Museum Labels Roman Emperor ‘Transgender Woman’

The teenage Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, nicknamed Elagabalus, who ruled only briefly between AD 218 and 222, is being touted as Rome’s first (and presumably only) transgender woman emperor:

North Hertfordshire Museum has reclassified Elagabalus as a transgender woman and will now use the pronouns she/her. The museum has a single coin depicting Elagabalus, which is sometimes displayed along with other LGBTQ+ artefacts from their collection.

This is on the basis of a statement by the young ruler recorded in Cassius Dio’s Roman History that has him instructing one of his homosexual lovers to “Call me not Lord, for I am a Lady.”

The context involves a sexual liaison with a certain Zoticus, whose drinks were nonetheless spiked by another lover of the emperor’s, Hierocles, preventing the former from performing, whereupon Elagabalus stripped Zoticus of honours and drove him out of Rome.

There are reports that Elagabalus actually married the aforementioned Hierocles, although he is also said to have blasphemed by marrying Vestal priestesses.

To bolster their case, the North Hertfordshire Museum may point to accounts according to which Elagabalus would dress as a female prostitute and solicit men, although none of these episodes paint a particularly edifying picture. 

He also effected a religious reform, placing a solar deity at the head of the Roman pantheon, celebrating the winter solstice, having himself circumcised, abstaining from pork, and bringing to Rome a black rock said to be holy to the sun god. Many of these elements appear to be culturally Middle Eastern and have to do with Elagabalus being Syrian. The sun cult to which he pretended to be a high priest is not the issue, indeed, the Sol Invictus religion would serve as a transitional phase for Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity, being basically monotheistic.

It just happens to be the case that Elagabalus had garbled Semitic influences even as he garbled Roman piety and mixed the two. We may see him as an ante datum parody of Constantine’s Christo-paganism.

The supposed transgender, foreign-born emperor is a prime example of what we might call the hundred-year chaotic period of the Roman state. Following Marcus Aurelius’s son, Commodus, and the end of the Pax Romana, we have a line of strange regents: the liberated slave (or son of a slave) Petrinax; Didius Julian, who bought the emperorship at auction; Septimius Severus, who celebrated the figure of Hannibal and foisted a pro-Carthaginian version of history on Rome (how relevant his project is to the modern West…); Elagabalus himself, who was followed by Maximinus Thrax; and finally Caracalla, who granted citizenship to all free men in the empire.

Degeneracy and the risk of cultural disintegration had always been present. The monarchical age ended because of the outrage of the son of Tarquinus the Proud raping a chaste woman; Augustus was succeeded by the brutal Tiberius and the perverted Caligula; Hadrian might have been a pederast; and Marcus Aurelius’ stoicism was followed by the infamous Commodus. 

But it is with this latter emperor, or perhaps with Petrinax, that the imperial state may be said to have lost its virtus and Romanitas—to cease to be culturally and civilizationally Roman—for the long term (perhaps until Diocletian’s Tetrarchy).

It makes some sense, then, given the current assault on Western culture and the rise of political authoritarianism, that Elagabalus should be celebrated as a trailblazer for modern gender nonconformity, albeit he did it from the pinnacle of privilege and at the head of a tyrannical structure. His personal identity accompanied a religiously and politically destabilising project and wantonness in the exercise of power.

But if the proponents of non-binary gender identities and queer theory would like to believe that the breakdown of traditional categories around sexuality and gender will accompany an ethical politics, personal emancipation, and collective prosperity, Elagabalus is not the most felicitous example for them to highlight.