Miscellany

22 min read

HISTORY’S GREATEST CONUNDRUMS AND MYSTERIES SOLVED

COMPILED BY JONNY WILKES AND DANNY BIRD

Was Roman emperor Elagabalus transgender?

FLOWER POWER An 1888 painting by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema depicts Elagabulus (seen wearing gold) showering his guests with pink rose petals during a banquet

LONG ANSWER

Generally speaking, the words that have historically been associated with the four-year reign of Elagabalus are ‘depraved’, ‘incompetent’ and ‘eccentric’. Brought to power in AD 218 through his grandmother’s scheming, he reordered the religion of the Roman empire (with himself as high priest), had generals and senators executed, and flaunted sexual appetites that even Romans found a bit much. At the same time as he speed-married and divorced at least four wives – and among them a Vestal Virgin, a priestess who, as the name suggests, shouldn’t have been the marrying type – he took numerous male lovers. Rumours also spread of prostituting himself at brothels and even of tying the knot with a male charioteer.

But lurking in the annals of Roman history, there are some intriguing details. He preferred to be called by feminine terms, like ‘lady’, and affected a ‘womanly’ look by wearing makeup and wigs. Most tellingly, he supposedly asked physicians to give him a vagina. This interest in reassignment surgery has fuelled the claim that Elagabalus should be remembered as transgender. Making a judgment on a historical person’s gender is fraught with difficulty, however, especially when the main sources had been written to slander an unpopular ruler, as was the case with Cassius Dio’s less-than-friendly accounts of Elagabalus. The truth is: who can say definitively? It certainly seems that he was coming to terms with his gender and sexuality, and this undoubtedly collided with the machismo expected of Roman men, let alone the empire’s ruler.

IDENTITY CRISIS Did Elagabalus really aspire to identify as a woman, or were the rumours merely propaganda peddled by his adversaries?

GETTY IMAGES X2

Who were the Luddites?

RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE A depiction of Ned Ludd (below), whose destruction of stocking frames is said to have inspired his followers to do the same (left)

GETTY IMAGES X2, ALAMY X2

Answered by Professor Katrina Navickas, author of Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789–1848 (Manchester University Press, 2017)

The Luddites were a group of skilled artisans, primarily working in the textile industry, who led a violent protest against industrialisation during the early years of the 19th century. Taking their name from Ned Ludd, a folkloric figure who was said to have conducted

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History Revealed Magazine

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