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effeminacy. Indeed, the list of un-Roman offences ascribed to the ruler nicknamed "the Assyrian" is
almost endless. On a practical level, too, the demands of his god left him no time for state affairs.
Before long, Maesa put her other grandson, Alexander Severus, into the breach. The Praetorians did
the rest.
The second half of the book takes us on a tour of Elagabalus' reception through the ages. Needless to
say, a sex-mad evil Oriental tyrant did not get a good press, whether dressed up by German
academics ("The late revenge of the Semites on Greco-Roman culture, whose chains it had silently
worn for centuries") or French psychiatrists ("As the victim of a neuropathia dominated by a quasiunconscious exhibitionism, he would probably have ended in dementia"). But for the Decadent
movement, as Icks recounts, the worm turned and Elagabalus would become an alluring androgyne
and an artist: "For artist he had been! The greatest of his time and many others, without doubt."
In the 21st century, he's a strong but gentle gay guy, a Michael Jackson-like pop star, or, in the words
of graphic novelist Neil Gaiman, "Heliogabolus [sic] was just a weird kid with a thing about animals
and big dicks."