First contacts with China

It is generally not mentioned that in the wake of Alexander's expansion, an opening towards China, or Seres as Strabo called the country, was created to the east of Central Asia. After all, in 329 BC, the king founded the city of Alexandria Eschate (very appropriately being Alexandria the Furthest), the later Khojend in modern Tajikistan, where he stopped his march eastwards. 

His Greek settlers in Central Asia were there to stay for the next three hundred years as Seleucos established his Empire, which later became the Graeco-Bactrian kingdom. Over time, their kings steadily expanded their power further to the east, and the main force appeared to be King Euthydemus (230-200 BC). This Euthydemus was born in Magnesia, Asia Minor as the son of the Greek general Apollodotus. By 209 BC, as Graeco-Bactria king, he withstood the three-year-long siege of Bactra led by the Seleucid ruler Antiochus III. In the end, Antiochus offered one of his daughters in marriage to Demetrius, son of Euthydemus, in exchange for which he received several Indian war elephants. 

Once well settled, Euthydemus went to the lands beyond Alexandria Eschate. As reported by Strabo, he even reached Kashgar in the region of Xinjiang. This may date the first Western and China exchanges to around 200 BC. 

How China looked at the West is a much lesser-known story. Not unlike the Greeks, the Chinese held that they were the center of world civilization and that all other countries were tributaries of China. This implies that the campaign of Euthydemus may have been a significant turning point (see also: Alexander's influence reached all the way to China?)

Around 130 BC, embassies of the Han Dynasty traveled to Central Asia as the Chinese emperor Wudi was interested in the sophisticated civilizations of Ferghana, Bactria, and Parthia, respectively known to the Chinese as Dayuan, Daxia, and Anxi. Since then, numerous embassies left every year to these countries, where they found people living in fixed homes and interested in the rich produce of China. Chinese records reveal that more than ten such missions were dispatched into Parthia, Seleucid Syria (known as Lijian), Chaldea (Tiaozhi), and north-western India (Tianzhu). Allegedly, they even visited Emperor Augustus (27 BC – 14 AD), and it seems hard to imagine Chinese envoys walking in the streets of Rome! 

Roman soldiers also made their way east, although not out of their free will. It has been documented that soldiers captured by the Parthians were dispatched to defend their eastern borders. In 54 BC, Pliny mentioned that after the battle of Carrhae in 53 BC (see: Harran, better known under its Roman name Carrhae), the Parthians sent some 10,000 prisoners to Margiana to man the frontier. Chinese sources report that these soldiers had blond hair and blue eyes. Eventually, these troops were captured by the Chinese to founding the city of Liqian or Li-Chien – a transliteration of Alexandria - it seems, in the region of Gansu in western China. Several inscriptions discovered in the Kara-Kamar caves on the border between eastern Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan were written in Bactrian, Greek, Arabic, and Latin. The latter was composed of three lines and was left by the Roman soldiers of the Pannonian Legio XV Apollinaris around the 2^nd century AD. Notably, this cave complex showed remarkable similarities with temples dedicated to the god Mithras, who was featured in killing the bull. This secret male cult started about the 1^st century AD and soon spread with the legionnaires over the entire Roman Empire. 

By the first century BC, Rome started showing serious interest in the precious silk it received through trade with the Parthians. Wearing silk soon exploded, but it was not met with overall approval. Seneca (3 BC-65 AD) complained that silk did not hide the body, not "even one's decency." This led the Senate to issue an edict prohibiting silk-wearing, which the wealthy Roman elite liked to ignore. Besides the moral ground, this edict also had an economic reason, as importing silk caused a massive outflow of gold. 

Yet, business is business, and the trade prospered. Over land, using the Silk Road was a tedious and expensive operation, which was soon to be supplanted by a newly found maritime route. The ships would sail from China, stopping at ports in modern Vietnam, India, and Sri Lanka controlled by the Chinese emperors. The western end of this business route, with stopovers in Egypt and the Nabataean territories, was controlled by Rome. Their merchants traveled on Roman, Indian, and even Chinese ships. 

Best known from this period is the campaign led by the Chinese general Ban Chao, who in 97 AD crossed the Pamir Mountains with an army of 70,000 men to fight the Xiongnu, generally the people living in Central Asia. He even reached the Caspian Sea and the lands occupied by the Parthians. From here, the general sent an envoy to Dagin (Rome). Ultimately, this was Gan Ying, who stopped in Mesopotamia although he intended to sail to Rome via the Black Sea. The Parthian merchants wishing to safeguard their profitable position as the middleman between Rome and China, told Gan Ying that his planned trip would take him two years. In reality, this was two months. This is why the envoy decided to abandon his mission and return home. His merit, to a certain extent at least, was his account of Rome and Emperor Nerva, which he obviously based on second-hand information. However, he correctly reported that Rome was the leading economic power at the western end of Eurasia. The Chinese army settled for an alliance with the Parthians. 

The earliest documented Roman embassy to arrive in China dates to 166 AD. Chinese sources mention that it came from Antun (Antoninus Pius), king of Dagin (Rome). This information must be clarified since Antoninus Pius died five years before, in 161 AD. It is suggested that they meant Marcus Aurelius, who added the name of his predecessor to his own; he came to power in 166 AD. 

This Roman delegation probably arrived by sea and carried presents of rhinoceros horns, ivory, and tortoise shells originating from Southern Asia. More important, however, is that the Chinese acquired a treatise on astronomy. Roman cartographers knew of the existence of China since the country was mentioned on the map by Claudius Ptolemy in about 150 AD. The booming trade across the Indian Ocean in the 2^nd century AD enabled the identification of Roman outposts in India and Sri Lanka. 

After a lacuna about further exchanges, the next documented account emerged in the 3^rd century AD when the Roman Emperor (possibly Alexander Severus) sent presents of colored glass to Emperor Taitsu of the Kingdom of Wei (reigned 227-239 AD) in Northern China. The last record about an embassy from Rome dates from 284 AD when the envoys of presumably Emperor Carus (282-283 AD) brought "tribute" to the Chinese Empire. 

To summarize, contact between our western world and China lasted at least six hundred years after Alexander opened access to Central Asia. In all its aspects, the Silk Road sank into oblivion until Marco Polo revived this part of history in the 13^th century, i.e., one thousand years later!

The Histories by Polybius, A new translation by Robin Waterfield

The Histories by Polybius (ISBN 978-0199534708) are far less known than, for instance, The Histories by Herodotus and cover an entirely different period. As a result, the author and his book merit being put in a well-deserved spotlight.

Few people ever heard of Polybius and it may be useful to introduce him with a short biography. Polybius was born ca. 200 BC, probably in Megalopolis, the capital of the Achaean League (a federal organization of the Peloponnesus). His father played a leading political role and Polybius at the age of thirty was elected deputy leader of the League. But his life changed dramatically when Macedonia lost its independence at the Battle of Pydna in 168 BC. This had far-reaching consequences for the rest of Greece. The Achaen leaders were deported to Rome, including Polybius, who spent seventeen years in the capital.

However, as a highly educated Greek, he soon befriended Scipio Aemilianus, one of the most powerful men in Rome at that time. He also became friends with Prince Demetrius held hostage in Rome and managed to arrange his escape from the city in 162 BC in order to reclaim his place on the Seleucid throne.

Polybius accompanied Scipio during his campaign in Spain and went to Numidia, modern Tunisia. He tells us how he walked in the footsteps of Hannibal from Spain to Italy. In 149 BC, he was summoned to Carthage where, using his diplomatic skills brought the Carthaginians to comply with the demands of Rome. Not for long though as two years later Polybius joined Scipio again in his siege of Carthage. When that city fell, he traveled beyond Gibraltar to explore the coast of western Africa. For reasons that could not be determined, Achaea revolted against Rome in 146 BC and lost the battle; as a result, the League was dismantled, and proud Corinth was destroyed. Polybius apparently played an important role in the reconstruction of Greece, a gesture that was widely appreciated as Pausanias tells us that many cities of the Peloponnesus erected statues in honor of their fellow countryman.

It is clear that Polybius led a very active life as a politician, general, and even as an explorer and it makes one wonder when and how he found the time to write. Besides his Histories, he left us a study on tactics, a treatise on the habitability of the equatorial region, about the war of Rome against Numantia in Spain, and a biography of Philopoemen, a famous and skilled strategos of Achaea. Unfortunately, the largest part of his works have not survived.

Polybius’ Histories treat the rise of the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean in the period from 220 to 146 BC – a colossal job filling forty books of which only five have survived. Books 1 and 2 are basically an introduction to his work leading to the battle for power between Rome and Carthage, which spills over into Book 3 with the victory of Hannibal in 216 BC. In Books 4 and 5, Polybius turns to the situation in Greece and the eastern Mediterranean before that same date in order to match the chronology in which he likes to report events. Of the following books, which are not necessarily straight history and treat for instance of geography in Book 34, substantial excerpts also exist. From what transpires, he took the trouble to make a summary of his work in Book 40. So much precious information has, unfortunately, been lost over the centuries!

In his effort to explain what kind of constitutional structure Rome applied to conquer the world, it appears that in Book 6 Polybius developed a highly interesting theory about the recurrent cycle of government in which monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy alternate. In the same book, he described the constitution of Rome at length giving us a unique insight into the great organizational skills of the Romans.

What makes Polybius stand out is his overall chronology reporting the events as they develop simultaneously in the eastern and western end of the Mediterranean. It truly is a rare horizontal history and, what’s more, he is the only historian from the Hellenistic period whose work survived to such an extent.

Since the Punic Wars are treated in detail, I found this the best history I ever read without getting lost or confused one way or another in those repeated conflicts that lasted on and off for 118 years. To keep track of time, the year in which the events took place is handily quoted in the margin.

The translation made by Robin Waterfield is superb and reads with the clarity that is characteristic of him (see: Dividing the Spoils).

The book has a great Introduction without which the Histories would be very hard to understand. It also includes a handy chronology of the events covered in the book and a set of three maps, one of the Mediterranean and a detailed one for both Greece and Italy.