BY ALPER ÖZKAN (MSN/PhD)
d_ozkan@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
In the good old days you couldn’t really get into a ruling position without being a tyrant of some description, and while my hopes are high for Donald Trump, most modern dictators can’t hold a candle to the great madmen of ancient times. So let’s look at some of the rulers of old and their legendary deeds—or rather, misdeeds, which are of course more fun to talk about.
Taira no Kiyomori: While Japan is ostensibly always ruled by a sovereign of divine descent, the country has in practice often been divided among several warrior clans that compete against one another—though rarely does the situation escalate to total war, as explicit shows of power may lead to the offending clan being branded traitors and rebels, and therefore open up the game for their rivals. Once in a while, though, you get someone who has no taste for these formalities. Controlling around half the country at the height of his power, Kiyomori was a man with virtually no compunction about putting his enemies to the sword, consequences be damned. Indeed, so many were his victims that one day, while sitting in the courtyard, the old Taira saw their vengeful spirits gather around him, in the shape of a great mound of chittering, animate skulls—but he, unfazed, stared down at the gathering until the spirits vanished, out-scaring his personal demons with nothing but his iron will.
When a high fever at last claimed him, Kiyomori is said to have been so angry that none could draw near his body without getting scorched, and some even assert that Ox-Head and Horse-Face, attendants of King Yama, arrived on the scene to personally escort him to the underworld. His last wish, incidentally, was for the head of his upstart rival Minamoto no Yoritomo to be mounted on his grave.
King Zhou of Shang: While Kiyomori was ruthless to the core, it is nevertheless easy to admire the force of his personality—not so for King Zhou. Bewitched by his concubine Daji, this weak-willed tyrant was led to commit a variety of admittedly very creative atrocities, including an execution by means of the Chinese equivalent of the brazen bull—incidentally translated as “Bronze Toaster,” which is an unexpectedly hilarious name for a torture device (though nowhere near as horrifically cheesy as that of the brazen bull itself, which reputedly came with an acoustic system to convert the screams of its victims into the bellows of a bull). Daji was also responsible for the creation of the Pool of Wine and Forest of Meat, which were exactly what it said on the label, but with a caveat: After enjoying the pool and the forest, the revelers were eaten by Daji, who was supposedly a fox-spirit and fed on human flesh. Other fun, innocuous activities enjoyed by the pair include the dissection of a sage’s heart, which is said to have had seven openings (the sage somehow survived this, but was understandably rather irate afterward), and the cooking and feeding of a minstrel to his father.
There was also another famous Chinese tyrant, Dong Zhuo (whom I always used to confuse with Zhou), who was…well, he was more or less Jabba the Hutt, in both looks and personality. Really, I think there’s a passage in “Romance of the Three Kingdoms” where one of his tacticians accidentally bumps into him and bounces back.
The Julio-Claudian dynasty: I think we’re all familiar with Lil’ Boot, but I’ll write about him regardless: Despised by both the Senate and the populace during the latter part of his reign (mostly due to his, shall we say, thriftiness), Caligula’s eccentricities have been embellished to such a point that it’s difficult to tell where history ends and folklore begins—he didn’t behead his cousin to “cure his cough,” to be sure, but he did have him executed (which was less insanity than it was prudence—you couldn’t murder enough rivals in the Roman Empire) and probably did taunt the Senate by purporting to make his horse a consul. The rest of his dynasty was equally colorful—after all, it led to Nero, who in one story asked his physicians to make him pregnant, since he was curious as to how painful it was (I have no experience with childbirth, but I know enough about it to say, “very”). This was ultimately accomplished by feeding Nero a frog egg, which grew in his stomach and eventually burst forth from his mouth (that’s more or less what pregnancy is like, right?), and the resulting batrachian-hominid-xenomorph monstrosity went on to rule Rome for a further 1,500 years….
Or at least that’s what would have happened if I wrote alternate history fiction.