The World

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.’