The World

* Martial revelled in the sexual freedoms of well-off Roman women such as his wanton friend Caelia, who was spoiled for choice by the diversity of the slaves that flooded into Rome with each victory: ‘you grant your favours to Parthians … Germans … Dacians, and for you from his Egyptian city comes the gallant of Memphis, and the black Indian from the Red Sea; nor do you shun the lecheries of circumcised Jews.’ His contemporary the poet Juvenal agreed that an honest wife was a ‘rare bird’ in a world where the slaves who were meant to guard her virtue could so easily collude in her pleasures. ‘Who guards the guardians?’ he asked in an often misunderstood line. ‘Who now keep silent the sins of the promiscuous girl when paid in the same coin?’

* Champion charioteers became rich – even though they were slaves. Most famous was Scorpus who won 2,048 races until he was killed, probably in a chariot crash. Martial wrote his epitaph: ‘Here I lie, Scorpus, pride of the noisy circus, darling of Rome. Spiteful fate snatched me aged twenty-six. She must have counted my victories, not my years, and decided I was old.’

* The Maya were in contact with the Caribbean where invaders and traders from the mainland were slowly conquering the islands. New DNA analysis shows that for millennia the Caribbean had been home to archaic foraging peoples, but now invaders in canoes from America, makers of ceramic goods, were occupying the islands, wiping out the existing peoples, who vanish in most places, through either intermarriage or killing. These occupiers were the ancestors of the Taíno, who inhabited the islands until the Spanish conquest.

* Teotihuacan’s connections extended not only to the south: there is evidence of links to north America too. This was the time of a system of settlements around Hopewell in Ohio where after 100 BC people built burial mounds and large earthworks based on complex astronomical measurements, created beautiful artefacts – ranging from copper breastplates to pipes adorned with animal carvings that evoked shamanic rituals – and buried their dead with ritual costumes made up of ornaments that originated from Mexico to the Great Lakes. This culture broke up around AD 500.

* Hadrian’s buildings were spectacular: his palace at Tivoli – where remains are still being discovered – was nothing less than an imperial theme park designed to show his power. In Rome, his tomb, known today as the Castel Sant’Angelo, is magnificently bold, and the beauty of his Pantheon, with its open-eyed dome representing the world itself, boasting the widest vault of any building until 1436, still takes one’s breath away.

Severans and Zenobians: Arab Dynasties

THE EUNUCHS, THE IMPERIAL PHILOSOPHER AND THE PANDEMIC

While Hadrian was visiting Greece, revelling in the rituals of Greek culture and projecting himself as a new Pericles, he was also channelling another hero, Antiochos Epiphanes. Back in Jerusalem, the building of Aelia on the site of the Jewish Temple sparked a new revolt led by a self-declared prince of Israel, Simon Bar Kochba, who annihilated one Roman legion and threatened the security of the entire east. Rushing back to Judaea and summoning his best general from Britannia, Hadrian supervised the start of the harsh campaign, regaining control by 136 only by killing 580,000 Jews and enslaving 97,000, so many that they caused a slump in slave prices. But Hadrian persisted in building Aelia, banning Jews from Judaea, which he pointedly renamed Palestina – after the Philistines. The Jews cursed Hadrian, but after this third catastrophe, following the destructions of Jerusalem in 586 BC and AD 70, the Jews – settling in large numbers in Alexandria and Hispania – survived as both a religion and a people, never losing their link to, and reverence for, Jerusalem and Judaea.

When he returned to his Tivoli villa, the sixty-year-old Hadrian fell ill with arteriosclerosis and fretted about the succession. His great-nephew Pedanius Fruscus, backed by his distinguished nonagenarian grandfather Servanius, expected to be named, but instead Hadrian chose a playful aristocrat, Ceionius. When Pedanius and Servanius grumbled or perhaps even plotted, Hadrian had the boy executed and forced the old man to kill himself, which he did with the curse that the emperor should ‘long for death but be unable to die’. And so it happened.

Suffering bitterly, Hadrian drew a circle around his nipple as a bullseye and begged a slave to kill him, but he could not do it. The emperor had not completely lost his wit, writing brilliantly about death.^* In 138, Ceionius died young, at which Hadrian created around himself a new adoptive family to rule into the future. First he adopted as his son Antoninus, already fifty-two, a decent and efficient proconsul who was required to adopt in turn Lucius, the son of the late Ceionius, and the sixteen-year-old Marcus Annius Verus.