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December 28th, 2011 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
By
David Leafe
Last updated at 4:21 PM on 28th December 2011
Elagabalus followed in footsteps of Caligula (pictured above and played by Malcolm McDowell)
The guests invited to dine at the imperial palace in Rome stared at each other uneasily as slaves carried dish after exotic dish to the couches on which they reclined. The delicacies included camel heels, nightingale tongues, the severed heads of parrots and flamingo brains — yet no one could enjoy their food for fear of what the after-dinner entertainment might involve.
Still only 17, their host, the boy Emperor Elagabalus, already had a monstrous reputation. A promiscuous hedonist who had lovers of both sexes, he was known to harness teams of naked women to his chariot and whip them as they pulled him around the palace grounds.
At one feast, he had several of his guests lashed to a water-wheel, which turned slowly and drowned them as their horrified fellow diners looked on. On another occasion, he let poisonous snakes loose among the crowds at the gladiatorial games, causing widespread death and injury.
And in still another example of his brutality, he threw gold and silver from a high tower, and watched as a mob of citizens fought to grab them, with many dying in the crush.
As for the unfortunates gathered in his opulent dining hall in 221 AD, their apprehension proved to have been fully justified. When their meal was over, Elagabalus gave the signal for dozens of leopards and lions to be released among his guests.
Men and women alike ran screaming from the palace, their panicked cries echoing far across the darkened streets of Rome and drowning out the crazed laughter of the Emperor as he savoured their terror.
It was an extraordinarily sadistic prank, but then — as described in a book by Dutch academic Martijn Icks this cross-dressing Caesar rivalled better-known tyrants such as Caligula and Nero when it came to wickedness and vice.
The eminent Cambridge classics professor Mary Beard draws comparisons between Elagabalus’s behaviour and that of Colonel Gaddafi to show you how the trademarks of tyranny have survived for two milennia.
Just as Gaddafi paraded in pantomime military outfits covered in spurious medals, Elagabalus dressed entirely in precious silks and draped himself with gems.
At one feast, he had several of his
guests lashed to a water-wheel, which turned slowly and drowned them as
their horrified fellow diners looked on. On another occasion, he let
poisonous snakes loose among the crowds at the gladiatorial games,
causing widespread death and injury.
As Gaddafi had his all-female squad of Amazonian bodyguards — wearing lipstick and high heels — the boy Emperor apparently dreamt of surrounding himself with a new Roman senate composed entirely of women.
Both tortured opponents with unhinged zeal, both wasted fortunes on extravagant palaces — and both met remarkably similar and bloody ends; Gaddafi cowering in a drain, Elagabalus in a latrine.
But, in truth, Elagabalus left Gaddafi far behind in infamy.
The cruel emperor came to wear the imperial purple only thanks to the machinations of his grandmother, Julia Maesa, whose nephew Caracalla had been Emperor for eight years until he was stabbed to death by an army commander.
Determined that Rome should once again be ruled by a member of her family, Julia turned to her 14-year-old grandson Elagabalus, who was raised in the Syrian town of Emesa, a remote outpost of the Empire.
Everything about him would later confirm the Roman suspicion that men who hailed from the East were immoral and sexually perverted effeminates who drenched themselves in perfume and surrounded themselves with eunuchs.
Said to have been an extraordinarily handsome youth, with a short military haircut and bright eyes, he had devoted his early years to the worship of the local sun god Elagabal, after whom he had been named.
As high priest at the temple in Emesa, his daily duties had included performing dances and other rituals while wearing bejewelled robes which did much to flatter his appearance.
His veneration of Elagabal appeared to be a mixture of genuine religious conviction and self-glorification. ‘On his head, he wore a crown in the shape of a tiara, glittering with gold and precious stones,’ wrote the historian Herodian. ‘Any Roman or Greek dress he loathed because, he claimed, it was made out of wool, which is a cheap material. Only silk was good enough for him.’
Similarities: The eminent Cambridge classics professor Mary Beard draws comparisons between Elagabalus’s behaviour to that of Colonel Gaddafi
The flamboyant teenager’s love of show and extravagance would soon be of wider concern as his grandmother began claiming falsely that Elagabalus was the illegitimate son of her nephew, the murdered emperor, and therefore his natural successor.
In 218 AD, she bribed a legion of soldiers who were stationed near Emesa to rise up against the ruling Emperor Macrinus.
Hearing of the rebellion, Macrinus travelled to the Syrian town of Antioch and gathered an army there, but he was killed in a battle with troops who were loyal to Elagabalus and then declared him the new Emperor.
Young though he was, Elagabalus soon proved a headstrong and ruthless despot. When his chief adviser, a eunuch named Gannys, warned him to live a temperate and prudent life for fear of alienating those whose taxes would fund his excesses, he became enraged and stabbed the older man to death.
As he prepared for his triumphal entry into Rome, his grandmother urged him to ingratiate himself with his new subjects by dressing soberly in a Roman toga. He refused and demanded that a huge portrait of himself in his showy priest’s apparel should be hung in the middle of the senate house, high above a statue of the goddess Victory.
Tyrant: Elagabalus was feared by all
This hallowed spot was where senators traditionally made offerings upon entering the building, but Elagabalus caused further offence by insisting that they should invoke the name of his god Elagabal before that of Victory or any other — even Jupiter, the head of the Roman pantheon.
Referring to the senators contemptuously as ‘slaves in togas’, he began executing some among their number at will and without trial. One man, Pomponius Bassus, was dispatched simply because Elagabalus had decided he wanted to marry his wife.
However, he changed his mind soon after Bassus’ execution, and in the year 219 AD he instead took an aristocrat’s daughter named Julia Paula as his wife.
The wedding celebrations were on a huge scale — a record 51 tigers were killed at the games held in the newlyweds’ honour — but Elagabalus quickly cast his new bride out of the palace when he discovered she had an unsightly birthmark.
Two years later, he scandalised the people of Rome by marrying Aquilia Severa, one of the Vestal Virgins. These high priestesses were charged with keeping alight the flame which burned in honour of Vesta, the goddess of the hearth and home.
Vestals who broke their vow of celibacy were traditionally executed by being buried alive, a measure of how sacred the cult of Vesta was to the Romans. But Elagabalus was unrepentant about violating Aquilia, explaining that he had done so in order that ‘godlike children might spring from me’.
While clearly anxious to secure his dynasty by producing heirs as quickly as possible, Elagabalus fell far short of the masculine ideals expected of an Emperor. He preferred to spend his days in the company of the palace women, singing, dancing, weaving and wearing a hairnet, eye make-up and rouge.
‘The soldiers were revolted at the sight of him,’ wrote one ancient historian. ‘With his face made up more elaborately than a modest woman, he was effeminately dressed up in golden necklaces and soft clothes, dancing for everyone to see in this state.’
Elagabalus was rumoured to have consulted his physicians about an early version of a sex-change operation, and he took a series of male lovers, allegedly selecting candidates for high office on the basis of the size of their private parts.
‘The soldiers were revolted at the sight
of him,’ wrote one ancient historian. ‘With his face made up more
elaborately than a modest woman, he was effeminately dressed up in
golden necklaces and soft clothes, dancing for everyone to see in this
state.’
One — presumably well-endowed — consort was Aurelius Zoticus, the son of a humble cook. He found himself appointed as the Emperor’s chamberlain, and complied with a request that he should refer to him as ‘Lady’ rather than ‘Lord’, but he was banned from the palace soon afterwards because he was unable to become aroused on demand.
Another man, Hierocles, had been a charioteer and slave before he came to the Emperor’s attention.
The senator and historian Cassius Dio describes how Elagabalus referred to Hierocles as his ‘husband’, and delighted in walking around with black eyes after insisting that his brutish lover should beat him up. But even all this was apparently not enough to sate the Emperor’s strange desires. Dressed as a woman, he also visited the taverns of Rome at night in order to play the prostitute.
Later, he set up his own brothel within the palace compound, and would stand in the doorway naked, soliciting customers with ‘a soft and murmurous voice’.
By day, he continued to alienate the Roman people with his insistence that they should worship his god, Elagabal. Every morning at dawn he made huge, public sacrifices to this little-known deity, represented by a black conical stone held within a temple built on the Palatine Hill, the sacred heart of the capital.
Attendance was compulsory for members of the senate, who were forced to watch dutifully as Elagabalus paraded before them in ever more lavish priestly garb.
The proceedings began with his slaughter of dozens of cattle and sheep, whose entrails were then placed in golden bowls and offered up as a sacrifice to Elagabal.
It was suspected that these offerings included the remains of young boys, Elagabalus killing only those who had both parents still alive so as to maximise the resulting grief and suffering.
As his reign continued, his excesses took ever more bizarre and obscene turns. It was reported that the amulet-bedecked Emperor had once locked a lion, a monkey and a snake together in the temple, and then thrown among them the genitals of his executed enemies.
Elagabalus had his own brothel within the palace and he would stand in the doorway naked, and solicit his customers
The thinking behind this was never explained, but the people of Rome had long given up expecting reasonable or decorous behaviour of their Emperor.
In an orgy of spending, he erected new palaces, baths and summer-houses for himself all over Rome. He fitted them out with ostentatious features such as urinals made of onyx, and entertained visitors with spectacles including naval regattas staged on canals filled with wine.
Most eccentric of all were the arrangements he made for his own death. Following a Syrian priest’s prophecy that he would meet a violent end, he was determined that he would kill himself in style rather than die at the hands of others, and he was thorough in his planning.
If he discovered trouble was looming, he proposed to hang himself with a noose of purple and scarlet silk, stab himself to death with swords made of gold, or jump from of a specially built ‘suicide tower’.
‘It was constructed of boards gilded and jewelled in his own presence,’ recorded one historian. ‘Even his death, he declared, should be costly and marked by luxury, in order that it might be said that no one had ever died in this fashion.’
But Elagabalus never got an opportunity to use the tower, or any of his other means of suicide. In March 222 AD, just four years into his reign, Rome’s soldiers finally rebelled against their reviled, wayward Emperor.
After slaughtering his minions and tearing out their vital organs, they then fell upon Elagabalus as he hid cowering in a latrine.
After killing him, they dragged his body through the streets by a hook and attempted to stuff it into a sewer. When it proved too big, they threw him into the River Tiber.
Amid the cheers as the current swept his bloody corpse away, few would have argued with the poet Assonius when he wrote that ‘no fouler or more filthy monster ever filled the imperial throne of Rome’.
The Crimes Of Elagabalus by Martijn Icks is published by I.B. Tauris at £22.50. To order a copy PP free, call 0843 382 000.
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Could this be why xmas lunch at Sandringham is never televised?
– lanzresident, carmen, 28/12/2011 9:48
lol!
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Some things don’t seem to change too much in that part of the world do they? Once upon a time it was Elagabalus, today its Berlusconi!
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What’s so shocking about this old Roman then? He’d fit right into Hollywood and today’s celebrities.
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A great role for Daniel Craig!
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I can’t think of anyone in history or now he can be compared to, not even Caligula.
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Because Imperial Rome was not an actual monarchy (the unpopular ancient Roman monarchy ended in the 5th century BC), it did not have clear rules for family succession, and in the instances where family direct father to son inheritance occurred, it rarely extended beyond a couple of generations. Succession was rarely clearly settled, partly because Rome’s emperors rarely lived long enough to raise successors into adulthood, and their genetic successors were often the targets of palace intrigue. Imperial succession was therefore as a practical matter more a function of civil war than civil law, as inheritance was by either designation (for example, Augustus selecting Tiberius as his successor) or acclamation to the throne by legion, rather than genetic family inheritance. Rome’s Imperial government was more like a modern dictatorship than a royal one as succession was rarely smooth, and those who became emperors constantly worried about plots against their rule.
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A society that is on the point of collapse always goes into ‘Sexual Excess’ mode. Frightening. Many great nations have turned inwards seeking their own pleasure and abandoning any forms of Morality. Any parallels with our own Country ?
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Blaire would have embraced him !!!!!……..
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Life has become soo boring!!!! How many men fantasize about owning a brothel full of willing women?
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Was he in the Rome chapter of the Bullingdon Club?
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