Boy Caesar by Jeremy Reed Page B

biographers is more the subject of bibliography. Much of the controversy surrounding Heliogabalus’ life comes from faked documents anyhow.’
    ‘That’s my problem,’ Jim said. ‘I need you to tell me what licence I have to recreate Heliogabalus in contemporary terms. What matters to me is making him live now. My sources are too sketchy for me to lean on historical fact.’
    ‘I’ve no objection to your partially inventing history,’ Martin replied. ‘I’m all for students being original. What I don’t want is a purely psychological thesis. One that uses Heliogabalus as the baseline for a case history.’
    ‘Part of my work will, of course, be gender-based,’ Jim said. ‘There seems little doubt that his enemies were provoked by the fact that he was so openly gay.’
    Martin laughed. ‘No objections. If we’re to believe Lampridius, then Heliogabalus was the first – probably the only – Roman emperor openly to discuss the possibilty having a sex-change. Thisopens up a fascinating area of study that I hope you’ll explore. I think you’ll find Nero had similar tendencies, or at least he transferred them to his male lovers.’
    ‘Yes, to Sporus, wasn’t it? I’m glad you see this as a rich area of research. Although I think I’m right in saying there’s a pathology attached to Nero, which is not the case with Heliogabalus.’
    ‘I think so, most certainly,’ Martin replied. ‘Nero turned by degrees into a psychopath, committing one crime to cover for another. There’s certainly no evidence that Heliogabalus shared this tendency. But I’m still curious as to why you should choose such an obscure emperor as the subject for your dissertation.’
    ‘Empathy,’ Jim laughed. ‘But also the desire to rehabilitate him to history. He’s in many ways the emperor who has gone missing. It’s like he’s been sucked into a hole in the middle of the galaxy.’
    ‘There’s also the question of ritual,’ Martin added. ‘What for instance did his cult worship, other than the sun? Nobody’s ever made it clear, at least not in the way that we know about constituents of Mithraism or the rites conducted as part of the Elysian mysteries. I’d like you to tell me something about the cult of Elagabal. Allusions to it are few, but it shouldn’t be too hard to reconstruct.’
    ‘What we do know’, Jim said, feeling his assertiveness return, ‘is that he sacrificed animals in his temple and also underwent the
taurobolium.
There’s also an allusion to him having celebrated the rites of Salambo and if I recall correctly a reference somewhere to him throwing animals off a high tower as part of some ritual.’
    ‘Good,’ Martin said. ‘I’m sure if you follow your sources you’ll hit on the right trail. It’s an area in which I’m particularly interested. And what about his three marriages? They were surely organized around motives of religion –’
    ‘Perhaps, but there were other reasons. I think his first marriage to Julia Paula was undoubtedly dominated by the feeling he should marry into the Roman aristocracy. It seems to have been an attempt on his part to infiltrate the patrician classes.’
    ‘You mean because he himself was a foreigner?’
    ‘Precisely. He had no kudos in Rome other than a tenuous claim to be an Antonine.’
    ‘But his second marriage, though, to the Vestal Aquilia Severa, was undoubtedly an attempt to superimpose his own god on Rome’s existing one,’ Martin said.
    ‘Without question. Although his perversity was such that the idea of violating an off-limits woman was probably an additional incentive.’
    ‘I see you’ve got his psychology well sewn up,’ Martin approved. ‘And the third marriage? The motives behind this have always seemed obscure to me.’
    ‘Anna Faustina was, of course, an aristocrat. She was the great-granddaughter of the emperor Marcus Aurelius through his fourth daughter Arria Fadilla. We know little about her, although she seems to have been