settings
Gulliver’s Travels vocabulary
9 famous people mentioned
help & settings
[x]
-
Heliogabalus
-
synonyms: Elagabalus, Aelagabalus, Deus Sol Invictus ???
tags: [personage]
► definition
Definition:Roman emperor from 218 to 222. A member of the Severan dynasty, he was Syrian, the second son of Julia Soaemias and Sextus Varius Marcellus. In his early youth he served the god Elagabalus as a priest in Emesa, the hometown of his mother's family. As a private citizen, he was probably named Sextus Varius Avitus Bassianus. Upon becoming emperor he took the name Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus. He was called Elagabalus only after his death.[...]Elagabalus developed a reputation among his contemporaries for extreme eccentricity, decadence, and zealotry. This tradition has persisted, and with writers of the early modern age he suffers one of the worst reputations among Roman emperors. Edward Gibbon, for example, wrote that Elagabalus "abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures with ungoverned fury". According to Barthold Georg Niebuhr, "The name Elagabalus is branded in history above all others" because of his "unspeakably disgusting life". An example of a modern historian's assessment would be Adrian Goldsworthy's: "Elagabalus was not a tyrant, but he was an incompetent, probably the least able emperor Rome had ever had."Elagabalus is considered by some to be an early transgender figure and one of the first on record as seeking sex reassignment surgery.text from Wikpedia, licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
photo: By © José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53962342
► uses
Uses:
Hereafter a very notorious Roman Emperor will institute this worship in Rome, and thence derive a cognomen, Heliogabalus. I dare say you would like to take a peep at the divinity of the temple. You need not look up at the heavens; his Sunship is not there—at least not the Sunship adored by the Syrians.
---
I saw most of the first Roman emperors. I prevailed on the governor to call up Heliogabalus’s cooks to dress us a dinner, but they could not show us much of their skill, for want of materials. A helot of Agesilaus made us a dish of Spartan broth, but I was not able to get down a second spoonful.
Jonathan Swift. Gulliver's Travels Into Several Remote Regions of the World (1726)
---
like Heliogabalus, whose favourite dishes are said to have been the tongues of peacocks and nightingales, and the brains of parrots and pheasants
The Master-Cooks of King Richard II. The Forme of Cury (1390)
---
and, as Elagabalus, had painted his face with colours, and plied the distaff among the women, and brought the Moon from Carthage and given her in mystic marriage to the Sun.
Oscar Wilde. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
help with search