The World

Sulla, leader of the optimates – the ‘Best’ elite – rose in the shadow of Gaius Marius, an older leader of the populares people’s faction. In 107, when Marius fought Jugurtha of Numidia, Masinissa’s grandson, Sulla, serving as his deputy, captured the Berber king and made his name. In 102, Marius saved Rome from the greatest threat since Hannibal: the Germanic-Celtic tribes of the Cimbri and Teutons, starting in Denmark and migrating southwards, had routed a Roman army – a crisis so grave that the Romans conducted their last human sacrifices to appease the gods. Marius destroyed their invaders. Together Marius and Sulla then crushed the revolt of the Socii, the allied Italian cities in the so-called Social War. In 96 BC, Sulla was dispatched eastwards to rule as governor of Rome’s first Asian province, Cilicia, where he observed the meteoric rise of a talented, indefatigable monarch, Mithridates, king of Pontus, descended from Darius and Seleukos, who was conquering an empire that encompassed much of Asia Minor and the Black Sea. Said to be able to speak all the twenty-five languages of his subjects, Mithridates had hardened himself by living in the wild and made himself immune to poison by daily imbibing small doses, created by his Scythian hierophants. In 88, the Poison King orchestrated a massacre of Romans in Asia, before moving into Greece.

Sulla exploited a growing unease that Marius, who served as consul seven times, was too powerful. Their rivalry undermined the republic. In 88 BC, when the Senate planned Mithridates’ expulsion from Greece, Sulla won the command but Marius tried to procure it for himself. Outrageously breaking republican norms, Sulla marched his legion into Rome and outlawed Marius.^* Then he departed for Greece, where he expelled the Poison King.

In his absence, Marius seized back power, promoting a young man – his nephew, Gaius Julius Caesar. He was one of the patrician Julians who claimed descent from Aeneas and Venus, but his father, a governor of Asia, had died young. This cold, lithe, irrepressible life force with his avian, balding head, depilated body and dandyish style was close to his shrewd mother Aurelia. He was not rich and he suffered fits, possibly epilepsy, but did not let anything hold him back: Marius helped nominate him as a priest of Jupiter. But in 82 BC, after Marius’ death, Sulla returned, marched on Rome, routed his opponents and was elected dictator (the first since Hannibal’s invasion) – awarded the agnomen Felix (Lucky). He issued a proscriptio, a notice of condemnation that became a euphemism for a kill list. He was vindictive. ‘No friend ever served me, and no enemy ever wronged me, whom I have not fully repaid’ were the words Sulla had engraved on his tomb.

Caesar was the one of three young meteors particularly affected by Sulla’s bloody rise. Gnaeus Pompey, son of a rich potentate, raised his own legion and backed Sulla, murdering his enemies so efficiently he was nicknamed Adulescentulus Carnifex – Teenaged Butcher. Marcus Crassus – for whom the word crass should have been invented – was a homicidal speculator who added landowners to the death lists then grabbed their properties, making him very rich. As a Marian, Caesar was vulnerable. Sulla ordered Caesar, just eighteen, to divorce his wife Cornelia, daughter of a political enemy, but Caesar dared refuse: he was sacked as priest, his money confiscated, and added to the kill list. Only his mother Aurelia saved him by appealing to Sulla. Caesar fled to Asia where, serving with the Roman governor, he flirted with the king of Bithynia, a subordinate liaison he never lived down.^*

In 79, once his enemies were dead, Sulla, singular in so many things, retired from his dictatorship and returned to his earlier life of debauchery: he had shown what could be done in Rome. ‘If Sulla did it,’ reflected Pompey, ‘why not me?’ Caesar would emulate the dictator while noting that ‘Sulla was a political illiterate to resign the dictatorship.’

As Sulla was killing his enemies in Rome, Emperor Wu was losing control of himself and his family in Chang’an.

THE CASTRATED HISTORIAN AND EMPEROR WU

Wudi enjoyed a spree of successes: in 112 BC, he took Guandong in the south and more of Vietnam; in 109, he invaded Korea; in 108, he attacked the Xiongnu, then seized much of Xanjiang and expanded through Kazakhstan to Fergana in Uzbekistan; in 104, he demanded the special horses of Dayan (Kokand), sending his general Li Gungli to fight the War of the Heavenly Horses, thus securing 3,000 of these blood-sweating steeds.

Yet at court things were turning sour. When Wudi’s sister introduced him to a lowly born singer-dancer, Wei, he fell for her and their sons provided the essential heirs. But Empress Chen’s attempt to curse Wei with witchcraft was denounced and exposed, and she was destroyed. The new empress Wei Zifu brought him luck – for a while.