The World

Determined to torpedo the ambitions of Lady Qi, she first tried to entrap the emperor’s son Liu Ruyi, prince of Zhao, who was only twelve. The emperor repeatedly intervened to keep the boy out of his mother’s clutches, but when he was away hunting she poisoned him. With the son gone, the mother was exposed. The empress seized Lady Qi: her hands and legs were cut off, her eyes were gouged out and then, paralysed with poison, she was thrown into a cesspit to die. There she was shown to the emperor and others with the words: ‘Meet the human swine.’ The emperor hardly dared contradict his mother, leaving the politics to her. She was good at it, keeping many of her husband’s henchmen in position while crushing dissent. The inner court of palace women, eunuchs and affines was often portrayed by the bureaucrats who compiled the histories as decadent and rotten. Yet often, throughout this history, these trusted relationships formed the emperor’s essential base against the bureaucracy of the outer court. In China, as in most other monarchies, family and gender – so often presented in terms of vicious sex-mad women and weak-willed men – were forces in the eternal competition for power and legitimacy.

By the time Empress Lu finally died in 180 BC, her own family were planning to supplant the Han, but the old ministers had other ideas, massacring the entire Lu family and enthroning the Progenitor’s son, Wen, who consolidated the dynasty that would rule east Asia, almost in parallel with Rome.

Yet between Rome and China, another power, Antiochos the Great, descendant of Alexander’s general Seleukos, still dominated west Asia.

MIHRDAD AND JUDAH: JEWISH HAMMER; PARTHIAN SHOT

Yet the power of Antiochos the Great depended on his own peripatetic energy: in 187 BC he was killed raiding a temple in Iran. His son, Antiochos IV Epiphanes, even more manic and frantic that his father, had spent his youth in Rome. Inspired by Rome’s semi-democracy, the flashy king liked to greet and chat with his subjects on walkabouts and hold spectacular parties into which he was carried dressed as a mummy before bursting out of his bandages to the applause of the crowds. But he also thought he was a god manifest – a bad combination. Keen to complete his father’s dream of an empire from India to Libya, he invaded Egypt. But Rome now protected the Ptolemies. A Roman envoy intercepted him and drew a ‘line in the sand’ at his feet: if he advanced one step further, Rome would intervene. Antiochos retreated to Judaea. There the Jews, connected to Egypt where members of the priestly family served as generals, conspired against him. Antiochos slaughtered Jews, banned their faith and founded a shrine to himself in their Temple in sacred Jerusalem, sparking a rebellion by Judah the Maccabee (the Hammer) that ultimately led to the creation of a new Jewish kingdom.^* Antiochos’ Iranian provinces were also under attack. Galloping east to save them, he was unlucky enough to confront a warlord named Mihrdad who would create an empire powerful enough to hold Rome at bay for four centuries.

Mihrdad was the great-nephew of Arsak, probably an Afghan chieftain who fled to Parthia (Turkmenistan), becoming sacred ruler of a semi-nomadic tribe of horsemen who worshipped the Zoroastrian pantheon but were influenced by their Hellenic neighbours. Their power derived from their combination of armoured and light cavalry, who could fire their crossbows from the saddle: what the Romans called ‘the Parthian shot’. In 164, Antiochos arrived to defend Iran, but Mihrdad killed the last great Seleucid king and then took Persia and Babylon, where he was crowned king of kings, parading statues of Marduk and Ishtar, before moving to Seleucia where he and his successors built a new capital, Ctesiphon, fusing Greek and Persian kingship. Mihrdad’s heirs were prone to succession bloodbaths, but their cavalry was formidable, their treasure bountiful, thanks to a tax on the silk, perfumes and spices traded between China and the Mediterranean now dominated by Rome.

AFRICANUS THE YOUNGER AND THE KING OF NUMIDIA: THE DEATH OF GREAT CITIES

When Carthage recovered from its defeats, the Romans turned to the Scipios to destroy the great city once and for all. After Greece and Hispania – as the Romans called Spain – had been conquered, the ambitious generals and legions of the Carthaginian wars had to be used: new victories meant new loot, new temples, new slaves for Rome. Carthage was no longer a threat, but when a curmudgeonly ex-consul, Cato, visited, he was horrified to see that it was flourishing. In the Senate, he brandished a fresh Carthaginian fig to demonstrate that the city was just a short voyage away. ‘Carthage,’ he declared, ‘must be destroyed.’ It was the only time in history that a fruit served as a casus belli.