The World

Trajans and First Step Sharks: Romans and the Maya

SWINGER IN THE PALACE: MESSALINA’S COUP

‘So be it!’ shouted Chaerea. He drew his sword and swung it against Caligula’s neck, but it only shattered his jawbone. Another slash almost sliced off an arm. One forgets the sheer messiness of assassinations. Caligula twitched on the ground. ‘I am still alive!’ he cried, begging to be finished off.

‘Hit him again!’ shouted the praetorians, who stabbed Caligula thirty times, including in the genitals. When his German guards learned what had happened, they went berserk in the theatre, nearly slaughtering the entire crowd. Chaerea planned to liquidate the whole family, sending guards to kill Caesonia and her baby daughter, but she had rushed out and lay sobbing next to the deserted body of Caligula. They killed her there, then dashed the baby’s head against a wall.

Excited senators debated who to appoint princeps, but some praetorians found Claudius hiding behind a tapestry. Aided by his longstanding friend the Jewish king Herod Agrippa, Claudius negotiated with the praetorians and the Senate.

While he purported to be uninterested in power, and even privately hoped to restore the late republic, this was all designed to stay alive and contrast him with Caligula. Ambition was bred into the Julio-Claudians. Claudius embraced the crown and proved almost as vicious and capricious as Caligula.

Claudius started his reign with surprising rigour, bribing the praetorians, forgiving Caligula’s assassins (though executing Chaerea) and promising the Senate to respect its privileges. Abroad, he granted his friend Herod Agrippa an enlarged Jewish kingdom encompassing much of Israel, Jordan and Lebanon. Then he ordered a prestigious little war: the conquest of Britannia. The empire was run by three efficient freedmen, led by his trusted Narcissus, who became so powerful that before the British invasion, when some legions became restless, he addressed them himself in the emperor’s name.

At the centre of his court was his wife Messalina. Claudius was fifty-three; Messalina, aged twenty-three, was born into the imperial family. She had already delivered a daughter, and now, just as Claudius conquered Britannia, she delivered a son, Britannicus.

Once southern Britannia had been pacified, Claudius travelled to accept the surrender of eleven Britannic kings and parade through his new colony, in the town of Camulodunum, riding an elephant (quite a sight for Colchester high street then and now), but this left Messalina in Rome. Encouraged by Claudius’ freedmen, she started to sell governorships and toy with power.

The young empress embraced what we might today called a swinging lifestyle, yet this was not just about her capacity for pleasure; her thrill-seeking was also an expression of power gone to a young person’s head. Experiencing wild crushes on her fancies, she was in a position to enforce her wishes. But she also regarded anyone who did not support her as an enemy – and she was a dangerous enemy to have. One of her favourites was the actor Mnester, sometime lover of Caligula. When he resisted her, she supposedly got Claudius to tell him innocently to obey all her orders – and he became her lover, delighting her so much she had a bronze cast made of him. When the crowds in the theatre called out that Mnester was with Messalina in the palace, Claudius naively waved them away. She saved the life of one of Caligula’s German bodyguards, condemned to die in the gladiatorial ring, because he had slept with her. She was said to have won a sexual endurance competition by having twenty-five men in twenty-four hours, her exploits protected by a ring of silence. But the omertà was unlikely to last.

Claudius’ crown was recent and vulnerable. ‘This man, fellow senators, who looks to you as if he couldn’t hurt a fly,’ Seneca wrote, ‘used to kill people as easily as a dog shits.’ The fuddled princeps killed thirty-five senators.

Messalina meanwhile was threatened by Caligula’s sisters. She exposed Julia Livilla for having an affair with Seneca, and both of them were exiled. Claudius later had the recently returned Julia Livilla and her sister Julia Livia killed for plotting, supposedly on Messalina’s advice. Messalina also feared Agrippina, the last of Caligula’s sisters, and her son Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus – the future emperor Nero – who was becoming popular. It was said that when she went to suffocate baby Nero, a snake slithered out from under the pillow. She later tried to have Agrippina exiled and the boy killed, but Nero was cheered more at the Games than her own son Britannicus.

Around AD 47, Messalina, now thirty, started to overreach herself. When she framed the powerful freedman Callistus, his colleagues Narcissus and Pallas realized they were in danger themselves, just as Messalina was moving from shameless sex to political conspiracy. Her favourite lover, Gaius Silius, was a dashing senator: she felt so invulnerable she started to plan an actual seizure of power, hoping to retire (more likely kill) Claudius and rule with Silius on behalf of Britannicus.

Knowing that Messalina could easily discredit him, Claudius’ loyal ex-slave Narcissus persuaded his master’s favourite prostitutes, Cleopatra and Calpurnia, to tell him the truth – unusual receptacles of integrity. While Claudius was inspecting his new port at Ostia, Messalina was celebrating a Dionysian wedding to Silius, which was the start of a coup backed by the city militia. When the prostitutes told the emperor, Narcissus confirmed their tales. Claudius panicked, but the praetorians were still loyal and Narcissus arrested the conspirators. Messalina hitched a lift in a rubbish cart and begged for her life by presenting her two children to Claudius, who was rushing back to Rome. He was rendered speechless, but Narcissus had the children taken home. Arresting Messalina, Claudius and Narcissus proceeded to Silius’ house, which was filled with treasures purloined from the palace. Claudius, enraged, had Silius, Mnester and other conspirators killed. Then, as he dithered, Narcissus had Messalina beheaded. Claudius said nothing and asked for another flask of wine.

Claudius now looked weak, and he must have doubted that Britannicus was really his son. That opened the door for Agrippina – and her son: Nero.

RULE OF THE FREEDMEN: AGRIPPINA’S MARRIAGE

Agrippina made a show of consulting her uncle on all matters and as a direct descendant of Augustus she would consolidate his principate. Narcissus promoted one of Claudius’ earlier wives, but Pallas, now secretly sleeping with Agrippina, backed her. In AD 50, Claudius married Agrippina, who was promoted to Augusta, and adopted her son Lucius, who assumed the Claudian name Nero. Agrippina appointed Seneca to tutor Nero, while accusing Narcissus of corruption. Nero was married to Claudius’ daughter, Claudia – and appointed joint heir with Britannicus.

Claudius, sixty-three and drunk most of the time, started to worry about the boy’s safety. He grew closer to Messalina’s mother Domitia, grandmother of his children, and reflected aloud that his fate was to marry women then punish them. Agrippina feared that Claudius would dispose of her and marry Domitia. She and Nero testified to Domitia’s disloyalty; Claudius acquiesced in her execution.

Then in October 54, sending Narcissus away to treat his gout, Agrippina procured the skills of a poisoner named Locusta, already in prison for murder, and – suborning Claudius’ trusted server-taster and doctor – she poisoned Claudius’ mushrooms. The princeps was sick, but survived, so she then had the doctor poison him, this time successfully.

Agrippina sent the seventeen-year-old Nero to promise the praetorians a bonus and executed Narcissus, while her lover Pallas remained secretary for financial affairs.

On Nero’s first day as princeps he gave the praetorians the cloying password ‘best of mothers’, but swiftly his surging adolescent ambition clashed with Agrippina’s auctoritas. Nero, preeningly overconfident, blond, bullnecked and fleshy, had achieved power far too easily to appreciate it. Instead, regarding himself as too talented for politics, he flaunted his skills as actor and charioteer, a surprisingly modern politician for whom politics was an extension of showbusiness.

Agrippina tried to refresh her fading maternal influence by becoming Nero’s lover. But he had fallen in love with the beautiful wife of his friend Otho, Sabina Poppaea. When Nero wanted to divorce his wife Claudia, Agrippina advised against it. Poppaea mocked his inability to overrule his mummy.

Poppaea dressed gorgeously in the material that was suddenly fashionable: women started wearing Chinese silk with nothing underneath. ‘I see clothes of silk,’ grumbled Seneca, ‘if materials that don’t hide the body nor even one’s decency can be called clothes. Wretched flocks of maids labour so that the adulteress may be visible through her thin dress – and her husband has not more acquaintance with his wife’s body than any stranger …’ The fashion required the shaving of pubic hair, which appalled the well-connected naturalist Pliny the Elder. The Senate several times banned the immoral wearing of silk – but fashion was stronger. As was money.^*

In the Central Country, the source of this silk, a brilliant family of Chinese writers and soldiers was experiencing the opportunities and perils of serving the other great dynasty of world power, the Han.

MOTHERS, BROTHERS AND SISTERS: NERO, AGRIPPINA AND THE BANS

In AD 54, Ban Biao, who had started to write a private history of the imperial family, perished, leaving his masterwork Hanshu – the Book of Han – unfinished. The brutality and avarice of court feuding had almost destroyed the Han, but after a bloody civil war a masterly Han cousin, Emperor Guangwu, had restored the dynasty and appointed Ban to write its history. When Ban died, he left three children: two sons, a dreamy poet, Ban Gu, then aged twenty-two, a tough soldier, Ban Chao, twenty-one, and a daughter, Ban Zhao, nine, who would be the most remarkable of a talented family. All three would change history in different ways that extended from the imperial court all the way across the Silk Road towards the west. Each became famous, one as a historian, one as a conqueror and one as a writer, courtier and female advocate – one of the first women to achieve such prominence.

Ban Gu started to work in private on his father’s book. His ruffian brother Ban Chao had no interest in such delicate activity: he had joined the court, serving the emperor as a clerk of the Orchid Terrace, but its slow pace bored him. He craved adventure.

When the old emperor died, he was succeeded by his son, the thirty-year-old Ming, who heard that Ban Gu was ‘privately revising the national history’ – a euphemism for failing to extol the virtues of the dynasty. Ban was arrested, his library impounded. Fortunately his brother, Ban Chao, appealed to Ming on his behalf. Mingdi released him, summoned him to court and appointed him official Han historian while his brother Chao preferred rougher pursuits: ‘Throw away your writing-brush,’ he advised the delicate historian, ‘and join the army!’ Chao joined General Dou Gu on a campaign against the barbarians, in which his bloody exploits, cultural curiosity and political gifts made him the greatest Chinese conquistador, expanding the Western Region (Central Asia). The Bans were flourishing, but the Han court was as dangerous as that of the Caesars.

Nero was squeezed between his mother and his mistress. Agrippina, still in her early forties, got Nero drunk and seduced him, but then threatened to enthrone Claudius’ son Britannicus. Nero had abused Britannicus, even raping him. When he ordered the younger prince to perform a poem at the theatre, Britannicus recounted in verse how he had been passed over, speaking with such dignity that the crowd cheered. The fact that Britannicus was a better actor so infuriated the omnipotent narcissist that he ordered the poisoner Locusta to provide two poisons, one fast, one slow, to be served to Britannicus at family dinner. When her slow poison failed, Nero tricked Britannicus into taking the fast one. He looked on as Britannicus went into convulsions.

Nero’s mother Agrippina and his wife Claudia (Britannicus’ sister) realized that the emperor was out of control. Nero moved Agrippina out of the palace, and discussed how to destroy her. The praetorians would never kill a daughter of Germanicus, and poisons often failed, so he was delighted when a sleazy freedman called Anicetus came up with a plan.

In 59, attending a festival on the Bay of Naples, Agrippina was taken out for a cruise on a specially sabotaged murder boat. When she survived the lead roof of a canopy falling on her, the boat itself came apart, but she managed to swim to shore. Nero feared her vengeance and dispatched the freedman back to her villa. As she was held down and butchered, she pointed to her belly and cried, ‘Strike here, Anicetus, for this womb bore Nero.’

Helped by his minister Seneca, Nero squared his matricide with the Senate by framing Agrippina for treason. Now he was liberated.

In 62, he had Pallas killed, harvesting his fortune. Finally, Nero could marry Poppaea – except that he was still married to Empress Claudia, whom he loathed. When there were rumours that he would divorce her for infertility, the people protested and Nero panicked. Once again Anicetus proved useful, testifying to adultery with the empress. She was exiled to the island of Pandateria, where, still just twenty-two, she was tied down and her veins opened. The head was presented to Poppaea as a marriage gift. In 63, Nero and his new empress had a daughter together.

The next year, while Nero was at his villa at Antium (Anzio), fire broke out in Rome, spreading fast among the closely packed multi-storey wooden buildings. The inferno was one of history’s super-propellants – pandemics and disasters – that implacably test leaders and systems in what we might call the Nero Test. He did all the right things, offering his private gardens as refuge, reducing the grain price, erecting shelters, inviting refugees to live in his palaces, but in his self-absorbed need to dramatize his own importance at all times he put on a show about the fire in which he sang with his lyre. Its charm deteriorated even more as the Roman fire flared up again. Nero’s oblivious decision to take advantage of the space cleared by the fire to build a new palace, the Golden House, added to the impression that he had ignited it. In its vestibule, he erected a colossus of himself as a ninety-nine-foot naked god holding a rudder on a globe to express his world power.^* The truth matters less than the impression: Nero had failed the Nero Test.

Poppaea was raised to Augusta after the birth of their short-lived daughter and, chatelaine of the hundred-acre palace, was powerful enough to appoint her own inept protégé to govern Judaea.

Untrammelled by any sensible advisers, Nero sought scapegoats for the fire and other inauspicious events, focusing on a newly popular Jewish sect named Christians who followed Jesus, the prophet executed by the Romans during Tiberius’ reign. They were an object of special suspicion because they rejected the essential Roman rite of sacrificing to the gods – and the princeps. This behaviour was just acceptable among Jews, whose beliefs were ancient, but not among the new-fangled Christians, whose egalitarian beliefs seemed to challenge the entire order of society – a superstitio that championed the slaves, always a very touchy subject. Nero had Christians slaughtered in the arena, and one of Jesus’ surviving apostles, Peter, crucified upside down.^*

In the Golden House, Nero’s relationship with the pregnant Poppaea was deteriorating: during a row, Nero supposedly kicked her in the belly, killing her. Single again, he tried to marry Claudius’ last daughter by an earlier marriage, but when she refused she too was murdered. He set off for Greece to race chariots and perform as an actor, and there fell in love with a young eunuch and freed slave saucily named Sporus (Seed), who looked strangely like Poppaea. Nero encouraged him to transition into Poppaea – and married him.

Conspiracies intensified; rebellions multiplied. Seneca liked to say, ‘Poison is drunk from gold,’ but even the philosopher had amassed such riches that he started lending money at high interest rates – to the British chieftains among others. It may have been his aggressive debt collecting that accelerated a rebellion in Britannia, led by Queen Boadicea. A legion was destroyed before the rebels were crushed. Seneca, by now sixty, had already retired to his villa to write outrageous satires on emperors he had known when he was tenuously linked to a conspiracy. Nero ordered him to kill himself. ‘We’re always complaining our days are few, and acting as though there would be no end of them,’ Seneca reflected. Now there was an end: Seneca, taking poison and cutting his wrists, died in his bath, surrounded by friends.

In 66, Judaea exploded. The rebels, provoked by egregious Roman venality, eliminated a legion and founded a Jewish state based in the magnificent near-impregnable Temple city of Jerusalem, a development that threatened the eastern empire and sparked a rash of revolts. The Gallic and Hispanic legions rebelled; as they marched on Rome, senators and praetorians at last turned against Nero, who tried to flee to Ostia and then to Parthia – a hare-brained scheme. Returning to the palace in Rome he awoke the next morning to find himself abandoned and exclaimed, ‘Have I neither friend nor foe!’ On the run with a tiny retinue, including his beautiful Poppaean eunuch Sporus dressed as a girl, he tried and failed to kill himself, by drowning in the Tiber and by the sword, all the time declaiming theatrical lines loudly: ‘Is it so terrible a thing to die?’ Finally cornered, the arch-exhibitionist paced up and down crying, ‘What an artist the world is losing in me,’ before persuading his secretary to cut his throat. Just then an emissary of the Senate rushed in, but Nero, bleeding out, murmured, ‘Too late! That’s loyalty!’

The Caesars had destroyed themselves. In the years 68–9, there were three emperors before a fourth, Vespasian – an unpretentious old general nicknamed the Muleteer, who had helped conquer Britannia and whom the historian Suetonius described as looking ‘like a man always straining to have a shit’ – was hailed as emperor. At the time, he was crushing the Jewish rebels. In 70, his son Titus stormed Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple, leaving just the supporting walls of Herod’s magnificent edifice.^*

In 97, the triumphant Chinese paladin, Ban Chao, brother of the court historian, sent an envoy to visit Rome via Parthia. This pungently energetic general had taken his troops as far west as the shores of the Caspian Sea. While his brother Ban Gu wrote his history at court, and their talented sister Zhao married in their home province, Ban Chao always wanted to fight barbarians on the frontiers, telling his writer brother, ‘A brave man has no other plan but to … do something and become somebody in a foreign land.’ His mission was to seize the trade to Parthia and Rome – and break the Xiongnu. ‘If you don’t venture into the tiger’s lair,’ said Ban Chao. ‘You never catch its cubs.’

AUTHORESS AND THE PROTECTOR -GENERAL IN THE TIGER’S LAIR: BAN CHAO AND THE WISE ONE

In 75, the new Emperor Zhang, discouraged by the endless costs incurred in putting down the tribes in central Asia, recalled Ban Chao, who decided to disobey orders, having realized that to abandon the Western Region now would lose it for ever. Instead he advised Emperor Zhang that his new empire – like so many others – could be held with very few troops backed by local auxiliaries and by ostentatious displays of ferocity. While negotiating with a local chieftain, he heard that Xiongnu ambassadors had arrived to undermine his mission. He slaughtered the envoys and, brandishing their heads, he successfully concluded his negotiation with the now cooperative potentate. During another negotiation, when he saw that the chieftain was distracted by the unhelpful advice of his sorcerer, Ban Chao beheaded the sorcerer mid-conversation and then, unabashed, continued. Eventually he defeated the Xiongnu, and took the kingdoms of Kashgar and Khotan.

Ban encountered one people, the Yuezhi (Guishuang), who, defeated by the Xiongnu, rode southwards and built their own kingdom: these nomadic horsemen the Kushan – who practised skull deformation then – conquered Bactria and burst into northern India.^* Ban Chao defeated a Kushan army, but ultimately he made peace with these new players.

The Bans flourished as protégés of Zhang’s Empress Dou, who skilfully played the game of power, using accusations of witchcraft to destroy the crown prince, then, adopting the son of another concubine, forcing his mother to kill herself.^* The heir grew up believing that Empress Dou was his mother.

In 88, aged nine the boy succeeded his father as Emperor He. Dowager Empress Dou stayed in control, her brother Dou Xian ruling as general-in-chief or regent. But his arrogance offended everyone – even the boy emperor. Dou Xian won victories against the Xiongnu, which he celebrated with a ceremony at Yanran where an inscription written by Ban Gu was dedicated. Ban Gu was promoted to the regent’s secretary with the title marshal of the Black Warrior Gate, and was joined at court by his sister Zhao, now a widow. Refusing to marry again, she became a royal tutor in the imperial library.

In 92, the thirteen-year-old boy emperor was ‘capped’ – the ceremony to celebrate his majority – and, backed by a trusted eunuch Zheng Zhong, he turned on the Dous: the regent was eliminated, the empress retired and their pet historian Ban Gu, now sixty-one, arrested. Ban’s sister, who knew the young emperor, appealed, but Gu was executed. History writing again proved a perilous pursuit. Emperor He rewarded eunuch Zheng with the titles of marquess and director of the royal palace, the first eunuch to rise so high. One of the Dou’s trusted eunuchs, Cai Lun, keeper of tools and weapons, survived the downfall of the regent to continue his development of a new material on which to write. The court wrote on heavy bamboo and expensive silk, but now, after watching how paper wasps mixed tree bark with saliva, Cai invented paper, for which the emperor promoted him. But Ban Gu was dead: who would finish the Book of Han?

The coup that killed one sibling made the others. The emperor promoted Ban Chao to protector-general of the Western Region – and wanted the Hanshu finished: he ordered the scholarly sister Ban Zhao to complete the book. Still only about forty-five, she taught the Han princesses mathematics, history, morality and feminine comportment, becoming close to Empress Deng Sui, who elevated her to lady-in-waiting. Starting like other girls as a concubine, she had been chosen as consort at fifteen, ultimately replacing the ruler’s wife and becoming empress herself. Intelligent and competent, she encouraged the use of the new invention, paper, probably advised by Ban Zhao, who presided over the transferral of the imperial library from bamboo to the new medium. Her Hanshu was one of the first history books written on paper and her Lessons for Women was written as a guide to female survival at court. Nicknamed the Wise One, Ban Zhao gave advice on all matters including Taoist sexual techniques while serving as court poet, writing verses for special occasions and memoranda on politics. Long after the death of the meek Emperor He, Dowager Empress Deng ruled China, advised by this remarkable woman.

While she was teaching empresses about astronomy and marriage, her brother Ban Chao, protector-general, had heard of the Roman empire, which the Chinese complimented by giving it the name Da Qin – Big China. Ban Chao would have seen the goods and coins of the Romans, so the old general sent an envoy called Gan Ying to report. His sister recorded in her history how Gan Ying made it to the Western Sea, maybe the Persian Gulf, where the Parthians discouraged his enterprise, as he explained: ‘The Romans trade with Parthia and India by sea. Their king always wanted to send envoys to Han, but Parthia, wishing to control the trade in multicoloured Chinese silks, blocked the way.’ Here was a global Eurasian world. There is nothing modern about trade wars. As for the Roman emperors, Gan Ying explained, ‘Their kings are not permanent. They select and appoint the most worthy man. If there are unexpected calamities in the kingdom, such as frequent extraordinary winds or rains, he is unceremoniously replaced but the dismissed one is not angry …’^*

If Gan Ying had a rose-tinted view of Roman successions, he was right up to date: that year of 97, the Romans rejected dynasty and instead chose ‘the most worthy man’: their finest soldier, the contemporary and equivalent of Ban Chao, was named Trajan. And Trajan planned to emulate Alexander the Great by invading Persia and India.

STAR WARS, PIERCED PENISES, SEX SLAVES AND STEAM BATHS

Trajan looked the part of the bluff, old-fashioned Roman soldier – tough, clean-shaven, severe grey hair worn in a classic Caesar and usually portrayed wearing a gleaming engraved breastplate – and played it well.

Trajan was never happier than when sharing the rations and camps with ‘my excellent and most loyal fellow soldiers’. His only indulgences were wine and boys, actors and dancers mainly. Trajan was plainspoken and sociable: when he travelled in a carriage, he always invited three friends to chat along the way and he had the rare confidence to have talented men around him. ‘I like what I hear,’ he gruffly told a philosopher, ‘but I don’t understand a word of what you’re talking about.’ Yet he had an instinct for power.

Born in Italica, Spain, the emperor had no sons with his wife Pompeia Plotina, but he lived at the centre of a female household consisting of her sister, niece and two great-nieces, who all now moved to Rome. When Empress Pompeia arrived at the palace, she told the spectators, ‘I enter here as the same kind of woman I’ll be when I depart.’

Trajan liked to tease his entourage about the succession, once asking them to name the ten best candidates for emperor: it is a strange feature of successful epochs that there are many men gifted enough to rule while in meagre times there appears to be almost none. Hadrian was always the frontrunner. Like Trajan, he hailed from Hispania: Trajan had been Hadrian’s guardian when the boy’s father died young and he curated his protégé’s rise, but there was something about Hadrian that irritated Trajan. Hadrian had charmed Trajan’s wife and sister-in-law, who orchestrated his marriage to Sabina, the emperor’s beloved great-niece, positioning him perfectly. But it is always dangerous to be the prime candidate: maybe Trajan’s wife protected him by not overpromoting him. But at one point Trajan disapproved of his extravagant partying, and then Hadrian was caught hitting on Trajan’s male lovers. Older autocrats are likely be touchy on such matters. ‘Everything depended,’ wrote Trajan’s scholarly friend Pliny the Younger, ‘on the whims of a single man,’ but the emperor’s decisions were usually sensible.^*

No epoch realizes at the time quite how lucky it is until it is gone. But the spirit of this epoch was a lucky one of clement weather, lush harvests and plentiful revenues from an imperial population of between fifty and seventy million. Trajan possessed the three essentials of greatness – acumen, vision and resources. Between wars to annihilate the Dacians (Romania), he embarked on a massive building programme in Rome, boasting of his grandeur and victories with new temples, his triumphal column and the new stadium called Circus Maximus.

The rich, served by droves of slaves, enjoyed luxury and ease – ‘Red Sea pearls and polished Indian ivory’, in the words of the poet Martial – but the realities of urban life, imperial power and Roman society remained gritty and messy, corrupt and brutal.

Rome was now a seething mega-city of a million people, with the emperors enjoying vast palaces, the rich in sumptuous villas and the poor piled high in insulae, ten-storey blocks of flats. ‘I live in a little cell, with a window that won’t even close,’ wrote Martial, ‘in which Boreas [god of dark winter] himself wouldn’t want to live.’ Martial, another well-born Spaniard doing well in Rome, had been in and out of imperial favour but chronicled the hypocritical lubricity of high and low with irrepressible mischief. ‘With your giant nose and cock /’, he wrote, ‘I bet you can with ease / When you get excited / Check the end for cheese.’ He hated the cruelty of sadistic slave masters: ‘You say that the hare isn’t cooked, and ask for the whip; / Rufus, you prefer to carve up your cook than your hare.’ Yet he had a heart too. His most touching poem was in praise of a beloved enslaved female who died young: ‘A child with a voice as sweet as the fabled swan’s.’^*

Yet even the poor could enjoy what Juvenal called ‘bread and circuses’ – the bloody spectacles at the Colosseum and the Circus with 50,000 and 200,000 seats^* – and the baths. Trajan was just the latest potentate to build his own thermae. Sixty thousand Romans could bathe at any one time – ideal for what Ovid had called ‘furtive sport’. Nothing so defined urbane luxury as the baths that became the mark of Romanness: ‘To bathe is to live,’ a Roman scrawled on a wall, while the gravestone of a jolly bon vivant declared, ‘Baths, sex and wine ruin our bodies but make life worth living.’ A timeless truth. Yet it is ironic that the baths define Roman civilisation since they also probably spread the waterborne diseases that killed so many. In the baths, Martial chronicled naked Rome: he noticed that men tried to cover circumcised penises (the mark of Jewish slaves and therefore very unfashionable) and recorded the hilarity as thousands of bathers applauded when a spectacularly well-endowed man disrobed. He mocked the virtuous wife who was so excited by mixed bathing that she eloped with a youth, and the macho man who went to ogle young penises. A graffito from this time reads: ‘Apelles and Dexter had lunch here most pleasantly and fucked at the same time,’ adding, ‘We Apelles the Mouse and his brother Dexter lovingly fucked two women twice.’ The Roman city was replicated across the empire from Mauritania to Britannia: the word civilisation derives from civis, town, and civilisation comes from urbis, city. But cities were flourishing not only in Europe, Africa and Asia.

Across the Atlantic, in a world cut off from Afro-Eurasia for millennia, Trajan’s Mesoamerican contemporary First Step Shark – Yax Ehb Xook – the ajaw or lord of a thriving city state Tikal (Guatemala), one of many Mayan-speaking cities, was founding one of the great dynasties that would rule for eight centuries. Founded around 300 BC, Tikal – known by the Maya as Yax Mutal – had 100,000 inhabitants, much smaller than Rome, Luoyang, Chang’an and Seleucia, the biggest cities of Eurasia, each with a million. But Tikal was just one of many Mesoamerican city states that boasted sophisticated urban life. They developed glyphic writing (using logograms to represent words), charted the stars and created a calendar, celebrating their festivals according to their knowledge of the heavens. They lived on maize, tomatoes, beans, and drank chocolate. In their workshops, they crafted obsidian, volcanic glass, into weapons, tools, jewels and mirrors, and they spun cotton, which they traded, along with slaves, to their neighbours. They were skilled dentists, inserting turquoise and quartz into their front teeth so firmly that they remain in Maya skeletons. They knew of the wheel, but they did not use it for travel, only for children’s toys, yet they built straight, raised roads, known as white roads, to reflect the Milky Way. In their monumental pyramidal temples, they worshipped an array of gods who demanded blood: their rulers had to draw stingray spines through their penises, a painful ritual that demonstrated the need for divine approval to rule. At the temples, they made human sacrifices, by beheading, scalping, skinning, disembowelling their offerings, cutting out their hearts and burying them with wild animals. The best victims were high-born prisoners. The cities featured ballcourts where the Maya played sacred games with rubber balls, which had even higher prizes than our football. Their gods were said to have clashed with mortals on the ballcourts; some gods were top ballplayers and mortals became gods by beating them. Their rulers played to demonstrate their power. Sometimes they used balls containing human heads.

The games represented the wars fought against rival cities in which they deployed blow darts and obsidian spears. Major conflicts they called ‘star wars’, represented by a glyph of a star scattering the earth. The Maya traded their jewels, obsidian crafts and slaves with other American peoples,^* including the biggest city on the continent, Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico, City of the Sun. Teotihuacan’s apogee coincided with Trajan’s reign. It had a multi-ethnic population of 150,000 – Maya and others, and a hinterland containing a million people – and boasted a central avenue, the Avenue of the Dead, lined with monumental pyramids and temples. The Pyramid of the Sun, site of mass sacrifices, was the third highest edifice on earth.

Teotihuacan was the centre of obsidian craftsmanship, its people mining the glass from an old volcano, and many of them worked in obsidian laboratories, making weapons, mirrors and jewellery. Yet the city was built with no wheeled vehicles, no animal power and, unlike the many Maya cities, few inscriptions and no ballcourt. Lacking portraits or tombs, it may have been a sort of republic. After a revolution around 200, the Teotihuacans stopped building temples and palaces and started building comfortable apartment buildings decorated with colourful psychedelic murals, their inhabitants praying at communal altars where the heads of sacrificed victims were displayed. This was perhaps the first social housing and urban-renewal scheme.^*

Back in Rome, Trajan, granted the agnomen Optimus Princeps – Best Emperor – decided to conquer Parthia, which had been weakened by the feuds of House Arsak. Rome was gradually swallowing up the kingdoms that controlled Eurasian trade. In 106, when the Nabataean king died, Trajan annexed Arabia, giving Rome another border with Parthia and control of most trade routes except the Parthian ports on the Persian Gulf. The Best Emperor could not fail …

HADRIAN IN LOVE: DEATH ON THE NILE

Trajan’s Iraq war started well. As Hadrian covered his rear in Syria, Trajan, deploying a cosmopolitan army, which was only about 2 per cent Italian and included Arab cameleteers from Palmyra, Balearic slingers and African horsemen under a Berber general Lucius Quietus, found the Parthians in disarray. After swooping on the capital Ctesiphon, he sailed down the Tigris to the Gulf, where he gazed at the ships: ‘I should certainly have crossed to India too if I were still young.’ But the Parthians regrouped, while their allies – the Jews in Alexandria, Cyprus and Judaea – rebelled. Facing an Iraqi insurgency, the sixty-three-year-old Trajan had to fight desperately, ‘his majestic grey head’ attracting enemy fire. Retreating to Antioch, he ordered Quietus to cull the Jews, who were slaughtered and enslaved in huge numbers. The Best Emperor suffered a stroke – though he was convinced he was being poisoned. At his bedside, Empress Pompeia and her niece Matidia forged or coaxed Trajan’s adoption of Hadrian. Anyone who knew too much paid the price. Two days after Trajan’s death, in August 117, his wine taster died aged twenty-eight, as noted on his gravestone – surely more than a coincidence and a hint of dark deeds around the deathbed.

Emperor Hadrian abandoned Trajan’s conquests in Parthia, a sensible decision given that Jewish rebellions were still being suppressed. But he did not trust Quietus, so he had him killed. Then, arriving in Rome, he pre-empted any opposition by executing four ex-consuls.

Hadrian was nicknamed the Greekling, a fan of Hellenistic culture, fashion and love, wearing his full head of hair curled and a well-tended beard, Greek-style. He liked to be an expert on everything: he was certainly one of the most talented of emperors. He wrote witty poetry, possessed the gift of the gab and worked hard. His expeditions from Syria to Britannia make him the best-travelled of monarchs until the age of steam. He was jealous of experts, yet he promoted talented people, enjoying cheeky repartee with poets. When a woman gave him a petition and he said he might not have time to read it, she retorted, ‘Don’t be emperor then.’ He praised her and gave her an audience. But this highly strung and restless emperor was also as lethal as he was subtle, liquidating enemies fast and deploying spies, the frumentari, commissaries, who gave him reports on the personal lives of his subordinates, always useful knowledge. He could be pompous, pedantic and touchy, never forgiving Trajan’s architect, who told him, ‘Be off, and draw your gourds’ – Hadrian was designing domes – ‘you don’t understand these things.’ Hadrian later had him killed.^* And he once stabbed a slave secretary in the eye, blinding him.

While he adored his mother-in-law Matidia, whom he deified on her death (not always the attitude of sons-in-law), his marriage with her daughter Sabina deteriorated, but he insisted on her travelling with him. In 119–21, on a trip to Germania and Britannia, where he built his wall across the north, the relationship hit a crisis. His chief secretary, Suetonius, now forty, born in Africa, a friend of Pliny, was Trajan’s ex-archivist who had sifted the imperial papers to compile his Lives of the Caesars. He was accused of having an affair with Sabina, then in her thirties. Pliny said he was ‘quiet and studious’, but judging by his eye for outrageous material (he was also the author of a vanished masterpiece, Lives of Famous Whores), he was playful company. The historian was sacked – and then vanished. Did Hadrian quietly kill him?

Sabina continued to accompany Hadrian on his travels: in Bithynia, he fell in love with a beautiful Greek boy, the fourteen-year-old Antinous, who became his permanent companion. Travelling in 129 through Judaea and visiting the ruins of Jerusalem, a reminder of the ongoing rebellions by the Jews, he decided to build a shrine to Jupiter on the site of the Temple and a Roman city on the site of the holy city that he renamed Aelia Capitolina (after his own family Aelus and Jupiter’s temple on the Capitoline Hill). Moving on to Egypt, he was celebrating the festival of Osiris – which marks the death of the Egyptian god and his rebirth as the Nilotic waters – when somehow Antinous, now twenty, drowned, whether by accident, suicide, a ritual gone wrong or a sacrifice in return for Hadrian’s life. Poleaxed, Hadrian founded a new city, Antinouspolis, around his lover’s tomb, then established a cult across the empire that celebrated the life-giving death of divine youth. The cult became popular, evidence that a sacred young man offering salvation through his own death and resurrection was a persuasive narrative. But Hadrian’s luck changed in those Nilotic waters.

* Pliny estimated that, thanks to its 25 per cent tax on Indian Ocean trade in luxuries such as silk from China, and nard and ivory from Muziris, the port of the Chera rulers of south-western India, Rome earned 100 million sesterces a year, perhaps a third of imperial revenue. There is evidence, including a statue of Buddha found at Berenice, to confirm that a community of Indians, probably merchants, lived in the ports on the Red Sea. This trade – by many routes, land and sea – was in 1877 dubbed the Silk Road – Seidenstraße – by a German traveller, Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen, uncle of the First World War pilot the Red Baron.

* The Golden House was so magnificent it embarrassed the more austere Emperor Vespasian, Nero’s ultimate successor. Gradually dismantled, it was replaced by the Baths of Titus and other buildings until only its lower rooms survived. When discovered in the fifteenth century, they were initially thought to be caves or grottoes, so their decadent frescoes which so inspired the artists Raphael and Michelangelo were described as ‘grotesques’ – hence the modern word.

* His secret burial place became a Christian shrine – it was beneath what is now St Peter’s Basilica.

* This triumph yielded vast riches – including the candelabra from the Holy of Holies – and tens of thousands of Jewish slaves. Titus embellished Rome, building an arch and a huge new amphitheatre. Adapting Nero’s Colossus, he and Vespasian added sunrays to dedicate the statue to Sol Invictus (Invincible Sun) and placed it outside the amphitheatre – hence its name, Colosseum. While that still stands, the Colossus itself, a sight in Rome for four centuries, vanished some time around the fall of the western empire.

* The vast Kushan empire, founded by the warlord Kujula Kadphises and ruled from Pataliputra, endured for three centuries, a people bearded and moustachioed with long hair, sporting long coats, trousers and boots, brandishing lance and sword. The founder’s great-grandson Kanishka helped expand Indic culture and religion into central Asia and China and central Asian culture into India. He revered Greek, Indian and Persian pantheons – Shiva, Buddha, Hercules and Ahura-Mazda in a unique hybridity – and called himself king of kings. He also transported Chinese silk to the Indian Ocean and thence to the Mediterranean

* The female household of the Han was carefully regulated. Selections were made every eighth month of the year when virgins of flawless families would be inspected by a three-man committee – a palace counsellor, a eunuch and a physiognomist who graded the girls from 1 to 9. The lucky one would then be brought to the capital Luoyang for intimate examination: ‘Skin white and fine … belly round, hips square, body like congealed lard and carved jade, breasts bulging and navel deep enough to take a half-inch pearl,’ read one report. ‘No haemorrhoids, no blemishes, no moles, no sores nor defects in the mouth, the nose, armpits, private parts or feet.’ Concubines were ranked as either Honourable, Beautiful or Chosen Ladies. One of the Honourable Ladies was usually made empress.

* In 102, Wise One, Ban Zhao, petitioned Empress Deng to let her brother Protector-General Ban Chao retire. Deng agreed and he returned to Luoyang where she debriefed him on his adventures in the west before he died at seventy, leaving his son to run his territories. Ban Zhao’s influence continued: when the authoress finally died in 115, she was mourned by the royal family. She was the first famous female author: Empress Deng had her works collected in three volumes after her death.

* When Pliny, governor of Bithynia, encountered the growing sect of Christians, he executed those who refused to sacrifice to the gods in honour of the emperor and in the spirit of enquiry he tortured two Christian slaves yet ‘discovered nothing else but depraved, excessive superstition’. So he consulted Trajan. ‘You observed proper procedure, my dear Pliny,’ replied Trajan. ‘They’re not to be sought out; if denounced and proved guilty, they’re to be punished, with this reservation, that whoever denies that he’s a Christian and really proves it – by worshipping our gods – shall be pardoned … Anonymous denunciations have no place … They’re out of keeping with the spirit of our age.’

* Martial revelled in the sexual freedoms of well-off Roman women such as his wanton friend Caelia, who was spoiled for choice by the diversity of the slaves that flooded into Rome with each victory: ‘you grant your favours to Parthians … Germans … Dacians, and for you from his Egyptian city comes the gallant of Memphis, and the black Indian from the Red Sea; nor do you shun the lecheries of circumcised Jews.’ His contemporary the poet Juvenal agreed that an honest wife was a ‘rare bird’ in a world where the slaves who were meant to guard her virtue could so easily collude in her pleasures. ‘Who guards the guardians?’ he asked in an often misunderstood line. ‘Who now keep silent the sins of the promiscuous girl when paid in the same coin?’

* Champion charioteers became rich – even though they were slaves. Most famous was Scorpus who won 2,048 races until he was killed, probably in a chariot crash. Martial wrote his epitaph: ‘Here I lie, Scorpus, pride of the noisy circus, darling of Rome. Spiteful fate snatched me aged twenty-six. She must have counted my victories, not my years, and decided I was old.’

* The Maya were in contact with the Caribbean where invaders and traders from the mainland were slowly conquering the islands. New DNA analysis shows that for millennia the Caribbean had been home to archaic foraging peoples, but now invaders in canoes from America, makers of ceramic goods, were occupying the islands, wiping out the existing peoples, who vanish in most places, through either intermarriage or killing. These occupiers were the ancestors of the Taíno, who inhabited the islands until the Spanish conquest.

* Teotihuacan’s connections extended not only to the south: there is evidence of links to north America too. This was the time of a system of settlements around Hopewell in Ohio where after 100 BC people built burial mounds and large earthworks based on complex astronomical measurements, created beautiful artefacts – ranging from copper breastplates to pipes adorned with animal carvings that evoked shamanic rituals – and buried their dead with ritual costumes made up of ornaments that originated from Mexico to the Great Lakes. This culture broke up around AD 500.

* Hadrian’s buildings were spectacular: his palace at Tivoli – where remains are still being discovered – was nothing less than an imperial theme park designed to show his power. In Rome, his tomb, known today as the Castel Sant’Angelo, is magnificently bold, and the beauty of his Pantheon, with its open-eyed dome representing the world itself, boasting the widest vault of any building until 1436, still takes one’s breath away.