The World

Antiochos the Great, tense, lean, frenetic, was as ambitious as the founder of his house, conquering much of Türkiye, Iraq and Iran, even campaigning into Arabia and India. In Bactria, his satrap Euthydemos had declared independence and held out in Balkh. Unable to defeat him, Antiochos married his daughter to the satrap’s dashing sixteen-year-old son, Demetrios. One of the most extraordinary figures of his time, Demetrios, who succeeded his father as Greek king of Bactria, then invaded India in 186 BC, where the kingdom of Ashoka had collapsed. Launching two centuries of hybrid Greek–Indian rule (longer than the British Raj lasted), Demetrios – known to the Indians as Dharmamita and to the Greeks as Aniketos (Invincible) – ruled from Taxila (Pakistan). This Yavana (Graeco-Indian) king fused Indian and Greek pantheons: on his coins, he wears elephant tusks and python crowns, linking Hercules, Buddha and possibly the Brahminist goddess Lakshmi.^*

Antiochos the Great accepted a division of elephants from Demetrios and rode westwards, where he seized Greece. But he accepted Hannibal as an adviser – which made him an enemy of Rome: the Romans were keen to settle scores, realizing they had to control Greece, a natural staging post against them. They sent in the Scipios, Africanus and his brother Lucius, who defeated Hannibal at sea and then Antiochos himself on land. Lucius thereby won the agnomen Asiaticus, but both Scipios were accused of accepting bribes from Antiochos and letting Hannibal escape. Africanus smashed the incriminating tablets and advocated mercy for Hannibal, but the Romans were determined to hunt him down. Surrounded, the paladin took poison, dying in the same year as Scipio. The latter, embittered by Roman ingratitude, ordered his own burial at his villa at Liternum, not Rome, with the epitaph: ‘Ungrateful fatherland, you shan’t even have my bones.’ Scipio Africanus too may have been poisoned.

Chastened by his Roman defeat, Antiochos gave up on Europe, promised to relinquish his elephant army and his fleet and send his younger son as a hostage to Rome, but he kept Iran and Iraq and seized all of Syria and Judaea, treating the Jews well and granting them semi-independence and freedom of worship in their Jerusalem Temple. It looked as if House Seleukos would destroy their cousins the Ptolemies, take Egypt and reassemble Alexander’s conquests. Meanwhile in China, Qin had created a vast new empire.

Yet there were signs that all was not well: the First Emperor sailed up and down the coast, shooting whales with a giant crossbow while seeking the Island of Immortality.

ROTTING FISH OF QING: THE RISE OF LITTLE RASCAL

The emperor, forty-nine years old, was travelling with Prince Huhai, aged twenty-one, his eighteenth and favourite son, when he died, possibly poisoned by his own mercury-infused immortality elixirs. His chancellor, the seventy-year-old Councillor, concealed the death: the dead emperor was served meals while his eunuchs pretended to transmit reports to ‘the slumbering chariot’, but the body soon stank so pungently that the Councillor procured a cart of rotten fish to mask the royal putrefaction. The Councillor and the young prince’s eunuch chamberlain Zhao Gao decided to give the throne to Huhai, which meant they would remain in control.

When he reached the capital Xianyang, the Second Emperor was enthroned while his father was buried in his mausoleum with a human sacrifice in which ninety-nine concubines who had not delivered sons were buried with him. Their young female skeletons have been found, revealing violent deaths – and one girl still wearing her pearls. As the workmen who had created the complex were killed and thrown into a mass grave, royal princes were dismembered in the main square.

The rebellions started. In August 209 BC, in Henan, two hired labourers were in charge of delivering a chain gang of 900 convicts, but a rainstorm delayed their arrival. Knowing that in Qin lateness was punished by death, as was escape, they decided that ‘flight means death, plotting means death’ so ‘death for establishing a state is preferable’. After all, said one, ‘Are kings and nobles given their high status by birth?’ At the same time, a local sheriff named Liu Bang, the peasant from central China who had once seen the First Emperor in person, was leading another chain gang to Mount Li to work on the First Emperor’s tomb. A few prisoners escaped, which meant that Liu and his charges would be executed, so he liberated them all. More men joined his band when he killed the local magistrate.