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Every Day Life in Ancient Rome was More Scandalous than Historians Let On

Khalid Elhassan July 8, 2022 38 min

sir lawrence alma tadema the meeting of antony and cleopatra

25. A Mean Prank

Roman Emperor Elagabalus' hungover guests sometimes woke up next to a lion — Roman Emperor Elagabalus’ hungover guests sometimes woke up next to a lion. Wikimedia

To seat people on whoopee cushions is relatively harmless, as far as pranks go. Not so Elagabalus’ habit of pranking people by putting them in mortal fear for life and limb. One of his favorite pranks began with the teenaged emperor getting his dinner guests so drunk, that they had to crash and sleep it off in the palace. Once the marks were zonked out, Elagabalus had his servants sneak tame lions, leopards, bears, or a mix thereof, into the bedroom.

Come the morning, the Roman emperor would bust a gut as he laughed heartily at his hungover guests’ reaction to waking up in the midst of a menagerie of man-eating predators. Unsurprisingly, not many of the emperor’s marks appreciated the humor. Between that and other behavior that his subjects viewed as deviant, Romans heaved a sigh of relief when Elagabalus was violently overthrown at age eighteen. He was beheaded, his remains were tossed into a river, and his memory was forbidden by a senatorial edict.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.