Earlier this year, a British museum said it was reclassifying an ancient Roman emperor, depicted on a coin in its collection, as a transgender woman. So what do historians think about this move and is there a danger that modern labels oversimplify ancient gender identities?
The emperor in question is Marcus Aurelius Antoninus—better known by his nickname Elagabalus—who ruled from A.D. 218 until he was assassinated in A.D. 222, when he was still just a teenager.
While Elagabalus’ reign lasted only four years, he is among the most infamous Roman emperors, notorious for sex scandals and religious controversy. Historical records suggest that he was an eccentric, decadent, and sexually promiscuous character who threw wild dinner parties.
According to Roman chroniclers, Elagabalus flouted the prescribed gender norms of the time, dressing up as a female prostitute and selling his body to other men for sex, marrying a man and acting as his wife, and declaring himself to be a woman.
An engraving from 1880 depicts a bust of the Roman emperor Elagabalus. He is among the most infamous Roman emperors and flouted the prescribed gender norms of the time.
Both the ancient Greeks and Romans “regarded gender as grounded in biological sex. With few exceptions, all deviance from rules of conduct prescribed for men and women was thought to be willful and criminal,” Marilyn Skinner, a classics professor at the University of Arizona, told Newsweek.
“Romans did approve of females showing ‘masculine’ virtues like bravery when it benefited society and family…but men behaving like women were always abhorrent,” said Skinner, who is the author of the book Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture.
The idea that Elagabalus declared himself to be a woman stems from writings by the contemporary Roman historian and senator Lucius Cassius Dio. Elagabalus “was bestowed in marriage and was termed wife, mistress, and queen,” according to Dio, who also quoted the emperor as saying: “Call me not Lord, for I am a lady.”
These quotes informed the decision by the U.K.’s North Hertfordshire Museum to begin referring to Elagabalus using female pronouns. But historians that Newsweek spoke to urged caution in drawing such conclusions, pointing to the pitfalls of interpreting ancient sources.
“Most of our written sources are fragmentary, incomplete, and rarely contemporary, amounting to little more than gossip or hearsay at best, malign propaganda at worst. It’s rare that we have a figure’s own words to guide us,” Andrew Kenrick, a researcher with the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the U.K.’s University of East Anglia, who has studied ancient Rome, wrote in a piece for The Conversation.
Was Elagabalus Trans?
Keith Hoskins, a spokesperson for the museum and a member of the North Hertfordshire District Council, explained the decision to refer to the emperor using female pronouns.
“North Herts Museum has one coin of Elagabalus, which we periodically put on display as it is one of a few LGBTQ+ items we have in our collection,” Hoskins told Newsweek. “We try to be sensitive to identifying pronouns for people in the past, as we are for people in the present. It is only polite and respectful. We know that Elagabalus identified as a woman and was explicit about which pronouns to use.”
He went on: “In the past, inaccurate translations had referred to Elagabalus as ‘they.’ However, we now know this was the result of the classical Greek language making no distinction between gender when referring to people in the third person, making many translations inaccurate. It is now known through evidence—such as Dio’s text—that Elagabalus preferred the ‘she’ pronoun, and as such, this is something we reflect when discussing her in contemporary times.”
Historians, however, said that Dio’s accounts should be taken with a grain of salt.
“If you take Dio at his word, it’s entirely reasonable to think Elagabalus could have been trans,” Zachary Herz, an assistant professor of classics at the University of Colorado Boulder, told Newsweek.
“My problem is just that I don’t think Dio should be taken at his word, and I think the museum’s identification is far too certain on a question that’s actually ambiguous. The museum is overreading the evidence they have,” Herz said.
Ancient coins show Emperor Elagabalus, who appears to be depicted as a man.
Dio was a contemporary of Elagabalus and, as a senator, would have known the emperor in person. The writer is the principal source for understanding Elagabalus. However, it is important to note that Dio wrote under the patronage of Elagabalus’ cousin, Severus Alexander, who took the throne following the emperor’s assassination. It was therefore in Dio’s interest to paint a negative picture of Elagabalus.
The evidence that Elagabalus was trans “effectively comes from a ‘hit piece’ by a supporter of Elagabalus’ successor, who is using the sort of language we typically see in such pieces throughout Roman history to undermine the character of the individual,” Kenrick told Newsweek.
Dio wrote a long account of what a bad emperor and person Elagabalus was. In that account, Dio describes Elagabalus “correcting someone’s pronouns”—i.e., asking to be referred to as grammatically female—and trying to secure what we’d now call a vaginoplasty, according to Herz.
“The problem is that Elagabalus has a number of imperial portraits,” Herz said, “and weird imperial portraits at that. They break sharply from earlier conventions of how emperors were supposed to look, in ways that suggest that Elagabalus was being portrayed the way he wanted to look.”
Those portraits show him as a teenage boy, often with a mustache or sideburns. This iconography chimes with other visual depictions of the emperor.
“I think representation is important,” Kenrick said. “I identify as queer myself and so absolutely appreciate the importance of looking to the past and finding people who look and act like me. Elagabalus is an important symbol in that regard, whatever the historical realities, so it’s important not to erase their importance in that regard.
“But I also think self-identification is an important concept too, and the closest we have for evidence about how Elagabalus identified comes not from the textual evidence but from their depiction in coins and statues—which is as a male,” Kenrick said.
Newsweek contacted GLAAD and the National Center for Transgender Equality by email for comment.
Gender and Sexuality in Ancient Rome
The Romans placed a lot of importance on whether individuals acted like a man or woman “should” act. Their concept of how men and women ought to behave was very different from ours, but they took it seriously, according to Herz.
“The Romans struggled a little to get past thinking of gender as binary but were surprisingly open-minded about its fluidity,” Kenrick said. “For Roman men…their identity wasn’t connected to the sex of their partner but to the role they adopted. Most Roman men would have been bisexual, from our perspective, although they wouldn’t have described themselves in such terms.”
He went on: “The proper thing for a Roman man to do was to be the dominant partner in sex—and everything else. To be a man was to penetrate, whether with a man or a woman. Conversely, a Roman man taking on the passive sexual role—i.e., being penetrated, to put it bluntly—was considered to be taking on the female role.
“I’m sure many Roman men took on the passive role in private and thought no more about it than a gay man might today, but others also took on the effeminate role in public—dressing and acting in a more effeminate way,” Kenrick said.
The Romans did have a way to describe these supposedly “unmanly” men, referring to them using the derogatory term cinaedus.
“The noun cinaedus is a term of abuse that denotes men who are unacceptably feminine in both sexual and nonsexual ways,” Herz said.
“It’s possible that some people Romans thought of as cinaedi would see themselves as transgender if they were alive today, or that some would think of themselves as gay men, or some would think of themselves as something totally different,” he continued. “There’s really no way to know for sure. But a Roman who was told about the experience of a trans woman would probably reach for the idea of the cinaedus in order to make that experience make sense.”
Elagabalus ruled the Roman Empire for four years in the third century and was assassinated when he was just a teenager.
According to Herz, Elagabalus was portrayed in ancient written sources not as a woman, trans or cisgender but as a cinaedus. In other words, he was considered biologically male, no matter how he behaved and dressed or the sex of whomever he supposedly married.
“I think the [museum’s decision] is understandable but probably incorrect, in the sense that Elagabalus the historical figure would probably not have understood himself to be anything we’d now understand as a trans woman,” Herz said.
Skinner said: “This disagreement with how the museum portrays him is an example of what happens when we try to impose our existing categories on the sexuality of persons from antiquity. Often we can’t agree on the categories themselves, much less on whether they’re correct or not.”
All this highlights the pitfalls of retroactively applying modern gender identities to ancient figures. For example, most of the accounts of cinaedi in Roman literature contain hostile stereotypes.
“That’s probably the takeaway from all this—so many of our sources are hostile it’s difficult to get at the
lived reality of queer Romans, Elagabalus included,” Kenrick said.
