Peace Through Strength

We know a vast deal about the history of Rome and yet there remains so much we do not know. Mary Beard reports in her new book, Emperor of Rome, that the teenage emperor Elagabulus—who ruled from A.D. 218 to 222, his reign ending with his assassination at age 18—may have invented the whoopee cushion. He is said to have married one of the Vestal Virgins. He was also apparently a cross-dresser who, according to the Roman historian Dio Cassius, “asked doctors to give him female private parts by means of an incision.” “May have,” “is said to,” “apparently”—without such qualifications respectable Roman history could not be written. As the popular English historian Tom Holland put it in his debut book, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic (2003), “Write so much as a sentence about the ancient world and the temptation is immediately to qualify it. Even when the sources are at their most plentiful, uncertainties and discrepancies crop up everywhere.”