In the Historia Augusta, the metaphor of the plague as a tool of the “rhetoric of blame” is applied to the emperors Elagabalus, Gallienus, and Maximinus Thrax. Just as the plague meant destruction, physical death, the emperor as a metaphor for the plague symbolized the morbidity of the state, the dysfunction of institutions, the putrefaction of values. Our paper analyzes the aspects of private and public life in which the anonymous author of the collection of imperial biographies applies this stylistic figure to Elagabalus. Our conclusion is that the biographer wanted to emphasize the complete annihilation of the emperor as an individual (physical, moral, political, social, gender) and public person (sovereign, priest). Thus, just as plague means reduction to physical nothingness, for the anonymous author of the Historia Augusta, Elagabalus as a metaphor for plague was social nothingness itself.

Keywords: pestis, Historia Augusta, Elagabalus, the metaphor of the plague, literary deconstruction.