Heliogabalus, "the Perverse".
Heliogabalus has been a Syrian roman emperor who belonged to the Severan dynasty.
He takes the throne at the age of fourteen, and he keeps it until his death, four years later, because pretorians don't exactly like him. He's rembered as an eccentric personality: known as "the Perverse", under the control of her mother and grandmother, he rules Rome with a bunch of his free sexuality, his hate for royalty and this attempts to impose his religion over Rome, doing some sober things like putting his temple over the Jupiter's one saying he's just the serve of his god.
He was a crazy ass person, no doubts, but he was actually golden hearted to people who he loved: for example he distributed grain to the poors, loved his mother more than anyone, even though he was the best drama queen and tried to kill his cousin Alexander several times.
Rant incoming:
Now, Tumblr keep saying he was a trans woman because one day he started running through people yelling that he'd give half of his reign to anyone who was able to give him a vagina and he asked to be called "Augusta" when he married Ierocle, a male libert. But, since I have to destroy everything Tumblr users say because some of them have to STOP ADAPTING HISTORY TO NOWADAYS TRYING TO LOOK INTELLECTUAL, I'm here to say make a couple of points clear:
we don't have enough historical proofs about this question to say with certain words he was trans, except for these two episodes who can be explained with the point 2;
Heliogabalus grew up with the thought of the woman who takes power in her hands, since he has been raised by only powerful women, and in the Roman society, usually the Augusta was the real brain of the Emperor.
So, he basically was just a scared kid who wanted to be seen as a powerful regnant: he thought that being biologically female would have been an advantage for him — probably his mother and grandmother made his male nature being an heavy thing to live with, since his mother got most of her advantages out of her seduction ability (and so did her son, one of his favorite Roman gods was in fact Venus). So, he just felt like being a woman would have let him get more prestige.
Rant finished.
