The World

* Ptolemy’s Egyptian adviser, the priest Manetho, was the great historian who divided the Egyptian pharaohs into the dynasties that we still use today.

* It was Ptolemy who planned his own royal district around the Soma – Tomb of Alexander – adding the 400-foot Pharos lighthouse, one of the wonders of the ancient world; the Museion, sanctuary of the Muses (the first museum), an academy for Aristotelian study including the Library for which all the works of the world were to be translated into Greek. He welcomed intellectuals from all over the Greek world.

* Chandragupta was guided by the semi-mythic Chanakya. It was long believed that Chanakya wrote at least some of the Arthashastra (Science of Politics), a guide to staying in power: ‘You can lose a war as easily as you win. War is unpredictable. Avoid war.’ Chanakya understood the essence of politics, ‘The root of right governance is victorious inner restraint,’ and used the ancient Indian image of the wheel to describe the rajamandala, the circle of kingdoms, the tributaries around a powerful empire. The Arthashastra identifies Kautilya as its author; this was presumed to be another name for Chanakya, but it is now believed that Chanakya was not the author.

* Philadelphos supposedly kept nine paramours, of whom the star was a badass chariot-racing Greek beauty Belistiche, who – despite rules against female participation – somehow won the Olympics and moved to Alexandria as Philadelphos’ lover: they had a son together. This pleasure-loving daredevil sportswoman was so celebrated that when she died Philadelphos had her deified and buried in the temple of Sarapis.

* There is very little known about Ashoka except through his inscriptions – clearly inspired by those of the Persian Great Kings – on which these claims are based. Probably they are exaggerated. This account also uses the obscure and contradictory myths of Ashoka from the point of view of Sri Lankan and Indian Buddhist and Brahmanical sources.

* The emperor’s concept was to create an afterlife version of his empire. Beneath vaulted roofs depicting the heavens and stars flowed bronze-lined rivers of mercury, symbolizing the Yangtze and Yellow, while 7,500 terracotta soldiers guarded the entrances to the tomb, reinforced by crossbow boobytraps. The statues were unlike any previous Chinese statues, realistic in their physique and faces. Some had moustaches, some had hairbuns, some paunches; many had different eyes; all were fully fitted out with armour and weaponry. Most were built from a limited number of modular parts, but the generals were probably sculpted from life. These were probably inspired by smaller figures found in Warring States tombs, but it is just possible they were influenced by Greek sculpture, brought eastwards by Seleukos and his fellow Greeks. The first century BC historian Sima Qian is the source for the outrageous tales of Ying’s madness and cruelties but they may in fact be indirect descriptions of his master, Han emperor Wu.

* Ashoka’s death led to a vicious fight for the succession not just between different princes but between Brahmins, Buddhists, Jains and Ajivikas that was temporarily won by in 232 by a grandson, son of Kunala, Dasaratha Maurya, but ultimately his favoured son Samprati, a Jain not a Buddhist, seized the crown. The empire started to break up.

The Barcas and the Scipios: The Houses of Carthage and Rome

LOVE AMONG THE PTOLEMIES

King Philadelphos planned to bring Cyrene (Libya), ruled for fifty years by Ptolemy I’s stepson King Magas and his wife Apama, under Egyptian rule. He arranged the marriage of their daughter Berenice to his son Euergetes. But Apama, a Seleucid princess, wanted to keep Cyrene as a Seleucid base and, after Magas had died of gluttony, she tried to foil the plan by inviting the son of the Macedonian king, Demetros the Pretty, to marry her daughter instead. Berenice wanted to marry her cousin in Egypt, but she reluctantly married the popinjay Demetros, who was then seduced by her mother.

Berenice solved the problem in family style. Bursting into the maternal boudoir with a posse of killers, she surprised her husband and her mother in bed. Berenice killed her husband, spared her mother and then proceeded triumphantly to Alexandria to marry Euergetes.