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Contents

Introduction

PART ONE: Ancient Evil

Alexander the Great

Herod the Great

Tiberius

Caligula

Attila the Hun

Genghis Khan

Tamerlane the Great

PART TWO: Medieval & Renaissance Monarchs

Vlad the Impaler

Richard III

Cesare Borgia

Henry VIII

Suleiman the Magnificent

Ivan the Terrible

Murad IV

Peter the Great

Catherine the Great

PART THREE: Wicked Women

Jezebel

Empress Livia

Alice Kyteler

Lucrezia Borgia

Mary Tudor

Elizabeth Bathory

La Voisin

Madeleine Smith

Lizzie Borden

Mata Hari

Wallis Simpson

Jiang Qing

Ulrike Meinhof

Aileen Wuornos

PART FOUR: The Nazis

Kitty Schmidt, Walter Schellenberg and Salon Kitty

Adolf Hitler

Joseph Goebbels

Heinrich Himmler

Reinhard Heydrich

Adolf Eichmann

Joseph Mengele

Klaus Barbie

PART FIVE: Evil by Incompetence

Charles I of England and Scotland

Jack Ketch

Nicholas II of Russia

Hirohito

PART SIX: Modern Tyrants & War Criminals

Leopold II

Kaiser Wilhelm II

Vladimir Ilich Lenin

Joseph Stalin

Benito Mussolini

Tojo Hideki

Ante Pavelic

Ho Chi Minh

Josip Broz Tito

Mao Zedong

Kim Il Sung

Ferdinand Marcos

Nicolae Ceausescu

Jean-Bedel Bokassa

Pol Pot

Idi Amin

Haile Mengistu

Saddam Hussein

PART SEVEN: Reigns of Terror

Tomas de Torquemada

Cardinal Richelieu

Murat Rais

Jean Paul Marat

Maximilien Robespierre

François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier

Osama bin Laden

PART EIGHT: Mass Murderers

Sawney Bean

Gilles de Rais

Jack the Ripper

Peter Kürten, the Vampire of Düsseldorf

Fritz Haarman, the Vampire of Hanover

Herman Mudgett (H. H. Holmes)

Henri Landru

Ted Bundy

Albert De Salvo

Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper

Harold Shipman

PART NINE: Single Acts of Evil

John Wilkes Booth

George McMahon

Lee Harvey Oswald

PART TEN: Evil For the Fun of it

Marquis de Sade

Aleister Crowley

PART ELEVEN: Fakers and Frauds

Horatio Bottomley

Charles Dawson

Han van Meegeren

Tom Keating

PART TWELVE: Organized Crime

Henry Morgan

Salvatore ‘Lucky’ Luciano

Robert Maxwell

Ronnie Kray and Reggie Kray

PART THIRTEEN: Evil by Doing Nothing

Captain Stanley Lord

Introduction

There are over 18 million websites on the internet relating to evil. Many of them are facetious or relate to games of various kinds. We are all afraid of evil, yet we make jokes about it and it is easy to see why. When we encounter evil, whether it is in a lurid newspaper piece reporting the trial of a serial killer or when we are betrayed by someone we thought we could trust, we are at a loss to understand. Evil goes against the grain – for most of us – yet it is part of the warp and weft not only of history but of the everyday world that we live in. Evil acts are shocking, yet common. Laughing them off and making jokes about them is sometimes the only way we can cope with them. But the very fact that evil is commonplace makes it essential that we look at it hard and steadily, and try to understand it, not least so that we can defend ourselves as best we may.

There is a point of view that there are no evil people at all, only misguided actions. No bad people, only bad acts. After writing this book, I cannot agree with that. As a result of a misjudgement or a mistake, any one of us can commit an evil act; we all have the capacity to do something wrong inadvertently. But most of the people featured in this book deliberately and systematically committed evil acts, and they often committed them over and over again. We should not try to make excuses for what these people did. On the other hand, it is in all our interests to try to understand why they did what they did, so that we can avoid creating the situations in which evil is born, and so that we can detect the early signs of evil in the making, so that we can bring up our young in a way that makes them least likely to tread the downward path towards evil.

Evil depends partly on the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. Looking back across the centuries there seem to have been more evil people about at certain times than at others. The twentieth century was one of those times, possibly because technology and in particular the industrialization of warfare made it possible, using weapons of mass destruction, to kill very large numbers of people with relative ease. Evil sometimes appears or disappears according to your viewpoint. It is possible to see the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima as a good act, because it brought the Second World War quickly to an end, or as a necessary evil, because it did that but also killed a lot of people, or as an act of unqualified evil, because the people killed were civilians, slaughtered in cold blood, and they should never have been considered as military targets. The American decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima is a classic moral paradox.

The twentieth century saw an outbreak of evil that was completely unprecedented. There was a blood-letting on a scale that had never been seen before in human history. The 20 worst blood-lettings of the twentieth century each involved a million deaths or more; they were:

1.Second World War 50 million

2.Mao Zedong’s regime in China 48 million

3.Stalin’s regime in the Soviet Union 20 million

4.First World War, including Armenian massacres 15 million

5.Russian Civil War 8.8 million

6.Warlord and Nationalist era in China 4 million

7.Congo under King Leopold 3 million

8.Korean War 2.8 million

9. Second Indo-China War 2.7 million

10. Chinese Civil War 2.5 million

11. German expulsions after Second World War 2.1 million

12. Second Sudanese Civil War 1.9 million

13. Congolese Civil War 1.7 million

14. Cambodia Khmer Rouge regime 1.7 million

15. Afghanistan Civil War 1.4 million

16. Ethiopian Civil Wars 1.4 million

17. Mexican Revolution 1.3 million

18. East Pakistan massacres 1.2 million

19. Iran-Iraq War 1 million

20. Nigeria: Biafran War 1 million

This list implies a lot of separate events but many of them are closely linked. They form part of a single, complex and appalling upheaval which some have described as the Haemoclysm, the ‘Blood Flood’, which swept 155 million human lives away. The Western Haemoclysm started with the Balkan Wars, led on through two World Wars to the establishment of Communism in Eastern Europe. By the end of the Western Haemoclysm, marked by the death of Stalin, 80 million lives had been swept away.

The processes of political and social change play a great part. There was a great sociopolitical spasm in which monarchy imploded and republicanism exploded, imperialism collapsed and self-government became paramount, traditional religions (apart from Islam) seriously weakened, and Communism and the personality cults of dictators strengthened. These and many other changes have generated the violence. And there are always evil people waiting to seize opportunities to take power for themselves – and abuse it.

Necessarily, however long we make this book some people are going to be included and some left out. Napoleon and Charles Manson were left out, though they were on the draft list. A decision has to be made about who is more evil and who is less evil. We can ask ourselves hypothetical questions, ‘Who would I least like to meet in a dark alley at night?’ or ‘Who would I least like to be in a room with?’ The historian Professor Sir Alan Bullock, who wrote knowledgeably about both Hitler and Stalin, was once asked which of the two monsters he would have preferred to spend time with. He chose Hitler. Although an afternoon with Hitler would have been less exciting than an afternoon with Stalin – boring, even, according to Bullock – there was a better chance of getting through it alive. That makes Stalin easily the more evil of the two. Who would you least like to meet? My guess is that if you are a woman you will probably most fear a nightmare figure like Jack the Ripper. If you are a man, the choice is more open-ended. Probably all of us fear encountering Dr Harold Shipman, the GP from Hell – superficially ordinary, yet lethal.

There are different kinds of evil. There is the expert pediatrician who falsely accuses parents of abusing or even killing their children – evil by expertise. There is the lynch mob who throws stones through the window of a pediatrician, not understanding the difference between the words ‘pediatrician’ and ‘paedophile’ – evil through ignorance (not that there would be a right window for stone-throwing).

Inevitably, various writers have attempted to identify the ‘Top Ten’ or ‘Top Twenty’ most evil people. One list I came across was a ‘Top Twelve’, a short enough list to quote in full: Torquemada, Vlad the Impaler, Hitler, Stalin, Amin, Ivan the Terrible, Eichmann, Pol Pot, Mao, Genghis Khan, H. H. Holmes and Gilles de Rais. It is easy to see how each of those names qualifies for the top twelve, and they all find their place in this book, because they were all killers, but how many deaths did they cause? Gilles de Rais was a horrible man, but he didn’t cause nearly as many deaths (800) as Stalin (20 million) – or does the fact that de Rais committed the murders with his own hands and Stalin simply gave the orders to kill make de Rais’s killing more evil? It is not, after all, quite as easy to rank evil as we might have thought. I was glad that I was able to make this book a much longer exploration of evil. I have had the luxury of choosing from over 90, and that is rather easier to do, though still not easy. The structure of the book shows that there are different kinds of evil, and I have grouped people according to the type of evil they perpetrated. The last type is probably the most controversial – Evil by Doing Nothing. I describe one classic example in detail but you, the reader, will probably be able to think of many others.

Evil reputation is not always the best guide to evil actuality. Rasputin, Richard III and Lucrezia Borgia have evil reputations they don’t deserve. History is kind to some people, unkind to others. It is useful to take another look and ask whether this historical figure was really as evil (or, indeed, as good) as they have been made out to be. In this book I try to rectify a few of the unfairnesses of the past.

So – fame or infamy may not be the best guide to goodness or evil. Political agenda often influences people in identifying evil. While researching this book I found one alarming ‘Top 25’ Most Evil People of the Millennium. It included some fairly predictable names – Hitler, Stalin, Ivan the Terrible and Genghis Khan – but also two surprise entries in the shape of Bill and Hillary Clinton!

It may be that the most evil people in the world don’t get found out; history doesn’t notice them. The serial killer Dr Harold Shipman got very nearly to the end of his career as a GP without being detected; once he had retired, there would have been no reason for anyone to investigate any of his patients’ deaths. He very nearly got away with it. All of it. How many others, and not just in Britain, have got away with mass murder? In the days before forensic science it was much easier to poison people without detection. In the nature of things, there is no way of knowing how many of these ‘successful’ evil people there may have been. We can never know. We do know that large numbers of people have been executed for crimes they did not commit. Timothy Evans was one. Even in some high-profile cases, like that of Mary Queen of Scots, it may be that the convicted and executed ‘criminal’ was not only innocent but the terribly wronged victim of an even greater evil, framing by the authorities; was Mary the evil conspirator, or Walsingham?

What we can know with a terrible certainty is that the evil continues. There are still people committing terrible crimes against other people and who have yet to be brought to justice. There are several alleged ‘war criminals’ who have yet to stand trial for the atrocities they committed in Bosnia at the end of the twentieth century. There is an Iraqi ex-head of state who has, at the time of writing, yet to answer for his crimes. There are the leaders of Al-Qaeda and their successors who look as though they will go on committing atrocities – on and on into the future. There is no foreseeable end to evil. It is therefore all the more important that we face up to it, recognize it and do whatever we can to limit its impact on our lives.

PART ONE: Ancient Evil

Alexander the Great

(356–323 bc)

It may seem odd to launch a list of evil people with an individual who has been held up for centuries in many different countries as a role model, an icon of virtue and valour – as the ultimate hero. But history is what people say about the past, and that is always selective. Have we been selecting the good things about Alexander and ignoring or overlooking the bad?

Alexander ‘the Great’ was born at Pella in Macedonia in 356 bc. He was the son of King Philip of Macedon, who was a first-rate general and administrator, and Queen Olympias, who was brilliant, impulsive and hot-tempered. Alexander inherited to a high degree the qualities of both his parents. The most striking difference was that Alexander was far more ambitious than his father; he was in fact one of the most ambitious people of all time. His mother Olympias taught him that Achilles was his ancestor, and he became so fixated with this idea that his tutor, Aristotle actually called him Achilles. As part of this obsession, Alexander learnt the Iliad by heart, always carried a copy of Homer’s epic poem with him, and consciously acted out the dangerous fantasy that he was one of Homer’s heroes.

As a boy, Alexander was strong and fearless. He famously succeeded in taming Bucephalus, a spirited horse that nobody else dared to mount. It was when he was 13 that Alexander became Aristotle’s pupil, and Aristotle imbued him with a great love of literature, geography and ethnology, all of which fed and informed his military career. When he was 18, Alexander commanded a section of his father’s cavalry at the Battle of Chaeronea. He was also entrusted with acting as his father’s ambassador to Athens. He was a youth carefully groomed for kingship.

Then, when Alexander was 20, Philip of Macedon was assassinated. It is still unclear whether Alexander connived in the conspiracy to kill his father, but the assassination looks like a well-orchestrated palace coup, and the timing suited Alexander perfectly. There is a suspicion that his mother Olympias played a part in it. While Alexander was away making war on a barbarian tribe in the north, the people of Thebes, to the south, heard a rumour that he was dead and revolted against Macedonian domination, inviting Athens to join them in a rebellion. Alexander swiftly rode to Thebes with his army, stormed the city and destroyed every building except the temples and the house of the poet Pindar. The incident shows several aspects of the nature of Alexander well: the well-judged reverence for certain things, the poignant sentimentality, the grand gesture, the brutality, the wanton destructiveness. Fans of Alexander weaken at the knees at the thought that he spared the house of the poet, and gloss over the fact that he sold 30,000 captive Thebans into slavery. Clearly, a case can be made for Alexander as a war criminal.

Alexander turned then to Persia. The father had dreamed of conquering Persia; now the son wanted to outdo the father by achieving it. In 334 bc, he crossed the Hellespont with an army 35,000 strong. He was met by the Persian army on the banks of the Granicus River. He was victorious, and all Asia Minor opened before him. Halicarnassus withstood a siege, but the other towns gave in easily. In 333 bc, after a serious bout of illness, he marched along the south coast of Anatolia into Syria. Darius III, the Persian king, raised a huge army to stop him, but Alexander captured Darius’s camp, taking Darius’s wife and mother prisoner. Once again, Alexander won credit by behaving gallantly towards them.

He turned south to capture Tyre, after a seven-month siege, by building a causeway out to the island. He killed 8,000 citizens of Tyre, selling 30,000 more into slavery. This operation is considered Alexander’s greatest military achievement. He went on to do the same to Gaza. After that came Egypt, where Alexander was welcomed as a deliverer; the Egyptians hated their harsh Persian rulers. On the Nile Delta, Alexander founded a new city, egotistically naming it after himself – Alexandria.

In 331 bc, Alexander turned back to deal with the Persian army. Darius had gathered an enormous host, including the heavy cavalry of the Persian steppe, and many chariots with scythe-like blades protruding from the wheel-axles. The Persians cleared and smoothed a huge level plain at Arbela, east of the River Tigris, to make an arena where their chariots could be effectively deployed. In the Battle of Arbela which followed, Alexander’s army routed Darius’s and the Persian army retreated. It was one of the most decisive battles in history. Babylon surrendered, and Alexander took the Persian cities of Susa and Persepolis, which yielded vast treasures in gold and silver.

At Persepolis, Alexander committed some of his worst atrocities. All the inhabitants of the city were either killed or sold as slaves, and finally the great and beautiful city was burned to the ground. It was a terrible act of vandalism.

Alexander crossed the Zagros Mountains in 330 bc, to reach Media. Darius had fled there, and he was shortly afterwards killed by his own nobles. With Darius dead, Alexander effectively became king of the entire region, from Greece, right across Anatolia and the Near and Middle East. Not content with this, Alexander took his army on to the southern shore of the Caspian Sea, hammering local tribes as he went, and setting up Persian nobles as local governors, though many of these rebelled against his overlordship after he had moved on. The march continued through Bactria and Sogdiana, where Alexander married Roxane, the daughter of a Sogdian lord. It was in Sogdiana that the violence in Alexander broke out on a personal level. He lost his temper when drunk and killed a close friend, Clitus. For this single act, amongst all the acts of mass cruelty, his Macedonian troops never forgave him. They remembered him as the murderer of Clitus.

In 326 bc, Alexander reached northern Pakistan, where he defeated Porus, one of the local princes. He had planned to go on to conquer the Ganges valley, but his army mutinied. They were getting too far from home. It is interesting to speculate just how far Alexander would have gone if the troops had been willing. Would he have gone on to China? The huge sprawling military campaign had reached its furthest point though, and he turned to sail down the Indus River to its mouth, then led the army west in a terrible march across the desert of southern Iran. The army and the fleet returned to Susa.

Alexander then busied himself with an insane plan to turn Europe and Asia, or at least as much of Asia as he had conquered, into a single country. Babylon would be its capital. Inter-marriage would be one of the means by which the different regions would be bonded together, and this was why he married a Persian princess himself. He placed soldiers from all the provinces of this empire in his army. He introduced a common currency system throughout the empire. He encouraged the spread of Greek ideas, customs and laws into Asia, regarding them as more enlightened than the existing local laws. Thus far, it all sounds very modern and progressive – not unlike the European Union. But the scale was hopelessly grandiose, given the communications systems of the time, and there was underlying all of it the megalomania of the mad dictator. Naturally, to gain recognition as the supreme ruler everywhere in his empire, Alexander required all the provinces to acknowledge him as a god. It came back, in the end, to this ultimate ego-trip.

Alexander’s plan simmered, steamed and expanded, and at the time of his death he was planning a new expedition to Arabia. He was taken ill with what may have been malaria in Babylon. He died on 13 June,

323 bc. His body was put into a gold coffin and transported to Memphis in Egypt, and from there to Alexandria where it was placed in a beautiful tomb. The tomb of Alexander has, rather surprisingly, been lost. Alexander left no successor either, and a successor was essential for the survival of his empire. For all the brilliance and dash of Alexander's career, much of it was to do with personal vanity and egotism, and the manner of his conquest was invariably cruel. As always, too many people had to die to fulfil one man’s dream.

There are today, just as there always have been, varying views of Alexander. He was very conscious of his image, and worked hard to project an image of himself as a reckless, energetic, romantic super-hero ready to take on the world. He even got his architect Deinocrates to prepare a plan to sculpt the Greek peninsula of Mount Athos into a vast sculpture of himself, Alexander the Great, reclining; this astonishingly egotistical scheme was revived in the seventeenth century, when the idealized (sanitized) image of Alexander seemed to represent a great human ideal. The idea was presented to his namesake Pope Alexander VII in about 1655, but fortunately came to nothing.

Alexander very deliberately followed his role models, the warrior-heroes of Homer’s Iliad, and it was not at all by chance that he crossed the Hellespont to visit Achilles’s tomb at Troy before going to meet the Persian army. He needed his army and his biographers to see him doing that. He was a brilliantly successful propagandist for his own self-image, but his murderous actions speak far louder than the propaganda. His actions were those of the mass-killer, and whatever glamour the distance of history may lend, the misery and suffering he caused thousands of his contemporaries, across a swathe of Eurasia from Greece to the Indus valley, were on an incalculably grand scale.

Herod the Great

(74 bc–4 bc)

Because of the Bible story, most of us have grown up feeling that we know King Herod all too well. Herod is one of the great archetypes of evil. He was the king who was visited by the wise men from the East when they were trying to find their way to the infant Messiah. He was the king who tried to kill Jesus by having all the male babies in Bethlehem massacred. But how evil was Herod, really? How great could that so-called ‘Massacre of the Innocents’ have been?

The Christian Church has been eager to inflate the Massacre of the Innocents, at different times claiming that 60,000 or 100,000 male infants were slaughtered by this anti-Christ. But if we look at the reality of the situation, Bethlehem was only a village, and even if there were a thousand people living in that village there can only have been a score of male babies. It could not have been much of a massacre after all. Will a closer look at Herod perhaps reveal a very different historical figure?

Herod was the son of Antipater, the procurator of Judaea under Rome. When he was 25, Herod’s father appointed him ruler of Galilee. He imme­diately arrested Hezekiah, the arch-brigand, and executed him. He was summoned to appear before the Sanhedrin, charged with overriding their rights in executing Hezekiah. When he appeared with his bodyguard in full strength, the Sanhedrin was overawed and naturally reluctant to find him guilty. The governor of Syria, where Hezekiah had been a problem, sent a demand for Herod’s acquittal, which let the Sanhedrin off the hook. The trial was adjourned and Herod was informally encouraged to abscond. Herod was humiliated and angry. He was ready to return later with an army to wreak vengeance, but his father dissuaded him from massacring the Sanhedrin.

In 43 bc, Antipater was poisoned at the instigation of Malichus, who seems to have been a Jewish freedom-fighter. Herod had Malichus assassinated in Syria, which was by now in a state of anarchy. Mark Antony, who was Master of the East after the Battle of Philippi, wanted to support the son of his friend Antipater, but he was away in Egypt when the Parthians invaded Palestine and put Antigonus on the throne in 40 bc. Herod escaped to Rome, where Antony made him and his elder brother tetrarchs; Antony persuaded the Roman Senate to proclaim Herod the rightful King of Judaea.

In 39 bc, Herod returned to Palestine and, with Antony’s Roman troops at his disposal, he was able to lay siege to Jerusalem. Jerusalem was taken by storm. Antigonus, the usurper king, was beheaded at Antioch. In 37 bc, Herod was King of Judaea in fact, but still as a Roman client-king sponsored by Mark Antony. The Pharisees were resigned to accepting Herod’s harsh rule as a judgement of God. Herod’s marriage to Mariamne brought enemies into his household. Herod had ten wives, by whom he had 14 children. He tried to annihilate the rival Hasmonean faction by killing 45 members of the Sanhedrin and confiscating their possessions, but while there were members of the Hasmonean family still living there would always be a rival claimant to his throne. Mariamne’s unscrupulous mother Alexandra used her position to try to overthrow her son-in-law. She found an unexpected ally in Queen Cleopatra, who bore a grudge against Herod because he had spurned her advances. Alexandra’s plot nevertheless ensured that her name was added to Herod’s death list.

Herod’s reign was a battleground of different factions and interest groups. His Babylonian high priest was deposed so that Mariamne’s brother, Aristobulus, might hold the post. Cleopatra acquired grants of territory next to Herod’s and she demanded that Herod should collect arrears of tribute from these lands for her.

After the Battle of Actium in 31 bc, and the consequent suicides of Mark Antony and Cleopatra, Herod somehow managed to remain untainted by his association with both Antony and Cleopatra, and gained favour with Augustus, the victor. It was an extremely dangerous time for him, as he could easily have found himself deposed by Augustus. Herod took the initiative and went straight to Augustus in person to declare his loyalty. Augustus was impressed and confirmed Herod’s position as a client-king.

Herod was uncertain about the outcome of his meeting with Augustus, and left orders that if he did not return his wife Mariamne should be killed also. When he got back, he discovered that Mariamne knew all about this plan. She was furious, gave him a piece of her mind and refused to sleep with him any more. It had always been a turbulent marriage, though Herod genuinely loved her. In retaliation, he had her accused of adultery. At the trial, which Herod himself heard as judge, Mariamne’s mother Alexandra came forward to give evidence that Marimane was indeed an adulteress. Alexandra was evidently trying to get her name removed from Herod’s death list, and did not mind conniving at her daughter’s death in order to do it. Mariamne was duly sentenced to death and executed.

Herod also successfully eliminated one potential rival claimant to the throne after another, however innocent and unthreatening, until by 25 bc they were all dead. Then, in the way of great dictators, he was free to do some spectacular building work. This he needed to do in order to win round the Jewish people. They absolutely detested him, partly for not having been born a Jew, and partly for consolidating Roman control over their country; they saw him as a fake, a quisling, a traitor. In an heroic effort to win the Jewish people over and gain personal popularity, Herod rebuilt the Temple in Jerusalem in lavish style, making it one of the wonders of the world. But it was a futile effort. The Jews still hated him. Perhaps they knew his efforts were shallow, insincere and vainglorious. His next venture was to build a new city on the coast. Foolishly, he dedicated the city and a temple in it to the Roman Emperor, naming it Caesarea. There were arenas for gladiatorial games, which were also offensive to the Jews.

Herod became intermittently ill. Some said he was deranged and should be deposed, but few dared to act on this thought. Alexandra decided to take the risk. She declared Herod unfit to rule and herself queen in his place. This was just what Herod needed to stir him from his sickbed. He got up and staggered out to order Alexandra’s summary execution. She was executed immediately, without trial.

Still he had enemies in his household. His brother Pheroras and sister Salome plotted against the two sons of Mariamne. On his deathbed, Herod learnt that his eldest son, Antipater, had been plotting against him. He accused him formally before the governor of Syria and obtained permission from the Emperor Augustus to put his son to death. Herod had his son and heir Antipater executed, just five days before his own death. It was another son, Herod Antipas, who succeeded him – and this Herod too was a monster. This new Herod was the Herod who had a hand in the executions of both John the Baptist and Jesus.

Herod the Great’s reign was stained with cruelties and atrocities. Sooner or later, every member of the rival Hasmonean family fell victim to his suspicions and fears; all were to die on the slightest pretext. In the Bible he is blamed for the slaughter of the innocents. This was the organized killing of all male babies under the age of two, just in case one of them proved to be the king who would supplant him, the prophesied Messiah. This remarkable atrocity is not mentioned by the historian Josephus, but Josephus was much more interested in great events and important people and although he may have known about it a village massacre would not have seemed important to him. The killing becomes important in the Gospel of Matthew because the massacre, however small in scale, was intended to ensure the death of the infant Jesus, and was therefore profoundly relevant to the story. The Greek word used in Matthew in any case means 'killing' not ‘massacre’. Some historians think the killing of the firstborn didn’t happen at all, but appears in the Gospel because of an elision of two events. The wise men may well have arrived in the court of King Herod at a time when the firstborn were slaughtered – but it was Herod’s own firstborn, the two sons he had executed round about the time that Jesus was born.

Whether it happened or not, the killing of the firstborn in Bethlehem would have been entirely in character; it was very much the kind of thing Herod did, especially in the later years of his reign. His ordering the death of his wife Mariamne and his two sons by her were atrocities in the same style. It is now generally believed that Jesus was born in 5 or 7 bc, and both of these dates would have fallen in the final years of Herod the Great’s reign, when his paranoia reached fever pitch. He was completely unhinged, and justifiably hated by his family, his courtiers, his rivals and the great mass of Jewish people who were his subjects. He had his wife’s brother, Aristobulus, drowned in his swimming pool during a party. The network of fortresses he built across the land were not built to defend his kingdom against foreign enemies, but to defend himself against his own people.

Yet, in a perverse way, Herod caused something else to happen. Herod nurtured and intensified the Roman occupation of Judaea and therefore helped to create the climate of despair and rebellion that allowed Christianity to flourish. It was because of Herod that the Jews wanted a Messiah.

Tiberius

(42 bc–ad 37)

Tiberius Claudius Nero was born on 16 November, 42 bc. His father, who had the same name, was one of Julius Caesar’s officers. His mother was Livia, who had been handed on to Octavian, the future emperor Augustus, in 38 bc. Three months after her second marriage, Tiberius’s brother Drusus was born. Livia was to have no children by Augustus, and she devoted all her efforts towards the advancement of her sons. As a prince, Tiberius passed through all the appropriate state offices. At 21 he became a quaestor; at 29 he became a consul. He learnt the tasks associated with each role and proved to be a conscientious administrator.

Tiberius’s main milieu was the army camp. From 22 to 6 bc and again from ad 4 to 10 he spent most of his time with the army. In 20 bc Augustus sent Tiberius with an army to seat Tigranes of Armenia as a Roman client king. In 15 bc he went to help his brother subjugate two German tribes in the Black Forest.

A great unhappiness befell Tiberius when Agrippa died in 12 bc. This left Julia, the emperor’s only child, a widow. Livia persuaded Augustus to force Tiberius to marry Julia. Tiberius was already married to Vipsania, whom he loved, and did not want to divorce. In 9 bc Drusus died. Tiberius had always been eclipsed by his brilliant younger brother, but now he, Tiberius, was the first soldier of the Roman Empire. The soldiers under his command did not especially like Tiberius – he was not a man they could warm to – but they respected and trusted him and he always made their safety his first consideration. Tiberius returned from his Rhine campaign in triumph and was rewarded with the title ‘imperator’. He was also made consul again, and tribune. Tiberius was in this way closely associated with the emperor in the civil government of the empire, and it was thought at the time that this marked him out as the heir to the throne.

Tiberius had a dark side. He suddenly asked for permission to retire to Rhodes in order to study. He refused to give any reason for this retreat. It emerged years afterwards that his reason was to give the young princes Gaius and Lucius, the sons of Agrippa and Julia, their chance to shine – at least that was the reason he gave. It may rather be that he had no wish to become the servant of the two boys whom Augustus had adopted and evidently saw as joint heirs. Possibly Tiberius had no ambition to be emperor, and he wanted to get away from his mother’s endless scheming on his behalf. Possibly he wanted to get away from his wife Julia’s scandalous behaviour and it was safer to be nowhere near her when her sexual exploits were discovered by Augustus. When Augustus did indeed find out and exploded with anger, inflicting terrible punishment on Julia, Tiberius interceded on her behalf and did what he could to reduce her suffering. Possibly there were attractions on Rhodes that we know nothing of, but he did indeed pass time there with scholars, with whom he discoursed intelligently.

After five years, he asked for leave to return, and Augustus angrily refused. Livia managed to persuade Augustus to make him a legate, which to an extent legitimized his absence from Rome. Augustus then relented and allowed Tiberius to return on condition that he held no public office. The moment he returned, in ad 2, Lucius died, and about a year later Gaius died. They may have died naturally, but there is reason to suspect that Livia arranged their deaths to clear the way for her son to become emperor. Evil was done on Tiberius’s behalf, rather than by him; he was the beneficiary of evil.

The emperor was left with only one male descendant now, Agrippa Postumus, Julia’s son, and he was only a boy. Augustus adopted both Postumus and Tiberius as his sons, and indicated that he expected Tiberius to be his successor. Now Tiberius resumed his military career, returning in triumph to Rome once more in ad 11. From this time until Augustus’s death in ad 14, Tiberius was in effect joint emperor. When Augustus died, Tiberius was no longer young: he was 56.

Possibly because of the overriding ambitions of his mother, he had learnt to hide his feelings, ambitions and motives. What struck everyone was how impenetrable he was. Throughout his career as a military commander, he is only known once to have discussed anything, and that was after the catastrophic annihilation of Varus’s legions in Germany. He was stern and totally inscrutable, and therefore almost totally dislikable. The men of his own legions mutinied when they heard that he had become emperor and it was only the skill of Germanicus that prevented a mutinous march on Rome to unseat Tiberius. He was not a brilliant man, so he brooded over problems for a long time to get at the solution. Silent, gloomy men are never popular.

He was held in check for much of his life by his mother and the necessity of keeping the right side of Augustus. Once he became emperor, his true nature came increasingly out into the open. He cut himself off from his controlling mother by setting up court on the island of Capri, where he indulged in all kinds of perverted pastimes, which involved the sexual abuse of slaves and children. He became a monster of wickedness.

When Germanicus was in the East, Tiberius set Piso in place there to spy on him. Piso and his wife poisoned Germanicus, and it would seem likely that this was on Tiberius’s orders. Tiberius had Piso brought to Rome for a show trial; Piso was forced to commit suicide. Tiberius named two of the sons of Agrippina, Germanicus’s widow, as his heirs. In Rome, Tiberius maintained control through his minister, Sejanus. Sejanus in turn maintained his own position by feeding the emperor’s suspicions about Agrippina and her household. Then, after brooding on the situation on Capri for a while, Tiberius launched a purge. In his own memoirs, Tiberius claimed that he killed Sejanus because Sejanus entertained an insane rage against the sons of Germanicus. This cannot be true, because the destruction of Sejanus was a bloodbath, a Roman purge that consumed Agrippina and her two sons as well. It was Agrippina’s third son, the awful Caligula, who was to become Tiberius’s heir.

Tiberius was remembered in Rome as a dangerous emperor who could not be trusted. Under his rule, scores of people were prosecuted for treason on the slightest of pretexts and a climate of terror was created in which informers flourished as they provided Sejanus with the perjured evidence required to commit one judicial murder after another. Much of this evil may have been carried out by Sejanus while Tiberius was away, frolicking on Capri, but Tiberius was nevertheless responsible for delegating power to Sejanus. It was all the more terrible as an experience for Rome because of the contrast with the way Augustus ran things. Under Augustus there was no doctrine of constructive treason. Under Tiberius, more and more people were put to the sword and their property confiscated under trumped-up treason charges. As time passed, Tiberius seems to have become more and more indifferent to the shedding of civilian blood, so that Rome looked increasingly like one of his battlefields.

Caligula

(ad 12–41)

When the 25-year-old Gaius Caesar became third Emperor of Rome on the death of Tiberius, there was general rejoicing. Tiberius was old, corrupt, depraved and had shut himself away on Capri while his critics were cruelly executed in Rome. He had done Rome a favour by nominating little Gaius, great-grandson of the great Augustus and son of the military hero Germanicus, as his successor. As a child, Gaius had been taken on campaigns by his father. The soldiers had adopted him as a mascot, dressing him in a miniature uniform, complete with little boots, ‘caligulae’ – hence his nickname, Little Boot, Caligula.

But in four short years the nickname would turn into a by-word for capricious cruelty far worse than any of Tiberius’s. Caligula was wild, extravagant, with a penchant for sexual adventures. What started as youthful excesses resulting from too much power too young turned into insane excess.

Things started well, with Caligula declaring amnesties for all Romans imprisoned or exiled under Tiberius and stopping the treason trials. He gave away much of Tiberius’s wealth in tax rebates and cash bonuses for the garrison in Rome. He lavished huge amounts of money on the German mercenaries of his personal bodyguard. Senators who warned that he would bankrupt himself if he carried on like this were disregarded as he organized lavish circuses for the people. Exotic menageries of animals from all over the Roman Empire were collected for mock hunts in the arenas. Pay for gladiators doubled and trebled.

Behind the scenes things began to develop in an even more unsettling way. He had made his three sisters leave their husbands, and move into his palace so that he could sleep with them. At night, Caligula wandered round the city with his guards, joining in orgies with prostitutes.

After reigning for only seven months, Caligula fell seriously ill with a ‘brain fever’. After a month he recovered physically, though he was clearly mentally ill. He thought he had turned into a god. The programme of circuses accelerated, with more and more public holidays, and Caligula began to run out of money. The pay for gladiators fell, and only fat old gladiators lured out of retirement turned up in the arenas; the quality of the shows dropped and the people of Rome disliked what they saw. The crowd in the amphitheatre rose and booed. Caligula had those who had led the jeering rounded up. They were dragged off into the cellars, where their tongues were cut out; then they were forced out into the arena to do battle with the wild animals themselves. The spectators were shocked into silence by what they saw, but the Emperor shouted, laughed and clapped until the last of the jeerers had been killed. As he left, Caligula said, ‘I wish Rome had but one neck, so that I could cut off all their heads with one blow!’ Few Romans appreciated the Emperor’s strange sense of humour.

From then on, Caligula had to make economies. His idea of economies was to feed criminals from the prisons to the lions to fatten them up and launch a series of treason charges against wealthy citizens. Evidence was bought from perjurers, just as in Tiberius’s time, and entire estates and fortunes were taken as ‘fines’.

Finally, in the time-honoured way of political leaders then and now, Caligula resorted to foreign adventures as a means of acquiring wealth and distracting subjects from misery and mismanagement at home. He looked to Gaul and Spain, but spent the last of his imperial wealth on a strange event in the Bay of Naples. He moored 4,000 boats to make a floating bridge across the bay and rode across on horseback – to give the lie to an old prophecy that he had no more chance of becoming Emperor than of riding across the bay. When the bridge was destroyed in a storm, Caligula swore he would take revenge on Neptune, the Sea-god.

He also threw a party for his horse Incitatus, giving him presents of paintings to hang on his marble bedroom walls. Caligula threatened to make Incitatus a senator.

The prefect of the Praetorian Guard, Macro, had helped Caligula gain the throne, but now Caligula felt he owed him too much. Caligula tricked Macro into thinking he was to become prefect of Egypt, then had him arrested and executed.

Now desperate for cash, Caligula sank to sending his guards round the city, demanding cash from ordinary citizens in the street. The guards reported that they had extorted money even from the prostitutes, which gave Caligula another sick idea. He announced that his palace was to open as a brothel, with his sisters as prostitutes. Senators were obliged to turn up at the orgies, each paying an entrance fee of a thousand gold pieces; their humiliation was doubled when they were ordered to return with their wives and daughters. They were all obliged to join in the fun.

Caligula’s popularity was over, as he alienated one social class after another. In Gaul, he behaved equally madly, organizing a mock-auction in which French noblemen were forced to outbid one another for what turned out to be bundles of rubbish. In Germany, a thousand prisoners were captured. He decided that he only needed 300 prisoners to make an impressive triumphal return to Rome, so the rest were killed. His last great campaign was to be the conquest of Britain, but he lost his nerve when he reached the Channel, remembering that Neptune was his great enemy. Camping near Boulogne, he ordered his bewildered and unnerved soldiers to line up on the beach. Archers formed up at the water’s edge. Cavalry waited on the flanks. All looked out to sea as if waiting for the enemy to appear. Then Caligula rode into the sea, slashing at the water with his sword and swearing revenge on Neptune for wrecking his ships at Naples. Catapults were fired into the sea. Archers fired into the waves. Then Caligula ordered his men to gather seashells in their helmets – the plunder after the victory.

His was a weak, quirky personality totally corrupted by power, and now no-one found him funny. The army had been humiliated and he would not be forgiven for that. During the long march back to Rome, the conspiracy to get rid of him was hatched. For a month after his return home he was allowed to celebrate his imaginary victories – the celebration included plans to replace the heads of all the statues of gods in Rome with his own. Then Caligula pushed one of his veterans too far. He forced Cassius Chaerea to torture a young girl. Cassius wept at the girl’s innocent anguish. When Caligula got to hear about it, he ridiculed Cassius mercilessly.

In January ad 41, when Caligula was in his private theatre, Cassius waited for him in a covered walkway. He sent word in that a troupe of young Greek dancing boys was waiting to perform for him. This brought Caligula out into the passage. Cassius drew his sword, felled Caligula and killed him with ten thrusts of his sword. Cassius strode straight into the theatre and announced, ‘The show is over. The Emperor is dead’. After a moment’s silence there was a roar of applause.