The World

Caligula was spoiled, damaged and clueless, making enemies on all sides. A basic rule of power is: mock anyone, but never your bodyguards. Caligula teased Chaerea, giving insulting passwords like ‘phallus’ and ‘girlie’. Chaerea started a conspiracy with two others, chief secretary Callistus and probably his uncle Claudius. Caligula had encouraged a slave of Claudius’ to denounce him, an act guaranteed to alienate any Roman. In AD 40, Caligula declared himself a god and was about to leave Rome and move the capital to Alexandria. There was no time to lose. On 24 January 41, Caligula, still only twenty-nine, left the theatre where he was presiding over a show celebrating the Divine Augustus on the Palatine Hill and took the covered passageway, the cryptoporticus, through the imperial complex back to take a bath in the palace. His limping uncle Claudius asked permission to be excused. As Caligula stopped to watch a performance of singers, three of his most trusted praetorians surrounded him and drew their swords.

 

 

* The Tiger Tally, Hu-Fu, was the proof of imperial authority, a golden tiger divided into halves, one held by the ruler, one by the general. It was the second-century BC equivalent of the nuclear codes.

* When a beloved concubine died, Wudi lamented:

The whisper of her silk skirt has gone.

Dust gathers on the marble pavement.

Her empty room is cold and still.

Fallen leaves are piled against the doors.

How can my aching heart rest?

* Whatever her success, Feng Liao missed home in her ‘strange land on the other side of heaven’; instead, as she wrote in a beautiful poem that speaks for so many princesses married to uncouth strangers, they sent her:

To live far away in the alien land of the Asvin king,

A yurt is my dwelling, of felt are my walls,

For food I have meat, with kumis to drink

I’m always homesick and inside my heart aches

I wish I were a yellow-beaked swan winging myself back home.

After fifty years, she finally winged herself home to Chang’an.

* When one of his enemies, the tribune, was betrayed by one of his slaves, Sulla killed him. He freed the slave for his service and then had him thrown from the Tarpeian Rock – the eighty-foot cliff close to the Capitol used for killing egregious traitors and rebel slaves – for betraying his master. Romans were very nervous about slave revolts.

* The implication was that Caesar had taken the inferior sexual position to King Nicomedes. Much later, even during his first Triumph, his soldiers sang, ‘Caesar laid the Gauls low; Nicomedes bent him over.’

* Han tombs, even those of minor princes and kings, reveal the culture and splendour of the court, not least the jade suit (for example, of a king of Zhongshan), constructed from around fourteen pieces, that covered the entire body like a suit of armour, including gloves and helmet, stitched together with gold thread. In the tomb of a government minister, the marquess of Dai, were painted silk banners, inventories on bamboo slips, cooking recipes and a sex manual.

* In 62 BC, Caesar’s second wife Pompeia, granddaughter of Sulla, had embarrassed Caesar. The notorious adulterer and pontifex maximus was himself being cuckolded by his pretty young wife. When Pompeia hosted the women-only festival of the Bona Dea (‘Good Goddess’), the celebration was crashed by her secret lover, Clodius, an outrageous young patrician who, disguised as a woman, hoped to enjoy an assignation. Instead his gender was literally exposed; he was later tried and acquitted. But Caesar divorced Pompeia anyway, saying, ‘Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.’ Clodius became a murderous populist demagogue until killed in factional fighting. Caesar was a compulsive and successful lover of women: he had slept with the wives of both his fellow triumvirs Pompey and Crassus and his legionaries nicknamed him the Bald Fornicator. His favourite and most enduring lover was a married patrician, Servilia, whose first husband Marcus Brutus had been executed by Pompey. Now Caesar remarried a teenaged aristocrat, Calpurnia.

* During this extravaganza – to mark victories in Gaul, Pontus, Egypt and Africa – the triumphator’s devoted legionaries jovially sang about his exploits and even his gay affair with the King of Bithynia, their songs culminating in the lines: ‘Citizens, lock up your wives; we bring home the bald fornicator! All the gold you lent him went to pay his Gallic tarts.’ The defeated Gaulish king Vercingetorix and the deposed Egyptian queen Arsinoe IV, who had fought Caesar, were paraded – watched by Arsinoe’s sister Cleopatra. Vercingetorix was garrotted, the traditional climax of a triumph. Arsinoe was spared. For now.

* Back in Italy, Antony’s wife, Fulvia, and brother Lucius had challenged Octavian who, besieging them in Perusia, had written a bawdy poem that reveals another side of the young warlord:

Because Antony fucks Glaphyra, Fulvia has arranged this punishment for me: that I fuck her too.

That I fuck Fulvia? …