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I loved reading The Mad Emperor. Particularly the speculative tangents that Sidebottom often veers off into - they really flesh out Heliogabalus’s world:

The sun rose at 5.19 a.m on 8 June in Syria. The legionaries of III Gallica hailed the risen god. Heliogabalus, as priest of Elagabal, offered libations and performed sacrifice. (p. 88)

These include just going off about unrelated historical figures:

In plodding prose [The Meditations] reveal an autocrat [Marcus Aurelius] struggling with self-control and a martyr to duty who posessed no originality of thought and had a joyless loathing of the human body and pleasure. (p. 176)

Take that, Stoics. The tone is overall pretty light and lampshades the often goofy subject matter:

(don’t worry, we will come back to the importance of cock size in politics). (p. 174)

It’s also always entertaining to encounter polite inter-academic passive-agression:

Heliogabalus as a monotheist was an invention of the late fourth century AD, when Christianity had become the Roman state religion. It is a mystery why some modern scholars have supported the idea. (p. 230)

I was disappointed to find that using comparitive religion to speculate on the practices of the cult of Elagabal (the thing I wanted to learn about the most!) was somehow a bridge too far for Sidebottom, who calls such speculations, for example, a “bravura vision [that] is supported by no evidence whatsoever.”(p. 218) That’s as if his own book doesn’t include passages like:

Hang on a minute, the astute reader may well be thinking, at the start of this chapter there were some sensible words about the dangers of generalization, and now, towards the end, an anonymous scribe from the middle of nowhere in Egypt is representing the feelings of some fifty-four million provincials. What can I say? History is an art, not a science. Sometimes you have to trust your instincts when filling in the gaps in our evidence. (p. 247)

Okay, dude. So, I’d call Sidebottom “ideosyncratic” and say maybe he isn’t the exclusive perspective on this topic, but he’s a really entertaining storyteller.