Roman emperor Elagabalus was an aggressively weird teenager who loved to play elaborate and deeply terrifying practical jokes on his wealthy patrician dinner guests.

A closer look

Roman emperor Elagabalus was an aggressively weird teenager who loved to play elaborate and deeply terrifying practical jokes on his wealthy patrician dinner guests. During one notorious banquet, he rigged the dining room ceiling to drop hundreds of pounds of flower petals onto the attendees, which sounds incredibly romantic until you realize there were so many petals that several guests literally suffocated to death underneath the floral avalanche. He also famously deployed a catapult to launch highly venomous snakes into crowded gladiatorial audiences just for the sheer entertainment value, cementing his legacy as the ancient equivalent of an unhinged prankster YouTuber with unlimited power and zero impulse control!