Episode 1 Mary Beard's Ultimate Rome: Empire Without Limit

BIRDSONG

The story of the Roman Empire opens with a fairy tale.

Once upon a time, not far from here,

a princess gave birth to twin sons.

The King, her wicked uncle,

fearing that the boys would one day become his rivals,

ordered his faithful servants to throw them into the river.

But as it was in flood, they just left them

in a basket at the water's edge from where they floated downstream.

Rescued on the bank by a mother wolf who suckled them,

they were later found by a local shepherd who reared them as his own.

Their names were Romulus and Remus

and they went on to found Rome.

This small ordinary town in the middle of Italy

became the centre of an empire...

..stretching from the fringes of the Sahara...

..to the damp moorlands of northern Britain.

From Spain to Israel,

the Nile to the Rhine...

..it has framed the geography of modern Europe

and defined the way we think of empire now,

'transforming the Western world through revolutions in trade...'

This is one of the first examples of globalisation.

'..agriculture...'

Just olives, olives and more damn olives.

'..art, law and architecture.'

This is where even I get a bit gobsmacked by Roman engineering.

'There are plenty of conquests and defeats, too,

'battles and butchery. But there are also bigger questions.

'How did it work? And what difference did it make?

'Why did the Empire eventually fall?

'And how did it all come about in the first place?'

Was it ambition? Was it just luck?

If we really want answer that question,

we have to go back to what the Romans themselves said about it,

to their doubts, their debates and their conversations,

cos they wondered just as much as we do about what set them apart.

'It's on the Appian Way,

'one of the main roads out of Rome going south deep into Italy,

'that we first get a clear glimpse

'into the lives of the early Romans.'

Buonasera. Buonasera. Grazie.

'A period long before the marble columns and the Coliseum,

'and one that's often overlooked.'

This tomb was built 500 years after the city was founded.

It's a very long way from Romulus,

but what's written here tells us for the first time

what some Romans felt and thought, what their mind-set was.

In a way, what we really know about the Romans starts here.

This isn't Rome as we now imagine it,

but it is the grandest thing they could do at the time,

and back then it was new.

This is the tombstone of the first man to be buried here.

Scipio Barbatus, that means Beardy Scipio.

And it tells us a bit about his excellent qualities.

He is "fortis, vir" and "sapiens,"

he's a strong, brave man,

but he's clever, he's wise.

This is...quite strange.

It says his appearance was equal to his "virtus",

so his appearance was as good as his virtue.

He really looked the part, he cut a dash.

And it ends with his conquests.

He "Svbigit omne lovcana,"

he suppressed the whole of Lucania,

which is a region in South Italy,

"opsidesqve abdovcit," and he took hostages.

So it's very easy to see what these people's priorities were.

But it's kind of more than that.

Because in some ways, this is just a few lines of an epitaph,

but in another way, this is the first short surviving

historical narrative from any Roman that we have.

I mean, this is the beginning of Roman history writing.

It might be 500 years after the age of the founders,

but this is actually the first place where we can really see the Romans.

We get a very vivid picture of a people committed to conquest

and to the glory that came with military victory.

But that's actually like everyone else around them.

So what set the Romans apart?

With so little direct evidence

the best place to look for the answer

is in the stories that they told

and their own elaborate speculations on the city's origins.

And in particular in the mythical story of Romulus and Remus,

the brothers suckled by a wolf.

It was continually told and retold

and it contained a message about Rome's conquests and internal wars.

There's actually a little more Roman history in the myth.

It'd be easy to dismiss the story of Romulus and Remus

as if it was just a fairy tale, just a myth,

and it certainly isn't history, in our terms,

but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have a lot to tell us

about how the Romans thought about themselves,

what their cultural priorities and anxieties were.

Why a wolf?

The story wouldn't have been the same

if it had been a cow or a sheep.

It was the fact that they were rescued by a ferocious predator

that revealed the destiny of the twins.

Some Romans questioned the detail,

the Latin for wolf, "lupa", also means prostitute,

so was it actually a prostitute who came to the rescue?

But, in broad terms, they believed that the tale was true.

In fact, when later they came to inscribe in the Forum

a list of the names of all those generals

who had scored the biggest or bloodiest victories for Rome,

people like the Scipios,

who did they start the list with?

Romulus.

One person who's not on the list is Romulus' twin brother Remus,

because it's said they had a massive row

over where exactly to establish the new town.

It ended up with Romulus murdering his twin,

an act which reflected the bloody civil wars

that would later blight the politics of Rome.

It must be one of the oddest foundation stories

in the whole history of the world.

Not only does it involve a pair of twins, not a single founder,

but then one of the twins goes and kills the other.

That's to say fratricide lay at the very beginning of the Roman story.

Brother killing brother was hard-wired into Rome.

Establishing his new settlement on the Palatine Hill,

Romulus became its sole ruler.

Romulus' first problem

was that he had hardly any citizens for his new city.

So he declared it an asylum, and he welcomed criminals,

runaway slaves, the dispossessed and the down-and-out

from the whole of Italy.

It's another strange aspect of the tale.

Whereas the average ancient city

liked to imagine that its original inhabitants

had sprung miraculously from the soil of the homeland,

the Romans imagined that their city

had originally been a city of asylum seekers.

It was an attempt to give a mythic dimension

to one of Rome's later most distinctive characteristics,

that it not only welcomed outsiders,

but that eventually it spread Roman citizenship throughout the Empire.

Romulus' next problem was that he had no women

and, therefore, his city had no future.

But none of the people in the neighbouring towns

were prepared to give their daughters to be Roman wives.

They were actually nastily insulting and made no secret of the fact

that they didn't think a band of runaways was great husband material,

so Romulus had to resort to a trick.

So the story goes,

Romulus invited his neighbours, the Sabines, to a religious festival.

In the middle of the proceedings, he gave a signal for his men

to abduct all the young women among the visitors

and to carry them off as their wives.

This is the famous Rape Of The Sabine Women

and it's an almost uncomfortably frank image.

This woman here has been captured and she's trying to get away,

but she's not going to make it.

This one has already collapsed.

And another is trying to flee but it's hopeless.

The rape might have been a response to a terrible Roman humiliation,

but it was still a violent assault.

These women are not willing, they're victims.

It's an instant that the Romans discussed and debated

and displayed ever after.

Some of Rome's enemies

said that this was absolutely typical Roman behaviour.

If they wanted something, they just went out and grabbed it.

In the story, the families of the Sabine women, as you'd expect,

hit back at the Romans

in what would be Romans first war and first victory,

which was commemorated in a rather strange monument

at the heart of the city.

Most people walk straight past here,

but it's where the Romans were convinced

that the heart of that battle took place,

in what became the Forum but what was then not much more than a swamp.

And they marked the spot

where one of Rome's first enemies fell to his death.

This was just one of a series of monuments

that imprinted the origins of Rome onto the face of the later city.

If you wanted, you could go up onto the Palatine Hill

and see what was supposed to be the hut of Romulus himself.

It was still a tourist attraction in the fourth century AD.

The myths of Rome were there for all to see

and with them the problems of being Roman -

fratricide, rape, violence and constant conflict.

Rome at the beginning was ruled by kings,

Romulus and six others to follow.

But the citizens eventually rejected what they'd come to see as a tyranny

and established a kind of democracy

in which every year the people elected officials

to govern the city and fight its wars.

And soon after that there were signs that Rome was beginning to grow.

Why is it that an ordinary little town by the Tiber

became something much, much bigger than that?

The honest truth is, we don't know WHY it happened,

but we do know WHEN.

We can almost touch it. Almost.

SHE LAUGHS

Because in the early 4th century BC

the Romans built this massive city wall around their town.

Now, there's more to this than just defence,

this is a big statement that Rome has arrived.

And even more interesting,

a lot of the stone they used to build it

came from the territory of a little town a few miles up the road

that they'd just taken over.

This is one of the first hints of Roman expansion.

Rome's growth didn't stop at its walls,

it expanded beyond them deep into the Italian peninsula.

But we shouldn't imagine Romans crowding around maps,

plotting world domination.

For a start, they didn't have maps.

And, in any case,

there weren't any more militaristic than their neighbours.

Early Italy was a violent place.

So the question isn't why they went to war,

but why they went on winning?

On the traditional pattern of warfare, to put it a bit crudely,

every year the lads of one place would go out

and do over a neighbouring town.

And if they hit lucky, they'd come back with slaves and cattle.

It wasn't really organised warfare, it was glorified raiding.

What the Romans did was establish permanent relationships

with the people they beat.

Of course, they came back with slaves and cattle,

but they demanded for the future

that the defeated towns should provide troops for the Roman army.

And that cumulatively gave them a huge advantage,

cos in the ancient world

it wasn't hi-tech military hardware that counted,

it was how many boots you could get on the ground.

THUNDER

As a city on its own,

Rome could never have dominated the whole of Italy.

What's crucial is the relationship they formed with other people.

Rome not only conquered, but it incorporated its enemies.

And that's what's unique.

By the 3rd century BC,

Rome could call upon more than 700,000 soldiers.

And how they secured that manpower

can be seen on the city's first gold coins.

Jonathan Williams is the Deputy Director of the British Museum.

What is going on here?

I can read "Roma," Rome, underneath.

but there's a very complicated scene above

-that I can't quite work out.

-OK.

So what we've got here is we've got a couple of men here

standing either side of another man

who seems to be kneeling down holding something in his arms.

And what he's holding is a pig, an upturned pig.

Now, this is a pretty strange scene to us,

but any Roman would have known what this was meant to represent.

It's a scene of oath taking,

promises being given and accepted between two sides.

And this is how the Romans did it.

Strange to us, but it's clearly

a kind of meaningful ceremony for your Romans.

Some people think that this might be a mythological scene,

the oath being taken by Romulus, the first king of the Romans,

together with the Sabines, one of the earliest alliances

the Romans made with one of their allies.

But it could more generally just be a reference

to that whole system of alliances

between the Romans and all the other peoples of Italy

that were so important in the foundation

of the ways in which the Romans came to dominate and rule

the whole of the Italian peninsula.

And so what this coin is doing, in a sense,

is kind of...it's broadcasting,

or sort of creating an image of Rome

as the...the centre of these alliances with other peoples.

Absolutely. Yes. It's broadcasting messages to the allies,

but also to the Romans themselves about... "How faithful we are.

"We're good solid, loyal allies, but you'd better stick with us,

"cos you don't want to know what happens if you split on us."

Rome's expansion was more improvised than planned.

From the small walled town

to a patchwork of alliances with friends and conquered foes,

Rome controlled most of Italy.

And from that, the Romans soon came into conflict

with the other great superpower of the day - the city of Carthage.

Because there was actually another empire out there to rival Rome.

The Romans' network of alliances

put pressure on them to intervene in support of friends and allies

further and further afield.

It's a bit like what happens to modern superpowers.

One particular request for help had defining consequences.

During a dispute between two Sicilian towns

different groups appealed to Rome and to Carthage.

After intense debate in Rome

between those spoiling for a fight

and those who thought Rome was far better off out of it,

the Romans decided to go in.

And that was how Rome and Carthage

first came face-to-face in conflict.

Across a narrow strip of water, the island of Sicily,

more Greek that Italian,

became the setting of Rome's first overseas war,

a naval war against the Western Mediterranean's

most powerful seafaring state.

The Romans hadn't had or needed fighting ships before.

The story goes that what they did

is find a Carthaginian ship and copy it over and over again.

It was a big turning point.

And in 241 BC these waters were crowded

with the dreadnoughts of the ancient world

fighting it out in a final messy battle.

-Hey, George, we actually found it.

-All right!

-LAUGHTER

-It's another amphora.

It's the wreckage from this battle

that marine archaeologist Jeff Royal and his team

have been discovering and raising from the seabed.

It's really quite difficult to make sense of this.

I've been looking at it ever so hard

and I keep thinking that every little rock on the bed of the sea

is some bit of Roman or Carthaginian military equipment.

But when you actually come across one of these amphora

just lying there, you know, the detritus of the battle,

it really hits you in the face.

You're seeing it literally as it fell, as it were, with your own eyes.

It's quite extraordinary.

What's the most memorable thing you've come across like this?

The rams are always memorable, because it's...

it's a really big deal to have found them.

And it was one of the objectives of the survey.

And, of course, yeah, when we see 'em it's...it's always exciting.

Built into the ships' bows, these rams did exactly that -

rammed the enemy vessels.

But what we've seen from the evidence

is obviously there was a lot of destruction at sea level

-or sea-surface level.

-Yeah.

-So all of that is spread out,

the helmets, the rams. The rams themselves all have frontal damage.

Now, you get 11 rams...

-So they're actually going head-to-head?

-Or hitting something.

-Basically, you just run into each other? It's just...

-Yeah.

-It's like kind of the dodgems without the dodge?

-Yeah.

Your sightlines at sea

and the speeds that they would have been going,

you had an hour and a half, an hour and 45, nearly two hours,

to see that this is going to happen.

-You've got time to change your mind?

-Yeah.

And if you don't change your mind and you lose,

-everyone on the ship's dead?

-Yeah.

It's thanks to Jeff's work

that I can get my hands on some of the actual remains of this battle.

This extraordinary object is one of the bronze rams

that would have been fitted to the front of the ships

underneath the water line.

This one clearly did pierce an enemy ship,

because part of a Carthaginian plank is still fixed to it.

It's quite nicely decorated,

there's a helmet here, a kind of helmet logo with feather plumes.

And all down here is a wonderful trace of Roman officialdom.

It says "lucius quintius".

The quistal, that's the quality control agent, approved this ram.

Sort of marvellous Roman administrative efficiency.

Actually, a wonderful contrast with the one Carthaginian ram

that's been discovered, which has on it instead,

"Oh, may the god Baal," you know,

"strike your ships and make a hole in them."

In some ways the most interesting and most moving object

to have been discovered is this helmet,

a Roman helmet,

and it came complete with its cheekpieces,

which would have protected the fighter's face.

And it brings you about as close as you can ever get

to the individuals who fought

and, in this case I imagine, died in that great battle.

I suspect I might be the first person

to put this helmet on since 241 BC.

Whoever...wore it must have had a bigger head than me,

or else there was a lot of padding in it.

The end result of all this

was that the Carthaginians were pushed out of Sicily altogether

and the island became the first overseas territory

under Roman control.

In a way, you might say that the Roman Empire began here.

Rome defeated Carthage twice more.

First was the famous occasion when Hannibal

pulled off the stunt of crossing the Alps with his elephants

only to lose out eventually on all fronts.

The Romans finished the job years later in 146 BC.

Whether they were really anxious about Carthaginian recovery

or simply wanted to show their muscle,

they launched an expedition to North Africa

under one of the Scipios and they razed the city to the ground.

As one hardline senator had repeatedly insisted,

"Carthago delenda est" - Carthage must be destroyed.

We don't know what actually drove Rome

to annihilate the city of Carthage.

They'd taken over most of the Carthaginian Empire

when they defeated Hannibal,

so maybe it was a devastating display of imperial self-confidence.

But 146 would also be remembered for another city's destruction.

This was the year that Rome sacked Corinth,

the wealthiest city in Greece.

146 would become ingrained in the minds of every Roman,

the year when Rome became so powerful

that it no longer had any serious challengers left.

The destruction of two of the most famous cities in the Mediterranean

changed the rules of the game for ever.

There was still no sign of a Roman master plan,

or that they really wanted actually to governed anywhere,

but they now had more power than anyone else,

even if they didn't really know how to use it.

Basically, the Roman priority was to get their own way.

But 146 was also an ambivalent year.

Some people certainly celebrated,

but others already saw it as the beginning of the end.

There's a logic in the history of empires -

when you get to the top, you can only come down.

Carthage was wiped from the Earth,

but Greece was very different,

and it gave Rome something more precious than economic profit -

its culture.

Conquest didn't just change the people that Rome conquered,

it changed Rome, too.

And it was thanks to Greece

that Rome started to become full of marble columns,

elegant statues and objets d'art.

This was the very beginning of the Rome we know

and also the beginning of a flourishing art market.

This was once a great piece of art,

it's a statue of Hercules.

He was part of the cargo of a shipwreck

that's been recovered from the seabed.

Not just him - there were more than 30 other marble statues,

some bronze ones, some exquisite jewellery,

glassware, scientific instruments.

And they say they found the pips of the very last olives

the crew ate before the disaster.

But from our point of view what's important

is that this was a cargo of stuff,

one out of many thousands that was making its way from the Greek world

on a one-way ticket to Rome.

ACTORS CONVERSE IN GREEK

The Greek world that Rome conquered had a long history of art,

theatre and literature.

ACTORS CONVERSE IN GREEK

And many Romans felt the cultural traditions of Greece

outclassed their own.

But Rome not only bought, plundered and emulated Greek culture,

Romans wrote themselves into the Greek story,

tracing their own origins

back to the mythical war between Greeks and Trojans

and to the most famous work of Greek literature of all - The Iliad.

One crucial character for the Romans was Aeneas,

who played a rather minor part

on the losing Trojan side in Homer's Iliad.

The Romans took the story of Aeneas and ran with it,

making him flee from Troy and come to Italy to found the Roman race

as a kind of ancestor of Romulus and Remus.

It's almost as if they're saying

that they didn't just belong in the Greek world,

but they actually came from here.

BIRDSONG

The story of Aeneas gave the Romans a stake in the traditions of Greece.

But exactly how Greek to be was the topic of the day,

with some conservative hardliners arguing that soft Greek culture

was destroying old Roman values.

There's more to conquest than conquest by sword,

there's conquest by book, by word and by culture.

One Roman poet later claimed

that it wasn't actually the Romans who conquered Greece,

but the Greeks who conquered Rome.

What he meant by that was the Greeks were really the winners,

because Rome owed them such a vast cultural debt

that went back centuries before the conquest of Corinth.

But at the same time, it was Rome's interest in Greek culture,

their study, their preservation and their replication of it

that's played a big part in keeping that culture alive for us.

In a way, I like to think Rome has kind of given us Greece.

The Romans had now gained effective control

over the entire Mediterranean,

the only people ever to have done that,

not always by annexing territory,

but simply by being able to get their own way.

We think of this empire as the land around the sea,

but, actually, at the heart of it there's the Mediterranean itself.

It's crucial to understand

what's going on across this huge liquid territory.

We aren't talking just about

some nice little boats transporting sculptures,

the problems of controlling this sea

were as important as the ones of controlling Carthage or Corinth.

The Mediterranean was the Empire's internal sea and main highway.

"Mare nostrum" they called it - "our sea."

It was far cheaper and quicker to travel on the water than by land,

but it was dangerous, too.

That's not just because all you'd need was one storm

and you'd have lost everything,

there were also bandits and hijackers

wanting to get their hands on anything that was sailing,

not just goods, but people too.

It was a bit like a motorway swarming with human traffickers.

Rome's overseas conquests

had turned thousands and thousands of prisoners into slaves.

And that created a demand for more.

There were big profits to be made out of the slave trade.

Delos was a huge mercantile community

and people made loads of money here.

One Roman writer called it the biggest market in the whole planet.

All sorts of goods must have passed through,

perfumes and spices, sculpture and furniture,

but Delos was most famous

for being the world capital of the slave trade.

And one of the main suppliers of that trade

were those bandits and hijackers that the Romans called "pirates".

For the Romans, a pirate was anyone you didn't like in a ship,

from small-time chancers to big-time criminals more like the Mafia.

It was not an easy relationship

and those tough guys in ships proved pretty difficult to control.

One day they were stocking your market,

the next day they turned on you.

And that's exactly what we see here.

This is a wonderful pair of very distinctively Roman faces,

sunken cheeks and wrinkly, both of them looking a bit sinister.

It's kind of tempting to imagine

that they were involved in a rather nasty form of business.

They're also in a pretty ropey state,

they've been smashed and they look a bit burnt.

And the reason for that

actually stems from a key moment in the history of this place.

In 69 BC, the pirates came here,

they torched the place,

there was a vast fire and Delos was destroyed.

Pirates had their impact at Rome itself, too.

Fear of pirates provided a reason or excuse

for the Romans to take a decision

that would set the scene for big political changes

that would undermine their democracy and herald one-man rule.

Pirates were certainly a nuisance and sometimes dangerous,

but the threat could always be manipulated

to justify military action.

The war on pirates was a bit like the war on terror.

And in 67 BC, the Roman people

voted almost unlimited powers to one man to clear the sea of pirates.

And that man was Pompey.

Pompey the Great, as he was known,

got rid of the pirates in just three months,

and then turned his firepower

onto some fabulously wealthy eastern kings,

returning to Rome with a bang -

a spectacular two-day parade and a massive carnival.

The victory parade was one of the biggest street parties

the Romans ever celebrated.

There was the general processing through the streets in his chariot,

there was all the beauty and spoils and riches

he brought back home out in front of him,

and his prisoners walking there, too.

The idea was that the people in the city

should be able to see what the generals and armies

had been getting up to abroad and what they'd brought back.

Some people thought the display was terribly vulgar,

and on occasions people cried in the audience

as they watched the poor prisoners go past.

'But for most Romans this was a chance to let their hair down...

MARY SPEAKS ITALIAN

Not bad. MARY LAUGHS

'..and to indulge in the riches that had been won for them.'

With the party long gone,

not much trace of Pompey's triumphant is left behind,

but tucked away in a corner of a museum

we can see one member of that spectacle's supporting cast.

It's not often that you can actually track down an individual object

that was trundled through the streets of Rome

in a triumphal procession.

In fact, this is probably the only one.

Its great bronze urn

was probably used for mixing up wine and water and honey.

And it's actually got the name of one of the kings

who Pompey defeated scratched into its rim.

This makes me pretty certain that this was one of the treasures,

one of thousands upon thousands,

that the people of Rome watched go by in Pompey's parade in 61.

The Empire had been traditionally funded, formed and governed

by democratic officials serving for one year, sharing power.

The idea had always been to stop anyone becoming a king again.

But with Pompey, the Romans

began to shelve their rejection of individual power.

If you needed to defend or extend the Empire,

perhaps you had to hand over control to just one man.

Yet for a man who revolutionised Rome,

he's left very few visible traces.

This is a wonderful bit of Roman street archaeology.

You might miss it to start with,

but the layout of these buildings,

this sweeping curved facade

actually matches ancient Roman foundations underneath.

And those foundations belonged to

a huge semi-circular auditorium of a theatre.

These are the traces of the theatre that Pompey put up

with the profits of his eastern campaigns.

And they're the first time ever

that Roman buildings begin to match the Rome of our imaginations.

Huge, monumental, magnificent,

designed to impress.

Pompey set the benchmark

for what an imperial building should look like,

and one that later emperors would follow.

But he's never become a household name,

he's always been overshadowed in the quest for glory

and the competition for personal power.

The one person that forever after stole the limelight

was his great rival, Julius Caesar.

MARY: Blimey! SHE LAUGHS

Off we go. Never done this before.

SHE LAUGHS

Going in the opposite direction to Pompey, Caesar headed west.

Where Pompey had been so stunningly and bloodily successful out east,

and had come back with such a load of cash and spoils,

Caesar, if he wanted to rival him, had only one option,

which was to have a great conquest himself.

But in one important way Caesar really outdoes Pompey.

Pompey has big victories,

Caesar has big victories AND writes about them.

And the reason why we can go to Alesia,

the site of one of Caesar's last victories there,

is because we actually have Caesar's own account of it.

At Alesia, the army of Gauls had set up camp on a hill.

In Caesar's own description, he seems in complete control.

"Camps were constructed at strategic points," he writes.

"Pickets were stationed day and night.

"There was hard fighting on both sides.

"I had two trenches dug.

"I erected a rampart and a palisade."

When you see the scale of it all...

Is that despite what he claims when he writes the story up,

Caesar couldn't possibly have had his eye

on all the areas of this battlefield.

In the end, winning an ancient battle

comes down to strength of numbers, starving the enemy out,

surprising them from behind

and perhaps most of all, the truth is, it comes down to luck.

Luck or not, I'm sure that Caesar himself would be delighted to know

we still read his own version of these campaigns.

However he won the battle,

the real point is that HIS story has lasted for centuries.

And in terms of Imperial propaganda,

it's a nice proof that the pen really can be mightier,

or at least more enduring, than the sword.

The leader of the Gauls in their doomed last stand was Vercingetorix.

Since then, he's become a hero of modern France,

a freedom fighter standing up for the French nation.

The irony is that everything we know about Vercingetorix

goes back to what Caesar wrote about him.

In a way, our Vercingetorix is a Roman creation.

Whatever he was really like,

the point was that Caesar needed to show

that he had defeated a dangerous, brave

and ultimately worthy opponent.

The Romans would never have thought

that there was any kudos to be gained in beating a sissy.

Caesar also boasted about the number of Gauls

that his army had killed during his campaign.

Modern estimates come to around a million.

His figures may have been sexed up to impress back home,

but there's little doubt that Caesar's ambition

to surpass Pompey's glories

had been achieved through nothing short of genocide.

Excavations of the battlefield have unearthed some of the weapons

that won Caesar his victory,

including the ancient version of land mines.

These things aren't exactly hi-tech, but they're very, very nasty.

This one in particular.

You have to imagine standing on it in your leather sandal.

The point goes right through and into your foot

and you can't pull it out because of that little barb there.

Your foot's bleeding, you can't get your sandal off,

you're in agony, you can't move.

It makes my toes curl just to think about it.

There were people in Rome

who got anxious about what was going on in Gaul

and at the level of the killing.

And some of Caesar's enemies even went so far

as to suggest that he should be put on trial for war crimes,

and that the judge and jury should be all Gauls.

The Roman Empire was a pretty brutal thing,

but there were some levels of brutality

that even the Romans couldn't stand.

Julius Caesar would never have made it

without the loyal support of his troops.

They were far from the cattle raiders of the early city,

the soldiers were now professionals

bound to their general as he was to them, even more than to the state.

And unlike Pompey,

Caesar was prepared to use that army to seize control of Rome.

For his part, Caesar was well aware that his enemies in Rome

were conspiring against him,

that they were trying to back him into a corner

and as he put it - to undermine his dignitas,

that distinctive Roman combination of prestige and clout.

So he took a chance,

and with one of his legions he set out to march on Rome.

When he got to the River Rubicon,

which marked the border between Gaul and Italy,

he said, "Let's throw the dice in the air, then."

In other words, "God only knows what'll happen next."

Some Romans saw this as the legacy of Romulus and Remus,

the twins whose quarrels resulted in the death of one.

Now a Roman fought Roman for ultimate power.

Caesar's return to Rome triggered a chaotic civil war

that engulfed not just Italy but most of the Empire.

MARY SPEAKS ITALIAN

Pompey himself ended up dead on the coast of Egypt,

his decapitated head presented to Caesar

who, so we're told, burst into tears at the sight of it.

Caesar won the war and was made officially - dictator,

sole ruler of Rome.

But he didn't last much longer.

If there's just one Roman that everyone knows it's Julius Caesar,

not because of what he did but because he died.

His assassination has been blown up into an heroic scene

that we all know or think we know from films, paintings and plays,

and from those famous last words, "Et tu, Brute?"

which he definitely didn't say.

What we know for sure is that he was ambushed

by a group of his friends in a meeting in a Senate house

that ironically had been built by his great rival, Pompey.

It all happened just over there, where that tree now is.

It was another echo back to Rome's foundation story,

now it was Caesar who took the part of the murdered Remus.

It's the most famous political assassination ever,

carried out in the name of liberty,

just a few weeks after Caesar had been made dictator for life.

Too soon to know whether he'd succeeded or failed.

But the fact was that the assassins may have got rid of a man

they thought of as a tyrant, but they didn't get rid of tyranny.

It was all too little, too late.

By now, it was inevitable that the Empire would be ruled by one man.

The question was, what shape would that one-man rule take?

That was defined by the man who established autocratic power

long-term and who we call First Emperor Of Rome -

Gaius Julius Octavius,

or, as he later called himself, Augustus.

That name actually doesn't mean very much.

The closest you can get is "Revered One".

But he worked out the do's and don'ts of being a one-man ruler.

In the early third century BC, Scipio Barbatus, on his tomb,

could have his career summed up in just a few lines.

300 years later, the Emperor Augustus wrote his own epitaph

to be displayed outside his tomb... in hundreds of lines.

It's...an extraordinary overblown accounts of "what I did".

But it also offers a blueprint of how to be an emperor in the future.

And there are three things he stresses.

First of all, you have to be massively generous

to the Roman people.

You have to give them hand-outs and entertainments and services.

And that's what he lists here, all the cash he spent on that.

But then, you've got to build, build, build.

And that's really the model of Pompey.

And Augustus tells us about the temples that he constructed

and the theatres.

But most important of all - and this is what the biggest

part of the document is about - you have to invest in conquest.

And Augustus explains how he extended

the boundaries of the Roman Empire,

how he pacified the provinces of Gaul and Spain,

how he pacified the Alps.

The message he's hammering home is clear -

if you want to be a Roman emperor, you have to look like a conqueror.

However much the Romans tried to avoid the Pompeys

and the Caesars of this world, the problems of governing

and policing an ever-expanding Empire proved that decisions

taken by committee didn't work.

It wasn't the emperor that created the Roman Empire,

it was the Empire that created Roman emperors.

Augustus's account of what he did is a practical toolkit for how

to be a Roman emperor.

But the ideology behind it all is best represented on another

monument he put up celebrating pax - peace.

So this is an altar of peace.

It's celebrating the security

and the prosperity that the Roman Empire can bring.

But it isn't really peace in our sense of the word.

This isn't about the absence of fighting,

it's about peace that is the RESULT of fighting.

This is peace that has been won by victory.

Really, this is an altar of pacification.

It's also more than that.

Built out of marble by the best artists in town,

you couldn't miss the messages here.

The walls around it are covered with friezes, some depicting

Augustus with his family, carving the Imperial dynasty into stone.

And some of the images spread the idea of his divine birthright,

projecting his lineage all the way back

to the mythical founders of Rome.

On either side of the main steps,

there are two different versions of Rome's ancestry.

On one side, the wolf with Romulus and Remus,

and on the other side, Aeneas, who's just arrived in Italy from Troy.

There's a special resonance for the Emperor here

because Augustus claimed to be directly descended from Aeneas.

But there's an even bigger point if you take these two scenes together.

On the one side there's Romulus, who welcomed into his new city

outcasts and runaways.

On the other side, Aeneas,

who really did come from abroad.

The message about Rome's origins is clear -

Rome was always foreign.

This made perfect Roman sense.

The stories they told of their own origins

reflected the growing diversity,

expansion and openness of their world.

And there was one corner of the Empire

that had a particular resonance.

I'm in the place that many Romans thought the whole story

of their city began. It's more than 1,000 miles away from Rome.

It's the city of Troy, the city of the Trojan War,

that most famous, most defining war in the whole history

and myth of the classical world.

It's the war of Helen, Achilles, Hector and the Trojan horse.

It was also the birthplace of Aeneas.

And for the new Augustan age,

the Roman poet Virgil elaborately reimagined and rewrote Aeneas's

journey from Troy to Italy in his epic poem, the Aeneid.

He was using myth to explore the complexities of the rise of Rome

and of its Empire.

There are all kinds of things in this poem -

love, honour, heroism and Empire.

Virgil also points to some of the much more disconcerting

sides of Imperial power.

At the end of the story -

and it's really the last thing we see Aeneas doing - our hero cruelly

and gratuitously slaughters an enemy soldier who has surrendered to him.

It's as if in Virgil's hands,

the story of Aeneas both celebrates Rome's Empire

and exposes its potential brutality.

And yet Virgil could also present the Roman Empire as a gift

from the gods themselves.

At the very beginning, Jupiter, the king of the gods,

prophesies Rome's future power.

"I have given," he says, "I have given the Romans imperium sine fine."

"I have given them empire without limit."

It hadn't really started that way.

A completely unremarkable city had expanded far beyond its walls,

becoming the power centre of a vast Empire.

And from the twins to the emperors.

From cattle raiders to organised armies.

From the early victories of Scipio Barbatus to the crushing destruction

of Corinth in the east or the bloody killing fields of Gaul in the west.

Through a combination of improvisation, good luck,

greed and ambition,

Rome has imprinted on our minds what it means to be an empire.

The idea of empire without limit is something that Scipio Barbatus

could never have understood.

He knew all about conquest and military glory

and the profits that came with them.

But Rome having territorial control over swathes of the outside world,

thought of as limitless, would have been

absolutely incomprehensible to him.

Two and a half centuries later, Virgil's Aeneid

claims that Jupiter himself had planned it that way.

It's as if Virgil, looking back, is reinterpreting the messy,

the improvised history of Roman conquest into some grand design

of manifest destiny.

Now that Rome had acquired an empire, what to do with it?

It was a terribly exploitative system of resources,

of landscape and of people.

What would feed it and what would connect it?

We tend to joke when we say, "All roads lead to Rome".

But actually they did.

Who would lose out and who would succeed?

One of the biggest things he did was put up this huge amphitheatre.