Close friends with Emperor Augustus and his powerful deputy Marcus Agrippa, Herod’s sons were educated at the imperial court in Rome; and his mercantile empire of mines, wine and luxury goods made him probably the richest man in the empire after the imperial family. But by the end the poisonous intrigues of his decadent Jewish–Greek court began to destroy both his family and his reputation as a reliable ruler of the turbulent Middle East. Old age and debilitating health problems (Herod suffered from a horrifying condition that entailed a decay of the genitals, described by the Jewish historian Josephus as “a putrification of his privy member, that produced worms”) brought no respite from the killing. Stung by criticism from the Essenes—a rigid Jewish community—Herod had their monastery at Qumran burned down in 8 BC. Then, when a group of students tore down the imperial Roman eagle from the entrance to the Temple in 4 BC, he had them burned alive. Days before his death, he ordered the execution of his son Antipater, whom he suspected of plotting to take the throne, and his last act was to gather the foremost men of the nation to approve his last will, dividing the kingdom between three of his sons.
CLEOPATRA
69–30 BC
Fool! Don’t you see now that I could have poisoned you a hundred times had I been able to live without you.
Cleopatra VII was the last pharaoh-queen of Egypt but she was Greek, not Egyptian, and using the prestige of her royal dynasty, her own political acumen and her sexual charisma, she tried to regain her family’s lost empire—and nearly succeeded. She was descended from Ptolemy, one of Alexander the Great’s generals, who conquered his own Mediterranean empire, based on Egypt.
The Ptolemies had fused the Egyptian pantheon of gods with that of the Greeks while adopting the ancient pharaonic practice of sibling marriage. In 51BC, the teenage Cleopatra VII co-inherited the throne with her brother-husband Ptolemy XIII, but the ambitious, cunning queen, at age eighteen, made clear her intention to rule alone. Forced into exile by her brother, she sought the support of Julius Caesar.
In 48 BC, Caesar arrived in Egypt in pursuit of his defeated rival for supremacy in the Roman empire, Pompey, who was killed by the Egyptians. But Caesar, now dictator of Rome, was drawn into the Egyptian civil war by Cleopatra. He was fifty-two, she was twenty-one, the heir of the oldest dynasty of the Western world. She was probably not beautiful—her nose was aquiline, her chin pointed—but she possessed a ruthless aura like Caesar himself and shared a taste for sexual theater and adventurous politics.
Cleopatra smuggled herself into Caesar’s presence rolled up in a laundry bag (not a carpet). As soon as the highly intelligent and seductive queen tumbled out at his feet, Caesar was bewitched. Often in danger of defeat and hampered by meager forces, Caesar managed to rout her enemies and restore Cleopatra. As he fled the lovers’ combined army, Ptolemy XIII drowned in the Nile. Cleopatra’s youngest brother became Ptolemy XIV and her new husband.
Bearing a son by Caesar called Caesarion, the Egyptian queen lived openly as Caesar’s consort in Rome, causing a scandal. It was rumored that Caesar intended to become king of Rome and make Cleopatra his queen. On the Ides of March in 44 BC Caesar was murdered by his political enemies, and Cleopatra fled.
Back in Egypt, Cleopatra set about re-establishing her influence. The swashbuckling general Mark Antony, one of the Triumvirate who now ruled the republic, summoned Cleopatra to his presence. Her breathtaking entrance—reclining, dressed as Venus on a gold-burnished barge—captivated Antony as effectively as she had hooked Caesar. Mark Antony was assigned the imperium of the east, while Caesar’s adopted heir Octavian ruled the west. But Antony soon embraced a Hellenistic eastern vision of kingship, encouraged by Cleopatra, which was very different from the Roman tradition of austere dignity. She was determined to use Roman backing to reestablish the Ptolemaic empire.
Antony treated Cleopatra not as a protected sovereign but as an independent monarch. He gave her vast tracts of Syria, Lebanon and Cyprus, and appointed their children the monarchs of half a dozen countries. Antony saw Cleopatra as the co-founder of his eastern dynasty, and her new Egyptian territories as a key cornerstone to support his Roman empire in his wars against the Parthians. But Rome could not allow the re-emergence of an independent Ptolemaic empire. Pressed by Octavian, half-brother to Antony’s abandoned Roman wife, the Senate in Rome declared war on Egypt.
The lovers who had designated themselves gods were vanquished by Octavian at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC. Antony committed suicide, and Cleopatra, rather than facing the shame of being paraded in chains through Rome, had a venomous snake smuggled to her in a basket of figs. When Octavian’s soldiers came for her, they found the queen laid out on her golden bed, the pinpricks of an asp’s deadly fangs on her arm. Cleopatra had wanted to be the greatest of her dynasty, but she turned out to be its memorable last. She gambled her bid for empire on her relationship with a general who rarely won a battle—and she lost everything.
AUGUSTUS & LIVIA
63 BC–AD 14 & 58 BC–AD 29
He found Rome in brick and left it in marble.
Rome’s first and greatest emperor, Augustus, was the heir of Julius Caesar and founder of the Julio-Claudian imperial dynasty, which ruled until the fall of Nero.
Born in genteel obscurity as Octavius, he was the great-nephew of the dictator of Rome, Julius Caesar, who adopted the boy as his son. Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC—when Octavius was only nineteen—made him the great man’s heir, politically and in terms of his vast fortune. Now calling himself Caesar Octavian, he was initially mocked or ignored as a young novice but showed his mettle, first challenging the swashbuckling cavalry general Mark Antony, then joining him in alliance against Caesar’s assassins. The First Triumvirate—Antony, Octavian and Lepidus—defeated the assassins Brutus and Cassius at Philippi in 42 BC and then divided the Roman empire—with Octavian getting Rome and the west and Antony the east, where he went into political and romantic partnership with Cleopatra of Egypt. As Antony and Cleopatra’s ambitions alienated the Romans, the two sides went to war: Octavian—who was no soldier but whose forces were commanded by the talented general Marcus Agrippa—defeated his nemesis at Actium in 31 BC, leaving him master of the empire. Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide.
Octavian now combined various different roles in the Roman republic into a new position—princeps, emperor, which he held until his death. At first, the position was not meant to be hereditary. Still only thirty-three, Augustus (“Revered One”) as he now called himself, was slim and cold, a punctilious manager, delicate, unemotional, censorious, adulterous, a master of men and politics. He reformed government, provincial administration and justice, regulated taxation, patronized writers such as Horace, Virgil and Livy, embellished Rome, and tried not to expand the empire beyond its already vast borders, campaigning mostly against the Germans. In 9 AD, he was heartbroken by the loss of a legion under Varus in Germany. His last years were dominated by his wife Livia and the issue of succession. But however demented and murderous some of his successors, he had created a system of sometimes hereditary, sometimes elective autocrats—the emperors—that lasted until the end of the Roman empire. As it turned out, the dynastic future belonged to his wife and her family.
Livia was born in 58 BC into the family of Marcus Livius Drusus Claudianus, a magistrate from an Italian town whose blood lines carried a proud heritage. She was betrothed to her cousin Tiberius Claudius Nero in 42 BC and gave birth to her first son also named Tiberius Claudius Nero—the future emperor.
It was a tumultuous time, however, to be starting a family. In the civil wars that followed the murder of Julius Caesar in 44 BC, both Livia’s husband and her father supported the assassins of Caesar against Caesar’s heir, the young Octavian. When Octavian and his ally Mark Antony defeated Caesar’s murderers at Philippi in 42 BC, Livia’s father committed suicide. Then her husband joined the new anti-Octavian forces that gathered around Mark Antony, whose alliance with Caesar’s heir had proved short-lived. As a
result, the family was forced to abandon Italy in 40 BC to escape Octavian’s proscription of his enemies.
After a brief time in Sicily and then Greece, Tiberius Claudius Nero and his wife were persuaded to return to Rome in 39 BC, when Octavian offered an amnesty to supporters of Mark Antony. Back in the capital, Livia was introduced to Octavian for the first time, and by all accounts he immediately became besotted with her. By this stage, she was pregnant with a second son, Drusus, but despite this, her husband was persuaded to divorce her and present her as a political gift to Octavian.
From the moment of her marriage to Octavian, Livia carried herself in public as a reserved, dutiful and loyal wife. As her husband’s political strength grew, so her status gained recognition. In 35 BC she was made sacrosanctas, which gave her inviolability equal to that of a tribune.
But it was behind the scenes that she wielded her greatest, often supposedly malign, influence. She was a powerful woman and the sources are very prejudicial against her. There is no doubt she was ruthless and shrewd but equally there is no evidence she actually commited any of the poisonings for which she is infamous.
Augustus’s only child was Julia, a daughter from a previous marriage; so it was not clear who might succeed him. It was quite clear, though, to Livia: her own sons should inherit the throne.
The emperor’s first choice was his nephew Marcus Claudius Marcellus. However, in 23 BC, Marcellus died, in strange circumstances. Livia, who cultivated various experts on poison, was suspected of murder.
Next, Augustus favored Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, his closest friend and his chief military commander, the victor of Actium. In 17 BC Augustus adopted Agrippa’s two youngest sons, Gaius and Lucius Caesar, and the line of succession seemed to be secure.
Agrippa died in 12 BC, however, and the question of who would succeed Augustus was thrown into further doubt when, in AD 2 and 4 respectively, Lucius and Gaius died. The circumstances of the young princes’ deaths were mysterious, and again Livia was widely blamed. At last, Augustus was forced to embrace the option pushed by Livia: her son Tiberius, diffident but able, was adopted as the ailing emperor’s son in AD 4—thereby establishing him as one of the heirs to the throne.
Livia was forced into one final intervention. In AD 4, during the final rearrangement of his succession plans, Augustus also adopted Agrippa Postumus—Agrippa’s sole surviving son. Within two years, Postumus was exiled from Rome, possibly because of allegations that he had been involved in a coup plot against Augustus, though again Livia’s hand in events should not be discounted. Nevertheless, by AD 14 there were signs that Augustus was looking to rehabilitate his last adoptive son. Unwilling to countenance a possible late challenger to Tiberius, Livia is said to have poisoned her own husband, the aged emperor.
After Augustus’ death, Agrippa Postumus was quickly murdered, and Tiberius became emperor. Livia continued to be a figure of major importance—not least because her husband had bequeathed her one third of his estate (a highly unusual move). She now became known by the title Julia Augusta. Tiberius had always been appalled by her intrigues, even though they were in his favor; now he resented her interference.
When she died in AD 29 he did not attend the funeral. He also forbade her deification. Livia’s most fitting eulogy was delivered by Augustus’s great-grandson, whom she had helped to bring up in her own household. Caligula described her as a “Ulysses in a matron’s dress”—his praise perhaps the surest damnation that Livia could ever have received.
Though Tiberius was a competent administrator and talented general, he was all too aware that he was not his adopted father’s first choice—nor, indeed, his second or third preference, which perhaps explains why he never seemed comfortable as a ruler. Much of his reign was plagued by internal unrest and political intrigue. In AD 26, tiring of affairs of state, he moved to a palace on the island of Capri and spent the last decade of his rule in semi-retirement, leaving the Praetorian prefect, Lucius Aelius Sejanus, as de facto day-to-day ruler.
The ambitious Sejanus viewed his new role as a stepping-stone toward absolute power. From AD 29 he unleashed a terror. His enemies among the senatorial and equestrian classes were falsely accused of treason, tried and executed, making him the most powerful man in Rome. Sejanus also contrived to sideline Tiberius’ heirs. On becoming heir to Emperor Augustus in AD 4, Tiberius had adopted his nephew Germanicus, who became a popular general and later governed the eastern part of the empire. In AD 19, however, Germanicus died in Syria in mysterious circumstances. Tiberius’ own son Drusus died in AD 23—possibly poisoned by Sejanus, who was looking to further his political ambitions by marrying Drusus’ widow Livilla. Tiberius, however, refused him permission to marry her. When two of Germanicus’ sons were removed from the scene in AD 30, the succession looked as though it must fall to Germanicus’ surviving son Caligula or to Drusus’ son Tiberius Gemellus. In AD 31 Sejanus, determined to seize power for himself, hatched a plot to eliminate the emperor and the surviving male members of the imperial house. Tiberius had the Praetorian prefect arrested, then strangled and torn to pieces by a mob.
Meanwhile in Capri, Tiberius had devoted himself to more sensual pleasures since moving from Rome. The sensationalist historian Suetonius offers a flavor of what this entailed in his shocking Life of Tiberius:
On retiring to Capri he devised a pleasance for his secret orgies: teams of wantons of both sexes, selected as experts in deviant intercourse and dubbed analists, copulated before him in triple unions to excite his flagging passions. Some rooms were furnished with pornography and sex manuals from Egypt—which let the people there know what was expected of them. Tiberius also created lechery nooks in the woods and had girls and boys dressed as nymphs and Pans prostitute themselves in the open … He acquired a reputation for still grosser depravities that one can hardly bear to tell or be told, let alone believe. He had little boys trained as “minnows” to chase him when he went swimming and to get between his legs and nibble him. He also had babies not weaned from their mother’s breast suck at his chest and groin.
On Tiberius’s death in 37 AD, he was succeeded by Caligula.
JESUS
c. 4 BC—c. AD 30
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
The first three of the nine beatitudes (blessings) delivered by Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount
Jesus of Nazareth was the founder of Christianity, whose followers believe that he was the son and earthly manifestation of God. He lived in Judaea and Gallilee under the Romans and the princes of the Herodian dynasty. After working as a carpenter his ministry was short—perhaps one year, no more than three. He preached the coming of the kingdom of God and exhorted his followers to live lives of humility and compassion. He is also reported to have healed the sick and performed miracles. As a result of his activities, he was crucified, after which Christians believe he rose from the dead and ascended to heaven. His legacy, in the form of the Christian Church, not only underpins much of Western society and culture but also provides spiritual inspiration and guidance to millions of people worldwide.
The story of Jesus’ birth is well known, but little is recorded of the rest of his early years. His parents were Joseph, a carpenter, and Mary, who is known as the Virgin, though the Gospels of the New Testament differ over whether Jesus was immaculately conceived and there is much debate as to whether Jesus had brothers and a sister. Competing views of the exact nature and composition of his family continue to proliferate. He was born in the town of Bethlehem during a census that took place at the end of the reign of the Judaean king Herod the Great, who died in 4 BC. Various groups of pilgrims, including shepherds and “wise men” from the east, visited him at the time of his birth. Like all Jews, he was circumcised in the Temple of Jerusalem and had a dove sacrificed for his blessing.
Jesus was
apparently a precociously intelligent child. As a young man he went to be baptized by his cousin, John the Baptist, a prophet who had predicted his arrival. Sometime after this, Jesus became an itinerant preacher and healer, traveling the Jewish areas of Palestine and spreading his message.
The Gospels report that Jesus was able, usually by the laying-on of hands, to cure men and women of blindness, paralysis, leprosy, deafness, dumbness and bleeding. He was also famed for his powers of exorcism—he visited synagogues to cast out demons, thereby apparently curing both mental and physical ailments. It is said that he conferred this ability on his disciples.
Further attention and bigger crowds were attracted by Jesus’ ability to perform miracles. Some of his most famous miracles included the ability to walk on water; to multiply small numbers of fishes and loaves to feed large groups of people; and to turn water into wine. When he cursed a fig tree, it withered, to the amazement of his disciples.
As well as performing miracles, Jesus preached and his main message was the imminence of the kingdom of God, the Apocalypse and Judgment Day in which eternal life awaited those who repented and believed in him. He approved of poverty as a state of grace and chose to surround himself with sinners and the deprived, asserting that he was sent to preach not to the righteous but to those who had strayed. Jesus also taught the forgiveness of enemies and the observance of a humble and pious moral code.
According to some of the Gospels, he saw himself as the Messiah (or Christ), others claimed he used instead the vaguer “Son of Man.” A student of the Jewish prophets, his every act was a conscious fulfillment of the prophecies of Isaiah, Ezekiel and others. But he mocked the Temple’s priestly aristocracy and Herodian princelings and that, coupled with his apocalyptic message, made him a threat to the Romans too. Judaea was disturbed by a constant succession of Jewish “pseudo-prophets” and self-declared Messiahs, all of whom were ruthlessly suppressed by the Romans. Jesus remained a practicing Jew and as such he knew that a Jewish prophet had to live and die in Jerusalem. So when, around AD 30, Jesus went to Jerusalem for Passover, he was a source of considerable concern to the city’s governors.
Titans of History Page 7