The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome

by Bauer, Susan Wise

  Right about this time, Demetrius I came down through the Khyber Pass, towards the Punjab. There is no written account of his invasion that followed; to reconstruct the conquests of the Greek Bactrian kings, we have to follow the trail of coins they left behind them (each king struck his own coins with his own portrait, with the result that although we know practically nothing about these kings, we have some idea of what they looked like). As far as we can guess, the first cities Demetrius I encountered were Purushapura and Taxila, which had been independent from the Mauryans for some time and had not yet been reconquered by Pusyamitra. He took both, and by 175 seems to have fought through the Punjab.

  74.1 Bactria and India

  Meanwhile the Sunga king Pusyamitra spread his own grasp along the east and southwest. The two Indian kingdoms bordered each other, Greek and native side by side.

  BACK IN MACEDONIA, Philip V’s hostage son (also called Demetrius) had been returned from Rome, and had been welcomed by the Macedonians with enough joy to put his younger brother’s nose out of joint. This young man, Perseus, had been heir apparent as long as Demetrius was a prisoner; now his chance of a throne was threatened.8 He began to drop hints to Philip V that the newly freed Demetrius had been brainwashed by the Romans, who intended to put him on the throne of Macedonia as a Roman puppet. “We have in our bosom,” he remarked, with apparent reluctance, “I don’t want to say a traitor, but at least a spy. The Romans gave his body back to us, but they have retained his heart.”9 In 181, Philip gave in to his suspicions. Livy says that he ordered poison put into Demetrius’s cup; the young man, feeling the first pains, realized what had happened and died screaming out against his father’s cruelty.

  Philip himself died two years later, and Perseus became king of Macedonia. He sent messages of friendship to Rome, but they were deceptive; he was gathering Macedonia to invade Greece once more.

  His intentions were made clearer when he married one of the daughters of Seleucus IV. But he couldn’t count on Seleucid help against Rome; Seleucus IV was murdered by his prime minister right after the wedding, and a big Persian succession-fight broke out. Seleucus IV’s younger brother, Antiochus IV (later known as Antiochus Epiphanes), won the right to act as regent for Seleucus’s baby son, whom he then murdered.

  Perseus, meanwhile, set out to conquer Greece without raising Roman suspicions. Polybius says that he marched through central and northern Greece and called on various cities to “gain their confidence” while being very careful not to “inflict any damage” on the territory through which he passed.10 This went on for three years or so before one of the Greek kings—Eumenes, ruler of the city of Pergamum, in Asia Minor—went to Rome in person to complain about Perseus’s behavior. Perseus sent an assassin after Eumenes to silence him; this was a mistake, as the assassination failed and made the accusations that much more believable.

  In 171, seventeen thousand Roman soldiers headed for Macedonia, inaugurating the Third Macedonian War. Perseus sent ambassadors to Rome to ask, in injured tones, why the Romans were harassing him. “Go back and tell your king that, if he really wants an answer, he should talk to the consul who will soon be in Macedonia with his army,” the ambassadors were told.11

  The Third Macedonian War lasted about three years, like the Second; as in the Second, the Romans finally crushed the Macedonians in one big disastrous battle, this one at Pydna. Unlike the Second Macedonian War, the Third brought an end to Macedonia. The Romans were fed up with fighting unpleasant little wars in the north of Greece. In 168, Perseus was hauled back to Rome as a captive, and the Roman consul oversaw the division of Macedonia into four separate subject countries. The Macedonian monarchy which had produced Alexander had ended.

  ROMAN ENVOYS had come to the court of Antiochus Epiphanes to ask him whether he intended to support Perseus’s war with Rome; Antiochus Epiphanes was able to assure them, with perfect truth, that he had no intention of joining with Perseus against Rome.12

  He was planning on invading Egypt instead. The young Egyptian king Ptolemy VI, under the direction of his regents, had demanded that the Seleucid empire return its Western Semitic lands: the old kingdoms of Israel, Judah, Syria, and some of the surrounding land, which Antiochus the Great had taken away from the Ptolemaic dynasty. They had all been folded into a satrapy known as “Coele Syria,” and Egypt wanted it back.

  Instead, Antiochus Epiphanes marched his army down and laid siege to Alexandria while Rome was busy fighting in Macedonia. But he had overestimated the Roman preoccupation with Perseus. The Senate was not blind to this blatant bid for more territory; a Roman ambassador showed up at Antiochus’s camp with a letter demanding that Antiochus retreat and leave Egypt to the Ptolemys. Antiochus offered to talk the matter over with his advisors, but the ambassador (according to Livy) “drew a circle round the king with the stick he was carrying and said, ‘Before you step out of that circle, give me a reply to lay before the Senate.’ For a few minutes he hesitated, astounded at such a peremptory order, and at last replied, ‘I will do what the Senate thinks right.’”13 He was not prepared to take on the entire weight of Rome’s anger.

  74.2 Contested Satrapies

  Instead, he marched back up the coast and took his frustrations out on the satrapy of Coele Syria, beginning a purge among anyone who had shown sympathy for the Egyptians’ request. This included a good many residents of Jerusalem: “At the same time that Antiochus, who was called Epiphanes, had a quarrel with the sixth Ptolemy about his right to the whole country of Syria,” Josephus says, in his Wars of the Jews, “…[he] came upon the Jews with a great army, and took their city by force, and slew a great multitude of those that favored Ptolemy, and…spoiled the temple.”14

  The spoiling of the temple was pure opportunism; Antiochus was broke and needed the sacred treasures. On his pass through Judea, he not only plundered the temple treasury and butchered a great many citizens of Jerusalem, but also installed a garrison in Jerusalem to keep the Jews loyal.15

  The garrison was standard procedure for a conqueror, but Antiochus Epiphanes’s plan for keeping the Jews loyal was horrifically misguided. He knew nothing about the Jewish religion; his plan for folding the Jews more tightly into the Seleucid fold (and keeping them out of the Ptolemaic fence) was to change the temple cult so that their Yahweh became identified with Zeus. This chief god would then be worshipped as manifest in his own person: Antiochus Epiphanes, the “epiphany” or revelation of Zeus-Yahweh on earth.16

  This was a fairly standard mixture of the Greek pantheon with Persian ideas about the king’s divinity, as might be expected from a Greek ruler of the old Persian realm. For the Jews, who (unlike most ancient people) believed not only in a single God, but in that God’s essential difference from man, it was hideous blasphemy. Antiochus wanted them to sacrifice to Zeus in the temple, and to celebrate his own birthday as a religious festival.

  The Jews of Jerusalem went into hiding at this, or had to be flogged into obedience. Antiochus, infuriated by their stubbornness, declared Judaism an illegal religion. Anyone who refused to eat pork when required (this was against the Jewish regulations) or was found with a copy of the Jewish scriptures was put to death. “Two women were brought in for having circumcised their children,” the book of 2 Maccabees records. “These women they publicly paraded about the city, with their babies hung at their breasts, then hurled them down headlong from the wall.”21117

  This level of savagery lasted for less than a year before revolt rose up among the Jews. It was led by a family of five brothers who were descended from the old tribe of priests. The oldest brother Judas was the general of the resistance; he went through the countryside, enlisting indignant Jews, until he had six thousand men who joined him in an ongoing guerilla war against the Seleucid occupiers. “Coming without warning,” 2 Maccabees says, “he would set fire to towns and villages. He captured strategic positions and put to flight not a few of the enemy. He found the nights most advantageous for such attacks, and talk of his valor
spread everywhere.”18 He earned himself a freedom-fighter’s nickname, “Judas Maccabeus,” or “Judas the Hammer,” and the rebellion became known as the Maccabean War.

  The fury of the Jews and Antiochus’s own difficulties elsewhere (he had to send troops up north to fend off invading Parthians) prolonged the rebellion. So did another factor: Judas made “a league of friendship with the Romans,” as Josephus puts it; Rome was anxious to go on checking Seleucid power.19 The Jewish-Roman alliance did not last long, but it helped keep Jerusalem out of the hands of Antiochus for a full four years.212

  At the end of that time, Antiochus Epiphanes died, and the usual internal fight over the succession commenced. No one had energy to send more soldiers down to Jerusalem, and Judas declared himself king of the city: the first king of the Hasmonean Dynasty of Jerusalem. Eventually Antiochus’s nephew, Demetrius I (not to be confused with the Greek Bactrian Demetrius or the Macedonian Demetrius), managed to declare himself king of the Seleucid empire. When his crown was firmly on his head, he sent an army down to reconquer Jerusalem. Judas was killed in the fighting, and Jerusalem became once again part of Coele Syria under the Seleucid crown. But Demetrius I, taking his lesson from his dead uncle’s catastrophic decisions, granted Judas’s brother Jonathan a fair amount of freedom to govern the Jews as he saw fit, as long as he remained a faithful subject governor of the empire. Jonathan, Josephus says, “behaved himself with great circumspection,” meaning that he was not a freedom-fighting hothead like his older brother.20 He paid polite deference to the Seleucid authorities, and managed to stay in power in Jerusalem for almost twenty years.

  MEANWHILE, Rome was doing splendidly.

  Something extraordinary had happened a few years before. In 180, the city of Cumae, in Campania, had asked for permission to change its official language from its old dialect of Oscan to Latin.

  The people of Cumae already had the privilege of civitas sine suffragio, citizenship without the vote; the civitas sine suffragio was more like an alliance than anything else, a right which did nothing to destroy the original identity of the cities which held it.21 Now the people of Cumae were asking for a new level of identification with Rome. They did not become full Romans; nor did they entirely give up speaking Oscan. Without abandoning their identity as Cumaeans, they were making a willing identification not just with Roman politics, but with Roman culture.

  The Greeks had never had to make such a formal outwards pledge of unity, as they all spoke Greek already. Perhaps their very shared language kept them from ever allowing that pan-Hellenic identity to trump their identity as Spartans, Athenians, Corinthians, Thebans. But the official status of Latin allowed Cumae to remain Cumaean. Latin would not be their only language, but it would be used for commerce and administration, binding Cumae together with other cities and peoples who retained their own identities, but glossed another above it.

  Rome granted the request. Cumae could use Latin as its official language and be, in that sense, Roman. The Romans did not yet feel any need to further erase the old identities of their subject cities, to replace old customs with Roman customs, old allegiances with Roman allegiances, old gods with Roman gods.

  But this bestowal of Roman identity only went so far. Conquests were flooding into Rome, with the result that free foreigners were in danger of outnumbering free men of Roman birth. In 168, the censor Sempronius Gracchus began to register all foreign-born free men as a single tribe. They could become Roman, like the Cumaeans. They could even have the vote. But no matter how many came to Rome, they would never be able to outvote the native Romans.

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  Between East and West

  Between 200 and 110 BC, the Han Dynasty opens the Silk Road

  GAO ZU, THE FIRST HAN EMPEROR,213 had been born a peasant; now he ruled over a China in which the old noble families of the states had begun to re-emerge in answer to the Ch’in harshness. The old problem of unity had not gone away.

  On the other hand, the Chinese states were weary of war, and Gao Zu managed to hold the empire together with a quick-witted combination of heavy-handed authority and the promise of independence. He marched with his army against any dukes who showed signs of revolt, but he also proclaimed a general amnesty throughout the empire, meaning that all noble families who were not currently planning rebellion could live free from the fear of random arrest and execution. To those who had helped him establish his power, he granted freedom from taxes and service. In one rebellious city, which he was forced to besiege for over a month, he granted complete pardon to every man who fought against him, as long as they had not cursed him; only those who cursed him were put to death.1 The Ch’in emperors had clenched the imperial fist tighter and tighter; the Han king opened his fingers and gave freedom from oversight as a reward.

  His greatest battles were fought against outsiders. China, unlike the civilizations to the west, did not face the constant encroachments of other organized armies. But nomads had roamed along the northern borders for centuries. The walls built along the northern edges of the old Chinese states, now being linked together into a Great Wall, had first been erected as a defense against raiding nomads that the Chinese states considered to be barbarian, non-Chinese, outside the borders of real Chinese society.

  These nomads were not quite so barbarian as the Chinese liked to think. In fact the nearest nomadic tribes had begun to organize themselves into a loose association, a nation of sorts: the Xiongnu.2142 The association of tribes, each with its own leader, fell under the authority of a man appointed to be their king, or chanyu. In fact, the Xiongnu confederation was modelled after the Chinese government to the south.

  The people themselves were probably descended from the Ti, the Jung, and the other “barbarians” who appear in earlier accounts.3 They were not so very different from the “Chinese proper,” as Sima Qian himself inadvertently reveals when he remarks that the Xiongnu were descended from a member of the Hsia Dynasty.4 But this was a likeness that most Chinese ignored, as Qian also reveals when he adds, quickly, that they are, of course, something a little less than human.

  During the earliest years of the Han, the Xiongnu chanyu was a general named Mao-tun; he is one of the few nomadic leaders whose name survives, and he had organized his confederation to the point where they had a regular annual gathering place (somewhere in Outer Mongolia) and something like a voting system.5 Gao Zu collected a huge force of three hundred thousand men and marched up north to meet him. The nomads, like the Scythians a century before, used their mobility to their advantage; they retreated until the emperor and his personal force had ridden out ahead of the bulk of his army, and then turned—four hundred thousand horsemen strong—and attacked. It took seven days for Gao Zu to fight his way free.6

  Afterwards, Gao Zu decided that it would be best to make peace. His empire was still filled with other generals who had fought in the war against the Ch’in, and who had not ended up with a throne; he did not want to start another war, against an outside power, with them at his back. He sent the Xiongnu gifts of money to pacify them, and—in a startling admission of Mao-tun’s power—he also sent one of his daughters up to be the warrior-king’s bride.

  THE EARLY YEARS of the Han succession were less than smooth. Gao Zu died in 195 after a rule of only seven years, and was succeeded by his young son Hui-ti. But the real power in the Han court was held by Gao Zu’s widow, Kao-hou, who ruled as empress dowager and regent for her son.

  Kao-hou was not the emperor’s only wife (he also had a whole constellation of sons born to noblewomen who became his wives and concubines after he took the title of emperor), but she had been his wife back in the days “when he was still a commoner.” She was a “woman of very strong will,” and her son Hui-ti was, “by nature, weak and soft-hearted.”7 She poisoned and put to death an array of royal sons and wives, in an excess of cruelty that sickened her son: “Emperor Hui gave himself up each day to drink,” Sima Qian says, “and no longer took part in affairs of stat
e.”8 At twenty-three, he died. His mother was less than heartbroken: “Mourning was announced and the Empress Dowager lamented,” Qian writes, “but no tears fell from her eyes.”9

  In fact her son’s death allowed her to install various brothers, sisters, and cousins from her own family as generals, ministers, secretaries, and dukes, which cemented her own power. With the cooperation of Hui-ti’s widow, she produced a baby which she claimed to be Hui-ti’s heir apparent; palace rumor said that the child was actually the son of a lady-in-waiting (Hui-ti had, apparently, been too consistently soused to father a son of his own). The new emperor was installed, but as he grew older he began to ask awkward questions about his parentage. The empress dowager then had him murdered and appointed another putative son of Hui-ti emperor in his place.10

  This heir-juggling kept her in power for nine more years, but by the time she died in 179, she had grown so unpopular that the court rose up and slaughtered every relative of Kao-hou that they could get their hands on. The removal of her family left the throne and a good many government jobs open, but the Han Dynasty—unlike the Ch’in—survived this particular crisis. Despite the chaos in the court, the throne had not indulged in the harsh micromanagement of the people that had made the First Emperor’s family so unpopular: “The common people succeeded in putting behind them the sufferings of the age of the Warring States,” the Grand Historian sums up, “and ruler and subject alike sought rest in surcease of action.…Punishments were seldom meted out…while the people applied themselves to the tasks of farming, and food and clothing became abundant.”11 The throne had managed to keep the barbarians out and to leave the people alone to conduct their own lives, and as a result of this laissez-faire policy, China was prospering. Prosperous people are disinclined to revolt; once the unpopular family of Kao-hou had been cleared out, another son of the dead Gao Zu by a concubine was proclaimed emperor.