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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;DonnaML, post: 6659751, member: 110350&quot;]A very nice coin!</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Of course, a number of historians have argued that most of the scandalous and scurrilous gossip about him has little or no credibility. (See the summary in the Wikipedia article.) Anyway, there may not have been a movie about him (yet!), but there have been a lot of other cultural representations, including at least two historical novels:</p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elagabalus" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elagabalus" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elagabalus</a></p><p><br /></p><p>&quot;Cultural references</p><p><br /></p><p>Despite the attempted damnatio memoriae, stories about Elagabalus survived and figured in many works of art and literature.[121] In Spanish, his name became a word for &quot;glutton&quot;, heliogábalo.[121][122] Due to the ancient stories about him, he often appears in literature and other creative media as a decadent figure (becoming something of an anti-hero in the Decadent movement of the late 19th century, and inspiring many famous works of art, especially by Decadents)[81] and the epitome of a young, amoral aesthete. The most notable of these works include:[123]</p><p><br /></p><p>Fiction</p><p><br /></p><p>Illustration by Auguste Leroux for the 1902 edition of Jean Lombard&#039;s L&#039;agonie showing the migration of the baetylus of Elgabal, though with the emperor riding rather than leading the god&#039;s chariot</p><p><br /></p><p>L&#039;Agonie (1888) by Jean Lombard,[124] which was the inspiration for Louis Couperus&#039;s De berg van licht (The Mountain of Light) in 1905–06;</p><p><br /></p><p>Héliogabale ou l&#039;Anarchiste couronné (Heliogabalus or The Anarchist Crowned) by Antonin Artaud (1934), depicting the life of Elagabalus and combining essay, biography, and fiction;[125]</p><p><br /></p><p>historical novels Family Favourites (1960) by Alfred Duggan and Child of the Sun (1966) by Kyle Onstott and Lance Horner, in the former of which an ordinary Roman soldier witnesses the reign; and</p><p><br /></p><p>Victor Pelevin&#039;s Sol Invictus, which depicts Elagabalus as a key unrecognized spiritual figure.</p><p><br /></p><p>Plays</p><p><br /></p><p>Heliogabalus: A Buffoonery in Three Acts (1920) by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan[126]</p><p>Heliogabalus: A Love Story (2002) by Sky Gilbert[127]</p><p><br /></p><p>Dance</p><p><br /></p><p>Elagabalus on a wall painting at Forchtenstein Castle in Austria</p><p>Héliogabale, a modern dance choreographed by Maurice Béjart[128]</p><p>The Legends, a dance performed by Sebastian Droste as Heliogabalus, as part of the Dances of Vice, Horror and Ecstasy performance staged by Droste and Anita Berber in 1923[129]</p><p><br /></p><p>Music</p><p><br /></p><p>Eliogabalo (1667), an opera by Venetian Baroque composer Francesco Cavalli</p><p>Elagabalus is mentioned in the Major-General&#039;s Song (1879) from Gilbert and Sullivan&#039;s The Pirates of Penzance.[130]</p><p>Heliogabale (1910), an opera by French composer Déodat de Séverac</p><p>Eliogabalus (1990), title of both the second album and second song by the experimental rock band Devil Doll (Slovenian band)</p><p>Heliogabalus imperator (Emperor Heliogabalus) (1972), an orchestral work by the German composer Hans Werner Henze</p><p>Six Litanies for Heliogabalus (2007), an album by American musician John Zorn</p><p>The Pale Emperor (2015), an album by American musician Marilyn Manson, was inspired by the life of Heliogabalus and more specifically Antonin Artaud&#039;s book[131][132]</p><p><br /></p><p>Paintings</p><p><br /></p><p>The Roses of Heliogabalus by Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1888)</p><p>Heliogabalus, High Priest of the Sun (1866), by the Pre-Raphaelite Simeon Solomon</p><p>One of the most notorious incidents laid to his account, an extravagant dinner party in which guests were smothered under a mass of &quot;violets and other flowers&quot; dropped from above,[133] is immortalized in the 19th-century painting The Roses of Heliogabalus (1888), by the Anglo-Dutch academician Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema.</p><p>Antonin Artaud Heliogabalus (2010–11), by Anselm Kiefer[134]</p><p><br /></p><p>Poetry</p><p>Algabal (1892–1919), a collection of poems by Stefan George</p><p>In &quot;He &#039;Digesteth Harde Yron&#039;&quot; American poet Marianne Moore describes a banquet at which Elagabalus served six hundred ostrich brains, a detail she found in George Jennison&#039;s book Animals for Show and Pleasure in Ancient Rome.</p><p><br /></p><p>Television</p><p>In CBBC&#039;s adaptation of Horrible Histories, Elagabalus is portrayed by Mathew Baynton as a laddish teenager with a cruel sense of humour.&quot;</p><p><br /></p><p>I&#039;ve actually read Alfred Duggan&#039;s novel &quot;Family Favourites&quot; -- or most of it; I gave up before the end. Duggan was a British writer who was much better known in the 1950s and 1960s than he is now; I believe he wrote a number of historical novels about Britain in the Anglo-Saxon period. His novel about Elagabalus was sympathetic, but in a very odd way -- essentially, as I recall, presenting him as a masculine gay man and vociferously rejecting as defamatory any notion that he was &quot;effeminate.&quot; A product of its times and the prejudices of its author, I suppose.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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