The World

Caesar Augustus projected Rome as a divine world empire that, behind the republican façade, was already a dynasty: married thrice but without sons, his ambitions rested on his daughter Julia. After marrying her to a nephew who died young, Augustus married her to his partner in power Agrippa, then aged forty, who was granted the same powers as the princeps himself. ‘Agrippa is so great,’ Augustus’ minister Maecenas had warned, ‘he must either be killed or become a son-in-law.’ The marriage delivered two sons, Gaius and Lucius, who became the heirs. But Julia found her destiny a tedious burden, as was being continually pregnant by a much older husband. But pregnancy had its benefits.

While Augustus championed his family values and enforced a new conservative morality policy including anti-adultery legislation, Julia pursued a string of love affairs, having sex with her husband only when she was pregnant: ‘I take on a passenger only when the ship’s hold is full.’ As her sons grew up adored by Augustus, her promiscuity became a problem.

The empire was now so big that Augustus sent Agrippa to rule the eastern half: first they signed a treaty with the young kandake (queen) of Kush. But the queen, Amanirenas, ‘a masculine sort of woman’, wrote the geographer-historian Strabo, ‘fierce and one-eyed’ – one of a succession of female warrior-rulers – and her husband King Teriteqas were dissatisfied with the Roman vassaldom. Her opportunity came when Augustus ordered his Egyptian prefect, Aulus Gallus, to invade Arabia Felix (Fertile Arabia – Yemen). Spices, medicines, perfumes, jewels arrived by sea from India at Egyptian or Arabian ports on the Red Sea and overland in caravans from Marib in Sheba (Yemen/Ethiopia) through Nabataea (Jordan). Augustus wished to control these trades.

Ten thousand legionaries crossed the Red Sea from Berenice, landing not far from Jeddah, marching down through Medina to take Aden, but they got lost in the desert, failed to take Marib and, their fleet destroyed, perished.

In Meroe, Teriteqas and Amanirenas learned that Augustus’ Egyptian garrison had departed for Arabia and invaded Egypt. When Teriteqas died, Amanirenas succeeded him, leading their army up the Nile, an exploit she celebrated on a stela and by burying a huge head of Augustus in front of a temple. Egypt was Rome’s essential breadbasket: Augustus attacked Kush, Amanirenas counter-attacked, then they agreed to negotiate. Augustus lifted taxes imposed upon the Kushites; Amanirenas ceded a strip of Lower Nubia, but she had successfully defied Rome’s greatest emperor.

Augustus made a deal with Malik of Nabataea, enabling him to beautify his red-rose capital Petra as well as Mada’in Salih, while the emperor backed his Jewish ally Herod – despite his massacres and his killing of his own beloved if traitorous wife and three of his many sons. Shrewd, charming, visionary and psychotic, Herod ruled for forty years, remodelling Jerusalem, where he built a gigantic and magnificent Jewish Temple.^*

Soon 120 Roman boats were sailing annually from Red Sea ports to India. Around 20 BC, a delegation from an Indian ruler arrived to see Augustus with a gift of tigers. Roman traders, usually Arab or Egyptian rather than Italian, traded amphorae of wine, mirrors, statues and lamps in return for ivory, spices, topaz and slaves. And a new luxury was starting to arrive from China, via Parthia and Eudaemon (Aden): silk.

FLYING SWALLOW AND THE PASSION OF THE CUT SLEEVE

Her name was Flying Swallow and she was dancing at the palace of Princess Yamma when the emperor came to watch. Flying Swallow – Zhao Feiyen – was a dancing girl who came from a family so poor that they had exposed her as a baby until, overcome with regret, they returned to find her still alive. Emperor Cheng saw the slender, graceful Flying Swallow, then just fifteen, dancing with her sister – and fell in love.