38. Waking Up Next to Wild Beasts
Whatever its downside, embarrassing people by seating them on whoopee cushions is a relatively harmless practical joke, redolent of innocent fun. Not so Elagabalus’ habit of pranking people by putting them in mortal fear of life and limb. One of his favorite pranks began with the teenage emperor getting his dinner guests so drunk, that they had to crash and sleep it off in the palace.
Once the marks were zonked out, Elagabalus 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 behavior his subjects viewed as deviant, Romans heaved a sigh of relief when Elagabalus 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.