The World

The Han and the Caesars

KING FATSO, HIS SON AND THE CLEOPATRAS

As if to demonstrate this new interconnectedness, Rome now turned to Egypt, Mediterranean breadbasket and gateway to Asia. After destroying Carthage and fighting in Hispania, Scipio Aemilianus – loathed by the popular faction in Rome for his aristocratic grandeur – was dispatched to talk sense to the most atrocious of Egyptian pharaohs, depraved even by the standards of the degenerate Ptolemies.

Fatso (Physcon) – as Ptolemy VIII was called by the Alexandrians – was effete, obese and sadistic, thriving in a period of mob violence and factional intrigue. Marrying his sister Cleopatra II and fathering a son Memphites, Fatso then fell in love with her daughter, child of his sister-wife and late brother – his niece and stepdaughter Cleopatra III – and married her too, further poisoning the family since the mother and daughter became jealous rivals. Cleopatra II was shocked at the betrayal by husband and daughter, sparking a loathing that led to a revolution. Fatso and his younger wife fled to Cyprus, while Cleopatra II ruled Egypt as sole queen. But Fatso had not given up. Realizing that their son Memphites might replace him, he kidnapped the fourteen-year-old, who trusted his father. Then Fatso had him strangled in front of him before cutting off his head, legs and hands, which he then sent to the boy’s mother, his sister-wife, the night before her birthday. Heartbroken, she displayed the body parts to Alexandrians. Fatso then outplayed her and invaded, taking a terrible vengeance on his enemies, who were burned alive. Rome cared little about Ptolemaic atrocities and much about Roman influence and trade: Fatso, who had visited Rome, carefully cultivated the Scipio family, even proposing to marry a Scipio daughter. Around 139 BC, Scipio was sent to Alexandria to overawe the egregious Fatso, now so fat he could scarcely walk. The Alexandrians watched the royal blancmange bulging out of his silken gowns, moistly panting to keep up with the craggy Roman. ‘The Alexandrians owe me one thing,’ joked Scipio. ‘They’ve actually seen their king walk.’

Family politics bolstered the rule of women. Cleopatra II survived the murder of her son. After Fatso’s death in 116, she and her daughter Cleopatra III ruled with a son who adored houmous, nicknamed King Chickpeas by Alexandrians. When a king is named after his favourite dish, a dynasty is in trouble.

Yet Scipio – and his historian Polybius – would have appreciated Fatso’s only positive achievement: his sailors discovered the Indian monsoon, which meant they could sail to Parthia or India in summer and return in winter. In 118, he sent the sailor Eudoxos of Cyzicus directly to India.

HARMONIOUS KINSHIP, BLOOD -SPATTERED MARRIAGE: A PRINCESS WITH THE NOMADS

The Chinese were probing from the opposite direction. In Chang’an, a remarkable young Han emperor would rule for fifty-four years and establish a short-lived empire that extended from Korea in the east to Uzbekistan in the west. Emperor Wu was initially curious, cultivated and bold, sending an ambassador westwards to contact other great powers – the start of China’s western path.

Wudi was made by women and almost destroyed by women: in 141 BC, aged fifteen, he was placed on the throne by his aunt and mother-in-law, Princess Guantao, and immediately started to restore imperial power. Yet his grandmother, Empress Dowager Dou, who held the Tiger Tally^* essential for giving orders to the military, crushed his proposals. Using his failure to produce an heir with his empress Chen, she planned his removal. Wudi pretended to devote himself to partying, showing no interest in politics as he secretly gathered a brains trust of henchmen. When the chance arose to expand southwards, he dared to bypass his grandmother’s Tiger Tally and annexed parts of today’s south China, seizing Minyue (Fujian). At home he fathered a child with a favourite concubine. Both moves outmanoeuvred his grandmother, who died soon afterwards. Wudi promoted promising candidates for office if they could draft documents in his favoured antique rhetorical style, but while a few Confucian scholars tutored imperial princes, he did not develop a coherent set of Confucian doctrines. He did have an artistic and intellectual streak himself,^* enlarging the old Qin emperors’ Music Bureau which handled court spectaculars and cultural matters. But at heart he was an empire builder. Enriched by tax revenues, he launched offensives on all fronts. To build an alliance against the Xiongnu, Wudi, using Harmonious Kinship, sent a princess, Jieyou, impoverished granddaughter of a fallen prince, to marry the chieftain of the Wusun tribe (in today’s Xinjiang).

Accompanied by a lady-in-waiting Feng Liao, Jieyou married three times: first she wed the chieftain, then when he died his brother and heir, whom she loved and with whom she had five children, and then finally his nephew too. In the process, this remarkable woman sent Feng Liao to negotiate alliances and appeal to the court in Chang’an with such success that she briefed the emperor and was appointed an ambassador.^*

Simultaneously, Wudi dispatched an intrepid soldier-courtier on a trading mission to the west. In ten years of adventure, Zhang Qian was captured, enslaved, imprisoned, escaped, married, enslaved again and finally in 122 BC returned to report to the emperor. He described the Parthians and the Indo-Greeks, spoke of his discovery of a Sichuan berry sauce already on sale in the area we now call northern India and recommended a breed of horses in Fergana (Uzbekistan), known for ‘bloodsweating’ – most likely because they were victims of parasites that caused them to bleed. Wudi was impressed – he wanted those ‘heavenly horses’ and these reports encouraged trade with Parthia. Persian luxuries now appear in Chinese tombs, and, starting in 110, Parthia sent delegations to Chang’an.

As China encountered Parthia, so did Rome: while the Han were perfecting dynastic monarchy, the Romans spent the next fifty years in civil wars, out of which their own monarchy emerged. The first one-man ruler of Rome since the kings, Lucius Cornelius Sulla was the precursor of Caesar – and the first to take Rome into Asia.

THE KING WHO COULDN’T BE POISONED, THE MONORCHISTIC DICTATOR AND THE TEENAGED BUTCHER

Sulla was a new type of Roman. He spent his youth partying with actors and courtesans, a patrician so poor he lived in an apartment in a city block, not a villa. Athletic, blue-eyed, with bright red-blond hair and freckled skin, Sulla was both breezy and terrifying: rumoured to have one testicle, he cheerfully let his soldiers sing songs about his monorchistic anatomy yet punished any indiscipline with instant crucifixion. His motto was ‘No better friend, no worse enemy’.

Sulla, leader of the optimates – the ‘Best’ elite – rose in the shadow of Gaius Marius, an older leader of the populares people’s faction. In 107, when Marius fought Jugurtha of Numidia, Masinissa’s grandson, Sulla, serving as his deputy, captured the Berber king and made his name. In 102, Marius saved Rome from the greatest threat since Hannibal: the Germanic-Celtic tribes of the Cimbri and Teutons, starting in Denmark and migrating southwards, had routed a Roman army – a crisis so grave that the Romans conducted their last human sacrifices to appease the gods. Marius destroyed their invaders. Together Marius and Sulla then crushed the revolt of the Socii, the allied Italian cities in the so-called Social War. In 96 BC, Sulla was dispatched eastwards to rule as governor of Rome’s first Asian province, Cilicia, where he observed the meteoric rise of a talented, indefatigable monarch, Mithridates, king of Pontus, descended from Darius and Seleukos, who was conquering an empire that encompassed much of Asia Minor and the Black Sea. Said to be able to speak all the twenty-five languages of his subjects, Mithridates had hardened himself by living in the wild and made himself immune to poison by daily imbibing small doses, created by his Scythian hierophants. In 88, the Poison King orchestrated a massacre of Romans in Asia, before moving into Greece.

Sulla exploited a growing unease that Marius, who served as consul seven times, was too powerful. Their rivalry undermined the republic. In 88 BC, when the Senate planned Mithridates’ expulsion from Greece, Sulla won the command but Marius tried to procure it for himself. Outrageously breaking republican norms, Sulla marched his legion into Rome and outlawed Marius.^* Then he departed for Greece, where he expelled the Poison King.

In his absence, Marius seized back power, promoting a young man – his nephew, Gaius Julius Caesar. He was one of the patrician Julians who claimed descent from Aeneas and Venus, but his father, a governor of Asia, had died young. This cold, lithe, irrepressible life force with his avian, balding head, depilated body and dandyish style was close to his shrewd mother Aurelia. He was not rich and he suffered fits, possibly epilepsy, but did not let anything hold him back: Marius helped nominate him as a priest of Jupiter. But in 82 BC, after Marius’ death, Sulla returned, marched on Rome, routed his opponents and was elected dictator (the first since Hannibal’s invasion) – awarded the agnomen Felix (Lucky). He issued a proscriptio, a notice of condemnation that became a euphemism for a kill list. He was vindictive. ‘No friend ever served me, and no enemy ever wronged me, whom I have not fully repaid’ were the words Sulla had engraved on his tomb.

Caesar was the one of three young meteors particularly affected by Sulla’s bloody rise. Gnaeus Pompey, son of a rich potentate, raised his own legion and backed Sulla, murdering his enemies so efficiently he was nicknamed Adulescentulus Carnifex – Teenaged Butcher. Marcus Crassus – for whom the word crass should have been invented – was a homicidal speculator who added landowners to the death lists then grabbed their properties, making him very rich. As a Marian, Caesar was vulnerable. Sulla ordered Caesar, just eighteen, to divorce his wife Cornelia, daughter of a political enemy, but Caesar dared refuse: he was sacked as priest, his money confiscated, and added to the kill list. Only his mother Aurelia saved him by appealing to Sulla. Caesar fled to Asia where, serving with the Roman governor, he flirted with the king of Bithynia, a subordinate liaison he never lived down.^*

In 79, once his enemies were dead, Sulla, singular in so many things, retired from his dictatorship and returned to his earlier life of debauchery: he had shown what could be done in Rome. ‘If Sulla did it,’ reflected Pompey, ‘why not me?’ Caesar would emulate the dictator while noting that ‘Sulla was a political illiterate to resign the dictatorship.’

As Sulla was killing his enemies in Rome, Emperor Wu was losing control of himself and his family in Chang’an.

THE CASTRATED HISTORIAN AND EMPEROR WU

Wudi enjoyed a spree of successes: in 112 BC, he took Guandong in the south and more of Vietnam; in 109, he invaded Korea; in 108, he attacked the Xiongnu, then seized much of Xanjiang and expanded through Kazakhstan to Fergana in Uzbekistan; in 104, he demanded the special horses of Dayan (Kokand), sending his general Li Gungli to fight the War of the Heavenly Horses, thus securing 3,000 of these blood-sweating steeds.

Yet at court things were turning sour. When Wudi’s sister introduced him to a lowly born singer-dancer, Wei, he fell for her and their sons provided the essential heirs. But Empress Chen’s attempt to curse Wei with witchcraft was denounced and exposed, and she was destroyed. The new empress Wei Zifu brought him luck – for a while.

Capricious and increasingly murderous, Wudi became ever more improvident. He built vast new palaces, embarked on expensive tours, executing grandees who failed to feed his vast entourage, and staged elaborate sacrifice rituals on the sacred Mount Tai to confirm the Mandate of Heaven.^* Empress Wei came to be overshadowed by his beloved Consort Li, whose brother won laurels in central Asia, winning fame as the Flying General. But the Xiongnu hit back, defeating a Han army. In 99, when the Flying General’s grandson Li Leng defected to the nomads, his friend the court historian Sima Qian went to intercede with the emperor – with atrocious consequences.

Wudi believed that history was as important as war: it legitimized the dynasty. But it had to be the right history. Wudi commissioned his grand scribe – part historian, part astrologer – Sima Tian to write the first full Chinese history, known today as the Shiji, Records of the Grand Historian. When Sima Tian died in 110, he passed his quill to his thirty-five-year-old son Sima Qian, who recalled him ‘grasping my hands with tearful eyes’ and saying, ‘Don’t forget what I intended to write down.’

Sima Qian, an attendant of the emperor, who had served in the army against the Xiongnu, set to work. Scribes like Sima used a writing brush, ink slab, knife and seal to write on narrow wooden strips, silk being used only for important documents. Like Polybius, his contemporary in Rome, he believed in world history ‘to examine all that concerns heaven and man, to penetrate the changes of past and present’. But the history of the past is always about the present: when he criticized ‘expedient’ royal advisers and denounced the First Emperor’s cruelties, he offended his own paranoid emperor.

In 99 BC, Sima Qian interceded with the emperor for Li Leng – ‘to widen His Majesty’s view’ – at which the emperor accused him of Grand Insult and sentenced him to death by suicide, a sentence that could be commuted on payment of a fine or castration. Sima did not have the money and refused to kill himself, so he was forced to choose ‘the punishment of rottenness’. He dreamed of his book being read in ‘villages and great cities’ but ‘since I regretted that I had not finished [the book], I submitted to the extreme penalty without bitterness’ – the shame of castration, performed in the silkworm chamber, where mutilated men were kept like silkworms in a warm, airless room, believed to help prevent infection. He survived, was promoted to court archivist/astrologer and palace secretary and finished his classic history. But his involvement in intrigues was not quite over.

In 96 BC, after a dream about an assassin and killer puppets, Wudi was convinced by his chief of security that his illnesses were the treasonous work of black magic. In a spiralling vortex of denunciations and witch-hunting, he ordered foreign shamans to excavate the palaces to find magical dolls and unleashed witchcraft trials against his own ministers, executing no less than six of his chancellors, butchering entire clans, tens of thousands of innocent people. Even Wudi’s own daughters were sucked into the vortex and executed. Killing sons was sometimes necessary for monarchs – but not daughters.

Wudi’s eldest son Ju with Empress Wei was the heir apparent, but at sixty-two the emperor fathered a son with a younger concubine, Lady Gouyi. Wudi’s security chief framed Prince Ju for witchcraft and for wishing his father dead – probably no more than the truth since the emperor had been on the throne for so long. As tension rose, Ju – realizing he was being framed – forged an order from Wudi and killed the security chief, before rushing to explain himself to his father. So, backed by his mother the empress, he tried to seize power.

After five days of fighting in the streets of Chang’an, the emperor restored order, Empress Wei committed suicide, her clan was eliminated and Ju hanged himself. All the emperor’s sons – and anyone who had shown any hesitation in backing him – were killed except the baby. Yet the witch-frenzy changed China forever, liquidating the old clans and creating a vacuum that was filled by officials of obscure birth.

Finally, the emperor realized that his henchmen had framed his son. Grieving and blaming himself, he issued his public Repenting Edict of Luntai, but now punished the family of his Consort Li who had managed to destroy most of the Wei family. The Li were killed to the ninth degree.

The only heir left alive was the boy, now aged nine, born to Lady Gouyi. In 88 BC, the emperor appointed him as his heir but, fearing the mother would become too powerful after his death, he summoned the young woman and ordered her arrest: she kowtowed in amazement, at which he ordered, ‘Out, quickly! You can’t be saved!’ He had her killed.

When Wudi died in 87, buried, no doubt in a jade suit, in the Maoling tomb, his concubines may have been sacrificed, though this might be an echo of the First Emperor. Among the beautiful artefacts buried with him was the Golden Horse, a two-foot-high statue of the one of Wudi’s ‘heavenly horses’. Even more than the First Emperor, Wudi was the creator of Chinese empire: he had doubled its size, yet his killings, witch-hunts and extravagance had unleashed court feuds and ‘100 peasant revolts’.

In 73, the slaves of Rome rebelled – and the city’s potentates, Pompey and Crassus, competed to crush them.

BALD FORNICATOR AND EGYPTIAN QUEEN: CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA

It started in the gladiator school at Capua where seventy gladiators – all of whom were slaves – escaped and elected a Thracian, Spartacus, as leader. Establishing his headquarters near Mount Etna, he repeatedly defeated Roman units, assisted by his partner, a Dionysian priestess. Rome was run on slave labour, boosted by captives from its wars, and Romans were terrified of revolt: 40 per cent of its Italian population were enslaved, and this was the third slave revolt in forty years. Spartacus’ rebels, recruited from the rural slaves who laboured in mines and plantations, could not decide whether to escape across the Alps or go looting in Italy, but they had no programme to liberate all slaves. Within a year, 40,000 ex-slaves and their families had joined Spartacus, who had seized a swathe of southern Italy before marching north. Since Pompey was conquering Hispania, and other legions were confronting the Poison King in Asia, Rome was vulnerable. The property speculator Crassus raised forces and defeated the slaves, crucifying 6,000; Pompey mopped up. Both claimed credit.

In 67 BC, Pompey was sent east to crush the resurgent Mithridates of Pontus. First, he defeated the Poison King, whom he pursued into the Caucasus where Mithridates committed suicide, then he annexed much of Asia Minor and Syria. He deposed the Seleucids, and brought under Roman sway the kingdoms of Arab Nabataea and Jewish Judaea. When a Judaean prince of the Maccabean family defied him, he stormed Jerusalem, violating the Temple by entering the Holy of Holies, and left a rump Judaea under Jewish rule. The Egyptian king Piper (Ptolemy XII Auletes) courted Pompey, winning his support with eyewatering bribes. It is possible that Pompey met Piper’s six-year-old daughter, Cleopatra, who would later be adept at negotiating with Roman potentates. Suddenly Rome was a tricontinental empire: only in Parthia had Pompey met his match. Pompey invaded Georgia and Armenia, but Farhad II of Parthia seized back Armenia. Pompey and Farhad negotiated as equals.

Back in Rome, democracy was being destroyed by fights for the prizes of its growing empire. A conspiracy to overthrow it in a bloody massacre was only defeated thanks to the eloquence of consul, brilliant orator and sublime writer Marcus Tullius Cicero. Arriving home in Rome, flaunting Alexander the Great’s cloak (captured from Mithradates), Pompey, richer and more powerful than any Roman had ever been, was awarded an unprecedented third triumph for victories on a third continent and granted the agnomen Magnus – Great. The tri-triumphator launched a spectacular building programme. There was something of the modern politician about this man, described as ‘honest of face, shameless of heart’, but even self-righteous Cicero was dazzled by his ‘incredible godlike virtus’. Pompey dominated the fragile Roman democracy but did not seize total power. Instead the senators, wary of this bumptious meteor, procrastinated in confirming his Asian arrangements. Crassus tried to undermine him by backing Caesar, who lagged behind the other two.

Caesar had only returned to Rome when he learned that Sulla was dead. The journey home revealed much about him: on his way he was captured by pirates. He warned them that, if freed, he would kill them all. Once freed, he hired a flotilla, hunted them down and crucified them. Back in Rome, he married Sulla’s granddaughter Pompeia (after his first wife had died), borrowed heavily and ran for office. As he told his mother, his debts were so big, it was either ‘election or prison’. In the end, Crassus paid his debts. Embracing the populares faction, Caesar was elected as chief priest – pontifex maximus – in preference to two venerable aristocrats, before distinguishing himself fighting in Spain. On his return, elected consul, Caesar proposed a populist programme in informal alliance with Pompey and Crassus. Yet they struggled to control factional violence; democracy was disintegrating; at one point, elections were delayed and Pompey served as sole consul. Pompey and Caesar crowned their alliance with marriages: Pompey divorced his wife and married Caesar’s only child, his daughter Julia.^* The two were now family. Caesar and Crassus both dreamed of emulating Pompey’s conquests: Caesar became proconsul of Gaul; Crassus got Syria.

In 57 BC, the triumvirs received Egyptian visitors: King Piper and his daughter Cleopatra, now twelve. After impoverishing Egypt to bribe Pompey, Piper had just been deposed and replaced with his own eldest daughter Berenice IV. Escaping from Egypt, Piper came to rally Roman help, winning over Caesar and Crassus, who dispatched Roman troops from Syria – including a swaggering cousin of Caesar, Mark Antony. Restored to his crown, Piper murdered one daughter, Berenice, and replaced her as queen with another, Cleopatra. Back in Alexandria, she met Antony, who was impressed by the teenaged queen. At eighteen, Cleopatra inherited Egypt and married her brother, Ptolemy XIII.

As Pompey remained in Rome, in 53 BC Crassus sailed for Syria, hoping to out-Pompey Pompey and throw back the Parthian House of Arsak.

CRASSUS’ HEAD AND THE MILLION DEAD GAULS

Crassus and 40,000 legionaries crossed the Euphrates and followed it southwards towards Seleucia. The Parthian king, Urad II, offered to negotiate. Crassus refused. Opening his hand, Urad warned, ‘Hair will grow here before you see Seleucia.’ Crassus was advised to avoid the plains, ideal terrain for the Parthian cavalry; he ignored the advice.

At Carrhae, exhausted legionaries were confronted by the Parthians on a hill above them. Initially camouflaged by animal skins, they threw them aside in unison to reveal 1,000 cataphracts, armoured cavalry, and 17,000 light horsemen, helmets agleam. As the Romans assumed their classic testudo formation, the Parthians launched a devastating barrage of Parthian shots. Crassus retreated. When he parleyed with the Parthians, he was unhorsed and beheaded. The Parthians poured gold into his throat to mock his crassness, then sent the head to Urad, a philhellene married to a Greek princess, who was watching Euripides’ tragedy The Bacchae. The play’s director commandeered the head as a stage prop: an actor appeared on stage holding it and singing the words, ‘We bring from the mountain / A tendril fresh-cut to the palace / A wonderful prey.’

Far to the west Caesar was conquering Gaul. Caesar was already forty-one and still heavily indebted when he launched his campaigns, only now displaying his homicidal ambition, adventurous spirit (at one point scouting out enemy territory in Gallic disguise) and indefatigable energy. He ensured that Romans read all about his exploits – he claimed to have killed a million Gauls, whom Romans regarded as savages – by sending home reports (narrated in the third person). Despite two crowd-pleasing raids on the benighted, barbaric island of Britannia, Caesar’s imperium was about to run out and his aristocratic enemies, backed by Pompey, challenged him. Pompey’s wife, Caesar’s daughter Julia, had died in childbirth, loosening their uneasy ties. Pompey, who had most to lose, was reluctant to fight, yet he left Caesar little choice.

‘Let the dice roll!’ said Caesar as, channelling Sulla, he crossed the Rubicon into Italy. Pompey supported the democratic republic against a potential tyrant but was unprepared, and was forced to abandon Italy and muster forces in Greece. Caesar followed him. At Pharsalos, he defeated Pompey, who sailed to Egypt, where he had just recognized the twelve-year-old Ptolemy XIII as pharaoh with his sister-wife Arsinoe, after they had fallen out with their masterful elder sister Cleopatra. She was now fighting for her life.

The Ptolemies needed to back Roman winners: as Pompey was rowed ashore, he was beheaded. Elected dictator, Caesar left Antony, magister equitum – master of horse (the traditional deputy of a dictator) – to govern Rome while he sailed for Alexandria with a mere 4,000 troops, chasing Pompey. On arrival the Egyptians presented Pompey’s head. Caesar wept and mourned his former son-in-law, then took up residence at the palace, demanding that the rival siblings, Ptolemy and Cleopatra, present themselves. Cleopatra refused to be judged, arranging to be delivered to Caesar in a laundry bag carried by a strapping factotum. Even if Caesar was not already the sort of man to be delighted with her haughty charisma, he was dazzled by this sexy coup de théâtre. He was fifty-two, she was twenty-two.

WHO I SCREW: CLEOPATRA, CAESAR AND ANTONY

Yet they were well matched. Both were political animals, theatrical maestros and born survivors and killers. Caesar was a perennial practitioner of the adventurous style of politics; she was the heiress of the world’s grandest dynasty, proprietress of the body of the great Alexander, which Caesar visited. The queen was educated, intelligent, possibly a virgin, and polyglot, speaking Greek, Latin, ‘Ethiopian’, Egyptian (the first Ptolemy to do so; her mother may have been Egyptian) and the language Caesar most respected: power. If she lost her struggle with her brother, she would be killed. She needed Caesar.

Caesar was ill prepared for street fighting but he backed Cleopatra. Ptolemy rallied the mob while his troops besieged Caesar and Cleopatra in the palace. The fighting was vicious; Caesar was risking the world for a girl he barely knew. His small force retreated: the museum caught fire. Finding himself trapped, Caesar dived into the harbour and swam to one of his ships – quite an exploit at his age. With reinforcements, who included Jews sent from the high priest of Jerusalem and Arabs sent from the Nabataean king, Caesar routed Ptolemy, who was drowned, and secured Alexandria.

Caesar and Cleopatra celebrated on a Nilotic cruise – his first rest in ten years. Leaving a pregnant Cleopatra as pharaoh with a younger brother, Caesar hastened to crush Mithridates’ son, Pharnaces, who had seized Pontus and ordered the castration of Roman citizens. Caesar defeated him so easily he boasted, ‘I came, I saw, I conquered.’ When he had finished mopping-up operations in Asia, Hispania and Africa, where typically he had an affair with the Berber queen, Eunoe of Mauritania, he celebrated a unique quadruple triumph^* and was appointed the first ever dictator perpetuus; he was further honoured by having his face put on the coinage and his name added to the calendar as the month of July. Caesar did not liquidate his opponents but instead boasted of his mercy. Cleopatra was visiting Rome with their son Little Caesar – Ptolemy Caesarion. But Caesar grew bored in Rome and planned to emulate Alexander and avenge Crassus by striking Dacia (Romania), before attacking Parthia and going on to conquer Scythia (Ukraine). Knowing that Caesar might never return, Cleopatra tried to get the three-year-old Caesarion recognized as his heir. But while she lived in one of his villas, Caesar only discussed his Egyptian family with intimate friends. Romans were fascinated by her and the baby: Cicero was received by her, and grumbled about her arrogance. When Caesar made his will, he did not mention Cleopatra’s baby, instead naming a great-nephew Octavian, aged nineteen, who had joined him in Spain, as his heir.

The Perpetual Dictator thrice turned down the diadem of kingship offered by Antony but his enemies, led by Brutus, son of his lover Servilia, loathing his near-monarchy, planned to kill him before he departed. A prophetess warned Caesar about the Ides of March; Antony and Calpurnia warned of plots; but Caesar dismissed his Spanish bodyguards and walked to the senatorial meeting at Pompey’s Theatre where, in the portico, Brutus and a cadre of familiar faces approached. One asked for a signature and then all drew daggers and stabbed him. Such was the frenzy that the assassins also stabbed each other. Caesar defended himself with his stylus, a sharp writing tool, but when he saw Brutus, Servilia’s son whom he had pardoned, he just said, ‘You too, my child,’ falling to the ground and covering his head with his toga. He was stabbed twenty-three times (though the second strike to the chest was said to be fatal).

The assassins wanted to restore the republic but had no plans. Antony, now consul, outmanoeuvred them: at Caesar’s funeral in the Forum, he hailed Caesar’s divinity and greatness and displayed his bloodied toga, so inflaming the crowd that they drove the assassins out of Rome. (They set up headquarters in Greece). Sturdy and curly-haired, violent and virile, a cold-blooded politician, mediocre general and impulsive showman, the forty-two-year-old Antony was no understudy to Caesar: he craved power for himself. A playboy who studied philosophy in Athens, he was an enthusiast for seductions and banquets, often half soused. He sometimes dressed in Herculean lionskins and drove round Rome in a convoy of Britannic chariots, bearing his mistress, the courtesan Cytheris – and his mother. Now he abandoned Cytheris to marry Fulvia, a fierce political arbiter, once married to the demagogic agitator Clodius – a move much mocked by Cicero. Disdaining Caesar’s callow heir Octavian, now officially named ‘Caesar’ himself, Antony finally allied with him, launching a hit list – a proscription – through which Antony took revenge on Cicero for his witticisms. ‘There’s nothing proper about what you are doing, soldier,’ Cicero told the hitman, ‘but do try to kill me properly.’ Antony nailed his victim’s hands and head to the rostrum in the Forum, while Fulvia cut out his tongue and pierced it with her hatpin – an ugly display even by Roman standards.

Now that Rome was secured, Antony and Octavian pursued the assassins to Greece, where they were defeated and driven to suicide. Then they divided the empire, Antony taking the east, Octavian the west.

Antony had inherited Caesar’s Parthian expedition. As he mustered forces in Tarsus (Syria), Cleopatra, now twenty-eight, came to secure his support, arriving in her royal barge as a royal Isis–Aphrodite. Like Caesar, he had a taste for eastern monarchs, having just had an affair with the ex-courtesan queen of Cappadocia, Glaphyra.^*

On their first night together, Antony fell for Cleopatra. She celebrated in Ptolemaic style – with Bacchic banquets and sibling murder: she had Antony kill her sister Arsinoe. During his wild stay in Alexandria, she gave birth to twins. But soon afterwards, in 40 BC, Antony negotiated a new partnership with Octavian and jilted Cleopatra to marry Octavian’s sister Octavia. The two leaders now focused on retaking Judaea and Syria from the Parthians, appointing a young Jewish ally, Herod, as king of an enlarged Judaea.

In 38, Antony went east to attack Parthia – and returned to Cleopatra, giving her new territories in Lebanon, Israel and Cyprus, while together they had another son. But his army was obliterated in what is today Azerbaijan and he barely made it back to Syria. Cleopatra sailed up the coast with supplies. Her support, along with her tantrums and their shared children, convinced him that his destiny lay with her, so he abandoned Octavia in Athens.

Antony and the queen paraded through Alexandria as Dionysios and Sarapis, then married. She was enthroned as queen of kings, Caesarion as king of kings, acclaimed as son of Caesar, and their three children received kingdoms. Octavian criticized this unvirile eastern debauchery, to which Antony replied: ‘Do you object to me screwing Cleopatra? But we are married and it’s not as if it’s anything new.’ Indeed Octavian was a hypocrite, being an avid adulterer himself. Octavian, whose wife Scribonia was then pregnant, had recently fallen in love with Livia, the clever and beautiful twenty-year-old pregnant wife of Tiberius Claudius Nero, one of the Claudian clan and an Antony supporter, who agreed to divorce her. Octavian divorced Scribonia on the day his daughter Julia was born and married Livia, three days after she gave birth, at a sumptuous ceremony embellished with deliciae – half-naked boy slaves – and attended by her compliant ex-husband. ‘And what about you? Are you faithful to Livia?’ Antony naively asked Octavian. ‘What does it really matter where or with whom one gets it up?’

It did matter, politically. Octavian revealed Antony’s will, which acclaimed Caesarion as Caesar’s son and left everything to Cleopatra, with whom he wished to be buried, presumably embalmed pharaonically in Alexandria. Octavian denounced Cleopatra as a fatale monstrum, and the Senate declared war on her. Antony and Cleopatra mustered impressive resources – 250 galleys and 20,000 troops.^* If Octavian won, his empire would speak Latin and be based in Rome; if Antony, it would be Greek-speaking, ruled from Alexandria – and today we would all speak Greek rather than Latin languages. They fought for the Mediterranean world.

CLEOPATRA’S SNAKE, ALEXANDER’S NOSE

On 2 September 31 BC, the two fleets clashed. When the armies massed in Greece, Antony was outmanoeuvred by Octavian’s general Marcus Agrippa, who blockaded the Antonian army and fleet at Actium. Antony’s fleet featured multi-rower ships, quinqueremes, octeres and even giant deceres, but he was less good on the detail. At their war council, Cleopatra, commanding her fleet of 200, voted to break out of Actium, but in battle their coordination was disastrous. Cleopatra fled back to Alexandria with sixty ships, planning to use her Red Sea fleet to escape to her trading posts in Arabia if not India, only for the Arab king Malik to burn her ships. When Antony sailed after her, Octavian marched through Syria, negotiating secretly with Cleopatra, who offered to abdicate providing her children, especially Caesarion, kept their crowns. It is not clear if she really welcomed the defeated Antony.

She negotiated with Octavian, setting up headquarters in her mausoleum within the palace. Antony was possibly betrayed by Cleopatra, who misinformed him that she was dead, clearly a signal to commit suicide. After stabbing himself with his sword, he was borne to her tomb where he died in her arms aged fifty-two. Allowing her to reside in the palace, Octavian took her three Antonian children into custody. When they met, she learned there was no third act: Octavian would display her in his triumph. ‘I will not be triumphed over,’ she told him – she had seen her sister Arsinoe paraded through Rome – but concealed her plans. After feasting in style, her devoted attendants Eiras and Charmian arranged for a peasant to bring a basket of figs, containing a snake or at least a poison which all three of them somehow imbibed. She sent a sealed letter to Octavian asking to be buried with Antony, at which his guards rushed to stop her – too late. Cleopatra, at the age of thirty-nine, laid out in her glory wearing her diadem, was dead, along with her ladies-in-waiting. One was still just alive when Octavian’s troops burst in and saw Cleopatra in her final magnificence: ‘What a majestic scene!’

‘Extremely,’ the girl murmured, ‘as becomes the descendant of so many kings.’

Cleopatra had hoped that Caesarion would rule Egypt. ‘Too many Caesars,’ warned Octavian’s advisers, ‘is not good.’

Cleopatra had sent King Caesarion, seventeen years old, with his tutor down to the Red Sea port of Berenice to escape to India, but Octavian tricked the tutor into bringing him back, hinting that the boy could rule Egypt – and then had him strangled.^*

Octavian visited the tomb of Alexander, but when he touched the mummy, he knocked off its nose – a moment that marked the end of the Alexandrian age, the fall of the Roman Republic and the launch of an imperial monarchy.

AUGUSTUS, JULIA AND THE ONE -EYED QUEEN OF KUSH

Master of the empire, the young warlord Octavian behaved as he wished, seducing the wives of his henchmen whom he would take into another room at a dinner, returning them to their husbands with their ears red, hair tousled. While they were on their own, he cross-examined them on their husbands’ politics, finding out who was conspiring against him.

Octavian was a master of political dosage, understanding, after years of war and murder, that abrupt measures offend while respectful adaptation can mask dramatic change. While purportedly respecting the republic, he was now the most powerful Roman ever, adopting a new title, princeps – meaning ‘the first’ – and a new name; he was offered Romulus but finally settled on Augustus, meaning Awesome. Yet he remained modest, staying in his comfortable villa on the Palatine Hill.^* But the humility was contrived. His household was enormous, with freedmen doing the secretarial work while the graves of Livia’s staff show she was served by a thousand slaves, including entertainers and dwarves. Nor was his reign as easy-going as he liked to pretend. Vicious when necessary, merciful when possible, he used informers to report any dissidence; conspirators were eliminated fast; when his secretary took money to reveal the contents of one of his letters, Augustus personally broke his legs.^* Yet he was not a humourless megalomaniac either; his letters to intimates are bantering and affectionate. An enthusiastic gambler, he was highly social, regularly dined with friends and toyed with writing a tragedy while, through his wealthy advisor, Maecenas, promoted and befriended his court poets, Virgil and Horace. He praised Horace’s athletic love life, nicknaming him ‘Perfect Penis’, but did not threaten the poet when he failed to praise the princeps. He just teased him.

Caesar Augustus projected Rome as a divine world empire that, behind the republican façade, was already a dynasty: married thrice but without sons, his ambitions rested on his daughter Julia. After marrying her to a nephew who died young, Augustus married her to his partner in power Agrippa, then aged forty, who was granted the same powers as the princeps himself. ‘Agrippa is so great,’ Augustus’ minister Maecenas had warned, ‘he must either be killed or become a son-in-law.’ The marriage delivered two sons, Gaius and Lucius, who became the heirs. But Julia found her destiny a tedious burden, as was being continually pregnant by a much older husband. But pregnancy had its benefits.

While Augustus championed his family values and enforced a new conservative morality policy including anti-adultery legislation, Julia pursued a string of love affairs, having sex with her husband only when she was pregnant: ‘I take on a passenger only when the ship’s hold is full.’ As her sons grew up adored by Augustus, her promiscuity became a problem.

The empire was now so big that Augustus sent Agrippa to rule the eastern half: first they signed a treaty with the young kandake (queen) of Kush. But the queen, Amanirenas, ‘a masculine sort of woman’, wrote the geographer-historian Strabo, ‘fierce and one-eyed’ – one of a succession of female warrior-rulers – and her husband King Teriteqas were dissatisfied with the Roman vassaldom. Her opportunity came when Augustus ordered his Egyptian prefect, Aulus Gallus, to invade Arabia Felix (Fertile Arabia – Yemen). Spices, medicines, perfumes, jewels arrived by sea from India at Egyptian or Arabian ports on the Red Sea and overland in caravans from Marib in Sheba (Yemen/Ethiopia) through Nabataea (Jordan). Augustus wished to control these trades.

Ten thousand legionaries crossed the Red Sea from Berenice, landing not far from Jeddah, marching down through Medina to take Aden, but they got lost in the desert, failed to take Marib and, their fleet destroyed, perished.

In Meroe, Teriteqas and Amanirenas learned that Augustus’ Egyptian garrison had departed for Arabia and invaded Egypt. When Teriteqas died, Amanirenas succeeded him, leading their army up the Nile, an exploit she celebrated on a stela and by burying a huge head of Augustus in front of a temple. Egypt was Rome’s essential breadbasket: Augustus attacked Kush, Amanirenas counter-attacked, then they agreed to negotiate. Augustus lifted taxes imposed upon the Kushites; Amanirenas ceded a strip of Lower Nubia, but she had successfully defied Rome’s greatest emperor.

Augustus made a deal with Malik of Nabataea, enabling him to beautify his red-rose capital Petra as well as Mada’in Salih, while the emperor backed his Jewish ally Herod – despite his massacres and his killing of his own beloved if traitorous wife and three of his many sons. Shrewd, charming, visionary and psychotic, Herod ruled for forty years, remodelling Jerusalem, where he built a gigantic and magnificent Jewish Temple.^*

Soon 120 Roman boats were sailing annually from Red Sea ports to India. Around 20 BC, a delegation from an Indian ruler arrived to see Augustus with a gift of tigers. Roman traders, usually Arab or Egyptian rather than Italian, traded amphorae of wine, mirrors, statues and lamps in return for ivory, spices, topaz and slaves. And a new luxury was starting to arrive from China, via Parthia and Eudaemon (Aden): silk.

FLYING SWALLOW AND THE PASSION OF THE CUT SLEEVE

Her name was Flying Swallow and she was dancing at the palace of Princess Yamma when the emperor came to watch. Flying Swallow – Zhao Feiyen – was a dancing girl who came from a family so poor that they had exposed her as a baby until, overcome with regret, they returned to find her still alive. Emperor Cheng saw the slender, graceful Flying Swallow, then just fifteen, dancing with her sister – and fell in love.

Coming to the throne in 33 BC just as Augustus was confronting Antony, the eighteen-year-old Cheng had a wife, Empress Xu, and an adored consort, Ban, but neither had provided him with an heir. Cheng was a cheerful playboy, almost disinherited by his father for his hedonism, who loved sensual music and liked to plunge incognito into the stews of Chang’an for whoring and cockfighting. Flying Swallow was right up his street. As for politics, he left that to his mother, the Dowager Empress Wang, whose brother Wang Feng and others of the family ran the empire as marshals of the state. Now, brought back to the palace and enrolled with her sister Zhao Hede as a concubine, Flying Swallow brought new levels of murderous envy to the already charged court. Within a year of arriving, the two girls had framed the empress and Consort Ban for using black magic, getting Cheng to declare Flying Swallow empress in 16 BC. While Flying Swallow failed to deliver children, Cheng fathered sons by two concubines. Persuaded by Flying Swallow or Zhao Hede (who did the dirty work), the emperor or the empress killed the babies themselves to protect the two sisters; one of the mothers was forced to commit suicide to keep the secret. The sisters fell out when the emperor favoured Zhao Hede, then colluded to poison any other girls who got pregnant.

In 7 BC, Cheng died suddenly, possibly after an over-generous dose of aphrodisiac administered by Zhao Hede. Frightened as the ensuing investigations into murdered babies and aphrodisiac overdosing closed in, she committed suicide as Cheng’s nephew became emperor Ai. He excited great expectations, but illness prevented him governing and he did not like ‘music or girls’. Instead he fell in love with a teenaged male courtier Dong Zian: such was his devotion that the emperor preferred to cut off the sleeve of his gown rather than wake his sleeping lover. Many emperors had male lovers, openly listed among their favourites, but ‘the passion of the cut sleeve’ went much further: Aidi overpromoted the twenty-two-year-old Dong to the role of commander of the army, and when Aidi was dying he left the throne to his boyfriend. Instead, granny intervened: Dowager Empress Wang orchestrated the suicide of Dong and promoted her own nephew to regent. Aged eighty-three, the dowager alone preserved Han stability, but when she died in 13 her nephew tried to found his own dynasty – a lesson in how not to manage an empire – just as, at the other end of the Silk Road, another emperor, aided by a capable female potentate, demonstrated how it should be done.

THE REPTILE OF CAPRI

Augustus, now seventy-five, was dying at his villa in his home town, Nola, south of Rome, with his wife Livia, also in her seventies, and her capable but morose son Tiberius beside him. His own direct family would not succeed him, but instead he had woven a tangled web of marriages to bind together his blood with that of Livia.

His hopes to leave a dynastic coterie of heirs had long been based on Gaius and Lucius, teenaged sons of his daughter Julia and her husband Agrippa. Julia had been pregnant when in 12 BC Agrippa died, and she gave birth to a son, Postumus, who grew up to be irresponsible if not unbalanced. But they also had a daughter, Agrippina.

Now Augustus ordered Julia to marry Tiberius, with whom he had shared the tribunicial power since 6 BC. Julia was happy with the choice. Tiberius was not. But, intelligent and exuberant, Julia was both sexually adventurous and politically dissident, bridling at her father’s control. Augustus was distracted by the rise of her sons, as Gaius and Lucius were elected consul. He adored the boys, nicknaming Gaius his ‘most beloved little donkey’ and looking forward to a time when they would ‘succeed to my position’. But then in quick succession both of them died – just as Augustus discovered their mother’s antics.

Dressing in the showiest dresses, Julia flaunted affairs with a string of senators and generals, including a Scipio and Antony’s son Iullus Antonius, a dangerous choice. If she had been a man, such exploits would have been regarded as virile peccadillos, but she was heiress to an empire, perilously popular, and her libertinism undermined Augustus’ conservative crackdown on immorality. In AD 3, he banished her for life – but, just as he feared, she became a symbol of resistance, attracting the support of popular protests against him. Iullus Antonius was executed.

Augustus was forced to turn to his wife Livia’s sons Tiberius and Drusus. Tiberius found politics a strain. Repulsed by Julia’s promiscuity and resenting his mother’s orders, sated with war, he retired to Rhodes. Nor was this the end of it: Julia’s daughter, also called Julia, had brazen love affairs with among others the erotic poet Ovid. But this was about much more than poetry and sex: Julia’s husband Aemilius Paullus was planning Augustus’ assassination. In AD 8, Paullus was executed, young Julia exiled.^*

Augustus brokered the marriages that ultimately produced the emperors Caligula, Claudius and Nero. Livia’s younger son Drusus, married to Antonia, daughter of Octavia and Antony, delivered two sons, the handsome, charismatic Germanicus and the stammering, limping Claudius. Claudius was lucky not to be exposed as a baby – his mother reviled him as ‘the monster’ – but he married four times and had children. Their father Drusus died young, but Augustus promoted Germanicus, who won laurels in the wars against the Germans. Augustus married Germanicus to Agrippina, daughter of Agrippa and Julia, who produced six children, three girls and three boys. Agrippina insisted on serving in camp with her husband, giving orders in battle when necessary and turning her youngest son, Gaius, into a military mascot, dressed in a mini-legionary’s uniform, hence his nickname Caligula – Little Boots. Augustus merged these plans by naming Tiberius as his heir but ordering him to adopt Germanicus as his son.

As he lay dying, Augustus talked about his one big fiasco: in AD 9, three legions had been wiped out by German tribesmen in the Teutoburg Forest. Archaeologists have found Roman armour there. Augustus spent his last years murmuring, ‘Give me back my legions.’ ‘If I played my part well,’ said Augustus before he died, with Livia beside him,^* ‘then give me applause.’ He had and they did, deifying him like Caesar as he was cremated and buried in his magnificent mausoleum, which still stands in Rome.

As soon as Tiberius took power, advised by his mother Livia – her female auctoritas recognized in the cognomen Augusta – he ordered the killing of Augustus’ last grandson, Postumus. Tiberius retired to Capri, where this reptilian princeps petted his tame iguana and enjoyed swimming while, according to lurid historians, being probed by the tongues of a troop of boys whom he nicknamed his ‘minnows’. (Then as now, an orgy in a swimming pool was shorthand for depravity).

In Rome, he delegated his power to a henchman, Sejanus, prefect of the Praetorian Guards,^* whom he used to purge his enemies. His heir was his son Drusus, married to Germanicus’ sister, Livilla. Livilla, however, started an affair with Sejanus, who aspired to rule and may have poisoned Drusus. Finally, in 31, Antony’s daughter Antonia visited Capri to reveal Sejanus’ treason. The princeps appeared in Rome and had him executed. Livilla’s fate was to be starved to death by her steely mother.

An empire is only as good as its governors. Tiberius’ focus was drawn to the east, to where he dispatched his adopted son Germanicus as viceroy. The old iguana was jealous of this princeling. When Germanicus, at the age of thirty-three, fell fatally ill in Antioch, he accused Tiberius of poisoning him – and died watched by his wife and sons, who included the seven-year-old Caligula. Later Tiberius drove his widow to starve herself and then arrested, and quietly killed, Germanicus’ elder sons.

Further south, Tiberius’ prefect Pontius Pilate struggled to control the turbulent Jews, who were wary of Roman idolatry and despotism.^* Pilate’s violent suppression of Jewish protests in Jerusalem and Samaria had exacerbated tensions. Now in AD 33, Pilate confronted a Jewish prophet, Jesus, one of many such preachers. Jesus – Joshua in Hebrew – was a scion of the Davidic dynasty who had been brought up in Galilee, which was ruled by one of Herod’s sons. Like all Jews, he had been circumcised in the Temple in Jerusalem, and regularly travelled to the city for Passover and other Jewish festivals. The first decades of his life are unknown. When he emerged as a preacher, he did not claim to be the Messiah, though he performed acts of healing and the magical delivery of provisions. Instead, criticizing the Temple grandees and supporting the downtrodden, he preached moral conduct in this life in preparation for an imminent End of Days, prophesied in the Jewish Torah. It struck a chord with the human need for a moral mission that offered meaning in life and redemption in death. Faced with disorders during the Jewish festival of Passover when Jerusalem was packed with pilgrims, Pilate crucified Jesus on a hill outside the city. When the body disappeared from his tomb, his followers believed he was the Messiah – son of God – risen from the dead to bear the sins of mankind.

Tiberius would not have spent long on this minor incident among the crazy Jews, but, hearing of Pilate’s bungling, he recalled him. On the succession, he selected the last of Germanicus’ sons as the Caesar to deliver calm and continuity: Caligula.

IF ONLY ROME HAD ONE NECK: CALIGULA AND SISTERS

No princeps ever came to power with such popular enthusiasm as Little Boots. He was raised by stern women – first by his great-grandmother Livia (whom he called ‘Odysseus in a dress’), then by Antonia, daughter of Antony – in a vortex of murder and ambition. No wonder he was damaged and insecure.

In AD 36, Tiberius invited Caligula to live with him in Capri, ‘rearing a viper for the Roman people’. Yet he appointed joint heirs, Caligula and his own grandson, the eighteen-year-old Tiberius Gemellus, but the boy was suspected of being Sejanus’ son. When Tiberius died, Caligula, a twenty-five-year-old epileptic, gangly, pointy-faced and balding, was hailed by the people as ‘our chick’ in an orgy of celebration as he promised to end treason trials and restore elections. The Senate appointed Caligula as sole heir, but while his predecessors were experienced commanders, he himself had no laurels. After a short illness, he ordered the execution of his cousin Gemellus, an act that so horrified their joint grandmother Antonia that she starved herself to death. Attracted by the Egyptian tradition of sister-marriage, he gathered around him his sisters Agrippina (the Younger), Julia Livilla and Drusilla and may have slept with them, or just claimed that he did. Agrippina, married to the aristocrat Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, had just had a son, Lucius – the future Nero. When Drusilla died, Caligula deified her, the first Caesar woman to be so elevated. It implied that Caligula too was a god.

Starting with public gifts of cash and public construction projects, he also orchestrated spectacular shows, and rode his horse Incitatus across a bridge of boats on the Gulf of Naples, wearing the breastplate of Alexander the Great. Caligula could not resist boasting of his power; as he told his grandmother Antonia, ‘Remember that I have the right to do anything to anyone.’ He had a hangman’s wit. When killing his victims, he ordered the executioner to ‘strike so he feels he is dying’. As he began to sense his unpopularity, he quoted a Greek play, ‘Let them hate so long as they fear,’ adding, ‘If only Rome had one neck.’ At dinners, he demanded the right to seduce the wives of his guests and then rated them afterwards. He must have heard that Augustus had done something similar, but somehow Augustus befriended his victims while Caligula repelled them. At one of his dinner parties, he burst out laughing: ‘At a single nod from me,’ he told the consuls, ‘both of you would have your throats cut on the spot.’ And whenever his kissed his wives, he would sigh, ‘Off comes this beautiful head whenever I give the word.’ To torment the Senate, he threatened to make his horse a senator. Jealous of the brilliant speeches of Seneca, a forty-four-year-old senator, son of a historian from Hispania, he ordered his execution for conspiracy – but, hearing that he was mortally ill, he laughed that he would die soon anyway and just exiled him. Seneca understood that ‘all cruelty springs from weakness.’

Caligula had affairs with the beautiful actor Mnester and Drusilla’s husband Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, a great-great-grandson of Augustus, a taste totally acceptable in the Roman male provided he was married, feared the gods and took the active position in sex. But later, fearing Lepidus’ pedigree, he had him executed. His trusted praetorian prefect Cassius Chaerea tortured women for sport, often joined by Caligula. The emperor exiled his two surviving sisters. Rightly suspicious of all members of his family, he was indulgent towards his lame uncle Claudius, who had spent his life writing a history of the Etruscans. Caligula promoted him to consul as a joke and, in a clear sign that he did not regard him as a threat, he married him to their teenage cousin Valeria Messalina, also descended from Octavia and Antony. Meanwhile, anxious for a successor, he tried to father a son, finally marrying for the fourth time his mistress Milonia Caesonia, with whom he had a daughter.

In pursuit of military success, he travelled up to Gaul where he supposedly ordered his troops to collect seashells to dedicate to Neptune, the sea god. More likely they built military huts (mistranslated as seashells) while Caligula received the allegiance of that tempting target – Britannia.

Such was the competence of the administration – overseen by Caligula’s secretary, the Greek freedman Callistus – that the empire continued to run even under the rule of a demented freak. Keen to secure the east, the emperor sent his friend the Jewish prince Herod Agrippa to remove the untrustworthy prefect of Egypt, then promoted him to king like his grandfather Herod the Great. He next ordered the Jews to worship a statue of himself in the Temple in Jerusalem. The Jews seethed. Herod Agrippa persuaded him to cancel the order.^*

Caligula was spoiled, damaged and clueless, making enemies on all sides. A basic rule of power is: mock anyone, but never your bodyguards. Caligula teased Chaerea, giving insulting passwords like ‘phallus’ and ‘girlie’. Chaerea started a conspiracy with two others, chief secretary Callistus and probably his uncle Claudius. Caligula had encouraged a slave of Claudius’ to denounce him, an act guaranteed to alienate any Roman. In AD 40, Caligula declared himself a god and was about to leave Rome and move the capital to Alexandria. There was no time to lose. On 24 January 41, Caligula, still only twenty-nine, left the theatre where he was presiding over a show celebrating the Divine Augustus on the Palatine Hill and took the covered passageway, the cryptoporticus, through the imperial complex back to take a bath in the palace. His limping uncle Claudius asked permission to be excused. As Caligula stopped to watch a performance of singers, three of his most trusted praetorians surrounded him and drew their swords.

* The Tiger Tally, Hu-Fu, was the proof of imperial authority, a golden tiger divided into halves, one held by the ruler, one by the general. It was the second-century BC equivalent of the nuclear codes.

* When a beloved concubine died, Wudi lamented:

The whisper of her silk skirt has gone.

Dust gathers on the marble pavement.

Her empty room is cold and still.

Fallen leaves are piled against the doors.

How can my aching heart rest?

* Whatever her success, Feng Liao missed home in her ‘strange land on the other side of heaven’; instead, as she wrote in a beautiful poem that speaks for so many princesses married to uncouth strangers, they sent her:

To live far away in the alien land of the Asvin king,

A yurt is my dwelling, of felt are my walls,

For food I have meat, with kumis to drink

I’m always homesick and inside my heart aches

I wish I were a yellow-beaked swan winging myself back home.

After fifty years, she finally winged herself home to Chang’an.

* When one of his enemies, the tribune, was betrayed by one of his slaves, Sulla killed him. He freed the slave for his service and then had him thrown from the Tarpeian Rock – the eighty-foot cliff close to the Capitol used for killing egregious traitors and rebel slaves – for betraying his master. Romans were very nervous about slave revolts.

* The implication was that Caesar had taken the inferior sexual position to King Nicomedes. Much later, even during his first Triumph, his soldiers sang, ‘Caesar laid the Gauls low; Nicomedes bent him over.’

* Han tombs, even those of minor princes and kings, reveal the culture and splendour of the court, not least the jade suit (for example, of a king of Zhongshan), constructed from around fourteen pieces, that covered the entire body like a suit of armour, including gloves and helmet, stitched together with gold thread. In the tomb of a government minister, the marquess of Dai, were painted silk banners, inventories on bamboo slips, cooking recipes and a sex manual.

* In 62 BC, Caesar’s second wife Pompeia, granddaughter of Sulla, had embarrassed Caesar. The notorious adulterer and pontifex maximus was himself being cuckolded by his pretty young wife. When Pompeia hosted the women-only festival of the Bona Dea (‘Good Goddess’), the celebration was crashed by her secret lover, Clodius, an outrageous young patrician who, disguised as a woman, hoped to enjoy an assignation. Instead his gender was literally exposed; he was later tried and acquitted. But Caesar divorced Pompeia anyway, saying, ‘Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.’ Clodius became a murderous populist demagogue until killed in factional fighting. Caesar was a compulsive and successful lover of women: he had slept with the wives of both his fellow triumvirs Pompey and Crassus and his legionaries nicknamed him the Bald Fornicator. His favourite and most enduring lover was a married patrician, Servilia, whose first husband Marcus Brutus had been executed by Pompey. Now Caesar remarried a teenaged aristocrat, Calpurnia.

* During this extravaganza – to mark victories in Gaul, Pontus, Egypt and Africa – the triumphator’s devoted legionaries jovially sang about his exploits and even his gay affair with the King of Bithynia, their songs culminating in the lines: ‘Citizens, lock up your wives; we bring home the bald fornicator! All the gold you lent him went to pay his Gallic tarts.’ The defeated Gaulish king Vercingetorix and the deposed Egyptian queen Arsinoe IV, who had fought Caesar, were paraded – watched by Arsinoe’s sister Cleopatra. Vercingetorix was garrotted, the traditional climax of a triumph. Arsinoe was spared. For now.

* Back in Italy, Antony’s wife, Fulvia, and brother Lucius had challenged Octavian who, besieging them in Perusia, had written a bawdy poem that reveals another side of the young warlord:

Because Antony fucks Glaphyra, Fulvia has arranged this punishment for me: that I fuck her too.

That I fuck Fulvia? …

‘Either fuck or fight,’ she says. Doesn’t she know

My prick is dearer to me than life itself? Let the trumpets blare!

* Antony’s Semitic clients, the Jewish king Herod and the Arab king Malik, delayed sending troops – both aggrieved by gifts of valuable territory to Cleopatra.

* The three children of Cleopatra and Antony were raised by Octavia in Rome. Two died young, but the third, Cleopatra Selene, was married to Juba II, king of Mauritania. This was the Berber prince Juba’s reward for fighting for Octavian at Actium, along with a new-fangled kingdom named Mauritania in today’s Algeria. Together they built a Grecian–Roman capital of cultural sophistication, while Juba sent trading expeditions that reached the Canary Islands. Cleopatra Selene died in AD 6. Their son Ptolemy, a mixture of Euro-African, Berber, Roman and Greek, Antonian and Ptolemaic, succeeded his father in AD 23.

* Princeps was the origin of our word prince, much as the Palatine was the origin of palace. Augustus avoided the title dictator, abolished after Caesar’s assassination. From now on, dictator became an insult, not an office.

* Yet he disliked cruelty for its own sake: one of his earlier supporters, Vedius Pollio, was a rich but a notorious sadist who fed slaves who angered him to his carnivorous lampreys in the pond at his villa. When Augustus was there for dinner, a slave dropped a valuable cup and Vedius ordered him thrown to the lampreys, at which Augustus ordered his retainers to smash the rest of the cups until the slave was released and spared.

* Herod was a brilliant player of Roman politics, switching from Antony to Augustus, then becoming almost a foreign member of the Caesar dynasty. Much of his monumental building work survives today. Of his Temple, only the outer walls survive: its western wall is the Kotel, the Western Wall, today’s most sacred shrine for Jews.

* Ovid was the outrageous chronicler of just the sort of delicious love affairs with other people’s wives that were now out of favour under Augustus. Admitting not just a ‘poem and a mistake’ but also a ‘crime worse than murder’, Ovid was lucky to be alive, exiled to the faraway town of Tomis (Romania). He never returned.

* Livia was said to have poisoned Augustus with figs. She was also rumoured to have poisoned all his earlier prospective successors. There is no proof of any of this and much of it was pure chauvinism, as poison was supposedly feminine – secret, insidious, concealed in food consumed trustingly. In an era when many died of scarcely understood infections, poison or necromancy could explain the sudden deaths of healthy people. Yet, as we have seen, poison was the ideal weapon for family murders: it preserved the image of a smooth succession. In an age when auguries, spells and omens were believed by everyone, poison was part of the political arsenal and all potentates had access to experts on necromancy and poisons. ‘Livia, remember our married life,’ said Augustus as he died, ‘and farewell.’

* Traditionally the praetorians were the guards of a Roman general on campaign: they slept across the doorway of his tent. Since the legions were not allowed inside the pomerium, the city limits (except when a Sulla or Caesar broke the rules), Augustus had created his own praetorians who along with a guard of Germans protected the emperor.

* After Herod’s death, the ineptitude of his sons and a rash of Jewish messiahs – sacred kings – had convinced Tiberius to annex Judaea, which was governed by a mix of Roman prefects, Jewish high priests and Herodian princes.

* At the same time, Caligula summoned his African cousin King Ptolemy of Mauritania, only grandchild of Cleopatra and Antony, and had him executed, annexing the kingdom, possibly because his royal Ptolemaic descent could have interfered with his plans in Egypt.