The World

Coming to the throne in 33 BC just as Augustus was confronting Antony, the eighteen-year-old Cheng had a wife, Empress Xu, and an adored consort, Ban, but neither had provided him with an heir. Cheng was a cheerful playboy, almost disinherited by his father for his hedonism, who loved sensual music and liked to plunge incognito into the stews of Chang’an for whoring and cockfighting. Flying Swallow was right up his street. As for politics, he left that to his mother, the Dowager Empress Wang, whose brother Wang Feng and others of the family ran the empire as marshals of the state. Now, brought back to the palace and enrolled with her sister Zhao Hede as a concubine, Flying Swallow brought new levels of murderous envy to the already charged court. Within a year of arriving, the two girls had framed the empress and Consort Ban for using black magic, getting Cheng to declare Flying Swallow empress in 16 BC. While Flying Swallow failed to deliver children, Cheng fathered sons by two concubines. Persuaded by Flying Swallow or Zhao Hede (who did the dirty work), the emperor or the empress killed the babies themselves to protect the two sisters; one of the mothers was forced to commit suicide to keep the secret. The sisters fell out when the emperor favoured Zhao Hede, then colluded to poison any other girls who got pregnant.

In 7 BC, Cheng died suddenly, possibly after an over-generous dose of aphrodisiac administered by Zhao Hede. Frightened as the ensuing investigations into murdered babies and aphrodisiac overdosing closed in, she committed suicide as Cheng’s nephew became emperor Ai. He excited great expectations, but illness prevented him governing and he did not like ‘music or girls’. Instead he fell in love with a teenaged male courtier Dong Zian: such was his devotion that the emperor preferred to cut off the sleeve of his gown rather than wake his sleeping lover. Many emperors had male lovers, openly listed among their favourites, but ‘the passion of the cut sleeve’ went much further: Aidi overpromoted the twenty-two-year-old Dong to the role of commander of the army, and when Aidi was dying he left the throne to his boyfriend. Instead, granny intervened: Dowager Empress Wang orchestrated the suicide of Dong and promoted her own nephew to regent. Aged eighty-three, the dowager alone preserved Han stability, but when she died in 13 her nephew tried to found his own dynasty – a lesson in how not to manage an empire – just as, at the other end of the Silk Road, another emperor, aided by a capable female potentate, demonstrated how it should be done.

THE REPTILE OF CAPRI

Augustus, now seventy-five, was dying at his villa in his home town, Nola, south of Rome, with his wife Livia, also in her seventies, and her capable but morose son Tiberius beside him. His own direct family would not succeed him, but instead he had woven a tangled web of marriages to bind together his blood with that of Livia.

His hopes to leave a dynastic coterie of heirs had long been based on Gaius and Lucius, teenaged sons of his daughter Julia and her husband Agrippa. Julia had been pregnant when in 12 BC Agrippa died, and she gave birth to a son, Postumus, who grew up to be irresponsible if not unbalanced. But they also had a daughter, Agrippina.

Now Augustus ordered Julia to marry Tiberius, with whom he had shared the tribunicial power since 6 BC. Julia was happy with the choice. Tiberius was not. But, intelligent and exuberant, Julia was both sexually adventurous and politically dissident, bridling at her father’s control. Augustus was distracted by the rise of her sons, as Gaius and Lucius were elected consul. He adored the boys, nicknaming Gaius his ‘most beloved little donkey’ and looking forward to a time when they would ‘succeed to my position’. But then in quick succession both of them died – just as Augustus discovered their mother’s antics.

Dressing in the showiest dresses, Julia flaunted affairs with a string of senators and generals, including a Scipio and Antony’s son Iullus Antonius, a dangerous choice. If she had been a man, such exploits would have been regarded as virile peccadillos, but she was heiress to an empire, perilously popular, and her libertinism undermined Augustus’ conservative crackdown on immorality. In AD 3, he banished her for life – but, just as he feared, she became a symbol of resistance, attracting the support of popular protests against him. Iullus Antonius was executed.

Augustus was forced to turn to his wife Livia’s sons Tiberius and Drusus. Tiberius found politics a strain. Repulsed by Julia’s promiscuity and resenting his mother’s orders, sated with war, he retired to Rhodes. Nor was this the end of it: Julia’s daughter, also called Julia, had brazen love affairs with among others the erotic poet Ovid. But this was about much more than poetry and sex: Julia’s husband Aemilius Paullus was planning Augustus’ assassination. In AD 8, Paullus was executed, young Julia exiled.^*