Titans of History (9 page)

Born around 73
BC
, Herod was the second son of Antipater, an Idumean convert to Judaism and chief minister of the Jewish king Hyrcanus II, great-grandson of Simon the Maccabee, who had established Judaea in 142
BC
as an independent Jewish state. The Maccabees had ruled Judaea as both kings and high priests ever since, but to win back his throne in 63
BC
, after his brother Aristobulus had wrested it from him, the ineffectual Hyrcanus was forced to ally himself with the Roman strongman Pompey the Great, ceding control of Judaea to Rome. Herod and his father Antipater were shrewd students of politics in Rome, always supporting the winner in the civil wars, from Pompey to Augustus, in order to keep power. When Julius Caesar subsequently appointed Antipater as governor of Judaea in 47
BC
, Hyrcanus continued as king in name only, and though he survived a revolt in 43
BC
led by his popular nephew Antigonus—a revolt in which Antipater was poisoned—he was exiled three years later. The Parthians, Rome's rival empire, invaded and overran the Middle East, and Antigonus became king under their patronage. Herod escaped to the protection of Queen Cleopatra of Egypt and thence to Rome, where the two dominant strongmen, Mark Antony and Octavian (the future Emperor Augustus) appointed him king of Judaea. It
took him three years to conquer his kingdom. When he took Jerusalem, he slaughtered forty-six of the Jewish ruling council.

Already hated by his people, Herod attempted to legitimize his position by discarding his first wife Doris and marrying the Maccabee princess Mariamme, the teenage granddaughter of Hyrcanus. In all, he was to marry ten times and produce fourteen children, three of whom he murdered while another three eventually succeeded him.

Herod ordered a series of grandiose construction projects, which included aqueducts, amphitheaters, the stunning trading port of Caesarea (considered by many to be one of the great wonders of the world), and the fortresses of Masada, Antonia and Herodium. Most ambitious of all was the rebuilding of the Second Temple in Jerusalem—a massive project that took years to complete. Over 10,000 men spent ten years constructing the Temple Mount alone, and work on the Temple courts and outbuildings continued long after Herod's death. The last supporting wall remains today the holiest site of Judaism: the Western Wall.

He ruled by terror, having the high priest—his wife's brother Aristobulus, whom he feared as a potential rival—drowned in 36
BC
. Old King Hyrcanus was also killed. Herod's marriage to the gorgeous, proud Maccabean princess Mariamme was passionate and destructive. They both loved and hated each other, but had two sons together. In 29
BC
, he ordered the execution of Mariamme following suggestions she was plotting against him. Later, in 7
BC
, he ordered the execution of Aristobulus and Alexander—his sons by Mariamme—after being persuaded by Antipater (his son by Doris) that the two were scheming against him. Augustus joked that he would rather be Herod's pig than his son since Jews do not eat pigs.

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.

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 51
BC
, 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.

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.