The Crimes of Elagabalus the life and legacy of Rome's decadent boy emperor

The four years of Elagabalus’s rule have generated two millennia of attention, from salacious rumor to scholarly analysis to novels casting him as a gay hero avant la lettre. Here, Icks succeeds in distinguishing the reality of the emperor’s brief life from the myth that clouds it—and in tracing the meaning of that myth to the present day.