The Mad Emperor'Buy the book; it's very entertaining.' David Aaronovitch, The Times A Financial Times, BBC History and Spectator Book of the Year On 8 June 218 AD, a fourteen year old Syrian boy, egged on by his grandmother, led an army to battle in a Roman civil war. Against all expectations, he was victorious. Varius Avitus Bassianus, known to the modern world as Heliogabalus, was proclaimed emperor. The next four years were to be the strangest in the history of