21. Scary Weird Pranking
Embarrassing people by seating them on whoopee cushions, whatever the downside, is a relatively harmless practical joke. It is coarse humor, but mostly innocent fun. Not so Heliogabalus’ weird – and sadistic – 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 Heliogabalus’ marks were zonked out, the emperor had his servants sneak tamed lions, leopards, bears, or a mix thereof, into the 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 weird behavior that his subjects viewed as deviant, the Romans heaved a sigh of relief when Heliogabalus was violently overthrown at age eighteen. He was beheaded, his corpse was tossed into the Tiber River, and his memory was damned by a senatorial edict.