At similar gatherings he addressed ex-pimps that he assembled from every quarter, as well as the most depraved boys and youths. When he went to the prostitutes, he dressed as a woman. At his banquets he and his friends performed with women.
The story went that he bought a well-known and very beautiful harlot for one hundred thousand sesterces.
In balneis semper cum muliebribus fuit, ita ut eas ipse psilothro curaret: ipse quoque barbam psilothro adcurans: quodque pudendum dictu est, eodem, quo mulieres adcurabantur, et eadem hora, rasit et virilia subactoribus suis, novacula manu sua, qua postea barbam fecit.
The Historia Augusta makes many revelations about the intimate personal life of the Roman Emperors and their erotic mores. Among the later rulers, Commodus, who belongs in the second century A.D., defiled the temples of the gods with fornication and human blood.
Of the Emperor Severus, who flourished in the second century A.D., the Historia Augusta says:
Domestically, he was indifferent, and kept his wife Julia, although she was a notorious adulteress and an accomplice in the conspiracy against his own life.
Heliogabalus, whose biography appears in the Historia Augusta and who ruled in the third century A.D., discovered certain kinds of lustful pleasures, as the chronicle states, to supersede the male prostitutes.