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  As emperor, Liu Ji never forgot his roots. Sure, he took advantage of some of the perks the office of emperor provided—he took seven concubines, slept on the finest silks, and tasted the world’s most expensive wines—but it was much more common to find him sitting in the palace barracks drinking cheap beer, telling dirty jokes, and playing poker with enlisted soldiers. He looked out for the peasants, was beloved by the people, and built the foundation for a golden age in Chinese history—the Han Dynasty would last for four centuries after his death, and would be one of the most powerful and richest civilizations ever established.

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  The Han Dynasty is considered the first golden age of Chinese history. Lasting 414 years and encompassing more than fifty-five million people, the Han saw flourishing trade, agriculture, and arts. The famous Silk Road was also constructed during this time, and the Mandarin word for “Chinese” literally translates to the phrase “the people of Han.”

  One of Liu Ji’s favorite tactics was to send a diplomatic envoy to personally insult the enemy commander in an effort to get him so cheesed off that he would make a tactical error and send his troops directly into an ambush.

  Qin Shi Huang was buried in a massive tomb filled with life-sized terra-cotta warriors and rivers of flowing mercury. The men who constructed the tomb were buried alive within it so that nobody would know the secret location of the emperor’s final resting place. Qin’s tomb remained hidden until a Chinese Jed Clampett accidentally stumbled across it in 1974 while drilling for oil.

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  7

  GAIUS JULIUS CAESAR

  (100–44 BCE)

  The cohorts which Caesar had posted behind him ran forward and, instead of hurling their javelins, as they usually did, or even thrusting at the legs and thighs of the enemy, aimed at their eyes and stabbed upward at their faces. Caesar had instructed them to do this because he believed that these young men, who had not much experience of battle and the wounds of battle but who particularly plumed themselves on their good looks, would dislike more than anything the idea of being attacked in this way and, fearing both the danger of the moment and the possibility of disfigurement for the future, would not be able to stand up to it. And this in fact was exactly what happened.

  —PLUTARCH, LIFE OF CAESAR

  GAIUS JULIUS CAESAR WAS BORN IN ROME, THE NEPHEW OF A WILDLY SUCCESSFUL AND POPULAR GENERAL NAMED MARIUS. Young Julius’s uncle was so well liked, in fact, that the entire Roman Republic was embroiled in a vicious, brutal war for three years, with half of Italy supporting Marius and the other half supporting a dude called Sulla. Sulla won by default when Marius fell ill and was diagnosed with a pretty terminal case of death, but since the war had such a boring, anticlimactic ending, Sulla decided that it would be cool to satiate his ravenous thirst for bloody vengeance by marching his legions into Rome, declaring himself dictator, and executing everybody who had ever opposed him for any reason ever. Since this guy was a crazy bastard initiating more purges than a bulimic supermodel, Julius decided he should make like a leaf and get the hell out of there before he ended up having his severed head used as decorative ornamentation adorning the gates of Rome.

  Once Sulla retired and the streets were no longer running red with blood, Caesar caught the first ship back to his hometown. Unfortunately, his boat was attacked by pirates, who took him prisoner and decided to hold him for ransom. When Caesar asked them how much they were going to try to get for him and they told him twenty talents (I have no idea how much money this comes out to in real American dollar bills, but I am under the impression that it is a lot), Julius laughed right in their faces and told them that it was insulting for them to demand less than fifty for a person of his stature. He just didn’t give a crap.

  Caesar rocked out with the pirates for a while, drinking rum, sailing around, camping out on remote islands, and singing hilarious sea chanteys about boobs and sword fights, and everybody thought he was more awesome than a fully loaded baked potato with sour cream and bacon. One night around the campfire Julius said something to the effect of, “You guys are pretty cool. It’s a shame that I’m going to have to execute you all when I get back to town.” Then he raised his wineglass, shouted “Cheers!” and everybody laughed at this hilarious joke, even though some people didn’t really get it. (Two weeks later, Caesar returned home, put together a fleet of warships, hunted down the pirates, and had them all crucified.)

  Once he had satisfied his quest for vengeance, Caesar began to campaign for political office in Rome. His popularity and his oratorical skills got him elected tribune, quaestor, praetor, and half a dozen other cool-sounding political offices that nobody really knows what they actually did. He was also elected pontifex maximus, which was the office of head priest of Rome. Nowadays we call this person the Pope, only I guess back in antiquity instead of performing marriages, wearing fashionable hats, and living a life of celibacy, most clergymen spent their time secretly plotting world domination and bribing city officials to throw giant buckets of animal crap on their political rivals.

  Eventually, J-Dog was appointed governor of Spain. As soon as he showed up, Caesar raised a couple of legions and got his conquer on, subjugating the uncivilized tribes of Hispania and acquiring territory stretching as far as the Atlantic Ocean. While everybody was pretty pumped up that Julius was such an unstoppable military genius, the Senate decided that he wasn’t being a very good governor because he was killing all of his subjects, so they called him back to Rome.

  Caesar didn’t care. He formed a political alliance with Crassus, the wealthiest man in Rome, and Pompey, the republic’s most successful military commander. These guys called themselves the triumvirate, which is the official term for a group of three classical-age diabolical madmen working together to control the government until such time as they all decide to backstab and kill each other. This group flexed its nuts and got Caesar elected consul and governor of a place called Gaul.

  Gaul is what historians like to call France when they want it to sound tough. Sure, technically the two lands occupy the same geographic location, but there are some subtle differences when you observe them from an empirical standpoint. Gaul is the home of beer-chugging, pelt-wearing barbarians who eat meat off the bone, throw axes at people they don’t like, and spend their time punching trees into lumber or playing bocce ball with severed heads. France, on the other hand, is where you can find baguettes, flowery cursive script, and movies that make about as much sense as a bad salvia trip.

  In Gaul, Caesar proved himself to be one of history’s most brilliant military tacticians, inspiring his men to victory against rebellious barbarian tribes on numerous occasions. In his ten years as governor, he conquered eight hundred cities, killed more than a million barbarian warriors, and captured another million enemy combatants. Despite being almost constantly outnumbered, sometimes by ratios of over three to one, and fighting in a hostile, unfamiliar land, Caesar’s legions reached down their enemies’ throats and pulled out a clenched fist holding an inverted nut sack, using divide-and-conquer tactics to whip up on the Belgae, Nervii, Helvetii, Lusitanians, Britons, Catuvellauni, Eburones, Suebi, Rauraci, Boii, Tulingi, Germans, and a bunch of other tribes you’ve probably never heard of before because Julius effing Caesar stomped their colons into oblivion over two thousand years ago.

  Julius Caesar was a fighting general who observed the action from the front, running up and down the battle lines yelling words of encouragement to psych his soldiers up. On one particular occasion, the Romans were getting their asses handed to them and started to run away like sissies, so Julius grabbed a sword and launched a one-man assault right into the middle of a horde of charging, axe-swinging Gallic barbarians. His men were so inspired by this action (and afraid that their commander would be killed as a result of their sniveling cowardice) that they sacked up, turned around, and liquefied nearly the entire force of sixty thousand warriors. The city of Rome celebrated Caesar’s victory for nearly two weeks.


  Gaul eventually got sick of having all of its cities burned down and its people slaughtered, so they organized a revolt under a barbarian warlord named Vercingetorix. Caesar refused to be defeated by a guy whose name was reminiscent of an evil video game dragon, so he marched four full legions across the entire length of Gaul in the dead of winter and besieged the main body of the rebel force outside the city of Alesia. Even though a surprise Gallic counterattack left Caesar completely surrounded and outnumbered almost six to one, he completely destroyed the rebel armies, plundered their camp, captured the city, and had Vercingetorix dragged through the streets of Rome in chains. Gaul didn’t attempt to organize another revolt for nearly three hundred years.

  Caesar was also a master of manipulating the system to fit his own evil plans. Classical armies didn’t fight during the winter, so as soon as it was time to bust out the Old Navy performance fleece Caesar simply took all the money he’d looted from Gaul back to Rome and used it to bribe government officials and citizens to support him. Eventually Pompey got a little unsettled by Julius’s incredible popularity, so he tried to strip Caesar of his power. Caesar responded to this insult by assembling his army and marching across the Rubicon River toward Rome. Pompey was like, “Holy crap, I better get out of here before this dude rocks my face off!” and fled for Greece. Caesar marched through the gates of Rome, seized power over the republic, and immediately set out after his adversary.

  At the Battle of Pharsalus in 48 BCE, Caesar’s hardcore grizzled veterans stabbed Pompey’s weak-willed troops in their pretty-boy faces. The soldiers who weren’t killed in this manner were so horrified at the idea that they could mess up their hair or get nasty scars and ruin their supermodel good looks that they immediately ran for the hills like gutless prima donnas. Caesar’s legionnaires flanked Pompey’s forces, and that was the end of the Roman civil war.

  Pompey was an expert at running for it like a bitch, however, and this time he fled to Egypt. Caesar chased after him, but a couple of days before he arrived in town some dude shivved Pompey in a dark alley. Julius decided he’d already come all the way out to Egypt, so he might as well hang out for a bit and help adjudicate a dispute over who should be the next pharaoh. On one hand was a stodgy uptight dickwad named Ptolemy, and on the other hand was the hottest woman in all of Egypt, Cleopatra, who was carried to him by her servants completely naked except for a bedsheet. Now, having hot, nubile Egyptian princesses delivered to your door like Chinese takeout may sound pretty far-fetched to you and me, but that’s just how Julius Caesar rolled. For some strange reason Ptolemy was actually surprised when Caesar sided with Cleopatra in the dispute, so he put an army together. Caesar immediately emasculated him and all of his friends, got it on repeatedly with Cleopatra, and slam-dunked the hell out of a basketball for no reason at all.

  After vanquishing his enemies in Egypt, Julius dominated Pompey’s supporters up and down the Mediterranean, winning victories in Africa, the Middle East, and Spain. Then he returned to Rome and appointed himself presidente por vida, seizing sole power in the republic in a way that many other power-hungry megalomaniacs had previously failed to achieve. Eventually, some dudes were like, “Caesar is too awesome. It’s not good for humanity to have such a total badass running around killing everyone,” so they stabbed him in the back twenty-three times. Sometimes that’s the price you pay for being awesome.

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  Part of the reason Brutus (of “Et tu, Brute” fame) was so eager to assassinate Caesar was because J. C. was banging his mom—they had an affair that lasted nearly twenty years!

  After besieging and capturing the Gallic stronghold of Uxellodunum, Caesar cut off the hands of the surviving warriors and dispersed them across Gaul as a means of making sure they didn’t raise arms against him again.

  At one point Julius heard rumors about a possibly mythical land across the channel from Gaul, known as Britannia. Caesar, being the adventurous guy he was, became the first Roman to set foot on the island of Britain. He then immediately became the first Roman to slay a British person, as his legions started killing everyone they found and burning their cities. He eventually decided to head home when he realized that the British didn’t have anything worth plundering.

  During the Battle of Massilia, a brave centurion known as Gaius Acilius boarded an enemy vessel and immediately starting killing everything in sight. When the enemy lopped off Acilius’s right hand, he single-handedly captured the ship by bashing everyone’s skulls in with his shield.

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  8

  THE SURENA

  (84–52 BCE)

  Nor was this Surena an ordinary person, but in wealth, family, and reputation the second man in the kingdom, and in courage and prowess the first, and for bodily stature and beauty no man like him.

  —PLUTARCH, LIFE OF CRASSUS

  CAESAR AND POMPEY EACH MET THEIR RESPECTIVE ENDS ON THE POINTY PARTS OF A COUPLE DOZEN WELL-SHARPENED KNIVES, BUT WHAT ABOUT THIRD MEMBER OF THE TRIUMVIRATE, THE ROMAN STATESMAN MARCUS LICINIUS CRASSUS? Well, in the year 53 BCE, Crassus was a complete raging dumbass. When most rich old white guys go spiraling into their midlife crises they’re content to buy sports cars and nail strippers with giant plastic boobs, but for some bizarre reason the richest man in Rome decided it would be wise to put a huge army together and invade Iran. I should mention at this point that Crassus didn’t really know the first thing about leading armies to glory on the battlefield, but he didn’t give a damn, either—dudes like Caesar and Pompey were kicking ass all over the place, and he didn’t want his subjects to think that he had a tiny dong or something.

  Now, during this time period the Middle East was inhabited by a group of steel-toed hardasses known as the Parthians. These natural-born warriors were unparalleled horsemen, deadly archers, and almost completely impervious to all forms of conventional weapons. They had made a career out of kneeing the Romans in the groin every time some half-witted general tried to invade their homeland, and they certainly weren’t going to make an exception for a douche-flavored taco like Marcus Licinius Crassus.

  The bravest, strongest, and most crotch-clubbingly masculine of the Parthians was a dude known only as the Surena. This guy was a high-ranking noble, and his family served for generations as the defenders of the crown—members of his clan were responsible for protecting the king of Parthia at all costs, and it was their personal honor to place the crown on the king’s head during coronation ceremonies. So he was kind of a big deal.

  The Surena had already demonstrated that he was harder than a railroad spike; when King Hydrodes was overthrown and expelled from Parthia, it was the Surena who led the mission to recapture the kingdom. He personally assaulted the walls of the capital city, climbed up the siege ramps, crushed the defenders to death by swinging his ball sack around like a pillowcase full of bricks, and almost single-handedly cleared out the parapets with a fiery scimitar of neck-slashing death and dismemberment.

  The Surena was also more attractive to the ladies than a going-out-of-business sale at a designer shoe store. The Romans, who aren’t particularly known for heaping praise on people they considered to be “dirty subhuman barbarians,” made especially sure to mention how good-looking this dude was, so you have to assume they weren’t just blowing smoke up his ass for the sake of preserving cordial international relations. Of course, you can probably draw your own conclusions regarding his virility when you realize that it took two hundred wagons to carry his harem of sizzling-hot concubines. Interestingly, the Surena never left home without his hoochie train—he even took them on military campaigns with him. Wouldn’t you?

  Crassus arrived in Parthia with a force of roughly forty thousand Roman legionnaires, and it was the Surena who rode out to meet him. Now, the Parthian hero’s force was composed of just ten thousand horse archers and a thousand heavy cavalrymen, so he wasn’t going to be able to get away with just hurling wave after wave of his own men at the Romans. Instead, he took advantage of the fact that Crassus was
an arrogant douchebag who was so incompetent that he had to hire a guy to make sure he didn’t pass out face-first into his Cheerios and drown in two pints of milk. The Surena baited him, hid the main force of his army, and drew the Romans out into the middle of the damn desert. Crassus, being the inept toolshed that he was, was so pumped up about getting to watch his soldiers kill stuff that he marched his army full speed into the middle of the burning-hot wasteland and didn’t even let the troops stop for water breaks.

  While a small group of Parthians continually harassed the Romans, getting Crassus to chase them deeper and deeper into the desert, the Surena and his bodyguard of heavily armored lancers simply rode up behind Crassus’s force and picked off the heat-exhausted stragglers, taking them out like a lioness weeding out the sick and the wounded from a herd of unsuspecting caribou on the Discovery Channel. When Crassus’s men could finally venture no farther, the Surena made his move. The Parthians rode up en masse to the deafening sound of war drums, and the Romans all pretty much suffered myocardial infarctions right there on the spot. Crassus had his legions form into an anti-cavalry formation when they saw the Parthian horsemen arrive, but the Surena had no intention of charging face-first into the Roman lines like an overconfident idiot. His tactic was painfully simple—the horse archers just rode around the massed group of Romans in circles, indiscriminately firing arrows into the teeming throng of exhausted troops.

  Not only were the Parthians ultra-elite snipers, but the fact that they were all mounted and capable of penetrating even the heaviest metal armor with their superstrong composite bows made this battle roughly the equivalent of a convoy of Humvees with .50 caliber machine guns circle-strafing a unit of Revolutionary War militiamen. The Romans, frustrated that they couldn’t catch the Parthians to kill them, decided to just wait until the horse archers ran out of arrows. It was then that they noticed the Surena leading a column of a thousand camels onto the battlefield, each one carrying a pack bursting with ammunition.