The Book of Ancient Bastards: 101 of the Worst Miscreants and Misdeeds From Ancient Sumer to the Enlightenment
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When he took the throne of Egypt in 145 B.C., our Ptolemy took the reign name “Eurgetes” (Greek for “Benefactor”). In truth he was anything but. Quickly tiring of his lying, his murderous rages, and his rampant gluttony, his subjects began to refer to him as “Physcon” (“Potbelly”) because he was so fat. The quote that leads off this chapter references that physical characteristic as well as his laziness. Beholden to the Roman Republic for its support, Ptolemy VIII was forced to actually walk through the city of Alexandria (as opposed to being carted about in a litter) while playing tour guide to a visiting collection of Roman V.I.P.s, including Scipio Aemilianus, the author of the quote.
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CLEOPATRA THEA
Poisonous Evil Queen or Just Misunderstood?
(CA. 164–121 B.C.)
As soon as Seleucus assumed the diadem after his brother’s death his mother shot him dead with an arrow, either fearing lest he should avenge his father or moved by an insane hatred for everybody. After Seleucus, Grypus became king, and he compelled his mother to drink poison that she had mixed for himself. So justice overtook her at last.
—Appian, Syriaca
The evil queen meting out death and destruction to her own children before her own well-deserved death in the quotation excerpted above has a very famous name: Cleopatra. No, not that Cleopatra.
This Cleopatra was also born in Egypt, but about a century earlier than the more famous one. Her father, Ptolemy VI, used her as a pawn in his diplomatic chess match with his neighbors, the Seleucid dynasty in Syria. First, she was married off to a usurper (Alexander Balas), then taken back by her father and married to the heir to the Seleucid throne (Demetrius II). Then after this second husband became king and was captured by the Parthians, her father again intervened and married her to Demetrius’s younger brother (Antiochus IX). When that brother was killed in battle, she was returned to Demetrius, recently escaped from ten years of Parthian captivity.
By these three men she had several children, including the next two heirs to the Seleucid throne (Seleucus V and Antiochus VIII Grypus). And this was finally her opportunity to stop being a pawn and start being a queen. It was through her children that Cleopatra Thea exercised power, first murdering her son Seleucus V shortly after he became king in 125 B.C., then ruling as regent for her other son Grypus while he was still a child.
By 121 B.C., Grypus had grown into his teens, and well aware of the fate of his older brother, he apparently knew better than to trust his own mother. So when Mama Cleo decided to try to slip him a poison mickey in a drink, he turned on her and had her drink it herself.
Done in by her own treachery, Cleopatra Thea died as she lived the majority of her life: at the hands of a close male relative.
What’s In a Bastard’s Name?
Cleopatra was a common name in ancient Macedonia; in fact, Alexander the Great had a sister by that name. And the Macedonian rulers of the Hellenistic state in Egypt glommed on to the name as a potential connection to anything related to Alexander. So just as there were countless Ptolemys coming out of Egypt, damn near every female born to the royal family there over the 300 years of Ptolemaic rule in Egypt was named, you guessed it: Cleopatra.
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MITHRIDATES VI OF PONTUS
Gold-Plated Bastard
(134– 63 B.C.)
[Mithridates VI] was ever eager for war, of exceptional bravery, always great in spirit and sometimes in achievement, in strategy a general, in bodily prowess a soldier, in hatred to the Romans a Hannibal.
—Velleius Paterculus, Compendium of Roman History
Here’s one for ya: a monarch in the vein of that fascinating bastard Alexander the Great. Equal parts paranoid and propagandist, a matricide who also killed his siblings, all while dosing himself with antidotes to build his immunity to poison, Mithridates VI, ruler of the Greek kingdom of Pontus (in what is now northern Turkey), was a thorn in the side of an expanding Roman military-industrial complex for decades until his death in 63 B.C.
King from the time he was thirteen, Mithridates did not actually rule until he turned twenty, whereupon he had his regent (aka “Mom”) killed, along with his brother and sister for good measure. According to his carefully scripted life story, before this, he’d fled into the forest for fear for his own life (Mom apparently wanted him dead), where he lived for years, killing lions and strengthening himself to take his kingdom back.
This guy knew how to frame a narrative.
Mithridates’s neighbors to the west consisted of a bunch of small post-Hellenistic Greek-speaking kingdoms, all of them dominated from afar by the Roman Republic. Beginning in 133 B.C. with the foundation of the Roman province of Asia in central Turkey, the Romans had begun to gradually expand into the region, first ruling indirectly through existing monarchs, whom they would co-opt and then set up as puppets, and eventually integrating territory into their provincial system after they had their hooks dug deep into the local economy.
Rome had civilian contractors (the Halliburtons of their day) called publicani who did everything from road- and public-building construction to tax collection in these conquered and soon-to-be conquered territories. It was a system ripe for the corrupting, and in no time Roman governors were looking for excuses to annex more and more territory in the hopes of getting hefty windfalls from the publicani who would in turn get lucrative government contracts to strip the newly incorporated territory of its wealth and then build a lot of very expensive roads.
So when the inevitable happened and in 88 B.C. a Roman general named Manius Aquillius trumped up an excuse to pick a fight with the kingdom of Pontus, Mithridates correctly read simmering Greek resentment of these Roman leeches and set himself up as defender of Greek liberty. Aquillius had the triple misfortune of getting out-generaled and crushed in battle near the city of Protostachium, being caught and handed over to Mithridates, and of being the son of a former governor of Asia who had levied ruinous taxes (50 percent and higher) on inhabitants who turned out to have long memories.
Golden-Throated Bastard
Never one to miss an opportunity, Mithridates had Aquillius dragged to Pergamum (a major city) on the back of a donkey, pelted with filth the entire way. Then, on stage in front of thousands in the city’s gorgeous outdoor amphitheatre, he had him executed in a particularly grisly manner. The historian Appian tells us how: “Mithridates poured molten gold down his throat, thus rebuking the Romans for their bribe-taking.”
In the decades that followed, the armies of the Roman Republic fought no less than three wars against Mithridates, eventually wearing him down and defeating his forces, then incorporating his kingdom into their foreign territories. On the run and trying to evade capture (and the subsequent march through Rome in chains as part of some general’s triumph before being executed), Mithridates is reputed to have attempted suicide by taking poison. In a fitting irony, he proved immune to the effects of the drug and had to opt for running onto a sword held steady by one of his officers.
Gold-plated bastard.
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CLEOPATRA VII, QUEEN OF EGYPT
Yes, That Cleopatra
(69–30 B.C.)
I will not be triumphed over.
—Cleopatra VII of Egypt
Cleopatra, the queen who made Rome tremble with equal parts fear, hatred, and awe. The last ruler of the last independent successor state of Alexander the Great’s empire, she imposed her will not with military might or massed sea power (although she initially possessed plenty of the latter) but instead used her wits and outlasted or co-opted all of her political foes save one.
Although born in Egypt, Cleopatra was a Macedonian down to her toenails. And unlike so many other members of the Ptolemaic dynasty, she was smart, smart, smart. Succeeding her doting father at the age of eighteen in 51 B.C., she cut a remarkable figure. Fluent in nine languages (Latin, interestingly enough, not being one of them), she was the only Ptolemy ever to bother to learn Coptic, the language of ancient Egypt.
To Romans, she represented every ethnocentric prejudice they so despised about so-called “decadent Easterners.” Married in succession to both of her younger brothers (likely never consummated, because propaganda aside, Cleopatra was, as far as we can tell, very choosy about whom she slept with), she waited to have a child with Julius Caesar, into whose bedroom she famously had herself smuggled by being rolled up in a carpet when he came to Egypt in 47 B.C.
Rarely apart after that for the remaining years of Caesar’s life, the couple had a son (Caesarion), and both he and his mother returned to Rome with Caesar. Until the day of Caesar’s death, Cleopatra lived with him in his villa in Rome, a symbol to his political opponents of Caesar’s intent to be a king himself in his own right.
Inbred Bastard
A direct descendant of Ptolemy I, Cleopatra VII was the product of centuries of inbreeding. The Ptolemaic dynasty had adopted the previous Egyptian royal policy of marrying royal children to each other (the idea being that royal children in Egypt possessed no other social equals on earth to whom they could be married, and if one royal parent made for a child blessed by the gods, then a child with two royal parents would be doubly blessed). Genetics being completely unknown at the time, the Ptolemys couldn’t possibly know the likely outcome: a royal family who proved “selfish, greedy, murderous, weak, stupid, vicious, sensual, vengeful,” in the words of one modern historian. In contrast, Cleopatra, the intelligent, shrewd exception who proved the rule, shone all the brighter. This fit in with her billing herself as “the New Isis.”
Getting out of Rome one step ahead of a Roman mob after Caesar’s assassination, Cleopatra settled in for a fight once back in Egypt. When summoned to a meeting with Rome’s newest eastern warlord, Marcus Antonius, she made a grand entrance that entranced the loutish Antonius.
The two made common cause against Antonius’s rival Octavian, and whether or not theirs was the passionate love match recorded by both history and Shakespeare, they had three children together. Also together they ruled the east for a decade, until finally forced into yet another civil war with Octavian, who defeated them at the battle of Actium in 31 B.C.
Within a year, the both of them had committed suicide; their children were either killed or adopted into the family of Octavian, and Egypt had become a Roman province.
Say this for Cleopatra, though: she didn’t lack for either brains or courage, and she came within an ace of winning!
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LUCIUS TARQUINIUS SUPERBUS, KING OF ROME
That’s Superbus, Not Superb
(REIGNED 535–509 B.C.)
By this blood, most chaste until a prince wronged it, I swear, and I take you, gods, to witness, that I will pursue Lucius Tarquinius Superbus and his wicked wife and all his children, with sword, with fire, aye with whatsoever violence I may; and that I will suffer neither them nor any other to be king in Rome!
—Lucius Junius Brutus (attributed by the Roman historian Livy)
Tarquin the Proud (“Superbus” is Latin for “proud” or “haughty”), also known as Tarquin the Cruel, was the seventh and final king of Rome. Supposedly descended both from a noble Etruscan (modern-day Tuscany) and a Greek adventurer from Corinth, Tarquin was also, according to the Roman historian and propagandist Livy, a tyrant who ruled without either seeking or taking the advice of the Roman senate, a vicious, bloodthirsty conqueror who ordered up wholesale slaughter, and a murderer who conspired with his sister-in-law Tullia to kill his brother (her husband) and his own wife (her sister), then eventually the king (her father!)
Once Tarquin and Tullia had gotten rid of brother, sister, and father (namely anyone who could stand in their way of ruling Rome), they set about consolidating their power. The Etruscan kings who ruled before Tarquin are supposed to have been smart enough to listen to Rome’s “advisory council” called the “senate,” and thus have given at least the illusion that they gave a fig for what “the people” thought about how they were governed.
Not so Tarquin. He set himself up as an autocrat, ignoring the senate and ruling through military might alone. He was reputed to be a great conqueror, in addition to being a thief who stole both his wife and his throne through political murder.
When Tarquin’s son Sextus raped a virtuous Roman matron named Lucretia, it was the beginning of the end. Lucretia denounced Sextus as a rapist in front of every male relative she had, then stabbed herself to death.
One of her relatives took up her dagger and vowed on the spot to raise a rebellion to drive the oppressive Tarquins out. The populace rose in response, and Tarquin and his family fled Rome, never to return. He died in exile a few years later, still fighting to retake the city he’d lost. Rome’s leading citizens convinced the people to forego kings, and to found a republic instead.
And that relative of Lucretia’s who vowed to finish what she’d started? Lucius Junius Brutus, one of the Roman Republic’s founders and first consuls and the ancestor of fellow Roman bastard (and assassin of Julius Caesar) Marcus Junius Brutus.
Of course how much of this whole story is actually true is debatable. After all, Livy was as much a propagandist as he was an historian, and he’s pretty much the only source we have for the period of Rome’s founding.
Historical bastard.
Poppy-Slaying Bastard
Livy tells the story of how Tarquin covertly conveyed his wishes to the son who had recently gained control of Gabii, a neighboring town, as to what Tarquin wanted him to do next in order to secure the hold of the Tarquin family on this new real estate:
“Tarquin, I suppose, was not sure of the messenger’s good faith: in any case, he said not a word in reply to his question, but with a thoughtful air went out into the garden. The man followed him, and Tarquin, strolling up and down in silence, began knocking off poppy-heads with his stick. The messenger at last wearied of putting his question and waiting for the reply, so he returned to Gabii supposing his mission to have failed.” On hearing of how Tarquin had responded by lopping off poppy heads with his stick, his son Sextus Tarquinius understood Tarquin’s meaning all too well, and in response heads began to roll in Gabii. It was one of the first such bloodbaths in Roman history. There would be many to follow.
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HANNIBAL OF CARTHAGE
Elephants and Siege Engines Just the Tip of the Iceberg
(248–182 B.C.)
I swear so soon as age will permit . . . I will use fire and steel to arrest the destiny of Rome.
—Hannibal of Carthage
Hannibal, the great nemesis of Rome, the Carthaginian general whose father forced him to swear the oath excerpted above, who went on to ravage Italy for twenty years, trying to take the city of Rome. Hannibal, whose name Roman matrons used as a proto-bogeyman to frighten their children into doing their chores and saying their prayers. Hannibal, who made good on his promise and fought Rome to a standstill for a generation.
Hannibal, the son of a great general, was raised to think strategically and to hate Rome reflexively. His home city of Carthage (originally a Phoenician colony) on the North African coast in what is now Tunisia had lost part of its far-flung trading empire to the Roman Republic during the First Punic War (264–241 B.C.), and Hannibal burned with a desire to make the Romans pay.
In 218 B.C., Hannibal took an army from Carthage’s colonies in Spain through southern France and across the Alps, into Italy, where he intended to sack the city of Rome itself. The logistical problem for Hannibal was that most of the terrifying war elephants he’d brought with him from Africa died during the passage th
rough the Alps, and he’d also been forced to leave most of his siege engines behind. Without them, he would never be able to successfully besiege Rome. And since the Romans controlled the seas, Hannibal could expect little in the way of supplies and reinforcements from Carthage, either.
So he lived off the land, looting and pillaging his way up and down Italy for years, then for decades, defeating the Romans in battle after battle, but unable to either draw them into a climactic battle in the open or breach Rome’s thick city walls. And the more Hannibal raided their farms to supply his army, the less likely Rome’s allied cities in Italy were to go over to Hannibal’s side in this war. He literally could neither lose, nor win.
Hannibal was eventually drawn back to Carthage and the climactic battle he craved was his at Zama in 202 B.C.
He lost. In the resulting peace, Carthage, was stripped of all of her overseas territories and reduced to a barely independent shadow of her former self. Hannibal went on the run, hiring out as a mercenary general among the Greek kingdoms in the eastern Mediterranean, continuing to fight Rome. His efforts came to naught. With the Romans closing in on him, and determined not to be dragged back to Rome in chains, Hannibal committed suicide in 182 B.C.
Sometimes a Bridge Is More Than The Sum of Its Parts
At one point in his back-and-forth struggle with Rome, Hannibal became so angry at what he considered Roman intransigence and duplicity that, according to the historian Appian, he “sold some of his prisoners, put others to death, and made a bridge of their bodies with which he passed over a stream. The senators and other distinguished prisoners in his hands he compelled to fight with each other, as a spectacle for the Africans, fathers against sons, and brothers against brothers. He omitted no act of disdainful cruelty.”