The World

Family politics bolstered the rule of women. Cleopatra II survived the murder of her son. After Fatso’s death in 116, she and her daughter Cleopatra III ruled with a son who adored houmous, nicknamed King Chickpeas by Alexandrians. When a king is named after his favourite dish, a dynasty is in trouble.

Yet Scipio – and his historian Polybius – would have appreciated Fatso’s only positive achievement: his sailors discovered the Indian monsoon, which meant they could sail to Parthia or India in summer and return in winter. In 118, he sent the sailor Eudoxos of Cyzicus directly to India.

HARMONIOUS KINSHIP, BLOOD -SPATTERED MARRIAGE: A PRINCESS WITH THE NOMADS

The Chinese were probing from the opposite direction. In Chang’an, a remarkable young Han emperor would rule for fifty-four years and establish a short-lived empire that extended from Korea in the east to Uzbekistan in the west. Emperor Wu was initially curious, cultivated and bold, sending an ambassador westwards to contact other great powers – the start of China’s western path.

Wudi was made by women and almost destroyed by women: in 141 BC, aged fifteen, he was placed on the throne by his aunt and mother-in-law, Princess Guantao, and immediately started to restore imperial power. Yet his grandmother, Empress Dowager Dou, who held the Tiger Tally^* essential for giving orders to the military, crushed his proposals. Using his failure to produce an heir with his empress Chen, she planned his removal. Wudi pretended to devote himself to partying, showing no interest in politics as he secretly gathered a brains trust of henchmen. When the chance arose to expand southwards, he dared to bypass his grandmother’s Tiger Tally and annexed parts of today’s south China, seizing Minyue (Fujian). At home he fathered a child with a favourite concubine. Both moves outmanoeuvred his grandmother, who died soon afterwards. Wudi promoted promising candidates for office if they could draft documents in his favoured antique rhetorical style, but while a few Confucian scholars tutored imperial princes, he did not develop a coherent set of Confucian doctrines. He did have an artistic and intellectual streak himself,^* enlarging the old Qin emperors’ Music Bureau which handled court spectaculars and cultural matters. But at heart he was an empire builder. Enriched by tax revenues, he launched offensives on all fronts. To build an alliance against the Xiongnu, Wudi, using Harmonious Kinship, sent a princess, Jieyou, impoverished granddaughter of a fallen prince, to marry the chieftain of the Wusun tribe (in today’s Xinjiang).

Accompanied by a lady-in-waiting Feng Liao, Jieyou married three times: first she wed the chieftain, then when he died his brother and heir, whom she loved and with whom she had five children, and then finally his nephew too. In the process, this remarkable woman sent Feng Liao to negotiate alliances and appeal to the court in Chang’an with such success that she briefed the emperor and was appointed an ambassador.^*

Simultaneously, Wudi dispatched an intrepid soldier-courtier on a trading mission to the west. In ten years of adventure, Zhang Qian was captured, enslaved, imprisoned, escaped, married, enslaved again and finally in 122 BC returned to report to the emperor. He described the Parthians and the Indo-Greeks, spoke of his discovery of a Sichuan berry sauce already on sale in the area we now call northern India and recommended a breed of horses in Fergana (Uzbekistan), known for ‘bloodsweating’ – most likely because they were victims of parasites that caused them to bleed. Wudi was impressed – he wanted those ‘heavenly horses’ and these reports encouraged trade with Parthia. Persian luxuries now appear in Chinese tombs, and, starting in 110, Parthia sent delegations to Chang’an.

As China encountered Parthia, so did Rome: while the Han were perfecting dynastic monarchy, the Romans spent the next fifty years in civil wars, out of which their own monarchy emerged. The first one-man ruler of Rome since the kings, Lucius Cornelius Sulla was the precursor of Caesar – and the first to take Rome into Asia.

THE KING WHO COULDN’T BE POISONED, THE MONORCHISTIC DICTATOR AND THE TEENAGED BUTCHER

Sulla was a new type of Roman. He spent his youth partying with actors and courtesans, a patrician so poor he lived in an apartment in a city block, not a villa. Athletic, blue-eyed, with bright red-blond hair and freckled skin, Sulla was both breezy and terrifying: rumoured to have one testicle, he cheerfully let his soldiers sing songs about his monorchistic anatomy yet punished any indiscipline with instant crucifixion. His motto was ‘No better friend, no worse enemy’.