Badass Page 6
Seeing no end to the relentless arrow storm in sight, the Roman cavalry, led by Crassus’s son Publius, charged full on into the Parthian lines and were promptly skewered on the lances of the Surena’s heavy cavalry like organic meat kabobs. The entire detachment was slaughtered, and Publius’s head was put on a pike and paraded around in front of the Roman lines. When the sun mercifully began to set, the Surena informed Crassus that he had one night to mourn the loss of his son and consider this benevolent offer: surrender or die.
Crassus decided upon a bold new course of action to lead his army out of this desperate situation. As soon as the sun set, he bravely and resolutely ordered his men to break ranks and run for it. The next morning, the Parthians went after them, killing and capturing everyone they could find. Crassus was caught, killed, and beheaded, and molten gold was poured down his throat. Twenty thousand Romans were slain, ten thousand more were captured, and many others died in the desert trying to get home. Parthian casualties totaled like two guys with sunstroke and one archer who got a nasty blister on his index finger.
When the Surena returned home he led his troops in a parade down the streets of the capital, carrying around the heads of the defeated Romans, putting some of the POWs in dresses, and having his convoy of topless concubines sing offensive songs about how much of a pussy Crassus was. His success at the Battle of Carrhae made the Surena so popular and heroic a figure among his people that the king eventually got jealous and had him publicly executed. That’s just how it goes sometimes—no matter how many times you bail a dude out, some jerks will screw you over at the drop of a hat.
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The “Parthian shot” was when a horse archer was galloping at full speed away from you and somehow twisted his body completely around in the saddle and accurately fired an arrow backward from his horse without missing a step. Over the years, the phrase “Parthian shot” was bastardized to “parting shot,” a term still used by jackass news media pundits across the country.
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9
JULIA AGRIPPINA
(15–59 CE)
From this moment the country was transformed. Complete obedience was accorded to a woman—and not a woman like Messalina who toyed with national affairs to satisfy her appetites. This was a rigorous, almost masculine despotism.
—TACITUS, ANNALS
JULIA AGRIPPINA WAS “ROME’S SWEETHEART,” KIND OF LIKE JULIA ROBERTS, ONLY IF INSTEAD OF ACTING IN CHARMING ROMANTIC COMEDIES SHE HACKED OSAMA BIN LADEN’S ARMS OFF WITH A CHAINSAW, NUKED NORTH KOREA, AND POISONED HALF OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES TO DEATH WITH CYANIDE CUPCAKES. She was a tyrannical, ultratough, take-no-prisoners woman who utterly destroyed anyone dumb enough to cross her and ruled Rome like a toga-wearing cross between Lady Macbeth and Martha Stewart’s homicidal evil twin. She also had an extra set of canine teeth, which I guess is pretty cool if you’re into that sort of thing.
In order to fully understand Agrippina’s rise to power, we first need to take a look at her father, the stalwart Roman military commander Germanicus. The descendant of Augustus (by marriage) and Mark Antony (by birth), this guy was considered to be the pinnacle of Roman military prowess, beloved by his people and revered as one of the bravest and most noble men ever produced by the Imperium. Back in Augustus’s time, a bunch of cantankerous German tribesmen ambushed some Roman legions, slaughtered tens of thousands of soldiers, nailed their skulls to tree trunks, sacrificed the survivors on the altar of their pagan gods, and carried three blood-drenched legion standards back to their ancestral homelands. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the entire Roman army then went into a state of complete revolt soon after. Germanicus assumed command of whatever was left of the German legions, gave the troops a tongue-lashing so withering that it made R. Lee Ermey look like a talking cartoon dinosaur, and told his men that they were going to go restore their damn honor or die trying. The legions fell in line, executed the mutineers, marched into Germany, crushed the barbarian tribesmen, and recovered the captured standards. Germanicus was congratulated as the greatest hero of the Roman Empire and was loved by all, right up to the point that Emperor Tiberius surreptitiously poisoned him to death a few years later.
While Germanicus is considered one of Rome’s greatest, most beloved, and most popular heroes, his offspring were some of the meanest, toughest, and most diabolical bastards to ever put on a toga for purposes other than convincing slutty sorority girls to get wasted on five-thousand-proof vodka and take their shirts off in front of a digital camcorder. Sure, Germanicus’s life was cut tragically short, but this guy was famous for being in the revenge business, and when he went down he made sure his kids took the rest of imperial Rome down in flames with him.
While the psychotic emperor Caligula is the most infamous of Germanicus’s issue, his daughter Julia Agrippina was the ultimate bad girl. She was beautiful, cunning, and diabolical, often planning intrigues and ruthlessly sabotaging her enemies for personal gain. She slept around on her husbands with members of powerful families, she used her station and her noble birth to get privileges otherwise unavailable to Roman women, and she utilized her father’s position as a war hero to exert her influence over the army. When Tiberius finally keeled over and died, Agrippina’s brother became the emperor Caligula, and Agrippina quickly became one of the most powerful women in Rome.
Caligula loved his sisters greatly (maybe a little too much, if you ask some historical sources), and Agrippina held a large amount of sway over her brother. Her image was placed on Roman coinage, she lived in the imperial palace, and she was awarded all the rights and privileges of the sacred Vestal Virgins (no matter how ironic that might seem), including front-row seats to the theater, all-you-can-eat shrimp, backstage passes to the Gladitorial Games at the Colosseum, and triple points on her frequent flier miles.
Once Caligula started getting really freaky and went nuts with those wild orgies and the arbitrary, wanton slaughter of his own citizenry, Agrippina plotted with one of her lovers to kill him and put her boyfriend on the throne. Unfortunately for our villainess, Caligula found out what was going on and had her exiled. All of her possessions were confiscated and she was shipped off to some island in the middle of nowhere, where she had to dive for sponges to make ends meet.
But it takes more than exile and not-so-subtle death threats to take out a ruthless social climber like Agrippina. Everybody in Rome eventually got sick of Caligula’s attitude, and the Praetorian Guard stabbed him to death in 41 CE, placing Caligula’s uncle Claudius on the throne. Claudius promptly recalled Agrippina back to the Eternal City, and she was pretty adept at parlaying her “unfortunate situation” into popularity and sympathy with the Roman people. Agrippina fell in love and married a wealthy senator, then immediately poisoned him to death and inherited his massive estate.
Agrippina’s goal wasn’t just wealth, however; it was the power that wealth brought. She had tasted the might of the emperor, and anything less than that was unacceptable. Her primary obstacle was Claudius’s wife, Messalina, a woman whose primary claim to fame is that she was a total whore. It didn’t take much effort for Agrippina to undermine the empress, defame her to the public, and subvert her to the point where the Praetorian Guard forced her to kill herself. With the emperor now suddenly single, the beautiful and seductive Agrippina did her thing. She married her uncle Claudius, which admittedly is kind of disgusting, but it’s pretty much par for the course in ancient Rome. Seriously, take a look at the imperial family tree sometime; it looks like the diagram of a moderately complicated parallel circuit. No wonder the emperors were so crazy.
Now, Claudius was pretty much a spineless, sniveling pussy, and Agrippina was the balls of the empire during his reign. She wore a gold cloak, traveled in special carriages usually reserved for holy artifacts, and generally ran the show in imperial Rome. She got whatever she wanted, commanded limitless power, and cougared it up with virile young guys in her spare time. Life was good, the empire did well, and Agrippina commanded
respect and power from the Roman people with an iron fist.
One of the great things about Agrippina was the way she worked the system for her own nefarious purposes. She took her foes out without being overt about it—realizing that she didn’t need to use a chainsaw when should could just as easily manipulate others to do the dirty work for her. She eliminated her enemies in the government, the imperial family, the palace, and the Praetorian Guard, took out everybody from powerful senators to her own sister-in-law, and cemented her place at the top of the political food chain. She sometimes had people killed outright, but they were also exiled, poisoned, discredited, publicly condemned, arrested, demoted, forced to commit suicide, or simply transferred to political offices way the hell out on the outskirts of the empire. Nobody was safe from her wrath.
Her crowning achievement was when she convinced the weak-willed Claudius to announce her son as his successor over his own birth son Britannicus. As soon as Claudius made this declaration official, she fed him some poisoned mushrooms, and that was the end of that. Her son became the emperor Nero, and we all know how well that worked out.
As Nero’s mom, somehow Agrippina held even more power over the empire than she had as Claudius’s wife. Nero allowed her to sit in on Senate meetings, silently surveying the situation from behind a curtain. She made the calls, ruled as emperor, and kept Nero in line. This worked out pretty well for a while, but Nero eventually started to grow a pair of nuts and tried to edge her out of her position. Well, nobody screwed with Agrippina that way. She tried to have him assassinated, but Nero figured out what was going on. First, he tried to poison her to death. This didn’t work—in true badass fashion she had spent her entire life building up resistances to most poisons. Then he tried to crush her to death by collapsing the roof of a building on top of her, but she survived and crawled through the rubble to safety. Next, he sabotaged her yacht so that when she took it out on the lake it sank—she jumped overboard and swam to shore. Eventually he just had her stabbed to death by assassins, an act that earned him the hatred of the Senate and the citizenry alike. After she was no longer around to serve as a stabilizing force in her son’s life, he went completely bat guano crazy, took up the fiddle, and burned Rome to the ground.
Though she may not have been the most virtuous woman this side of Mother Teresa, Agrippina was not a woman you stepped to if you enjoyed being alive. She was the daughter of a great commander and the only woman to ever be the wife, mother, and sister of emperors. She was the real might behind the throne of three all-powerful Roman rulers, worked tirelessly to build structures and improve the lives of citizens, and didn’t think twice about slaughtering anybody stupid enough to attempt to take the crown from her. She destroyed emperors, deposed senators, and was exceedingly tough to kill. That, my friends, is a legacy to be proud of.
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The Praetorian Guard was probably the worst outfit of bodyguards ever assembled. Sure, the soldiers who constituted the guard were elite fighters handpicked from Rome’s mightiest legions, but more often than not when these guys drew their swords it wasn’t for the purpose of cutting down a would-be assassin—it was because they were getting ready to run the emperor through themselves. During their long and storied career as the imperial royal guard, the Praetorians killed and/or deposed no fewer than ten different emperors.
Caligula tried to appoint his horse as consul once. It didn’t work out so well. Consul is just one of those jobs that require opposable thumbs.
Julia Agrippina was named after her mother. To avoid confusion, Germanicus’s wife is known as Agrippina the Elder, while our lady friend here is Agrippina the Younger.
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AMAGE
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While Julia Agrippina was a cunning, black-hearted mistress of deception and subtle manipulation, some classical-age women preferred to take a more direct approach to solving their issues.
Amage was the queen of the Sarmatians and an all-around kick-ass chick who eviscerated the ball sacks of anyone that tried to screw with her. Her husband, like many husbands both in antiquity and today, was completely and utterly useless in every way imaginable, spending all his time sitting around on the couch watching college football, ogling Hooters girls, and getting completely bombed on Miller High Life. With the king so completely vacuous that you could connect him to an EEG machine and have a physician pronounce him clinically deceased, Amage was left to run the country herself. And she did a pretty good job at it—she spent most of her time garrisoning fortresses, leading her armies against neighboring tribes, and presiding over disputes like a take-no-bullcrap judge on a trashy daytime courtroom TV show. In fact, she was so good at what she did that when her allies in the land of Cherson started getting dicked around by the neighboring Scythian Empire, they didn’t even bother sending a letter to her worthless husband. They came directly to her.
The warlike Scythian king had been screwing with the Chersonians (or whatever the hell you call people from Cherson)—sending war parties to raid their refrigerators, watch their DVDs, and wrinkle their comic books—and pretty much everybody knew that Amage was the only person with the balls to do anything about it. She sent a letter to the Scythians telling them to leave her allies alone or suffer the consequences, but the Scythian king responded by faxing her a picture of his bare ass with the words “kiss this” written on his butt cheeks with a Magic Marker.
That was it.
Amage immediately summoned her elite royal guard—120 bloodthirsty cavalrymen handpicked for their peerless strength and unflinching bravery—and set out to teach that Scythian bastard a lesson in manners. This classical-age commando assault team went completely balls-out and traversed a distance of roughly 140 miles in under twenty-four hours, arriving unexpectedly in the middle of the night at the Scythian king’s palace and storming the throne room. The warrior queen and her men killed the king, his guards, his family, his friends, his pets, people who owed him money, and pretty much everybody else they could get their hands on.
When the smoke cleared, the queen was standing triumphantly among a pile of dead warriors, her blade leveled at the throat of the young teenage prince of Scythia, who was the only member of his family not currently lying facedown in a pool of his own blood. In an icy, emotionless voice she informed him that he could stay alive and assume the throne so long as he took an oath never to defy her or screw with her allies. He quickly agreed, and Scythian armies never crossed the Sarmatians or any of their homies again.
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10
ALARIC THE BOLD
(370–410)
Corinth, Argos, Sparta, yielded without resistance to the arms of the Goths; and the most fortunate of the inhabitants were saved, by death, from beholding the slavery of their families and the conflagration of their cities.
—EDWARD GIBBON, DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
THE STORY OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE HAS MANY PARALLELS TO THE EQUALLY TRAGIC LIFE OF MILLIONAIRE PLAYMATE/GOLD-DIGGER ANNA NICOLE SMITH. For a time, she was the sexiest gal out there, possessing near-limitless power, prestige, and wealth, and everybody either wanted her or wanted to be her. Then, over time, she got bloated, rich, bitchy, and pretentious, and spent way too much time drunk off her ass or wigged out on barbiturates. In the later years, Rome grew fat, drunk, and lazy as well. Its citizens were uptight stickup-their-ass white people sitting on golden chaise lounges in togas and waving their hands nonchalantly while topless babes fed them grapes, they had more money than they knew what to do with, and they didn’t give a crap about anything but themselves. Hell, they didn’t even fight their own wars anymore—they had badasses like Alaric do it for them.
Alaric was a Goth. Now, when I talk about the Goths, it’s important to understand that I’m not referring to those really skinny pale kids with smeared black mascara who live in their parents’ basements and listen to terrible music. The long-haired European Visigoths were massively built, tough-ass Germans so hardcore they made the most bl
ack-hearted death metal enthusiast look like a beret-wearing French Renaissance painter, and their idea of a mosh pit involved cracking people in the back of the skull with an aluminum folding chair for no reason at all and then spitting blood on their unconscious bodies. These guys were known to drink an entire sixty-ounce flagon of mead in one gulp, smash the mug over your head, and then stab your friends to death with the broken shards of glass, all while listening to the subtle musical stylings of Yngwie Malmsteen. These brutal warriors went toe-to-toe with Rome’s enemies in exchange for cash and prizes, and Alaric, being of noble Gothic birth, was a commander of these volatile auxiliary forces.
Unfortunately, fighting other people’s wars for them wasn’t as awesome as you might think. The Romans pretty much looked at the barbarians as expendable resources, and Alaric’s kinsmen were usually utilized to spearhead Operation Human Shield—wave after wave of Gothic troops would be hurled into the fray, and then the Roman legions would climb over the mangled carcasses to achieve victory. This pretty much blew goats. After helping the Romans defeat the traitorous forces of the false emperor Eugenius, Alaric (along with any of his compatriots lucky enough to remain in one piece) was unceremoniously kicked to the curb. Thanks for risking your life for us, now get the hell outta here.