The World

The Barcas and the Scipios: The Houses of Carthage and Rome

LOVE AMONG THE PTOLEMIES

King Philadelphos planned to bring Cyrene (Libya), ruled for fifty years by Ptolemy I’s stepson King Magas and his wife Apama, under Egyptian rule. He arranged the marriage of their daughter Berenice to his son Euergetes. But Apama, a Seleucid princess, wanted to keep Cyrene as a Seleucid base and, after Magas had died of gluttony, she tried to foil the plan by inviting the son of the Macedonian king, Demetros the Pretty, to marry her daughter instead. Berenice wanted to marry her cousin in Egypt, but she reluctantly married the popinjay Demetros, who was then seduced by her mother.

Berenice solved the problem in family style. Bursting into the maternal boudoir with a posse of killers, she surprised her husband and her mother in bed. Berenice killed her husband, spared her mother and then proceeded triumphantly to Alexandria to marry Euergetes.

Egypt gained Cyrene; and Euergetes and Berenice had six children during their first seven years of marriage, a rare oasis of wholesomeness in this murderous family. The Ptolemies were committed to winning Mediterranean hegemony, which in the east meant competing with their cousins and rivals, the Seleukos family that still ruled from Syria to Iran. Once he was king, Euergetes, energetic and charismatic, saw an opportunity: his sister was married to King Antiochos II, but his sudden death put both of them in danger from his rapacious brothers. Euergetes sailed up to Antioch, the Seleucid capital, rushing into the palace moments too late. His sister and her child had just been murdered, but he managed to secure the Mediterranean seaboard from Thrace to Libya. At his zenith, Euergetes received a request for help from a city state that was his neighbour in Africa: Carthage asked for a loan to fund a war against an Italian city state.

The two seemed evenly matched, but Carthage, capital of a Mediterranean trading empire, would surely win. Its forces were commanded by a young general, Hamilcar Barca, whose family would dominate Carthage for the next fifty years. Hamilcar was already the father of three daughters, but before he left Carthage for the front, his eldest son was born: Hannibal.

AFRICAN LIGHTNING AND HUMAN SACRIFICE: BARCA OF CARTHAGE

The Barcas had their origins in the mother city Tyre (Lebanon): Hamilcar’s family called themselves the ‘Tyrian house of the ancient Barcas’, though Barca also meant Lightning. Established, according to its foundation myth, in 814 BC by Dido, a Phoenician princess driven out of Tyre by her brother Pygmalion, Carthage – Qart-Hadasht (New City) – was a city of temples and palaces with two harbours, all guarded by huge walls, with a population of 700,000 and several million subjects in its Tunisian hinterland.

These Phoenician settlers – they called themselves ‘Canani’, Canaan-ites – initially paid tribute to the rulers of Numidia, a kingdom of Berbers, a name derived from the Greek word barbarian, though they called themselves Mazigh-en. Berbers and Phoenicians initially intermarried. But ultimately the Carthaginians forced the Berbers to pay tribute, hired their superb horsemen – they rode without bit, saddle or stirrups – and enslaved those who resisted.

Carthage had grown into the metropolis of a trading empire: its shekels were the favoured Mediterranean currency. Its shipbuilders and their Greek rivals developed the trireme and larger quinquereme warships – rowed by three and five banks of oars – that dominated the Mediterranean. As sailors they were sophisticated enough to voyage into the Atlantic, sailing down to west Africa where they captured three African women who were flayed, their skins displayed long afterwards in the Temple of Tanit. In Africa, they encountered huge apes that they called ‘gorillas’, a Carthaginian word.

Carthaginians worshipped Baal Hammon and his wife Tanit in temples where, like their Tyrian cousins, they made animal and, in times of crisis, human sacrifices at the special altar, the tophet, where human bones, usually of children, have been discovered. As they challenged, and traded with, their Greek rivals, they syncretized their god Melqart, legendary first king of Tyre, with Hercules, son of Zeus and a human mother, bridging the human and divine. Speaking Phoenician (which had much in common with Hebrew and Arabic), along with Greek and Numidian, they did not eat pork, circumcised their children and dressed in robes and sported earrings. Carthage was a semi-democratic republic controlled by a balance of aristocratic families and a popular assembly of all male citizens.^* Deploying African elephants, Numidian cavalry, Spanish, Celtic, Greek and Italian infantry and fleets of quinqueremes, all officered by aristocrats, the Carthaginians, funded by their productive slave-powered farms and mines and by trading, had expanded into Spain, Malta, Sardinia and Sicily.

On his deathbed, Alexander the Great was planning to destroy Carthage, which then formed an alliance against his successors with a city state, Rome, that was consuming the Italian peninsula. It was an alliance that did not last. The Romans expanded into Sicily, which the Carthaginians regarded as their own. In 264 BC, what started as a minor proxy war escalated into a war between the Italian and African republics.

The Romans possessed plentiful manpower but no fleet; the Carthaginians depended on mercenaries but had the best fleet in the Great Sea. Yet technology never remains a monopoly for long. Copying a captured Carthaginian ship, Rome built its first fleet. Both sides were frequently defeated on land and sea as the action moved from Sicily to Africa and back to Sicily where Hamilcar harassed Roman positions and raided Italy, confident in victory. Then a Roman fleet defeated the Carthaginians at sea. Carthage was astonished.

The unbeaten Hamilcar was ordered to negotiate peace and was obliged to agree to the unthinkable: the loss of Sicily and payment of an indemnity. Resigning his command, Hamilcar sailed home, accusing a rival faction of a stab in the back. His unpaid Celtic mercenaries mutinied and threatened to destroy the city: he took command of a small army, backed by African cavalry under a Numidian prince to whom he married his daughter, and over three years of gruesome warfare (in which the besieged mutineers were forced to cannibalize their slaves) saved Carthage. But Hamilcar, glamorous war hero, aristocratic adventurer, popular favourite, was in danger.

The aristocrats criticized him, but he appealed to the people of Carthage, who were now asserting themselves. While they were fighting for survival, the Romans had broken the treaty by grabbing Sardinia as well. Playing the demagogue before the assembly, Hamilcar proposed a solution – a small expedition to raise cash by looting and conquering Spain, where the Carthaginians had a colony at Cadiz: its silver mines would fund the Roman war. While his ally Handsome Hasdrubal won backing among the elite, Hamilcar won over the people.

In 237, Hamilcar sacrificed a cow’s head to his god Melqart–Hercules and when the entrails were auspicious he turned to his nine-year-old son Hannibal and asked if he would like to join the adventure. The boy eagerly agreed, at which the father made him promise ‘never to show goodwill to the Romans’. Then with a small army, including his Numidian son-in-law with his cavalry and African elephants, he marched around Africa towards the Straits while Handsome, now also his son-in-law, led the fleet along the coast and ferried the Barcas to Cadiz.

Hamilcar conquered most of Spain, securing the silver mines and sending back cash to Carthage. Hannibal was tutored in history and Greek by a Spartan philosopher, but learned war in the field with his father. When Numidian tribes rebelled in Africa, Hamilcar sent Handsome Hasdrubal home to suppress them. But in 228, campaigning near Toledo accompanied by sons Hannibal and Hasdrubal, Hamilcar was betrayed by a tribal ally. As his sons galloped away, their father, at the age of forty-seven, drowned in a river.

The army elected Handsome, Barca’s son-in-law, as commander with Hannibal, now eighteen, as cavalry general. Handsome founded New Carthage (Cartagena) and it was he who had the idea of attacking Rome in Italy itself. But before they could depart, he was assassinated and Hannibal inherited the command. Before long Hannibal had captured a Spanish city allied to Rome; Rome seized Malta, consolidated Sardinia, planned a raid on Africa and sent an army to take Spain. Although Hannibal was attacked in the Council of the Mighty by rivals who believed Carthage was flourishing without a new war, he argued that Rome would never respect Carthage. The people backed House Barca. It was war.

Sending home a Spanish corps to defend Carthage, Hannibal imported 12,600 Berbers and thirty-seven elephants. He sacrificed at the island temple of Melqart–Hercules at Gades, then marched 120,000 men across the Rhône towards the Alps, just as the Roman consul, Publius Cornelius Scipio, was sailing from Pisa to attack Hannibal in Spain.

No family would equal the laurels of the Scipiones in the fight against the Barcas – and no family so represented the martial aristocracy of the Roman Republic that in many ways resembled Carthage.

In 753 BC, sixty-one years after Carthage, Rome was founded – though archaeology proves there were already settlements on the site.^* Ruled initially by kings, by war-band chieftains and then by colonels, probably patrician oligarchs, Rome, like Carthage, developed around 420 BC into a democratic republic, dominated by aristocratic clans of whom the Scipiones were typical.^* Rich and ancient landowners, enthused with the martial spirit of Rome, the Scipiones would provide sixteen of Rome’s ruling consuls, some serving more than once. Starting as one of many Italian city states, surrounded by rivals, the Sabines and Etruscans who had provided some of its early kings, Rome conquered all of its Italian neighbours. But its rise was neither smooth nor inevitable: it was on several occasions threatened by invasions of Gauls who, in 387, actually sacked the city – and in 280, King Pyrrhus of Epirus, cousin of Alexander the Great and aspiring empire-builder, invaded Italy and won a series of costly (Pyrrhic) victories.

The Scipiones personified the machismo, aggression and discipline of Rome, prizing pietas (piety), dignitas (prestige) and, above all, virtus, what we call virtue. The very concept of virtue derived from vir (man), god-fearing virile decency was male: men ruled the familia, the household. Noble fathers organized their daughters’ marriages to other grandees; it was easy for men to divorce and they did so often.^* Women were sub manu – under the hand: they could technically be executed by their fathers and husbands and were expected to display pudicitia, chastity and fidelity, to ensure the bloodline of their children, while running the home and keeping out of politics – though of course they exerted power behind the scenes. Once the childbearing was done, it is clear they enjoyed affairs with other nobles and even sex with slaves – provided they did not flaunt their pleasures. The familia included the family’s slaves, who were expected to be loyal to the dominus (master) and his household even more so than to the state. Domestic slavery, male and female, always involved sexual predations by masters – and mistresses. The killing of slaves by masters was entirely legal. In a slave-owning society, with as many as 40 per cent of the population enslaved, family and slavery were entwined. But slaves were often educated, sometimes revered and loved by their masters. They were frequently freed and freedmen could become citizens, later even potentates.

Rome’s success was, its people believed, owing to the favour of chief god, Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Roman religion was not one of doctrine, improvement or salvation but one of ritual and lifestyle, based on sacrifices to a pantheon to ensure success and prosperity. Only later did Romans believe that Jupiter had offered them ‘empire without limit’. Rome’s growth was marked by monumental building – starting with the gigantic Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline Hill – as well as its Senate-house and later amphitheatres and theatres. Baths came later: austere Scipiones had small baths in their villas, but ‘they smelt of camp, farm and heroism,’ claimed the philosopher Seneca later. With empire came cleanliness.

At the beginning of the century, Lucius Scipio Barbatus (Beardy) helped defeat a coalition of Italian rivals, but more importantly he was the first definitely known consul, a man of a new, free republic who, dying in 280, boasted on his grandiose tomb of victories and virtus. His two sons, both of them consuls, fought the Carthaginians, but Gnaeus was captured and thereafter nicknamed She-Ass.

Now Beardy’s grandsons Publius Cornelius Scipio and his brother Gnaeus arrived in Spain to find they had been outmanoeuvred by Hannibal in a duel between two republics – but also between two families.

SCIPIO, HANNIBAL AND MASINISSA

In spring 218 BC, Hannibal marched his elephants and 46,000 troops over the Alps and into Italy. Most of the elephants perished, but along the way he picked up new allies, the Gauls of southern France. Leaving some troops in Spain commanded by Gnaeus, Publius Cornelius Scipio, the consul, ferried his army back to Italy to meet Hannibal. Accompanied by his twenty-year-old son, another Publius, the future Africanus, he tried to stop Hannibal at Ticinus, where he was severely wounded, and again on the Trebbia River where the other consul was killed in a rout. In spring 217, Hannibal crossed the Apennines, losing an eye to infection, and tore into central Italy.

Chastened, the Romans elected Fabius Maximus Verrucosus (Warty) as dictator on a programme of attrition and harassment rather than pitched battles. But when the Romans mocked the dictator’s courage, calling him Cunctator – Delayer – the consuls massed an army of 80,000 to confront Hannibal. At Cannae, the Carthaginians surrounded and slaughtered as many as 70,000 legionaries at a rate of a hundred a minute. The younger Scipio, now elected tribune, was in the thick of the fighting and helped save the last 10,000 survivors, but it remains the greatest Roman defeat. The aristocratic consul Lucius Aemilius Paullus was killed; afterwards Scipio married the dead consul’s daughter, Aemilia, the very definition of an ideal Roman girl.

Hannibal collected the signet rings of the dead equites or knights and sent his brother Mago to Carthage where he dramatically cast them on to the floor of the Council. But when Maharba, his Berber cavalry commander, urged him to storm Rome, Hannibal refused. ‘You know how to conquer, Hannibal,’ said Maharba, ‘but not how to clinch victory.’ Instead Hannibal sent reasonable peace terms to the Senate, implying that his expedition was to force Rome to acknowledge Carthaginian Spain and probably return Sicily, not to conquer Italy.

Back in Rome, panic beset the city. Four traitors, Gauls and Greeks, were buried alive on the Forum, a human sacrifice to save the republic, which had lost 200,000 men. Its Italian and foreign allies, including Macedonia, defected to Hannibal. Fabius Warty Delayer restored order, purifying the city with religious rituals. When the tribunes of the army discussed abandoning Italy, young Scipio plunged in and drew his sword, making them swear ‘with all the passion in my heart that I will never desert our homeland. If I wilfully break my oath may Jupiter, Greatest and Best, bring me and my familia a shameful death! Swear the same oath!’ They did. The Romans held their nerve.

The two older Scipios had been sent back to Spain where they won victories against Hannibal’s brother Hasdrubal Barca, but now in 211 BC they were both killed. Eager to avenge his father, the younger Scipio, aged twenty-five, requested the command and, since no one else offered themselves, he and his army landed in Spain, where in 209 he defeated Hasdrubal, who was about to leave with reinforcements for Hannibal. Scipio combined dynamic energy with measured diplomacy: as he was notorious as a womanizer, his men hoped to please him by presenting him with a prisoner – the most beautiful woman in Spain – but he returned her to her fiancé, a Spanish chieftain who gratefully joined the Roman side.

Hasdrubal Barca set off with reinforcements for his brother, managing to cross the Alps with another corps of elephants and break into Italy, but on the Metauro River he was killed in a clash with a Roman army commanded by Gaius Claudius Nero, scion of a great patrician clan and ancestor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty of emperors, who had Hasdrubal’s head tossed over the fence into Hannibal’s camp.

Two Barca brothers were left alive: Hannibal had now been in Italy for almost fifteen years; he was undefeated, but Rome was undefeatable. He could not deliver the killer blow. The Romans’ losses were punishing, but they an advantage over the Carthaginians – 500,000 potential soldiers of whom somewhere between 10 and 25 per cent served annually while Hannibal depended on mercenaries, and the bad news kept coming. Scipio defeated Mago and conquered Spain; the Numidians rebelled; and Hannibal’s enemies criticized him in Carthage just as Scipio was persuading the Senate to let him attack Africa. Warty Delayer opposed him, but in 204 Scipio, consul at thirty-one, commanding 35,000 men, landed in Africa.

Scipio persuaded the African prince Masinissa, son of a longstanding Carthaginian ally, to change sides. Masinissa – ‘the best man of all the kings of our time’, a shrewd and resourceful Numidian cavalryman who fathered forty-four children – could now counter Hannibal’s cavalry. When his siege of Utica was broken by the Carthaginians, Scipio ambushed their camp, slaughtering 40,000 of their troops, a fiasco from which the city never recovered. Scipio recognized Masinissa as the Berber ruler, setting up his kingdom of Numidia as a Roman ally. Hannibal was recalled, at the age of forty-six: it was twenty-five years since he had last been in Carthage; Mago perished on the journey home. Now in Africa, Hannibal and Scipio faced one another in person. Hannibal mustered 40,000 men and eighty elephants, Scipio had fewer men but more cavalry thanks to King Masinissa.

On 19 October 202, at Zama, Scipio narrowly defeated Hannibal, whose elephants went berserk and charged into the soldiers on their own side. The war had cost the Scipios and Barcas many lives. Hannibal remained in Carthage, where he was elected suffete, organizing the payment of an indemnity and backing democratic reforms, having the Council elected for a year instead of being inducted for life. Masinissa, whose agricultural ingenuity later made his kingdom an essential source of grain for Rome, founded a dynasty that ruled for two centuries.

Now possessing unrivalled auctoritas – sacred authority – Scipio was awarded a triumph,^* then offered the consulship for life and dictatorship; but, criticized for his luxury and grandeur, he accepted only the victory agnomen Africanus.^* He then retired.

Anxious lest Carthage recover under Hannibal’s rule, Rome sent envoys to arrest or extradite him. Hannibal fled eastwards to the court of Antiochos III, scion of Seleukos, who was performing astonishing military feats in the east.

DEMETRIOS, KING OF THE INDIANS

Antiochos the Great, tense, lean, frenetic, was as ambitious as the founder of his house, conquering much of Türkiye, Iraq and Iran, even campaigning into Arabia and India. In Bactria, his satrap Euthydemos had declared independence and held out in Balkh. Unable to defeat him, Antiochos married his daughter to the satrap’s dashing sixteen-year-old son, Demetrios. One of the most extraordinary figures of his time, Demetrios, who succeeded his father as Greek king of Bactria, then invaded India in 186 BC, where the kingdom of Ashoka had collapsed. Launching two centuries of hybrid Greek–Indian rule (longer than the British Raj lasted), Demetrios – known to the Indians as Dharmamita and to the Greeks as Aniketos (Invincible) – ruled from Taxila (Pakistan). This Yavana (Graeco-Indian) king fused Indian and Greek pantheons: on his coins, he wears elephant tusks and python crowns, linking Hercules, Buddha and possibly the Brahminist goddess Lakshmi.^*

Antiochos the Great accepted a division of elephants from Demetrios and rode westwards, where he seized Greece. But he accepted Hannibal as an adviser – which made him an enemy of Rome: the Romans were keen to settle scores, realizing they had to control Greece, a natural staging post against them. They sent in the Scipios, Africanus and his brother Lucius, who defeated Hannibal at sea and then Antiochos himself on land. Lucius thereby won the agnomen Asiaticus, but both Scipios were accused of accepting bribes from Antiochos and letting Hannibal escape. Africanus smashed the incriminating tablets and advocated mercy for Hannibal, but the Romans were determined to hunt him down. Surrounded, the paladin took poison, dying in the same year as Scipio. The latter, embittered by Roman ingratitude, ordered his own burial at his villa at Liternum, not Rome, with the epitaph: ‘Ungrateful fatherland, you shan’t even have my bones.’ Scipio Africanus too may have been poisoned.

Chastened by his Roman defeat, Antiochos gave up on Europe, promised to relinquish his elephant army and his fleet and send his younger son as a hostage to Rome, but he kept Iran and Iraq and seized all of Syria and Judaea, treating the Jews well and granting them semi-independence and freedom of worship in their Jerusalem Temple. It looked as if House Seleukos would destroy their cousins the Ptolemies, take Egypt and reassemble Alexander’s conquests. Meanwhile in China, Qin had created a vast new empire.

Yet there were signs that all was not well: the First Emperor sailed up and down the coast, shooting whales with a giant crossbow while seeking the Island of Immortality.

ROTTING FISH OF QING: THE RISE OF LITTLE RASCAL

The emperor, forty-nine years old, was travelling with Prince Huhai, aged twenty-one, his eighteenth and favourite son, when he died, possibly poisoned by his own mercury-infused immortality elixirs. His chancellor, the seventy-year-old Councillor, concealed the death: the dead emperor was served meals while his eunuchs pretended to transmit reports to ‘the slumbering chariot’, but the body soon stank so pungently that the Councillor procured a cart of rotten fish to mask the royal putrefaction. The Councillor and the young prince’s eunuch chamberlain Zhao Gao decided to give the throne to Huhai, which meant they would remain in control.

When he reached the capital Xianyang, the Second Emperor was enthroned while his father was buried in his mausoleum with a human sacrifice in which ninety-nine concubines who had not delivered sons were buried with him. Their young female skeletons have been found, revealing violent deaths – and one girl still wearing her pearls. As the workmen who had created the complex were killed and thrown into a mass grave, royal princes were dismembered in the main square.

The rebellions started. In August 209 BC, in Henan, two hired labourers were in charge of delivering a chain gang of 900 convicts, but a rainstorm delayed their arrival. Knowing that in Qin lateness was punished by death, as was escape, they decided that ‘flight means death, plotting means death’ so ‘death for establishing a state is preferable’. After all, said one, ‘Are kings and nobles given their high status by birth?’ At the same time, a local sheriff named Liu Bang, the peasant from central China who had once seen the First Emperor in person, was leading another chain gang to Mount Li to work on the First Emperor’s tomb. A few prisoners escaped, which meant that Liu and his charges would be executed, so he liberated them all. More men joined his band when he killed the local magistrate.

As a boy in his village, Liu had been nicknamed Little Rascal by his father for his mischievous laziness, yet he was also genial, cheerful and loyal. A late starter, serving as companion to a local lord and enrolling as a village policeman, he rose slowly, impressing those he met including a local gentleman who was so taken with his physiognomy, which he took to indicate a glorious future, that he married him to his daughter Lu Zhi. Now forty-seven, he joined a multifaceted civil war in which warlords set up their own kingdoms.

The Second Emperor floundered: in August 208, his eunuch, Zhao Gao, framed the Councillor, who was sentenced to the gruesome Five Punishments, a horror probably developed by the First Emperor that would endure for centuries: the victim was tattooed on the face, then the nose was cut off, the limbs dislocated then amputated, the genitals sliced off and the body cut in half at the waist.^* Zhao Gao staged a rebel attack on the palace, manipulating the Second Emperor into committing suicide, then appointing a biddable prince as king. But it was too late.

In July 207, Liu Bang – Little Rascal – attacked the capital, captured the last of the Qin and, to secure the loyalty of recently conquered populations, announced a reduction in the dynasty’s punishments. After five years fighting rival warlords, in February 202 Liu Bang routed his rivals and accepted the title Huang-di, emperor, known posthumously as Gaozu – High Progenitor – of his new Han dynasty. Emperor Gao divided the empire into kingdoms which he granted to members of his own family and, not far from the ruined Xianyang, he built a new capital Chang’an. While he took many concubines, his partner was still his original wife Lu, mother of a son and daughter, but he worried that the son was ‘too weak’. Instead he favoured a younger concubine Qi and her son Liu Ruyi, whom he promised to promote. This unleashed a vicious rivalry between the two mothers that would be a feature of many Chinese courts.

Gaodi, born a peasant, was a rough, unpretentious, hard-drinking soldier. Once, the emperor stopped by at his peasant homestead where, playing a zither, he sang about his unlikely rise:

Now my power rules all Within the Seas,

I’ve returned to my old village.

Where else would I find braves

To guard the four corners of my land?

Within the Seas was the description that the Han gave to China itself; the challenge was guarding its Four Corners, particularly from the horsemen of the north who formed a confederation that preyed on Chinese cities, and at times in future centuries would conquer the whole of China. These Xiongnu were led by Modun, who as shanyu – king – had united these horse-riding tribes into a federation that, reacting against Chinese expansion, extended across Manchuria, eastern Siberia and central Asia: the first of the three great steppe empires. In 200, the emperor attacked Modun, but the shanyu soon surrounded him. Desperate to escape, Emperor Gao recognized Modun, paid him tribute and gave him a Han princess as wife, the start of heqin – Harmonious Kinship – in which Chinese princesses were married to these rather sophisticated barbarians, who were also bribed with thousands of bales of silk. Modun got both.

Liu never stopped fighting. At a minor siege, he was hit by an arrow, dying slowly from the wound in the company of his old henchmen, reminiscing about their astonishing rise. His soft-hearted eldest son succeeded to the throne. But he was controlled by the Dowager Empress Lu, who was as terrifying as she was competent.

MONSTRESS: MEET THE HUMAN SWINE

Emperor Hui, upon his accession, was just fifteen years of age, and naturally his mother made all the policy decisions, including the decision to marry him to his cousin, but they were childless. When he fathered two sons by a concubine, Lady Qi, Empress Lu had the imperial couple adopt them as their own and plotted to have the real mother killed.

Determined to torpedo the ambitions of Lady Qi, she first tried to entrap the emperor’s son Liu Ruyi, prince of Zhao, who was only twelve. The emperor repeatedly intervened to keep the boy out of his mother’s clutches, but when he was away hunting she poisoned him. With the son gone, the mother was exposed. The empress seized Lady Qi: her hands and legs were cut off, her eyes were gouged out and then, paralysed with poison, she was thrown into a cesspit to die. There she was shown to the emperor and others with the words: ‘Meet the human swine.’ The emperor hardly dared contradict his mother, leaving the politics to her. She was good at it, keeping many of her husband’s henchmen in position while crushing dissent. The inner court of palace women, eunuchs and affines was often portrayed by the bureaucrats who compiled the histories as decadent and rotten. Yet often, throughout this history, these trusted relationships formed the emperor’s essential base against the bureaucracy of the outer court. In China, as in most other monarchies, family and gender – so often presented in terms of vicious sex-mad women and weak-willed men – were forces in the eternal competition for power and legitimacy.

By the time Empress Lu finally died in 180 BC, her own family were planning to supplant the Han, but the old ministers had other ideas, massacring the entire Lu family and enthroning the Progenitor’s son, Wen, who consolidated the dynasty that would rule east Asia, almost in parallel with Rome.

Yet between Rome and China, another power, Antiochos the Great, descendant of Alexander’s general Seleukos, still dominated west Asia.

MIHRDAD AND JUDAH: JEWISH HAMMER; PARTHIAN SHOT

Yet the power of Antiochos the Great depended on his own peripatetic energy: in 187 BC he was killed raiding a temple in Iran. His son, Antiochos IV Epiphanes, even more manic and frantic that his father, had spent his youth in Rome. Inspired by Rome’s semi-democracy, the flashy king liked to greet and chat with his subjects on walkabouts and hold spectacular parties into which he was carried dressed as a mummy before bursting out of his bandages to the applause of the crowds. But he also thought he was a god manifest – a bad combination. Keen to complete his father’s dream of an empire from India to Libya, he invaded Egypt. But Rome now protected the Ptolemies. A Roman envoy intercepted him and drew a ‘line in the sand’ at his feet: if he advanced one step further, Rome would intervene. Antiochos retreated to Judaea. There the Jews, connected to Egypt where members of the priestly family served as generals, conspired against him. Antiochos slaughtered Jews, banned their faith and founded a shrine to himself in their Temple in sacred Jerusalem, sparking a rebellion by Judah the Maccabee (the Hammer) that ultimately led to the creation of a new Jewish kingdom.^* Antiochos’ Iranian provinces were also under attack. Galloping east to save them, he was unlucky enough to confront a warlord named Mihrdad who would create an empire powerful enough to hold Rome at bay for four centuries.

Mihrdad was the great-nephew of Arsak, probably an Afghan chieftain who fled to Parthia (Turkmenistan), becoming sacred ruler of a semi-nomadic tribe of horsemen who worshipped the Zoroastrian pantheon but were influenced by their Hellenic neighbours. Their power derived from their combination of armoured and light cavalry, who could fire their crossbows from the saddle: what the Romans called ‘the Parthian shot’. In 164, Antiochos arrived to defend Iran, but Mihrdad killed the last great Seleucid king and then took Persia and Babylon, where he was crowned king of kings, parading statues of Marduk and Ishtar, before moving to Seleucia where he and his successors built a new capital, Ctesiphon, fusing Greek and Persian kingship. Mihrdad’s heirs were prone to succession bloodbaths, but their cavalry was formidable, their treasure bountiful, thanks to a tax on the silk, perfumes and spices traded between China and the Mediterranean now dominated by Rome.

AFRICANUS THE YOUNGER AND THE KING OF NUMIDIA: THE DEATH OF GREAT CITIES

When Carthage recovered from its defeats, the Romans turned to the Scipios to destroy the great city once and for all. After Greece and Hispania – as the Romans called Spain – had been conquered, the ambitious generals and legions of the Carthaginian wars had to be used: new victories meant new loot, new temples, new slaves for Rome. Carthage was no longer a threat, but when a curmudgeonly ex-consul, Cato, visited, he was horrified to see that it was flourishing. In the Senate, he brandished a fresh Carthaginian fig to demonstrate that the city was just a short voyage away. ‘Carthage,’ he declared, ‘must be destroyed.’ It was the only time in history that a fruit served as a casus belli.

It was Rome’s African ally King Masinissa who provoked the Carthaginians into breaking their treaty. That meant war, and the Romans turned to a young Scipio, rich, cultivated, grand, a superb orator and patron of a circle of Greek intellectuals, a man who prided himself on exercising both a mind admired for wit and a body for its buffness. In 149 BC, the twenty-six-year-old Scipio Aemilianus^* led the Roman army to Africa, accompanied by his old Greek tutor Polybius, who was fascinated by expanding Roman power and the new connections between east and west. Elected consul, still only twenty-eight, Scipio, aided by Masinissa, defeated the Carthaginians and then cut off the city from the sea. After Roman prisoners had been skinned and dismembered on the walls, he stormed the city. Carthaginians burned themselves to death in their temples. The Romans slaughtered thousands, the troops flinging bodies off buildings which they set on fire – a dystopia confirmed by archaeology. As they watched, Polybius wept. ‘All cities, nations and powers,’ he said, ‘must like men meet their doom.’ The fall of a great city has a special poignancy. It is like the death of a piece of ourselves.

‘This is glorious,’ agreed Scipio, ‘but I have a foreboding that one day the same doom will be pronounced upon my own country.’ He razed the city, selling 80,000 of its citizens into slavery and returned as Rome’s reigning hero. Polybius, going home to Greece to write a world history, saw the opening of a new act – the age of symploki or interconnectedness: ‘In earliest times, history was a series of unrelated episodes but from now on history becomes an organic whole,’ he wrote. ‘Europe and Africa with Asia, and Asia with Africa and Europe.’ And the greatest Afro-eurasian continental powers would be built by two families.

* The assembly annually elected two suffetes – leaders who ruled in peace – and a commander-in-chief or a committee of generals, and a Council of 104 to judge and punish them. Generals were given political autonomy, but if they failed they were crucified. The suffetes were members of the Council of the Mighty – the Adirim, 300 grandees – who had special influence. When suffetes and generals and even the Mighty could not decide, the People were consulted.

* The myth of Rome’s foundation revolved around two brothers abandoned in infancy and raised by a she-wolf, an image of nurture and ferocity that Rome adopted as its symbol. One brother, Romulus, had killed the other, Remus, in a feud over the borders of the city and became the first king of his eponymous city – a timeless homily on the tragedy of family power.

* All Rome’s major offices, consuls, praetors, tribunes, were elected: office holders were elected by various assemblies of citizens, either the Centuriate, Tribal or Plebian assemblies, often meeting at the Comitum of the Forum. By the time much of Italy had been conquered, the electorate contained as many as 900,000 voters, but many fewer – 30-50,000 – actually voted; bribery was rife; factional violence endemic. These citizens – the males, not women and not slaves – elected two consuls annually who served as political and military leaders. Consuls were virtually always patricians (noblemen), while its Senate, filled with 600 patricians (resembling the Carthaginian Council of the Mighty), instructed the consuls and in times of crisis appointed dictators to rule for short periods. These patricians wore the national dress, the toga, a white garment with a purple border for office holders (hence the word candidate, from candidatus, meaning a man who wore the white toga of election campaigns). There was a growing tension between the patrician oligarchs and the people, the plebeians, whose elected tribunes could intervene and veto laws.

* In order to divorce his wife a man just said, ‘Take your things for yourself.’ Noble marriage was often political, but not always. There were cases where happily married couples were forced to divorce and make political marriages. Babies were born at home, and many women died in childbirth. Where Caesarean section was undertaken, the mother always died, even if (as with Scipio) the baby was saved. Imperfect babies were rejected and exposed. Most noble women had their babies breastfed by enslaved wetnurses. In the aristocracy, both girls and boys were educated, but the status of girls was shown by the fact that they were often given the family name – Cornelia in the case of Scipiones – with a number. A relationship between a man and a woman without marriage was called concubinatus. Concubine came to mean a non-married woman, a junior wife or, more often, an enslaved girl in the harem of a potentate.

* A triumph was the victory parade in which, after waiting outside the boundaries of Rome with his army, the triumphator, his face painted with red lead to resemble Jupiter and accompanied by a slave whispering ‘Memento mori’ (Remember you’re mortal), led his troops (singing bawdy songs about their general), wagons of booty and manacled prisoners on a procession through a celebratory Rome, culminating in sacrifices and then, in an underground dungeon, the strangling of VIP prisoners.

* Only the grandest Roman families like the Scipios had tri nomina: Publius the first name or praenomen, Cornelius the clan nomen and Scipio the cognomen. Most Romans just had two names; slaves had one. An agnomen was a nickname, often humorous, or a senatorial reward. The agnomen Africanus was awarded by the Senate as a victory name that became hereditary.

* One of Demetrios’ successors, Menander (Milinda), ruled north-west India and Pakistan, presenting himself as a Greek basileos and Indian maharaja: ‘learned, eloquent, wise and able’, he followed Buddha, who was not yet presented in statues, but these Greek monarchs may have influenced his presentation as a human. When Menander died, his widow Agathokleia became queen in her own right – a first for the Hellenistic and Indian worlds.

* Zhao Gao, now chancellor, tricked the emperor by forcing a loyalty test on courtiers: he presented a deer but insisted it be called a horse. ‘Is the chancellor perhaps mistaken calling a deer a horse?’ asked the emperor, but his courtiers backed the eunuch. It is a story that every leader should bear in mind – and the first historical case of gaslighting.

* This is the story told today in the Jewish festival of Hanukkah. The Maccabean kings ruled Judaea – encompassing most of today’s Israel, Jordan and Lebanon – for over a century.

* A statue known as The Greek Prince shows a ripped Roman patrician who may well be this Scipio. Roman intermarriage between patrician clans was complex, made worse by adoption that meant a grandee would adopt someone else’s son as his own, complicating already tangled relationships. Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Aemilianus had been adopted by Africanus’ son because his own father Lucius Aemelianus Paullus, conqueror of Macedonia, had so many other sons. While in Greece, his father encountered the future historian Polybius, who, forced to live in Rome as a hostage, became the boy’s tutor. The great Africanus had married his teenaged daughter Cornelia Africana, famed for her virtue and intelligence, to an elder senator Gracchus: their daughter Sempronia, a paragon of Roman pudicitia, was married to Scipio Aemilianus.