About the book: 2021 / In the life of Heliogabalus, part of the famous collection Historia Augusta, the biographer of this scandalous emperor, among other things, tells how he made a speech to the corrupt to the women and men of Rome: “He gathered all the harlots from the lists, from the theater, from the baths and from all the city places in which they trade their goods into a brothel and before them, as if before soldiers, he made a speech, calling them military comrades ( "commilitiones"): then he talked with them about various outfits and amusements of all kinds. Then he invited to such a meeting those who sold harlots, also boys and young men who were used for their lust, gathering them from all over the city. He went out to harlots in women's clothing, exposing their private parts, and at the end of the meeting promised them, as if they were soldiers, three gold pieces. He asked them to pray to the gods to grant them others like themselves” (Elius Lampridius. Heliogabalus. 26. 3-5). In January 1408, one of the brightest figures of Florentine humanism, Leonardo Bruni (also called Leonardo Aretinets after his hometown) , sends from Siena to Florence to his friend Niccolo Niccoli, a famous collector of manuscripts, his “Speech of Heliogabalus to the Roman Harlots,” an ironic pastiche based on the testimony of the Historia Augusta, claiming Epicurean pathos (“drawn from the very womb of Epicurus”), which has as its target , among other things, the tireless legislative activity of the Florentines and, at the same time, hurting Plato’s utopia with his mockery.