Historical context is that according to Dio's history Elagabalus married a man, wore wigs and women's clothes, and preferred to be called Domina instead of Dominus. And apparently offered a fortune to any physician able to surgically create a vagina.
I think it's a shorthand as there is no Arabic Polytheism in the game, though the announcement of Era Zaharrak (sic?) coming to Basque lands makes me very hopeful to see such a thing show up.
Yeah, his cult supposedly sacrificed Roman children. Using their guts as a form of augury divination (augury was a specific discipline of divination involving birds) like those guys who examined cow livers (which was apparently called haruspicy). Human sacrifice isn't very Hellenistic.
Dio was writing a 'woe look at how bad rome is we are being corrupted by decendant easterners instead of old manly roman emperors', is it any wonder that he wrote about how the Eastern Emperor with Eastern God/gods was 'an unmanly man who wanted to be a woman'.
Not to mention Elagabalus enjoyed getting his friends passed out drunk then letting defanged/declawed lions into the party room for them to discover when they woke up.
And I would even say having his culture as “Roman” is a bit off. He was the first emperor to be very much culturally “Eastern.” There were previous emperors from the East, but they were all thoroughly Romanized by the time they took office. Elagabalus had lived in the East for his whole life and thus was culturally quite different from the Romans, which rankled the Senate to no end.
I'd argue that's still Hellenic, but perhaps an Islamic syncreticism faith of the Hellenic religion. The grecoroman faiths were notorious for syncretism with other religions and countlessly incorporating gods.
There's always like a 50% chance that the weird and interesting stuff written about Roman emperors and their families is just slander by a butthurt historian LOL. Maybe everything about Elagabalus is true, or maybe it's some guy's attempt to call them girly.
Byzantine and Roman Emperors tend to have traits that are reflective of what we know about their real lives. So you get stuff like Justinian being ambitious, Claudius having a stammer, Caligula being a lunatic, Basil I being known as Michael III’s killer etc. My personal favourite is that Heraclius has the Crusader trait; he’s sometimes known as an informal early crusader, since he framed his wars against the Sassanids as being explicitly called by god. It’s an insane level of detail for characters who are centuries dead even by the earliest start dates.
why I love this community, like in 2015 if this was posted it would have gotten ripped and trolled for days but we here rejected that bs for the most part
But they took away Hadrian's gay trait, he's straight according to the game. Which is odd since Hadrian is almost certainly, definitely, 100% in the way we'd understand it today, exclusively homosexual. He deified his partner after his death. So one step forward, two steps back. That and I'd make an impassioned argument from the depths of my Romeaboo heart that Elagabalus probably wasn't transgender but I think mods or downvotes would strike me to the depths of Tartarus.
was scrolling through the title history for the byzantines and saw that heliogabulus was shown as a bisexual female, historically they were known as somewhat… eccentric and in the history of rome podcast Mike Duncan says that they probably would be considered transgender today!
For those discussing the historicity of Elagabalus being transgender it's important to understand that we simply lack a definitive answer on a scholarly level. They may have been a trans woman or they may have been the victim of the ancient world equivalent of when people call Joe Biden a sissy today. HOWEVER, most people here are not actual scholars of history presenting the scholarly perspective where being clear about it not being definitive is necessary and neutrality should be employed. As a trans woman I honestly personally like the idea that for everything else about them Elagabalus was a transgender Emperor of Rome. You may personally feel the slander argument is more compelling and that's understandable but just don't try to assert your side as more likely or true than the other because we just don't know for certain either way.
That said CK3 said trans rights and it makes me happy to see them choose to represent Elagabalus this way. Not mentioning it at all would be dishonest and this is a way that errs on the side of respecting their potential identity just in case.
He wasn't trans, it's more that the Roman authors were following a literary trend of writing about Easterners are being decedent, unmanly, lustful and womanlike while fear mongering about how they were gonna corrupt and undermine the moral values of 'true Romans'.
Give a teenager a credit card and they will go on a spending spree. Give a horny teenager an empire and you'll have the most decadent "slumber parties" in the realm.
He was a teen emperor that tried to replace roman gods with his own, so his political rivals and later moralistic writers pumped up the 'feminine easterners that aren't real men' trope.
She openly demanded people treat her as a woman and offered a fortune to anyone who could perform a surgery to give her a vagina, which is about as blatantly trans as you can get
Probably historically accurate that he would want to be called empress, we don't know for sure, but the title is wrong. We have no indication that he was trans and that's not what Ck3 is saying.
I know a lot of people who are into that sort of thing like fishing for historical figures to present as their own, but Elegabalus? Really? Do you want to claim him of all people?
Bruh this would be like if we decided historically awful women weren’t women because we as women didn’t want to claim them. Like damn someone can be evil and trans just as someone can be good as trans, really ain’t that complex
I feel like every couple months someone posts this and we have to have the whole “We literally can’t trust what Roman historians said about various emperors because they did brutal hit jobs on anyone they had personal or political beef with” talk
Classifying her as an "empress" in the files is acknowledging that she was a trans woman. That symbol you're talking about is the bisexual icon, because she was also bi.
The problem with spending your time in a lot of history communities is that you find yourself wanting to make a semi-pedantic argument over the difference between "Was most likely" and "was".
Eh, in-game but IRL it's unlikely. The only source that corroborates this is Cassius Dio, a historian who routinely slandered previous emperors to justify the current emperor and basically anyone he didn't like. Caligula and his horse and Nero playing the lute whilst Rome burned are two such examples of his slander. A much more reliable source, Herodian, does mention Elagabalus having a fondness of dancing - which Dio also mentions - so there is credence to the idea that he was effeminate, but the only source that states Elagabalus' desire to be a woman is Cassius Dio who is far too unreliable to take at face value.
Poor Elagabalus. Religion played a huge part in why historians are so hostile. We can’t blame someone for being raised in an environment where they were made to do holy prostitution from who knows what age exactly.
It would be cool. But I don't see the trait that symbolizes it. In any case, the Male/Female symbols show that she/he is a bisexual, not a transgender.
Historical context is that according to Dio's history Elagabalus married a man, wore wigs and women's clothes, and preferred to be called Domina instead of Dominus. And apparently offered a fortune to any physician able to surgically create a vagina.
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Not just any god, but a mandatory cult that they declared themselves head priestess of!
Well, Romans had a habit for integrating gods they met into their pantheon. If you squint, you can totally accept this as “hellenic”
I think it's a shorthand as there is no Arabic Polytheism in the game, though the announcement of Era Zaharrak (sic?) coming to Basque lands makes me very hopeful to see such a thing show up.
Yeah, his cult supposedly sacrificed Roman children. Using their guts as a form of augury divination (augury was a specific discipline of divination involving birds) like those guys who examined cow livers (which was apparently called haruspicy). Human sacrifice isn't very Hellenistic.
Dio was writing a 'woe look at how bad rome is we are being corrupted by decendant easterners instead of old manly roman emperors', is it any wonder that he wrote about how the Eastern Emperor with Eastern God/gods was 'an unmanly man who wanted to be a woman'.
He also married 4 women, though, including a vestal virgin
gaslit, gatekept and girlbossed
Not to mention Elagabalus enjoyed getting his friends passed out drunk then letting defanged/declawed lions into the party room for them to discover when they woke up.
And I would even say having his culture as “Roman” is a bit off. He was the first emperor to be very much culturally “Eastern.” There were previous emperors from the East, but they were all thoroughly Romanized by the time they took office. Elagabalus had lived in the East for his whole life and thus was culturally quite different from the Romans, which rankled the Senate to no end.
Funny part of this is that Dio means God in italian
DIIIIIOOOO
Since Elagabalus was from Aramaic Syria, shouldn't the culture be Syriac maybe?
Source?
You absolute nerd! Love to see it!
Is this the emperor whose lover drowned in the nile and became one of the most portrayed people in roman history on statues and such?
Interesting.
I'd argue that's still Hellenic, but perhaps an Islamic syncreticism faith of the Hellenic religion. The grecoroman faiths were notorious for syncretism with other religions and countlessly incorporating gods.
Not even the only Roman emperor who (supposedly) publicly married a man.
I admire your brain
Holly molly
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Wasnt he also Syrian and not Roman
Other CK players: actually know real-world history
I just made him a consul.
That's bisexual, no?
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There's always like a 50% chance that the weird and interesting stuff written about Roman emperors and their families is just slander by a butthurt historian LOL. Maybe everything about Elagabalus is true, or maybe it's some guy's attempt to call them girly.
Yeah but this is CK, where you do actually bang a horse and sleep with your sister
This is true, but it's still a fun nod to the historical controversy.
Historians also have a track record for erasing queer history.
Queue people getting mad at you taking a photo instead of a screenshot
Yep, we're lining up!
Cue people getting mad at you for using queue instead of cue.
It is just lazy
Paradox subs classic
To be fair at least it’s finally a good photo
Much easier to take a just as visible photo with a phone and upload it on app Reddit than having to go through it all on a computer.
Is this in the title history part? How far back does it go? To Augustus?
And Augustus has a moustache for some reason
yes and yes
Also thier personality is very accurate
Byzantine and Roman Emperors tend to have traits that are reflective of what we know about their real lives. So you get stuff like Justinian being ambitious, Claudius having a stammer, Caligula being a lunatic, Basil I being known as Michael III’s killer etc. My personal favourite is that Heraclius has the Crusader trait; he’s sometimes known as an informal early crusader, since he framed his wars against the Sassanids as being explicitly called by god. It’s an insane level of detail for characters who are centuries dead even by the earliest start dates.
So are his stats.
Elagabalus shows the danger of handing over absolute power to a 14 year old. Especially a crazy one.
But at least you’ll have a good time
His 14 year old cousin did reasonably okay, after Elagabalus got himself assassinated for, well, everything.
"Absolute power" is a significant exaggeration, realistically speaking.
“Byzantine Empire”
I was expecting the comments to be terrible, but lo and behold, it's actually not that toxic (aside from the removed comments probably)
I mean the fanbase pretty much encourages IN-GAME incest and Eugenics while also being gay and banging the pope
oh yeah the removed comments are pretty nasty. mod team is all volunteers with varying levels of activity so sorry if we missed stuff
why I love this community, like in 2015 if this was posted it would have gotten ripped and trolled for days but we here rejected that bs for the most part
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But they took away Hadrian's gay trait, he's straight according to the game. Which is odd since Hadrian is almost certainly, definitely, 100% in the way we'd understand it today, exclusively homosexual. He deified his partner after his death. So one step forward, two steps back. That and I'd make an impassioned argument from the depths of my Romeaboo heart that Elagabalus probably wasn't transgender but I think mods or downvotes would strike me to the depths of Tartarus.
Is this from a mod? Heliogabulus seems to have reigned in the 3rd century AD which I don't think is in vanilla CK3 unless I missed a major DLC
from looking at title history for the byzantine empire
And yet they didnt categoraize Trajan and Hadrian as gay... I mean that's like Roman History 101... Were they rommates?
I think lover status between two characters is lost on death, so that’s probably why.
Yeah just like most romans, and also greeks. They mostly participate in orgies which they fool around with each other.
Trajan wasn’t gay. Hadrian was, but not Trajan
was scrolling through the title history for the byzantines and saw that heliogabulus was shown as a bisexual female, historically they were known as somewhat… eccentric and in the history of rome podcast Mike Duncan says that they probably would be considered transgender today!
Is this included in the standard game or do you need a mod to see the title history?
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Sources are contradictory. Could have just been gay.
For those discussing the historicity of Elagabalus being transgender it's important to understand that we simply lack a definitive answer on a scholarly level. They may have been a trans woman or they may have been the victim of the ancient world equivalent of when people call Joe Biden a sissy today. HOWEVER, most people here are not actual scholars of history presenting the scholarly perspective where being clear about it not being definitive is necessary and neutrality should be employed. As a trans woman I honestly personally like the idea that for everything else about them Elagabalus was a transgender Emperor of Rome. You may personally feel the slander argument is more compelling and that's understandable but just don't try to assert your side as more likely or true than the other because we just don't know for certain either way.
Yeah. It's nice either way to feel like the devs threw us a bone, even if it's a small one.
That said CK3 said trans rights and it makes me happy to see them choose to represent Elagabalus this way. Not mentioning it at all would be dishonest and this is a way that errs on the side of respecting their potential identity just in case.
That's the symbol for Bisexual... BI believe.
The OP is referring to them being called "empress" instead of "emperor."
He means they are listed as Empress. They were bisexual as well according to the sources we have available to us in the modern era.
Known for being one of the least capable emperors of all time and had a short reign.
But you have to agree, what he did in that short time was the stuff of legend. True sigma mindset
He wasn't trans, it's more that the Roman authors were following a literary trend of writing about Easterners are being decedent, unmanly, lustful and womanlike while fear mongering about how they were gonna corrupt and undermine the moral values of 'true Romans'.
What sources contradict the claims that they insisted on female titles and dressed as a woman?
Give a teenager a credit card and they will go on a spending spree. Give a horny teenager an empire and you'll have the most decadent "slumber parties" in the realm.
I only know about Heliogabulus from horrible histories and in that he’s a crazy teenager, why is he a woman here?
He was a teen emperor that tried to replace roman gods with his own, so his political rivals and later moralistic writers pumped up the 'feminine easterners that aren't real men' trope.
She openly demanded people treat her as a woman and offered a fortune to anyone who could perform a surgery to give her a vagina, which is about as blatantly trans as you can get
Definitely one of the worst emperors tbh
Strange. What about the holy marriage with a Vestal Virgin? He hoped to get children from this union.
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i think the clothes come from a mod but no mods i have installed would affect title history
Neat
Here's how to take screenshots on most platforms:
that would be helpful if i knew my reddit login and was able to log in on my computer
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Whoa whoa cool down!
Probably historically accurate that he would want to be called empress, we don't know for sure, but the title is wrong. We have no indication that he was trans and that's not what Ck3 is saying.
she insisted that people call her domina vice dominus and also referred to herself as the “domina” of one of her lovers.
Heck yeah trans rights!
You really don't want Elagabalus as the example of transgender for people to see
Trans rights
Based
That's awesome!!
Isn't that symbol for bisexual tho?
Yes. But note that Helio is classed as a woman and an Empress.
I know a lot of people who are into that sort of thing like fishing for historical figures to present as their own, but Elegabalus? Really? Do you want to claim him of all people?
Bruh this would be like if we decided historically awful women weren’t women because we as women didn’t want to claim them. Like damn someone can be evil and trans just as someone can be good as trans, really ain’t that complex
i’m not trans
It’s not about ‘claiming’. Elagabalus made it very clear they were transgender. That’s just the fact of the matter.
Lol
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Based pdx
I feel like every couple months someone posts this and we have to have the whole “We literally can’t trust what Roman historians said about various emperors because they did brutal hit jobs on anyone they had personal or political beef with” talk
never saw it on the sub before and thought it was cool
That's some incredible historic research and accuracy.
It's an interpretation.
I really want to stan Heliogabalus because of the potential transness but then I look at literally everything else they did
I stan them exactly for everything else they did.
Grasping at straws there, huh?
do you know anything about heliogabulus?
I.. I don’t understand?
That's bisexual, not transgender
“Empress” is the key part
Slip n slide down the slope
According to people of the time, Cesar took it up the and screamed like a woman.
Can't trust the authors dude. But they had their own agenda just like authors do today.
Men having sex with other men in Rome was normal so it’s likely that Caesar and Pompey did like having sex with men.
I'm 95% sure that's her sexual orientation not her gender
It’s not the trait it’s because they’re listed as “empress”
Transgender doesn't exist in CK3 as an orientation.
Classifying her as an "empress" in the files is acknowledging that she was a trans woman. That symbol you're talking about is the bisexual icon, because she was also bi.
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fukks in the name gods
thats not inherently contradictory by any means and certainly not for the god Heliogabulus worshipped
Thanks, Lucas.
I’ve never seen those clothes before, what mod are you using?
All I know about Heliogabulus comes from Cultist Simulator and something tells me they weren’t
Ah a big factor in the crises of the 3rd century
What mod gives those clothes?
is this an easter egg or a mod? im just wondering since this is a classical empress and not a byzantine one.
Wait what ? How ?
The problem with spending your time in a lot of history communities is that you find yourself wanting to make a semi-pedantic argument over the difference between "Was most likely" and "was".
Huh, interesting, I have to do a presentation on him, soon. But I thought CK3 deals with the medieval era? Is this some kind of expansion?
it’s from the title history for the byzantine empire, that’s included in vanilla.
Eh, in-game but IRL it's unlikely. The only source that corroborates this is Cassius Dio, a historian who routinely slandered previous emperors to justify the current emperor and basically anyone he didn't like. Caligula and his horse and Nero playing the lute whilst Rome burned are two such examples of his slander. A much more reliable source, Herodian, does mention Elagabalus having a fondness of dancing - which Dio also mentions - so there is credence to the idea that he was effeminate, but the only source that states Elagabalus' desire to be a woman is Cassius Dio who is far too unreliable to take at face value.
. k
Poor Elagabalus. Religion played a huge part in why historians are so hostile. We can’t blame someone for being raised in an environment where they were made to do holy prostitution from who knows what age exactly.
Why are you booing me, I’m right
It would be cool. But I don't see the trait that symbolizes it. In any case, the Male/Female symbols show that she/he is a bisexual, not a transgender.
That is the symbol for orientation. No one is saying that the symbol means they are transgender.
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What? Who made him? He ruled 600 years before ck3 start date.
OP explained they were looking back through the title’s history.
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1 in learning...
Elagabalus had a moustache tho
How can I find him ingame? Looking for emperors of the Byzantine Empire?
title history for byzantine empire
Ah, adding stuff to games that are historically false. He was just a twink that loved being taken by any male, and was really into belittling.
thank you for your insight LoliAnimeLover.