thought that’s what everyone else would want too
Ok, now find another, and I’ll get working on the chariot.
And if you got any friends I got some ideas of even more fun we could have.
I have lived under a rock my whole life so I kind of just expected this sort of thing only exists in like porn or stories
Didn’t Caligula pimp the senators wives out as whores and let everyone fuck them? That’s a good deal beyond “a sick sense of humor”. That’s straight up evil.
Elagabala made it very clear to her contemporaries how she wanted to be addressed, I don’t understand why people insist on acting like they’re being enlightened by disrespecting her wishes. It’s privileging transphobes to let them tell us we can’r trust people like Elagabala to tell us who she was.
There’s an enduring question as to how reliable the sources are as to Elagabalus’s wishes. As such the question of whether Elagabalus was trans, or nonbinary, remains. I would regard only referring to Elagabalus as a man as inappropriate.
We don’t have to make her fit into a contemporary gender model to respect her clearly stated wishes.
Ive wondered how the legionnaires felt about being made to march up to the English channel coast and ordered to slap the water and collect seashells.
I always new I was real mad
Glitterhoof, my belovéd~