The World

Severans and Zenobians: Arab Dynasties

THE EUNUCHS, THE IMPERIAL PHILOSOPHER AND THE PANDEMIC

While Hadrian was visiting Greece, revelling in the rituals of Greek culture and projecting himself as a new Pericles, he was also channelling another hero, Antiochos Epiphanes. Back in Jerusalem, the building of Aelia on the site of the Jewish Temple sparked a new revolt led by a self-declared prince of Israel, Simon Bar Kochba, who annihilated one Roman legion and threatened the security of the entire east. Rushing back to Judaea and summoning his best general from Britannia, Hadrian supervised the start of the harsh campaign, regaining control by 136 only by killing 580,000 Jews and enslaving 97,000, so many that they caused a slump in slave prices. But Hadrian persisted in building Aelia, banning Jews from Judaea, which he pointedly renamed Palestina – after the Philistines. The Jews cursed Hadrian, but after this third catastrophe, following the destructions of Jerusalem in 586 BC and AD 70, the Jews – settling in large numbers in Alexandria and Hispania – survived as both a religion and a people, never losing their link to, and reverence for, Jerusalem and Judaea.

When he returned to his Tivoli villa, the sixty-year-old Hadrian fell ill with arteriosclerosis and fretted about the succession. His great-nephew Pedanius Fruscus, backed by his distinguished nonagenarian grandfather Servanius, expected to be named, but instead Hadrian chose a playful aristocrat, Ceionius. When Pedanius and Servanius grumbled or perhaps even plotted, Hadrian had the boy executed and forced the old man to kill himself, which he did with the curse that the emperor should ‘long for death but be unable to die’. And so it happened.

Suffering bitterly, Hadrian drew a circle around his nipple as a bullseye and begged a slave to kill him, but he could not do it. The emperor had not completely lost his wit, writing brilliantly about death.^* In 138, Ceionius died young, at which Hadrian created around himself a new adoptive family to rule into the future. First he adopted as his son Antoninus, already fifty-two, a decent and efficient proconsul who was required to adopt in turn Lucius, the son of the late Ceionius, and the sixteen-year-old Marcus Annius Verus.

Hadrian had been close to the Verus family since his Spanish childhood. Marcus’ grandfather, another respected proconsul, was one of Hadrian’s trusted friends, a subtle political veteran who is acclaimed on his marble inscription for his skill in ‘juggling the glass ball’ – a perfect definition of politics then and now. ‘From my grandfather Verus,’ wrote Marcus later, ‘I learned a kindly disposition and sweetness of temper.’ Something about the grandson Marcus Verus had struck Hadrian: he nicknamed the boy Verissimus, Most Truthful, a play on his name. Antoninus was also Marcus’ great-uncle. It was an intricate but well-judged web he spun.

In 138, Hadrian – denouncing the murderous ineptitude of medicine: ‘Many doctors have killed the king’ – finally died. Emperor Antoninus Pius moved the two Caesars into the palace and had them tutored by the best teachers. While Lucius was a playboy, Marcus was a philosopher, who used the Greek ideas of Stoicism as a guide to living as trainee emperor. Expected to die like most Romans in his fifties, Antoninus actually ruled for twenty-three stable years. In most previous reigns, the long apprenticeship of Marcus would have been untenable: either emperor or heir would have had to kill the other, but Marcus was neither ambitious nor entitled. Living in Tiberius’ old palace on the Palatine, he warned himself, ‘Don’t be Caesarofied! Don’t be dipped in the purple – for that can happen!’

In 145, Antoninus married his daughter Faustina to Marcus, who was unusually innocent for a young prince surrounded by available slaves: ‘I preserved the flower of manhood, didn’t seek proof of my virility, even deferred the time.’ Faustina became the Augusta, outranking Marcus, who was the Caesar. The cleverness of Hadrian’s web was that it allowed Antoninus to leave the empire to his own daughter.

In 161, the guards asked the dying emperor for his password. ‘Equanimity,’ he said, and died. Equanimity would indeed be Marcus’ ideal. Marcus made Lucius his junior co-emperor – even though he was an inept jackanapes who toured the empire with a circus of actors and clowns. This ancient fratboy even built a tavern inside his villa so he could wassail day and night.

Faustina had spent most of the previous decade pregnant, bearing fourteen children, of whom six died in infancy. Childhood mortality was high: only 50 per cent of Roman females lived to twelve, only 50 per cent of boys lived to seven; smallpox, which probably evolved from a rodent virus in prehistorical Africa, killed many, as did waterborne diseases. Marcus adored his children, describing one daughter as ‘a cloudless sky, a holiday, hope close at hand, a total joy, an excellent and flawless source of pride’. When one of those children died, he attempted a Stoical response: ‘One man prays: “How I may not lose my little child,” but you must pray: “How I may not be afraid to lose him.”’ On death he reflected, ‘Loss is nothing but change.’ In the year of their accession, Faustina gave birth to twin boys. One died at four but the other, Commodus, grew up to be golden-haired, blue-eyed and energetic, the first son born to a ruling princeps since Britannicus. To protect little Commodus, Marcus married one daughter to his co-emperor Lucius and the rest to husbands who would not threaten the succession.

Having survived so much dangerous childbearing, Faustina, passionate and outspoken, grew more distant from the cerebral Marcus and threw herself into affairs with gladiators and actors. Marcus even caught her in flagrante with one, but he was tolerant, though Faustina’s affairs were even mentioned on stage in Rome. When his aides advised him to exile her, he joked, ‘If we send her away, we must also send away her dowry’ – the empire. But Faustina’s intrigues would almost cost Marcus his head.

No Roman emperor so deserved a serene reign of philosophical contemplation, but Marcus was confronted by war on all fronts. From the north-east Germanic tribes galloped south and broke into Italy; in the east the Parthians attacked Syria. Lucius was dispatched to oversee a counter-attack that culminated in the burning of Ctesiphon. At the same time, keen to take advantage of Parthian defeat, Marcus sent an embassy to China.

In 166, envoys of An-dun (Marcus Aurelius Antoninus), king of Da Qin (Rome), probably Romanized Greek or Arab merchants from a Red Sea port, arrived in the capital Luoyang to meet the Han emperor – the first direct contact. There had been several moments in the previous century when Romans and Han were close: when Trajan was in Ctesiphon he was only a few hundred miles from the garrisons of Ban Yao, son of Protector-General Ban Chao. Roman coins have been found in China and Vietnam but especially in India, suggesting that most of the trade took place there. Bearing presents of ivory, rhino and tortoiseshell and an essay on astronomy, Marcus’ envoys were probably supposed to discuss direct silk trade, cutting out the Parthians. But they arrived just in time for high drama in Luoyang: Emperor Huan, thirty-four years old, took control of his kingdom from overmighty courtiers – with the help of trusted eunuchs.

In China, candidates for the knife were sometimes castrated by their families to prepare them for service at court, but others presented themselves outside the court. Having been asked thrice, ‘Will you regret it or not?’, they were anaesthetized with opium and held down for the operation – in China they were not just castrated but emasculated, losing not only testicles but penises. The wound took a hundred days to heal. Survival rates are just guesswork, but somewhere between 90 per cent and two-thirds died from an infection. If they survived as ‘un-men’, they applied to the Inner Court. For their services in helping emperors crush overmighty ministers, they were given titles and allowed to adopt heirs to whom they could leave riches and honours. Yet un-men were hated for their differentness – they often remained tiny, their voices were high, and they were partly incontinent, urinating through quills they kept in their hair – hence their nickname Urine-Sacks.

Huandi failed to control his powerful eunuchs, who framed his empress and had her and her entire clan executed for witchcraft. When Huandi died in 168, the eighteen-year-old Dowager Empress Dou appointed her father Dou Wu as regent. The dowager decided to kill the late emperor’s nine favourite concubines, but the eunuchs let her kill only one of them. The throne was vacant until the regent found a Han princeling in the provinces who was enthroned in the capital at the age of eleven as Emperor Ling. But the chief tutor, head of the civil service, Chen Fan, persuaded the regent to purge the eunuchs. Seventeen un-men gathered in secret and ‘smeared blood on their mouths’ in a pact praying to August Heaven to help them annihilate the Dou family. The eunuchs seized the dowager empress and surrounded the regent. Dou killed himself, his family was annihilated, the chief tutor was trampled to death by irate un-men. The castrated potentates, the ten so-called central regular attendants, now ruled China – but an anti-eunuch backlash was coming.

Marcus Aurelius’ envoys were probably in Luoyang for the triumph of the eunuchs, but it is not known if they made it home. Lucius’ successes against Parthia must have yielded a bounty of prizes, but that was not all he brought back.

A pandemic had hit China in waves between 151 and 161. The world was much more global than one might expect; the disease was reported among Roman soldiers at Lucius’ siege of Ctesiphon and it returned with them. Lucius and Marcus celebrated Parthian triumphs, but soon afterwards a plague ripped through the empire. Marcus understood in a very modern way that the cure and the panic of plague could be ‘far more corrupting’ than the sickness itself. The pandemic, probably a strain of smallpox – incessant killer throughout history – was observed by Marcus’ doctor Galen, a Greek philosopher from Pergamum who had studied medicine in Alexandria. A doctor for gladiators, he became expert at dressing the wounds inflicted on soft flesh by cold steel, understood that the brain was the seat of the soul and realized that blood circulated. Yet he was hopelessly wrong about most things: he believed that health was the result of four humours (blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile) and that there were two different circulatory systems: his remained the dominant medical theory for over a thousand years, and doctors were an iatrogenic menace to their patients until the late nineteenth century. Over the next two millennia, whenever you read the words ‘doctors were called’, prepare for death.

Now accompanying Marcus and Lucius as they travelled north towards the German war, Galen watched the army being annihilated by the plague, noting its symptoms. In this period, and during its second surge a few years later, its mortality rate was 25 per cent and it killed 2,000 a day in Rome, 250,000 in total. Rome never recovered, and Europe knew no more million-strong cities until 1800. Villages all over the empire were left empty, with as much as 10 per cent of the population killed, and the army was ravaged too, all of which created a labour shortage that may have affected the Roman ability to find troops to hold the German and Danube frontiers. The plague hit the Germanic tribes as well, but they did not live in cities and could move camp easily. Its effect in weakening the empire was as important as it is incalculable: pandemics are invisible and inexplicable, but they have brought down more empires than any number of demented emperors and fierce battles.

Marcus kept away from Rome, while Galen prescribed a special tonic of theriac, myrrh, snake flesh and, perhaps most usefully, opium poppy juice. On the way back home Lucius, just thirty-nine, contracted the plague and perished. Now Marcus concentrated on protecting his eight-year-old son Commodus, who was cared for by Galen.

In 169, Marcus launched his war against Germanic tribes, who resisted strongly, defeating at least one of his armies and invading both Italy and Greece. But the emperor, learning the military craft on the job, persisted, aided by miracles such as a lightning bolt that destroyed German siege engines and a freak rainstorm that rescued a beleaguered legion. At last defeating the Germans in battle, in 175 he negotiated a peace, allowing many Germans to settle within the empire and serve in the Roman army, including the horsewomen whose skeletons were found near Hadrian’s Wall in northern Britannia.

Marcus spent several years at the front, contemplating the meaning of existence.^* But absence from Rome was dangerous. A rumour spread that he was dead, reaching Faustina, whose priority was to safeguard the succession for Commodus. This false news was the first in a series of misunderstandings: Faustina wrote to Avidius Cassius, rector orientis, eastern viceroy, to get his backing if Marcus really was dead. Whether deliberately or not, Faustina had betrayed her husband.

THE PHILOSOPHER’S MONSTER: COMMODUS

A vicious martinet who claimed descent from Seleukos, Augustus and Herod – an ominous combination – Avidius declared himself emperor. But in the west Marcus was popular – and very much alive. A centurion beheaded Avidius and sent the head to Marcus, who just had it buried, refusing to take vengeance (‘May it never happen,’ he told senators, ‘that any of you should be killed either by my vote or by yours’), and he burned Avidius’ correspondence with his wife without reading it.

Somehow Marcus and Faustina reconciled, but soon afterwards, travelling with Marcus, Faustina died, aged forty-five. Marcus grieved for her – ‘such a fine woman, so obedient, so loving, so simple’ – but on his return from his eastern travels he promoted Commodus, just fifteen, to co-emperor and consul, the youngest ever. As Marcus returned to fight the Germans, Commodus was his companion, but the smirking hellion came to loathe his fastidious father. Marcus knew that Commodus was flawed, but fortunately parents are programmed to be deluded about their children. Many teenagers are spoiled, but imperial heirs were superlatively spoiled. ‘If you can, convert him by teaching; if not remember that kindliness was given to you for this very thing,’ Marcus suggested. ‘Kindliness is invincible,’ so he would say, ‘No, child, you are harming yourself, child.’ But he was faced with a simple but terrible dilemma understood only by autocrats: either he chose Commodus as heir and ensured a smooth succession, or he named someone else and had to kill his own son or condemn him to rebellion and death.

In 179, Marcus captured 40,000 Germans and celebrated with an equestrian statue and a column boasting of his victories, both of which still stand in Rome. But soon afterwards, at Vindobona (Vienna), he caught the plague. Knowing the symptoms well, he called in his courtiers, rebuked them for weeping, then summoned Commodus, telling his friends, ‘Here’s my son, whom you brought up and who’s just reached adolescence and stands in need of guides through the storms of life … You must be fathers to him in place of me alone … In this way you will provide yourselves and everyone else with an excellent emperor …’ The courtiers must have quaked at the prospect of Commodus. Marcus had won real affection and respect by learning war with the men. He was a student of deathbeds, those strange theatres of bodily disintegration and political transference. Marcus noticed Commodus ‘standing by his deathbed welcoming the evil happening to him’ and muttering, ‘We’ll breathe more easily now this schoolmaster is gone.’ When a tribune asked for the watchword, Marcus, now fifty-eight, retorted, ‘Go to the rising sun. I am already setting.’

SLAUGHTER OF EUNUCHS AND THE MEGALOMANIA OF EXSUPERATORIUS

Commodus was ‘most attractive to look at, because of his well-proportioned body and manly beauty, his hair natural, blond and curly. When he walked in sunlight, it shone like fire (some thought he sprinkled it with gold dust before going out) … and the first down was beginning to appear on his cheeks.’ If strangers admired him, those who knew him best hated him most: the first conspiracy was led by his own sister Lucilla, but the assassin, their cousin Quadratus, bungled the hit and was killed. Lucilla was murdered. A second plot gave Commodus the pretext to execute his father’s ministers and then his own wife. One of the plotters along with his sister was a Christian freedman’s daughter named Marcia, who had been the mistress of Quadratus. Somehow Marcia not only avoided denunciation but became the emperor’s mistress and adviser.

Yet Commodus possessed a cunning instinct for weakness and a gift for manipulation, bribing the army with money and peace and entertaining the people with thrilling spectacles. Revelling in his taboo-breaking antics, this vicious buffoon charged a million sesterces for his performances as a gladiator, traditionally the job of a murderous slave and therefore a way of projecting a popular touch. Commodus performed as a secutor, the elite gladiator who wore a full-face helmet with slits for the eyes, a loincloth, a leather belt, a thong on one arm, a greave on one leg, shield and sword, to fight the retiarius, a light gladiator who brandished trident and net. He always won, but when his opponents surrendered, he spared them. He killed a hundred lions, three elephants and a giraffe.

Practical jokes are always the resort of the witless; his were mirthless and cruel. Relishing his entourage of giants and dwarves, a wrestling hulk named Narcissus and a man with a penis larger than any animal except an elephant, Commodus’ practical jokes involved blinding and dissecting people. Spectators did not know whether to giggle at his absurdity or bite their lip in terror.

By 189, he was presenting himself as Jupiter and Hercules, sporting lionskin and a club, and adopting the extravagant agnomen Exsuperatorius (a delicious word meaning Supersuperlative). When he called himself Amazonius, he renamed Marcia Amazonia. She was an unlikely Christian but managed to protect the bishop of Rome, Victor, and free Christians from the mines. Unlike his predecessors, who regarded Christianity as a dangerous superstitio, Commodus saw it as just another eastern cult; perhaps Marcia encouraged his idea of himself as a reincarnated god. His misrule sparked more conspiracies that fed his paranoia. The plague returned with a vengeance; thousands were dying while Commodus’ killings became frenzied. His hitmen used infected needles dipped into pox sores so that the murdered would die of supposed natural causes – perhaps the first biological warfare. Now the emperor planned a reckoning with his enemies just as the slaughter of the eunuchs began in China.

On 22 September 189, the generals and bureaucrats decided to deal with the omnipotent Ten Eunuchs once and for all. It was the culmination of a decade of peasant rebellions, outrageous corruption and eunuch misrule. The Ten Eunuchs had repeatedly manipulated the weak emperors and used brazen brutality to liquidate all challengers. When they enthroned a child emperor and slaughtered their enemies, the generals decided to slaughter all the un-men. To that end they surrounded the Northern Palace and lit a fire at the gate to smoke out the eunuchs. Three days later, they stormed the palace and systematically killed every eunuch they could find – 2,000 of them. Anyone they came across without male genitalia (except women) was beheaded, so boys and adolescents had to prove their wholeness by dropping their trousers and revealing their penises. The all-powerful eunuch Zhang managed to seize the boy emperor Shao and flee towards the Yellow River, but they were hunted down and cornered. ‘We’re going to be destroyed and chaos will break out in the empire,’ said the eunuch. ‘Your Majesty, please take care of yourself!’ and he threw himself into the river.

The power of the Han had vanished with their eunuchs. When the general Dong Zhuo found the emperor and his little brother, they were riding in a peasant’s cart lost, almost alone, by the Yellow River. An entire cosmic system, headed by the Han emperors, was shattered by peasant rebellions. ‘The deer was running loose’ – the vivid Chinese expression for mayhem – and it would be four centuries before anyone caught it and a family united China again.^*

In December 192, in Rome, Commodus, still just twenty-nine, mustered a posse of gladiators to kill both consuls and terrorize Rome. But he had gone too far.

ELAGABALUS IN TRANSITION: THE AFRICAN EMPEROR AND THREE ARAB EMPRESSES

Languishing in his bath, Commodus wrote out his hit list and gave it to his beloved slave Philcommodus (Lovecommodus). His megalomania was raging, his administration in disorder, as he ruled through his lover Marcia, his manservant turned chamberlain Eclectus and a thuggish praetorian, Laetus.

In 191, he declared himself Pacifier of the World, renamed all the months after himself and rededicated Rome as Colonia Commodiana. When he planned a slaughter on 1 January 192, Marcia advised caution.

Lovecommodus showed the hit list to Marcia, and she saw that her name was at the top. ‘Well done, Commodus,’ she said, activating her conspiracy with her lover Eclectus. ‘What repayment for the kindness I’ve lavished on you and for the drunken insults endured all these years. A drunkard can’t outplay a sober woman.’

Marcia decided to poison Commodus and acclaim the city prefect Pertinax as emperor. Meanwhile Commodus held games at which he cut off an ostrich’s head. He then, recalled a witness, ‘came up to where we were sitting holding the head in his left hand and raising the bloody sword in his right.’ Saying nothing, he grinned, eyes gleaming eerily.

On 31 December, Marcia brought the bathing Commodus a poisoned glass of wine. Exsuperatorius started to vomit, at which Marcia sent in Narcissus the personal trainer, who strangled him with the cord of his dressing gown. Pertinax was hailed as emperor and Marcia married Eclectus. But all three were killed in the civil wars that followed, out of which emerged a dynasty, led by an African emperor and an Arab empress.

His beard thick and curled Greek-style, Septimius Severus, African-born son of a Berber-Carthaginian family, had risen fast under Marcus thanks to the pandemic. In his forties serving in Syria, he married an Arab girl, Julia Domna, a princess of Emesa (Homs),^* and they had twins sons. From 193, when Septimius was acclaimed emperor, he campaigned east and west, and expanded the empire to its greatest extent, always accompanied by Domna.

In 208, he invaded Caledonia (Scotland), where he fought to the northernmost point but only managed to hold the centre. He promoted his tough elder son, Caracalla (who earned his nickname by wearing a rough Caledonian hoodie), to co-emperor, followed by his brother Geta. But the two boys hated each other. Withdrawing to Eboracum (York), frustrated by the Caledonians, Septimius planned genocide: ‘Let no one escape total destruction … not even the male baby in the womb.’ Domna publicly criticized the promiscuity of the Scottish women. ‘We satisfy the call of nature much better than you Roman women,’ replied the wife of the Scottish chieftain, ‘for we openly take the best men, whereas you’re debauched in secret by the worst.’ In York, the emperor sickened and died, advising his sons: ‘Be harmonious, pay the soldiers, scorn everyone else.’

Their mother worked on family unity, but back in Rome, Caracalla ordered Geta’s murder. When Domna tried to defend him, he was killed in her arms. Caracalla granted citizenship to all free men in the empire, regardless of class or race, displaying the tolerance that helped make Rome so successful. Racially inclusive empires last longer than those that are not. But Caracalla’s motive was to maximize tax revenues, to fund his giant baths and his invasion of Parthia. Leaving his mother in Syria to govern, he marched into Parthia but was assassinated by a disgruntled officer. Domna, at the age of fifty-seven, was suffering agonizing breast cancer and committed suicide, but her sister Julia Maesa assumed family leadership, and then appointed her fourteen-year-old grandson, Elagabalus, priest of the family shrine, as emperor, claiming he was Caracalla’s son by her daughter.

Augusta Maesa ruled with her daughter, both sitting in the Senate, while Elagabalus explored his sexual and religious identities. Marrying five times, he shocked Romans with his Syrian gods, sacred dancing and eccentric sexuality, falling in love with his charioteer Hierocles – ‘I’m delighted,’ he said, ‘to be the mistress, wife, queen of Hierocles’ – and with a well-hung wrestler called Aurelius Zoticus, to whom he said, ‘Don’t call me lord, I am a lady,’ before asking his doctors to surgically craft him a vagina. It is possible he was merely being circumcised, a practice favoured by Jews and Arabs. Much of this was merely anti-eastern propaganda. Whether he was really the first transsexual or just a Syrian boy in love with a buff charioteer, his eastern religion offended many Romans.

When Elagabalus, now eighteen, turned against his heir, his more conventional first cousin Alexander Severus, the praetorians demanded his killing. In 222, his septuagenarian grandmother Maesa acquiesced in the killing of her daughter and grandson, and both were beheaded, their nude torsos hurled into the Tiber. Raised to the purple, Alexander Severus, pinheaded and beardless, was first dominated by his murderous granny and after her death by his mother Mamaea, the third female potentate of the family, who accompanied the emperor even to war. Mamaea was attracted to Christianity, studying with the Alexandrian scholar Origen, who had more than proved his ascetic credentials by castrating himself. But Mamaea and Alexander struggled to withstand German and Parthian attacks. In 235, on the German front, facing an army mutiny, mother and son – clinging to each other in their tent – were killed together, throwing the state into its greatest crisis since Hannibal, an eclipse that benefited a new Persian potentate, Ardashir.

No one knows his real origins, but the integrity of his new dynasty was bizarrely proven by the gift of a pair of testicles.

THE SHAH, THE STUFFED EMPEROR AND THE SALTED TESTICLES

Grandson of a Zoroastrian priest-prince named Sasan, Ardashir was a master of war and peace, first taking control of old Persia, then restoring the Zoroastrian faith and identifying himself as the choice of the god Ahura-Mazda. In 220, Ardashir killed the Parthian king and married one of his daughters, offering the Parthian grandees the chance to join his Iranshahr – Empire of Iranians. In the turbulence of his early wars, his pregnant wife Mirdad was guarded by his henchman Abarsam, who was accused of fathering the baby. Hoping to prove the integrity of the royal line, Abarsam had himself castrated and sent his testicles to the king in a box of salt – surely an example of protesting too much.

Promising loot and glory in war against the beleaguered Romans, Ardashir, accompanied by his teenaged son Shapur, raided Syria, perfecting the force that would be the Sasanian contribution to warfare: the armoured knights of his heavy cavalry known as cataphracts that could break Roman infantry. Now he took the fortresses Nisibis and Hatra and secured the trading entrepôt of Charax on the Persian Gulf, seizing control of the caravan and sea routes to India. Then he rode eastwards to finish off the Kushans. When his father died in 240, Shapur ravaged the Roman east.

Two of the shah’s retainers would be especially important: Kirder, a militant Zoroastrian magus, and Mani, an aristocratic prophet of Jewish-Christian background who founded a new religion, around a struggle between good and evil inspired by the visions of a sacred voice known as the Twin. Manichaeanism spread not just through Persia but to China and Rome too – a religion that could, instead of Christianity, have become one of the great world religions. Mani converted the king’s brother Peroz and many others, and Shapur allowed him to preach his faith freely. Kirder urged a purge of these heretics, but the shah concentrated on breaking Rome.

Three Roman emperors perished fighting Shapur, and at least one had to submit to the king of kings. The cruellest cut came in 260, when Shapur defeated and then captured Emperor Valerian ‘with his own hands’, he claimed, before going on to take the eastern Roman capital, Antioch. Valerian was used as Shapur’s mounting block, then flayed alive, the skin painted red and stuffed with straw and exhibited in a temple.

As Rome descended into civil war, it looked as if Persia would replace Rome in the east – until a Arab conqueress changed the World Game.

ZENOBIA AND CONSTANTINE

Just as Shapur was returning laden with loot, Odeinath, ruler of Palmyra, declared himself king, and attacked Shapur, defeating him near Samosata. Bearded with curled hair and Greek diadem, Odeinath (Odaenathus in his Roman identity), forty years old, was an Arab merchant prince, ras (rais) – chief in Arabic – and exarch of Palmyra, a desert trading city of 200,000 Arabs, Aramaeans, Greeks and Romans, grown rich from the caravans of the eastern trade, its ruins still magnificent even today. Odeinath was married to an Arab-Greek girl, Zenobia, who was descended from the Ptolemies, related to Cleopatra – though her achievements would make the Egyptian queen seem footling.

‘Her face was dark and swarthy,’ wrote a Roman historian, ‘her eyes were black and powerful, her spirit divinely great, and her beauty incredible. So white were her teeth that many thought that she had pearls in place of teeth.’ Marrying the exarch when she was around fourteen, she hired a Greek-Syrian tutor named Longinus to teach her Greek philosophy.

Now Odeinath recaptured Edessa and Emesa for Rome, then in 262, mustering a large army of Palmyrene archers, cataphracts and Arab cavalry, invaded Persia, besieging Ctesiphon. Odeinath was hailed by Palmyrenes as a god and rewarded by the latest, weak emperor as Corrector Totius Orientis, eastern viceroy, granted the agnomen Persicus Maximus, but instead he declared himself king of kings, portraying himself as the divine hunter killing two tigers – Rome and Persia. In 267, when a horde of nomads, Goths – making their first appearance – raided Syria/Iraq, Odeinath repelled them, but was then assassinated by a disgruntled nephew who had been humiliated on a royal hunt and now seized the crown – for one day. Zenobia, now twenty-five, was with him. She rallied the army, killed the nephew and seized the throne, crowning her baby son Vaballathus (Wah-balla¯t, or Gift of Allat, an Arab goddess). During an astonishing three years, she seized Antioch, where she set up court, advised by Longinus her philosopher, and, commanding an army of 70,000, directed the conquest of today’s Lebanon, Syria, Türkiye, Israel, Arabia and Egypt – just as Shapur, vanquisher of so many emperors, died, leaving Zenobia unchallenged, and Persia paralysed by religious schism.^*

In 272, Zenobia declared herself Augusta – empress – and her son Augustus, but to the west, a dynamic Roman general, Aurelian, first expelled rampaging barbarians from Italy then marched eastwards to regain Egypt, then Syria, defeating Zenobia at Emesa (after seeing a vision of Sol Invictus, Invincible Sun god, promising him victory). Trying to escape on a camel, Zenobia was captured.^* Serving in Aurelian’s army when it took Palmyra was a young Roman officer named Constantius Chlorus, whose son would radically change the world.

Born of humble family in Roman Dacia (Serbia) in 250, Constantius won the attention of the emperor, who made him one of his bodyguards. At a tavern in the east, Constantius met a Greek girl from Bithynia named Helena, whom he married, and while he was governing Dalmatia she gave birth to a son, Constantine. It is likely that Helena was already a follower of the Christian sect. Bold-faced, big-jawed and pointy-chinned with a Caesar haircut – a proper Roman general – Constantius was not a Christian. Instead he revered Sol Invictus, the god who had helped Aurelian defeat Zenobia.

After the assassination of Aurelian, Constantius backed a new claimant to the throne, Diocletian, a Dalmatian general who struggled to repel or absorb waves of tribes migrating from the eastern steppes. Goths, Saxons, Samaritians, Franks and Alemanni probed his frontiers in a stampede migration: each fearsome invasion was also a terrified migration fleeing a more fearsome attack. Behind Goths and Franks came the Huns, who now raided eastern Persia.

In 285, Diocletian, realizing that his job was too much for one man, raised a general Maximian to co-Augustus. While Diocletian ruled the east from Nicomedia (near the Bosphoros), Maximian, based at Mediolanum (Milan), promoted Constantius to govern Gaul.^* Constantius married Maximian’s daughter, without ever rejecting Helena and her son Constantine. But the connection paid off when the two Augusti appointed Caesars – Constantius in the west, Galerius in the east, creating a tetrarchy – the rule of four.

Constantius attacked the Franks and other German tribes first, then invaded Britannia, liquidating Carausius. His twenty-year-old son Constantine accompanied Emperor Diocletian as far as Egypt and Babylon. Craggy Constantine impressed Diocletian, who married him to his niece; she delivered his first son, Crispus.

Why was Rome in crisis? Diocletian believed that the gods were displeased by the neglect of the old religion and the spread of new superstitions. In Antioch he and Caesar Galerius ordered the haruspices (observers of entrails) to sacrifice animals and read the auguries. But something was wrong, and Diocletian believed there were too many Christians. He ordered everyone to sacrifice to the gods and emperors. When Christians refused, the killing started. Christians and Manichaeans were flayed, burned and decapitated. When Diocletian’s palace in Nicomedia caught fire, the terror intensified. Constantius, with his Christian wife Helena, and his own leaning towards Sol Invictus, kept quiet while in Diocletian’s retinue their son Constantine silently regretted the ‘bloody edicts’ against the ‘worshippers of God’. He was about to experience a momentous conversion.

* Little soul, little wanderer, little charmer,

Body’s guest and companion,

To what places will you set out for now?

To darkling, cold and gloomy ones –

And you won’t make your usual jokes.

* At the front he wrote his Meditations, a unique work for a ruling autocrat in its quest for self-knowledge and reconciliation with the cruel truths of life and death: ‘A river of all events, a violent current, that is what Eternity is,’ he wrote, channelling Heraklitos. ‘No sooner has each thing happened than it has passed; another comes along and it too will pass away … Substance is like a river in perpetual flux.’ As for himself, ‘I have a city and a fatherland. As Antoninus I am a Roman, as a man, I am a citizen of the Universe.’ But he was also pragmatic: ‘Each hour, decide firmly like a Roman and a man to do what is at hand.’ Many leaders have read it; few managed to live by it; and Marcus himself struggled to do so.

* It was now that the Chinese court had the first recorded contact with Japan: the islands were not yet united, no concept of Japan existed, but the Chinese called the people ‘dwarves’. Little is known of its politics but in 190, a female shaman-queen named Himiko, aged twenty, succeeded to the throne of the small realm of Yamatai that controlled a federation of rice-farming chieftainships. Later she sent slaves as a gift to the Chinese emperor.

* Julia Domna’s father, descended from kings appointed by Pompey, was high priest of the Arab sun deity Allah-Gabal – God of Mankind, Elagab in Latin – worshipped in the form of a black meteorite, probably just one of many across the Arab world. There was no evidence that Mecca existed at this point, but a similar black meteorite – the Kaaba – would be worshipped there. Julia’s name Domna – black in Arabic – referred to the divine stone of Emesa.

* Shapur’s successor Bahram II backed the fanatical Zoroastrian priest Kirder, who restored the Persian religion, turning on the prophet Mani, who was arrested, beheaded, flayed and stuffed. His death, a martyrdom like that of Jesus, encouraged the spread of his religion: the Uighurs in central Asia converted en masse to Manichaeanism.

* Palmyra was sacked, with thousands of Palmyrenes enslaved, and Zenobia was paraded in Aurelian’s Roman triumph. She was not executed but married to a Roman senator, living out her life in suburban obscurity after founding the first Arab empire in one of the most extraordinary female careers before modern times.

* The coasts of Gaul and Menapia (Netherlands) were cursed by the depredations of Frankish and Saxon pirates, so Maximian appointed one of his officers, Mausaeus Carausius, to build a fleet and destroy them. Instead Carausius first colluded with the pirates, then declared himself emperor of northern Gaul and Britannia, backed by Roman, British and Frankish troops. He even cast his own coins emblazoned with the world-beating slogans Restitutor Britanniae (Restorer of Britain) and Genius Britanniae (Spirit of Britain) – literally the first British empire.