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Pythagoras’ Greed Cup and Other Lesser-Known Ancient World Facts

Khalid Elhassan July 31, 2020 34 min

Roman Empire - Roman emperor — The assassination of Caligula. Quora

24. Imperial Level Pranking

Imagine waking up with a hangover to find one of these in your bedroom. Phys-Org

Embarrassing people by seating them on whoopee cushions is a relatively harmless practical joke, redolent of innocent fun. Not so Heliogabalus’ habit of pranking people by putting them in mortal fear of 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 inebriated guests passed out, Heliogabalus had his servants sneak tamed lions, leopards, bears, or a mix thereof, into their bedroom. Come the morning, the emperor would bust a gut laughing at his hungover guests’ reaction to waking up in the midst of a menagerie of man-eating predators. Between that and other behavior his subjects viewed as deviant, Romans heaved a sigh of relief when Heliogabalus was violently overthrown at age eighteen. He was beheaded, his corpse was tossed into a river, and his memory was damned 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.