The World

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.