A History of the World

by Andrew Marr

  Something had to be done. Cleopatra did it. Now, having made her bed, she lay on it. A vicious local war broke out in Alexandria, where Caesar had too few troops to control the uprising and street fighting. He came close to death. Part of the famous library was destroyed. Cleopatra stuck with him until Roman legions arrived to free them. In return she became effective ruler, and enjoyed a Nile boat cruise before bearing Caesar his only son. He, far from being infatuated to distraction, was busy studying his long-planned reform of the calendar. It was an Alexandrine who suggested to him the solution of a 365-day year, with an extra day every fourth year. Meanwhile, Cleopatra provided her own protection. In case anyone missed the point, she named the boy Caesarion.

  How overwhelmed by love was the conqueror? Not entirely, perhaps. When Caesar marched off to continue the civil war against his enemies, now including Pompey’s vengeful son and old political foes like Cato, he left some troops behind, just to keep an eye on Cleopatra.

  She built a temple dedicated to his worship. In their different ways, both Caesar and Cleopatra were aspiring to the status of god-people. She was associating herself with the ancient cult of Isis, and her son with Horus. As Caesar piled victory upon victory, Rome capitulated and voted him ever more lavish honours. The pagan city, so brilliant by now in its literature and architecture, treated him as a man to be worshipped, and declared him dictator for a decade to come. A triumph even greater than Pompey’s was declared, and another grandiose programme of rebuilding was begun as the spoils of Caesar’s murderous civil wars poured in. The Roman abasement before him knew no limits. Caesar introduced some reforms, but made no attempt to stop what had become Caesar-worship. His house was decked out like a temple. His chariot was erected opposite Jupiter’s. Cleopatra was there to watch both the bloodthirsty games put on in his honour and the growing Caesar cult; and to make sure that Caesar did not repudiate their child.

  For her there was the chance, at least, of a radically remade politics in which these two god-people, she and Caesar, would jointly rule the known world. Caesar may have had the same dream, though he was not a dreamy type. He put her statue in the temple of his alleged goddess ancestress, Venus Genetrix. The Roman mob started to mutter that he intended to marry Cleopatra and shift his capital to decadent Alexandria. He had to keep working to manipulate and manoeuvre through the highways and byways of the politics of Rome, of course, but Caesar’s attitude to religion seems always to have been cynical. It was a prop to power, a useful lever, taking many forms.

  In different ways both Caesar and Cleopatra were harking back to a familiar old Hellenistic world in which successful rulers, such as Alexander, claimed divinity. Religion and worldly power had always stood together, priests and kings side by side, since the known world came into being. Caesar in triumph painted his face divine red, like Jupiter’s statue, and was again declared dictator, this time for life. In fact, he turned out to have antagonized a lethal coalition of offended aristocrats and pro-republican conservatives, who would assassinate him in 44 BC, perhaps to make sure yet another planned war against the Parthians did not make him invulnerable.

  The time came. After Caesar, arriving for a meeting of the Senate, had been set upon by half a dozen plotters, then stabbed to death, twenty-three wounds were found on his body. His last act had been to cover his face so that his death agony could not be seen. With perfect dramatic placing, he was left lying in blood near the statue of his great ally and then his enemy, Pompey.

  Caesar had helped finish off a republic which, for all its faults, had lasted more than four hundred years. Its notions of citizenship and its rejection of monarchy had given the world something important. Caesar had not found a way of ruling this heterogeneous and sophisticated society, but his republican assassins had underestimated the popularity of a rich, god-mimicking strongman. They too were soon dead, while the association of divinity and worldly rule grew ever stronger in the Roman world. Its first true emperor, Caesar Augustus, was deified on his death by the Senate. Hardy soldier-farmers, in a tough republic, had mutated into rich imperial politicians, and now into servants to emperors.

  Soon Cleopatra would be dead too, the last of the pharaohs. Caesar’s death had eventually spawned another round of civil war, which by then must have seemed interminable to the citizens of Rome, but it was in fact about to end. Octavian, who had been declared Caesar’s adopted son, fought Mark Antony, his beloved general, for the ultimate prize. There was little to choose between them in their view of the dying republican dream, or in their absolute appetite for power. If Octavian, later Augustus, would be declared a god, Mark Antony apparently believed he was descended from Hercules. Cleopatra struggled to avoid taking sides until she felt sure she could tell who would win, but was eventually summoned by Mark Antony to Tarsus to explain herself. In the tightest of tight spots once again, she replayed an old tune, appearing not swathed in a rug this time, but in a golden barge.

  Shakespeare’s devastatingly beautiful description – the best known – follows, quite closely, that of Plutarch, who elsewhere emphasizes that he knew people who knew people in Cleopatra’s world. The queen, he says, sailed

  up the river Cydnus in a barge with gilded poop, its sails spread purple, its rowers urging it on with silver oars to the sound of the flute blended with pipes and lutes. She herself reclined beneath a canopy spangled with gold, adorned like Venus in a painting, while boys like Loves in paintings stood on either side and fanned her . . . Wondrous odours from countless incense-offerings diffused themselves along the river-banks.

  Who would say no? Not Mark Antony, possessing divine blood himself, and at this time the seeming winner of the Roman world’s struggle for supremacy.

  The pair returned to winter in Egypt, allegedly for a feast of lovemaking and self-indulgence, during which Cleopatra usefully became pregnant again, this time with twins. She would call them after the sun and moon, Alexander-Helios or Alexander Sun and Cleopatra-Selene or Cleopatra Moon, infant gods who might also rule the world. Mark Antony then began a political reorganization of the Middle East, giving his lover back old territories, though not Judah, which remained with Herod. He next turned to destroy a new irritant for the Romans, the fast-riding, sharp-shooting interlopers on the Asian plains called Parthians, whom Caesar had also intended to attack. An Iranian tribal people who had developed their own empire and who traded with both the Mediterranean and the Han Chinese, the Parthians had developed more powerful bows and a form of mobile warfare against which the Roman legions seemed powerless.

  Mark Antony was not the first great general to set off and then have to retreat, leaving behind tens of thousands of casualties. But his defeat by the Parthians weakened him at a time when his rival Octavian was on the rise in the West. It ended the dream of a new and even bigger ‘Asian Roman Empire’, or indeed any prospect of a neat division of the Mediterranean between the rival warlords. Few things in history happen neatly. Antony was to win a later great victory over the Armenians, which was celebrated with Cleopatra in Alexandria. Antony was declared the living god Dionysus; and Cleopatra, ‘Queen of Kings’ and ‘the youngest goddess’.

  Octavian was quick to whip up Roman hostility to this threatening swagger: he read Antony’s will to the Senate, in which he confirmed his preference for Alexandria over Rome. War was declared. Senators divided their loyalties. Legions prepared to march.

  It ended with one of ancient history’s least dramatic, if most important, battles. It was a sea battle, at Actium off the west coast of Greece, in 31 BC. Cleopatra commanded her own fleet in person, but when she and Mark Antony were faced with trying to break through Octavian’s blockade, she panicked and led her warships into the open sea and home to Egypt. Antony was perhaps already likely to lose. His men had been weakened by malaria, his huge five-rank oared ships could not gain enough speed to ram effectively, and one of his generals had gone over to Octavian with his secret battle plans. At any rate, this last major sea battle of classical times ended a
lmost before it had begun, when Mark Antony, seeing Cleopatra leave, followed her with just a few of his own ships.

  After this, their cause was doomed. Octavian marched on Alexandria as the lovers enjoyed a final orgy. Mark Antony stabbed himself and died at Cleopatra’s feet. She tried to negotiate with Octavian on her son Caesarion’s behalf, but when it became clear that Octavian intended to parade her in his Roman triumph, she too decided to kill herself to avoid such ignominy. (Her sister had been paraded by Caesar at his triumph, but the mob had taken pity on her and Caesar had spared her. Later, Cleopatra had her murdered anyway; this was not the death of a romantic martyr.) Thanks to an image carried at Octavian’s celebrations, showing Cleopatra killed by a cobra, the legend is that she committed suicide by placing an asp – a smaller, more credible serpent – on her breast, having had it smuggled to her in a basket of figs. Perhaps. Or maybe she simply used a reliable poison. She was not quite forty years old. Her death did not save Caesarion, who was caught and executed.

  The Roman Peace

  So ended not only Cleopatra’s strategy vis-à-vis Mark Antony, but her original dream of uniting the worlds of Egypt, Greece and Rome in the person of an ultimate god-king. Octavian declared himself Caesar Augustus, and with Rome exhausted from civil war he was able to initiate a long spell of imperial peace. Edward Gibbon, the great English historian, famously described what followed as a happy period in human history, when the Roman Empire

  comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilised portion of mankind . . . The gentle but powerful influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury. The image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence: the Roman Senate appeared to possess the sovereign authority

  His book (published between 1776 and 1788), which opens with this analysis, was concerned with why such an era of human happiness should have ended; he called it The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

  His answer was the rise of Christianity, which we will come to. Most modern historians would shrink from blaming the followers of Jesus for the collapse of the Roman world. Another part of the answer was given in Gibbon’s opening words, where he spoke of ‘the image of a free constitution’ and the Senate appearing to have authority. After his final victory, in 27 BC, Octavian restored the outward form of republican government, while reserving for himself the powers Julius Caesar had claimed, becoming warlord, dictator and head of the official religion. Yet he was a shrewd ruler as well as a lucky one. After some early campaigns, pushing upwards into central Europe and down towards Arabia, he more or less halted the Roman lust for expansion to concentrate on a programme of civic revival. Much of what we think of today as the glories of Rome – the grand buildings, the immaculately kept roads, the conquerors’ peace and the lavish materialism of city life – derives from the peace established by Augustus. His rule was really a monarchy, with the trappings of republicanism, and it would soon harden into full-fig imperialism.

  The weakness of such a system is the possibility of mad or bad kings. Rome would suffer from plenty of those, notably in Augustus’ family, after he handed over power to one of his daughter’s husbands, Tiberius. They included such horrors as Caligula, who was mad, and Nero, who was certainly bad. There followed ‘the year of the four emperors’, after which a rough tax collector’s son, Vespasian, grabbed power. His son was killed, and a senator called Nerva returned to the old practice of adopting the best-seeming candidate as the emperor-designate – a good Roman compromise between politics and kingship that produced a run of strong emperors, first Trajan, of Arch and Column fame, whose conquests reached the Persian Gulf; and then Hadrian, of the famous Wall.

  Life seemed so secure that the next emperor, Antoninus Pius, could rule for nearly a quarter of a century without leaving Italy, or going within hundreds of miles of the legions. He did, however, experience the problems of ‘too much’ in this early display-and-consumer society, when one of his circus festivals featuring giraffes, elephants, rhinoceroses, crocodiles and tigers cost so much he had to debase the currency to fund it. Then came Marcus Aurelius, another fighting emperor better known today for his fine meditations on life and duty, from the Stoic viewpoint. His son was a weak and unpopular figure who was killed young, ushering in another period of strife and uncertainty.

  Yet this experiment in empire had been a considerable political achievement. As with so many later regimes, ultimate power was with the army, which was why so many Roman legions were permanently stationed far from Rome, on the new frontiers in Germany, Britain and North Africa. Roman administrators spread the rule of law through elites who might have started out as British, Gaulish, Dacian or Jewish, but who came to think of themselves as at least partly Roman.

  Inside the long walls of Roman imperial power, new ways of living thrived. Something akin to a Mediterranean-wide middle class emerged, city-dwellers who as craftsmen, traders, shopkeepers, legal experts, teachers and builders accumulated enough wealth to enjoy exotic foods, public entertainments and well appointed private homes. Below them, but above the huge slave class, were the workers whose lives, though precarious, were also enlivened by the fast-food stalls of Roman towns, cheap wine and distractions including lotteries, gambling and circuses – lifestyles not so unlike those of millions of today’s city-dwellers. Even if most people, herding goats or ploughing clay in distant villages, would have known little of all this, Roman imperialism brought obvious material benefits.

  What it did not bring was a coherent system of beliefs that bound people tightly together, or that provided them with satisfying ways of explaining their fate. Had it done so, then Gibbon’s bugbear, Christianity, could hardly have taken off with such vigour. Julius Caesar and Cleopatra had seen religion and politics as pretty nearly the same thing, as ways of veiling their power so as to obtain the fealty of the masses. Like the emperors who followed him, Caesar could offer booty and favours to a few, and hand-outs to appease the plebs. But he could not inspire faith. The world Caesar had been born into was already a fallen republic, cynical and greedy, which had already experienced the rule of a part-time military dictator, Sulla. Yet it still thought of itself as having a virtuous and stable republican future. Hitherto, reason, order and political compromise had been possible. After Caesar, they were not.

  The Chinese Parallel

  China’s first emperor and his warrior state of Ch’in had engulfed the central area of that part of the world in a succession of terrible wars. Like Caesar, Zheng had had a megalomaniac vision of personal power. And paralleling Julius Caesar’s fall, Zheng’s death catapulted his empire into civil war, as would-be successors fought for control. China’s civil war was worse even than Rome’s. Yet in both cases, from the horror emerged a centralized empire with a better chance of peace. Perhaps sheer exhaustion, the bloodletting cure, was part of the explanation. Though none of the Han Chinese rulers has the worldwide fame of Augustus, their achievements were on a similar level.

  They reduced military service, partially dismantled their huge armies and got rid of the most vicious of the Ch’in laws. They created the first truly meritocratic and efficient bureaucracy that we know about, based on competitive examinations. Indeed, this was one of their great inventions, ahead of anything in the Roman world. So too were the Han troops’ semi-mechanized crossbows, fired by disciplined ranks moving forward then loading, like later European musket-based armies. Had it ever come to a fight between the Roman legions and the Han armies, the Chinese would surely have won. Like the Romans, the Han recruited tribes from the borders of their empire into their own armies – thus ‘using barbarians to fight barbarians’ – and as with the Romans, this eventually proved a problem.

  Because Han China’s buildings were mostly of carved and painted wood, and its art was painted on silk, very little of its physical glory survives – much less than of Rome’s. In general its writings are
more clerkish than the most gossipy and scandalous of the writers of the great Roman imperial age, but it was a highly sophisticated society.

  The historian Ian Morris has devised ingenious scales of human energy consumption to chart the rise and fall of societies, and on that basis the Roman and Han empires did similarly well, their people using up seven or eight times as much energy as their ice-age ancestors. The Han suffered from plagues passed along trade routes between themselves and the Mediterranean (so, at just the same time, did the Roman world, presumably catching Chinese bugs). They suffered droughts and barbarian invasions too; but because of Zheng’s centralization, the Chinese made progress. They had the peace and space to build new canals and roads, to spread fresh ideas about irrigation, to develop weights and measures, laws and money, that were all widely understood. With the Han empire they emerged into a world that would have been unimaginable during the long slaughter of the ‘warring states period’.

  In a similar way, the grandeur and relative prosperity of the Roman Empire at its height remains awesome, and it might have been hoped that a perpetual new Western order had been established. From southern Scotland to North Africa and from Portugal to Syria, a network of superbly engineered and maintained roads allowed Roman citizens to travel faster overland than any previous people – and as fast as any to come, until the arrival of the railways. Aqueducts, sewers, bathhouses and hypocaust heating literally underpinned the Pax Romana. Adminstrators could be trusted, even if they were never as effective as their Chinese rivals. The legions became foreign legions, as outlying tribes were brought in and tamed.