The Emperor and the Whoopee Cushion
Helioagabalus (204 – 222) was declared Roman emperor when he was barely fourteen-years-old. He had not been groomed or prepared for the job, and until he was thrust in the throne, he had been a priest of the Syrian sun god Elagabal. As might be expected, handing absolute power to an unprepared teenager did not go well. While not as vicious as some of Rome’s more monstrous rulers – he was no gratuitously cruel Caligula or Commodus – Heliogabalus did display the occasional mean streak. It often showed in his practical jokes. Jokes that, considering the fact that he was emperor of the Roman world with none above him, always meant punching down.
At the milder end of Heliogabalus thought it was funny to seat some of his more pompous dinner guests on the ancient Roman version of whoopee cushions. But 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 the marks were zonked out, Heliogabalus had his servants sneak tame lions, leopards, bears, or a mix thereof, into the bedroom. Come the morning, the emperor would bust a gut as he laughed heartily at his hungover guests’ reaction to waking up in the midst of a menagerie of man-eating predators. Unsurprisingly, not many of the emperor’s marks thought the practical jokes were particularly funny.