Numerous authors over the course of many centuries have described the outrages, atrocities and follies of the Roman emperors. In the twentieth century, this obsession (now shared by film directors) intensified during periods of deep upheaval and social breakdown: in the 1910s in Germany, in the 1930s in France, in the 1960s in Japan. The colossal abuse of colossal power, the all-consuming desire to achieve sexual ecstasy and oblivion, violence, torture and the despotic extermination of entire peoples remain no less alive and pressing problems today. The figure of one of the emperors, the teenage god Heliogabalus (as well as the madman Caligula and the matricide Nero), with his short-lived and contradictory kingdom of gold, blood, sperm and excrement, is most deeply connected with modern manias, anxieties and desires. The four-year reign of Heliogabalus, who was killed at eighteen, was accompanied by incest, sodomy, debauchery and anarchic ridicule of state power. Antonin Artaud's vivid biography of Heliogabalus most accurately relates the excesses of Heliogabalus, based on his beliefs, with the upheavals that are crushing modern empires, modern peoples and modern views.