Roman Emperor Heliogabalus (204 – 222) donned the imperial purple when he was barely fourteen-years-old. Unsurprisingly, a teenager who found himself with such power was bound to use it to do teenage stuff. Like prank people – but as seen below, with the kinds of pranks that put them in fear of life and limb.
The Teen Emperor and the Whoopee Cushion
Emperor Heliogabalus had not been groomed or prepared for the Rome’s top job. Until he was thrust on the throne, he had been a priest of the Syrian sun god Heliogabalus, whose name he adopted. As might be expected, if you hand absolute power to a unprepared teenager, you should not be surprised if things go wrong. Heliogabalus was not as vicious as some of Rome’s more monstrous rulers. He was no gratuitously cruel Caligula or Commodus. However, Heliogabalus did display the occasional mean streak.
Heliogabalus’ mean streak often showed in his practical jokes. Jokes that, in light of the fact that he was emperor of the Roman world with none above him, always meant punching down. At the milder end of the pranks was his tendency to seat some of his more pompous dinner guests on the ancient Roman version of whoopee cushions. It was a specially stuffed pad that emitted flatulence sounds when somebody sat on it. At the crueler end of the spectrum, as seen below, Heliogabalus liked to make his marks think that they were about to die in a horrible way.
Putting Guests in Fear of Life and Limb
Far as practical jokes go, seating guests on whoopee cushions is relatively harmless. Not so Heliogabalus’ habit of pranking people by putting them in mortal fear of life and limb. One of his favorite practical jokes began with the teenaged emperor getting his dinner guests so drunk. So wasted, that they had to crash and sleep it off in the palace. Once the marks were zonked out, Heliogabalus had his servants sneak tame lions, leopards, bears, or a mix thereof, into the bedroom.
The Roman emperor would bust a gut the following morning, laughing at his hungover guests’ reaction to waking up in the midst of a menagerie of deadly predators. Unsurprisingly, precious few of Heliogabalus’ marks appreciated the humor. Between that and other behavior that his subjects viewed as deviant, Romans heaved a sigh of relief when the teenaged emperor was violently overthrown at age eighteen. Heliogabalus was beheaded, his corpse was tossed into a river, and his memory was damned by a senatorial edict.
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Some Sources & Further Reading
Ball, Warwick – Rome in the East: The Transformation of an Empire (2000)
History Halls – Humor That Backfired Horribly: The Tyrant Who Was Killed Over a Gay Joke
Parkin, Tim, and Pomeroy, Arthur – Roman Social History (2007)
Unknown – Historia Augusta: The Life of Elagabalus
