Cicero Fan Club

When Hector’s mother Hecuba is attempting to get Hector to return to the safety of the walls of Troy and to not make his fateful stand against Achilles, she pleads with him by showing him her breast. Now, I want to preface by emphasizing the symbolism and meaning of this action; she’s showing him the breast he was fed on and the breast on which he cried as a child. However, look at it this way:

I think that attempting to litigate whether or not Elagabalus was a trans woman, is missing the point of their significance in history. Like it’s all well and good trying to work out what is Cassius Dio being an outrage gossip and what is true details about Elagabalus’ life, but I think the more notable details is that we have an account of Cassius Dio and ancient Roman knowing about what we would today call a transgender person. Like the references to attempting to pay a surgeon to craft a vagina, or “call me not a lord for I am a lady” are undoubtedly trans things and would be insanely weird if they happened to have been made up by a cis person with no knowledge of trans folks. This means that what we would today call trans people were not an unheard of concept in Cassius Dio’s day — not common — but just common enough to be believable slander against an effeminate teenager emperor.

As much as it’s fun to make fun of Lepidus as not being deserving of being in the 2nd Triumvirate, which is kind of fair, we need to acknowledge that Lepidus won. I will admit that Augustus calling on Lepidus, a former consul and the current Pontifex Maximus, last at Senate meetings is really funny. But look at it like this, Lepidus got:

I find it amazing that Cicero doubted Julius Caesar would overthrow the institutions of the Roman Republic and institute dictatorship because he thought Caesar was a femboy:

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The word fascinate comes from Ancient Roman penis jewelry.