At the same time, Augustus was trying to find himself an heir and create a dynasty, a most unrepublican idea.
The Senate had some sympathy for the idea of an heir, since no one wanted a war to erupt as soon as Augustus died, but there was no legal way for him to appoint someone to be the next imperator of Rome. The more personal problem was that Augustus had no son of his own. He had considered making a son-in-law his successor, and so back in 24 BC he had married his fourteen-year-old daughter Julia off to her seventeen-year-old cousin Marcellus, his first choice for an heir. But Marcellus died just a year later. After that, Augustus married Julia to one of his officers, a man named Agrippa; but Agrippa too died, in 12 BC.
Instead of giving the poor woman some peace, Augustus then married her to his last candidate: his wife’s son by a previous marriage, Tiberius. Tiberius was no one’s first choice. He was cold and distant, generally silent, and he had odd tics: he walked stiffly, and made constant gestures with his fingers when he talked.23 As Augustus’s heir, Tiberius was a placeholder. The emperor hoped that one of Julia’s sons would grow old enough to be appointed successor instead. But meanwhile he had created a wretched family life for his daughter. Julia hated Tiberius, and their life was so miserable that he went off to Rhodes, while she grew more promiscuous and drunken. Her behavior became so scandalous, in fact, that Augustus finally had her confined on Pandateria, a prison island.
His domestic troubles did not take him away from the business of running his empire for long. In 4 BC, Herod the Great—the vassal king put back on the throne by Mark Antony—died, leaving three sons and an enormously rebuilt temple. He had used his authority to turn the shabby, rebuilt Second Temple into a showpiece of his greatness as a king (albeit one under Roman supervision). The flat space on which it sat, the Temple Mount, was too small to allow for much expansion, so Herod dug all around it and built huge underground chambers to serve as foundations for more floor space.
Now Herod the Great was dead. But rather than choosing one of Herod’s three sons to succeed him, Augustus divided Palestine into three parts; perhaps the size of the Temple had revealed family ambitions that needed to be squelched. In any case, Herod Antipas got Galilee, next to the Sea of Galilee; Archelaus got Samaria and Judea; and the third brother, Philip, got the north. Herod Antipas and Philip ruled without too much incident; but Archelaus turned out to be so cruel that in AD 6 Augustus yanked him from his throne and put a Roman official, a procurator, in his place to keep an eye on the area. This procurator had the final say over the whole area, particularly in serious legal matters such as executions, but as long as Herod Antipas and Philip behaved themselves, the Romans tended to leave them alone.
A little farther to the east, the Parthians were suffering from an anti-Roman reaction.
In 2 BC, Phraates IV’s family life took a downturn again. His slave girl had borne him a son, and when this son reached his late teens, he turned and murdered his father. Coins from the reign of this boy, Phraates V, show his mother beside him; possibly she was a co-ruler, but she looks more like his consort, and it was not unheard of (although icky) to marry your mother in Parthia, particularly since she seems to have been barely fifteen years his senior.24 Their joint reign made them terribly unpopular, and after barely four years, the Parthians drove them out into exile.
After this one of those Roman-educated sons of Phraates IV took the throne, under the royal name Vonones I. This was the sort of influence over Parthia that the Romans had hoped for, the next best thing to actual rule as they had in Palestine. Unfortunately, it didn’t last. Vonones’s portraits on his coins show him with western-style hair, undoubtedly learned in his days in Rome, and Vonones’s Roman ways annoyed the Parthians in his court. Roman words in the mouths of Parthian men, Roman dress, Roman habits: these had become increasingly unpopular with the conservative part of Parthian society. During peace, it seemed even more important to stay vigilant about their native culture; a vigilance that wasn’t necessary during wartime, when the hostilities acted as a natural check over cultural exchange.
Vonones I also lasted for only four years or so, before the Parthian patriot Artabanus drove him away (or killed him) and became king in his place. Parthia remained at peace with Rome, but it was a tentative peace, with Parthia consistently resisting all Roman influence and holding itself aloof on the other side of the Euphrates.228
BY AD 4, Augustus had given up on finding himself a blood heir. Two of Julia’s grandsons had died young. The third, Agrippa Postumus, had grown to be so vicious that he was widely thought to be insane; Augustus had sent him to the prison island of Pandateria as well. He was stuck with Tiberius, so he formally adopted his son-in-law as his ward and part of his immediate family.
This did not make Tiberius his heir, since hereditary rule was still an unspoken possibility. But he did give Tiberius more and more control over the Roman army; and since the support of the Roman legions was the greatest prop of imperial power, this was almost as good as handing Tiberius a crown. In AD 13, the Senate confirmed Tiberius as proconsul and princeps alongside Augustus, which eliminated the immediate problem of a hereditary transfer of power.
The action came just in time. In August of AD 14, the two men were travelling together when the seventy-five-year-old Augustus was struck with diarrhea. He grew progressively weaker, until he was unable to get out of his bed.
On his last day, he asked for a mirror so that he could arrange his hair, as though for an audience. “When the friends he had summoned were present,” Suetonius writes, “he inquired of them whether they thought he had played his role well in the comedy of life.” When they agreed, he quoted (almost as his last words) two lines from a popular drama:
Since the play has been so good, clap your hands
And all of you dismiss us with applause.25
In the last moments of his life, he could finally admit the truth that no one in Rome had dared to speak: his role as protector of the Republic had been playacting, and his refusal to accept the title of emperor had been nothing but pretense, all done for the sake of the audience.
Chapter Eighty
Eclipse and Restoration
In China, between 33 BC and AD 75,
the Han Dynasty is temporarily replaced because of bad omens,
and then is restored for the same reason
AT THE VERY END OF THE ROAD EAST, China under the Han Dynasty was growing into an empire with its own surrounding provinces, not unlike the Roman empire at the very end of the road west. The chronicles of Sima Qian speak of tribe after tribe on its western border, conquered and folded into its borders. And just like the ruling family at the other end of the road, the Chinese royal clan suffered through its own personal dramas, which then weakened the borders of the empire itself.
In 33 BC, while Octavian was still building his powers, the Han emperor Yuandi died. He had inherited the throne from his father Xuandi, and now passed it to his son Chengdi.
Chengdi was eighteen, which in Chinese tradition was not quite old enough for full independent rule. His mother Cheng-chun became the empress dowager, with regentlike powers. When she suggested that Chengdi give her relatives from the Wang clan important government positions, Chengdi obediently complied. Her brothers became lords; her oldest brother, general-in-chief of the army. Other Wang family members were given other posts, until the highest posts in the Han government were overloaded with them.1
Chengdi died in 7, after a reign of over two decades—but with no son of his own. His nephew Aiti succeeded him. After this, the reigns of the Han rulers grow suspiciously short. Aiti died after only six years, also without children; and an eight-year-old cousin who next sat on the throne, Ping, died in AD 6 after a seven-year reign, also childless.
The empress dowager was still alive; she had now outlived four Han monarchs. Now she supervised the accession of yet another baby, a distant Han cousin named Ruzi who could claim to be the great-great-grandson of the earlier emperor Xuandi. As his re
gent, she appointed her own nephew Wang Mang, a well-respected and educated man who had been serving as a minister for years already. His biographer, the historian Ban Gu, remarked that he had managed to build himself up a loyal following by “distributing carriages, horses, gowns, and furs” to his “scholarly retainers,” while keeping little for himself; in other words, he was proficient at bribery.2
Noblemen who resented the Wang power in government protested; one insisted that Wang Mang had poisoned at least one of the previous kings; another led a short-lived, armed uprising. But Wang Mang promised that he would hand the crown over to the baby king as soon as he was old enough. This gave him at least ten years of grace time.
It only took him three to convince the people of the capital city that the extraordinary bad luck of the Han succession showed that the Will of Heaven had turned against the Han, and that the absence of an adult emperor on the throne was encouraging banditry, murder, and all sorts of crimes. When omens began to favor Wang Mang (for one thing, a white stone discovered at the bottom of a well had written on it “Tell Wang Mang that he must become Emperor!”), he declared that the Han had ended, and that he was now emperor of China. “I am a descendant of the Yellow Emperor,” he announced, “and have been given the Mandate for the continuation of the succession. The omens have indicated the clear commands of the Spirits, entrusting to me the people of the empire.”3
The Han had already survived for 197 years, no mean feat. But for the next decade and a half after AD 9, Wang Mang’s Xin Dynasty—the “New” Dynasty—would eclipse it.
The empress dowager, who finally died in 13 AD after having lived through the reigns of six emperors of China, did not live to see the end of the story. But the effects of the change in dynasty were obvious even before her death. Wang Mang was not a cruel man; he sent the baby prince away to be raised elsewhere, but spared his life (although rumor said that little Ruzi had been so carefully guarded that he did not know a chicken when he saw one). But his decisions were disastrous. He pronounced himself restorer of the old and honored ways, and tried to roll back all of the changes made during the Han to break the old ties of aristocratic privilege. He annoyed the peasants by giving the noble families some of their old feudal powers back; he annoyed the aristocrats by reviving the ancient idea that all of China belonged to the emperor (and even more by following through and claiming some of their territories for himself).4 His policies were so sweeping, and so sudden, that his people were thrown into confusion and discontent. His biographer Ban Gu tells us:
The people could not turn a hand without violating some prohibition…. The rich had no means to protect themselves and the poor no way to stay alive. They rose up and became thieves and bandits, infesting the hills and marshes.5
Wang Mang was also unlucky in the weather. Drought and famine over much of the capital region were joined, cruelly, by flooding; in AD 11, dikes on the Yellow river broke and thousands drowned. The omens that Wang Mang had depended on to sweep him into power turned against him. “Famine and pestilence raged,” says Ban Gu, “and people ate each other, so that before Wang Mang was finally punished [by losing his throne] half the population of the empire had perished.”
In response to this combination of political change and natural disaster, one of the first secret societies in Chinese history formed: the Red Eyebrows, who organized in a band to fight against the soldiers who came out into the countryside to enforce Wang Mang’s decrees. In an age before uniforms, they painted their foreheads red so that, in battle, they could distinguish friend from foe.6
In AD 23, Wang Mang gave up his throne and fled. He left behind him a mess of Han relatives, none of whom had a clear right to the throne. Battles between them dragged on for two years before one of them, Liu Xiu, won enough support to claim the throne for himself.
Liu Xiu, better known by his imperial name Guang Wudi, set himself to reversing the damage Wang Mang had done. But he created some distance between himself and the earlier Han kingdom (which, after all, had disintegrated into disorder) by moving his capital city from Chang’an to Loyang, two hundred miles east; thus the second half of the Han empire is often called the Eastern Han to distinguish it from the earlier Han rule.
He also did not restore the Han custom of giving all important posts to royal family members, which was how Wang Mang had gotten into power to start with. Instead, he divided the old Han territory up into new counties, and gave more of the government posts to less important families. And as part of his struggle against the constant influence of the old noble families, he built over one hundred training schools for future bureaucrats, in which government-paid teachers taught the skills that government officials needed to run the empire properly. He also put into effect a system of examinations; candidates who passed the examinations could win government posts, regardless of family background. It was a meritocracy, based on Confucian ideas of order, and it became a system that would endure for centuries.7
But the counties which these new administrators would run were smaller, and fewer, than before; the famine, civil war, and flooding had killed many, many Chinese. Census figures suggest that as many as ten million people had died in the last years of the Western Han and the years of the New Dynasty, in one of the great hidden disasters of the past.8
GUANG WUDI REIGNED for a long and prosperous thirty-two years, and then passed the crown to his son Mingdi.
Mingdi was not the emperor’s original heir. Guang Wudi had not entirely abandoned the old practice of building power through alliances with old families; his first marriage had been to a noblewoman of the north, and gave him a strategic link to the northern clans who might have given the emperor a run for the throne. Her son had been named crown prince. But almost twenty years into his reign, Guang Wudi felt in firm control of the north, and started to worry about the south instead. He put his first wife away and took a second, southern wife as official consort. When her son Mingdi was born, Guang Wudi pronounced this son, not his older child, to be his heir.
Mingdi was twenty-nine when he took the throne. He solved the problem of northern resentment by sending his general Pan Ch’ao north to campaign against the ongoing threat of the Xiongnu, above them. Gratitude assured him of the north’s loyalty. And Pan Ch’ao’s campaigns not only whipped the Xiongnu into submission, but also conquered the western area of the Tarim Basin: the so-called Oasis States, an act which reopened, from the eastern end, the road that had already been cleared from the west by the Parthian-Roman treaty.9
According to later biographers, Mingdi then had a dream: he saw a golden god in the sky, asking to be honored. His advisors assured him that this was the Buddha, a god of whom they had heard from India. This is a poetic expression of the reality of migration. Both merchants and missionaries from India had begun to travel regularly into China.
Mingdi sent men to India to learn more about the Buddha. According to Chinese tradition, they came back with the Sutta in Forty-two Sections, which were Buddhist sayings presented in much the same way as the Analects of Confucius.10 Mingdi, pleased by the Sutta, began to adopt its teachings for himself and for his court.
This is probably a simplified presentation of a more gradual adoption of Buddhist principles by the court, but it does show that Buddhism was making its way into China—and that it was spreading in a way quite unlike Confucianism. Confucianism, now set into the structures of Han bureaucracy by Guang Wudi’s schools, had begun among the people and had run along the grass roots of Chinese society, promising ordinary men and women principles that would get them through their day-to-day lives: a republican ethic. But Buddhism came into China at the top of the social tree; it was adopted first by the king, and spread from him downwards. In China, it was the religion of the educated, the powerful, and the well-to-do.
Chapter Eighty-One
The Problem of Succession
Between AD 14 and 69,
Roman emperors grow progressively madder,
the city burns, and the pe
rsecution of Christians begins
WITH AUGUSTUS DEAD, Tiberius, at the age of fifty-four, now held the sole power of princeps.
Tiberius knew that the people of Rome were not automatically going to acclaim him as the next Augustus; most of them knew that Augustus had chosen him, as Suetonius puts it, “through necessity rather than preference.”1 The Senate might very easily turn against him altogether, particularly if he seemed too anxious. So when he went before the senators, a month after Augustus’s death, to be formally recognized as head of state, he tried to follow Augustus’s own strategy of laying powers down with apparent humility so that they could be willingly returned. He wasn’t very good at apparent humility, though. When the Senate tried to return the powers, he kept on half-refusing them with ambiguous answers, until they were thoroughly frustrated and one of them shouted out, “Either do it, or have done with it!”2 Finally, he did manage to get himself confirmed as Augustus’s successor—but he never did end up with the title of Imperator, or with the new title of Augustus either.
He had appointed his own successor even before Augustus’s death: his nephew Germanicus, who had been serving as general in command of the legions at the Rhine (the Romans knew this province as Germany, and the Celtic tribes who roved through it as Germans). Now he brought Germanicus back to Rome and had him elected consul, and then sent him to govern the province of Syria.
The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome Page 74