RICHARD MILES: They say that when in Rome, do as the Romans do.
But in the history of the ancient world, what exactly, did the Romans do?
The story of Ancient Rome is a familiar one.
The dynamic republic which was transformed into the greatest empire
the world has ever known.
And which laid the foundations of western civilisation.
But what was it about Ancient Rome that made it so different
from the civilisations that had gone before?
Well, one clue lies in the word "Civilization".
It comes from civis, which means citizen.
A Latin word, not Greek, Punic, Babylonian or Acadian,
or any of the other mother tongues of the great civilisations.
What Rome managed to achieve, had never been done before.
It created a civilisation for export.
Civilisation is so much more than just culture.
Culture is eminently exportable,
as the Hellenistic kings that came after Alexander the Great had shown.
If the Romans wanted culture,
they knew that they could go to the marketplace
and buy it from some clever Greek.
Meanwhile, they were free to focus on something far more complex
than sculpture or philosophy.
Politics, civilisation's dark arts.
The Senate,
the law courts,
and when all else failed, the battlefield.
These were the places where Roman civilisation was forged.
Along the way, they developed systems and institutions,
from law to engineering, that were pragmatic,
durable and free from the clutter of ideology or dogma.
But Rome was no utopia on the Tiber
and there was no philosopher king, who'd planned the civilisation,
that had been hammered out here.
It was a familiar story of crude improvisation and blind panic
as the elite desperately clung on to power
and the masses boiled and seethed.
And at the same time, external enemies menaced both.
But Rome's response to these crises was entirely unfamiliar.
Rome didn't merely conquer the world, it transformed the world
into Rome.
They made their enemies an offer they couldn't refuse.
The chance to become Roman.
And this turned out to be the key to the success of a civilisation
that would spread from the banks of the Tiber,
to the frontiers of the ancient world.
So, the story begins with a bunch of insignificant hill villages,
in the back of beyond.
And it ends with a mighty republican empire.
But things are never as simple as that, are they?
After the Romans had conquered the world,
the only people they had left to defeat, were themselves.
From the first glimpses we get of Rome,
it's impossible to see the greatness that lay in its future.
In the Dark Ages
that followed the collapse of the Bronze Age civilisations,
it was just another cluster of clannish villages fighting for survival.
But at least the Romans had chosen a good spot for their city.
Situated in Latium in central Italy on a group of seven hills,
it was the best crossing point of the River Tiber.
Like Sparta, geography made Rome into a land power.
A nation of foot sloggers.
And its USP was its strategic position,
one of central Italy's most important trade routes.
Then as now, Rome was awash with foreigners.
Archaic central Italy was a fluid world.
People moved freely between cities and Rome became a real melting pot.
Rome soon began to develop the institutions and public spaces
that we identify with urban civilisation...
Planned streets, temples and a forum.
These friezes show the early history of the city.
Now, uncovering the early history of any civilisation is difficult,
but with Rome it's very complicated indeed
because of its longevity and success.
Later, Roman historians clearly embellished the early history of Rome
to disguise its humble beginnings.
After all, any great city needed a great history.
You can tell a lot about a society
from the stories they tell about themselves.
And as creation myths go,
the legend of Romulus and Remus is revelatory.
The Romans clearly liked to see themselves
as a product of the school of hard knocks.
The twin brothers had been chucked into the Tiber to drown
by their great uncle,
but washed up at the future site of Rome
where a maternal-minded she-wolf took over their upbringing.
But what could have been a heart warming story of adversity overcome,
had a sting in the tail.
Romulus and Remus fell out with one another.
And Romulus, in a fit of pique, murdered Remus,
spilling his blood all over the foundations of this fledgling city.
For later Romans,
who knew all about the civil wars that had racked their city,
that Rome had been born out of bloody fratricide,
would have seemed very fitting.
Rome's early history reflects two abiding obsessions.
The first was a threat from external forces,
and the second was internal dissension.
Weakness in the face of either, could lead to only one thing.
Tyranny.
The Romans were instinctive king haters.
very early on, they threw out their hereditary monarchs,
a historic moment recalled in another important creation myth,
the Rape of Lucretia.
Instead of a kingdom,
Rome presented itself to the world as a Republic,
from the Latin meaning, "public affairs".
And the component parts of this public affair,
were memorably summarised
by the initials SPQR,
which can still be seen all over Rome today.
SPQR,
Senatus Populus Que Romanus,
the Senate and the Roman people,
a simple resonant phrase,
the source of all authority for the actions of the Roman Republic,
but also one that masked all the unresolved tensions
between the strong and the weak, the powerful and the powerless,
and the haves and have-nots.
As we've already seen in our story of the Ancient World,
when societies give up on the simple hierarchies
derived from royal dynasties,
politics instantly becomes more complex and more unstable.
The Roman Republic was no exception.
Rome's political machine consisted of two consuls,
or magistrates, elected by the Senate and the people,
who held office together for a year at a time.
This deceptively simple system was designed to ensure
that no single individual became too powerful,
but from it, the Romans span a tangled web of intrigue,
power plays, backroom deals and back-stabbings.
Politics as usual, in other words.
The Roman Republican constitution
was a slightly creaking crackpot affair,
designed just to keep the show on the road.
(MEN CHATTERING)
The SPQR rulebook turned Roman politics into a kind of bicycle race.
Contenders hung back, jockeying for position,
until someone suddenly made a break for the front
and then it was every man for himself.
But although elite Romans were hardwired to achieve power and glory,
the genius of the Roman system,
was that it managed to avoid competitiveness
turning into a free-for-all, thanks to another set of rules.
A moral code that expressed the noble Roman ethos...
Courage, clemency,
wisdom, duty,
modesty, gravitas.
And the moral authority underpinning the Republic of virtue,
was enforced from beyond the grave.
For the budding Roman senator,
the words and deeds of his ancestors provided the standard
to which his behaviour should aspire
and the measure by which his achievements would be judged.
These tombs date to the Republican period.
And the first thing you notice, is that the Romans were buried as families.
So this is the quinti, and here we have the Clodiae.
Looking at these two guys' ears, they're definitely from the same family.
Perhaps the most important thing of all, for the Roman aristocrats,
was to compete politically,
not just for their own individual honour,
but also for the honour of their family.
Because the big senatorial families were like brands.
And the brand with each generation, needed to remain strong.
The long shadow cast by venerable ancestors
was impossible to shake,
especially as their memory was immortalised by wax-effigies
which were paraded at regular intervals.
Whatever achievements a Roman aristocrat could point to,
the dead were never satisfied.
But there was a problem with this inbuilt hunger for political office
in individual glory.
There simply weren't enough jobs to go around.
For instance, the most senior office consul.
Well, there are only two of those a year
and that meant that somebody was always going to miss out.
So there was an inbuilt tension
between, the one hand, a desire for individual glory,
and the other, the stability and coherence that the state needed.
And then there was that second initial in SPQR.
P for populus, the people.
(ALL SHOUTING)
The masses, the plebeians, were no passive bystanders,
and were willing to fight for their share of the power.
In 495 B.C., the Senate and the people had a falling out.
The plebeians withdrew to the Sacred Mount
in the north of the city,
and declared a kind of general strike
of farmers, craftsmen and critically, soldiers.
Faced with losing virtually its whole army, the Senate offered a compromise.
The creation of a popular tribunate.
Each year two plebeian tribunes
were elected to protect the interests of the people in the Senate.
The plebs now had a stake in the success of their city,
and a source of their identity.
It's a spirit which still lies at the heart of the Roman working class psyche.
(SPEAKING ITALIAN)
Ah, Lenin i Totti! Bravo.
One of the things about the Romans,
was their extreme attachment to the actual city of Rome.
Not since Athens, had a city played such a central part
in the fate of a state.
Alexander's murderous trail across the globe,
the Phoenicians merchant spirit,
the wandering Persian court,
all announced the essential mobility of power.
L'etat, c'est moi.
But for the Romans,
Rome would remain an obsession throughout their long history.
This Roman obsession with their city can be pegged to one humiliating event.
In 390 B.C., a horde of Celts from northern Italy marched southwards,
crushed the Roman army and sacked Rome.
A small number of defenders
managed to hold out up here, on the Capitoline Hill.
And they only got away with it because of the sacred geese
that were kept up here, who started honking
when the Celts tried to get up the hill.
But even they had to surrender eventually,
and the Celts only left the city
after the payment of a large sum of gold.
-(MEN SHOUTING) -(SWORD WHOOSHING)
But the pragmatic Romans were always open to the lessons
that adversity teaches.
The marauding Celts taught them that a dramatic shift in strategy
was required if national security was to be achieved.
And the key lay in its treatment of its neighbours.
(MEN SHOUTING)
In the past, when Rome had defeated its neighbours in war,
it followed the time-honoured traditions of pillage, plunder and enslavement.
But now the Romans realised that the way forward
was to absorb their vanquished neighbours rather than pillaging them.
From now on, defeated enemies in Latium,
would be turned into Romans and their territory turned into Rome.
Generally, in the Hellenistic world, territory was there to be conquered.
But at the same time, if circumstances dictated,
could also be given up.
Easy come, easy go.
But with the Romans, it was very different.
All territory that Rome conquered, immediately became Roman land,
as Roman as the city of Rome itself.
The Ancient World had never seen anything quite like this.
The Romans had re-written the rule book.
They came, they saw, they conquered and then they assimilated.
Rome's wars with its neighbours,
also helped to forge and refine the signature weapon of Ancient Rome...
The legion, that formidable conscript army,
with its centurions and eagles, its hob-nailed sandals and its gladius,
the short stabbing sword that ripped through the opposition ranks
in close quarter fighting.
As one by one the Samnites, the Etruscans
and the city-states of Campania fell,
the tactics, efficiency and dogged resilience
of Rome's legionaries increased.
But best of all, their numbers increased too,
as defeated enemies became assimilated fellow-citizens,
available for conscription into the ranks.
One of Rome's enemies,
complained that it was like fighting against the Hydra.
The Hydra was a mythical beast with many heads.
And each time you cut a head off, a brand new one grew back.
Well, he had a point.
Because any allies that were given Latin rights
were also expected to supply troops for the Roman army.
So, each time Rome conquered a new bit of territory,
the Roman army was replenished.
By the 2nd century B.C.,
over half the army was made up of non-Romans.
Rome was transformed from being just another city-state in central Italy
to an irresistible force.
The scale of Rome's conquests were massive.
It's been calculated that by the early years of the 3rd century B.C.,
Rome controlled more than 14,000 square kilometres of territory.
That was two and a half times more than it had done 50 years previously.
And there were riches too.
In 293, a triumph was held to celebrate the final victory over the Samnites
and amongst the spoils of war were over 1800 pounds of silver
and over two and a half million pounds of bronze.
The benefits to Rome were clear for all to see.
Ostentatious new temples were built
at the Largo Argentina on the Field of Mars.
Through ruthless conquest and clever politics,
a cluster of insignificant hill villages had become a city.
Now the task was to build a civilisation.
The brutal realities of war and conquest,
were followed by a very efficient system of incorporating subject populations
based on a series of legal rights, privileges and responsibilities.
Under Rome, civilisation as a tool of imperialism,
at last came of age.
The success of Rome was built on systems and infrastructures, not theories.
The Romans took the machinery of civilisation,
stripped it down and reassembled it
in new, more efficient forms that really delivered.
This was never more apparent than in the arena of the law.
Law was one of the great building blocks of Roman civilisation.
And the Roman legal system was one of the most sophisticated
and enlightened of the Ancient World.
It was a mortar that held together its ever expanding empire
and gave its citizens, both great and small,
the confidence that they'd have recourse to justice.
There had been laws before, of course, from the Mesopotamians to the Greeks,
but these were usually little more than pious platitudes
about the protection of widows and orphans.
Rome took the principles of justice for all
and embodied them in a fully fledged legal system.
As early as the mid 5th century B.C.,
the earliest Roman laws were published in the form of The Twelve Tables,
after a plebeian tribune called for laws to be written down
to prevent wealthy senators from exploiting their position
and seizing property.
It was from this that the legal principle
that property is sacred, developed.
In Roman society, it didn't matter who you were or where you were from,
you had rights and opportunities, even if you were a slave.
Rome, like every other ancient civilisation,
had huge numbers of slaves,
but the difference with the Romans was that it wasn't a question
of once a slave always a slave.
Stop, oh, traveller and turn left
to the tomb.
I presume it's that tomb over there.
There lies the remains of a good and merciful man. A lover of the poor.
Guyus
Attilius Ovodus.
Freed man of Sorano.
Seller of pearls... On the via Sacra.
This a wonderful and touching example
of the opportunities which the Roman Empire offered
to all sorts of different kinds of people.
Not only to foreigners, but also to people who'd once been slaves,
who had won their freedom and since then had prospered.
In this fluid social world, everything was possible.
(FOGHORN BLARING)
The National Archaeological Museum in Naples, has a curious memorial
which offers an insight into how citizens' rights, once gained,
could be handed down the generations.
This inscription records that Numerious Popidious Calcenous
paid for the reconstruction of part of the Temple of Isis at Pompeii,
after it'd been destroyed in an earthquake.
As a reward, he was allowed to join the town council.
Now there are thousands of inscriptions like this.
But this one is rather strange.
Because Calcenous was only six years old.
Now the reason why his name appears on the inscription,
was because his father was a freed man.
And as a freed man, he wasn't allowed to join the town council.
But his son, as a Roman citizen from birth, could.
So, money lay at the heart of social mobility in the Roman Empire.
But Rome's masterstroke
was the way in which it translated the benefits of its civilisation
into bricks and mortar.
Public works, the like of which the world had never seen before.
These weren't just showcase pieces, like temples and palaces,
they were massive infrastructure projects,
like the famous road network which turned Rome into a joined-up world.
The first of these carriageways was this,
the Appian Way,
built in 312 B.C., to connect Rome with Campania,
the blessed countryside.
The queen of long roads, as it was known,
spanned 560 kilometres,
eventually reaching Brundisium in the south.
A superhighway for trade and troops, whichever circumstances required.
Running alongside the roads were the aqueducts.
Those great monuments to the Roman values
of public works and utility,
which brought that most basic requirement for life,
clean drinking water, to the people.
The great and the good were justly proud of their aqueducts.
A leading senator, Sextus Julius Frontinus, wrote...
NARRATOR: I ask you, just compare with the vast monuments
of this vital aqueduct network those useless pyramids,
or the good-for-nothing tourist attractions of the Greeks.
MILES: As Rome's empire grew over the centuries,
the aqueduct became the ultimate symbol of Roman civilisation.
From North Africa to Gaul,
Roman engineers made their mark on the landscape
and improved the quality of life.
And they were built to last.
Deep beneath Rome, an underground aqueduct
still serves the needs of SPQR.
My guide is caver, vittorio Colombo.
So, vittorio, this is actually a Roman aqueduct?
Yes, indeed.
Ancient Rome had 11 aqueducts,
and this is the only one that is still in operation after 2000 years,
bringing one cubic metre of water every second.
This is the only one that is built completely underground.
And that's why it's still in operation
because the Barbarians didn't destroy it.
-So, in 19 B.C., this was built? -Exactly.
So in the time of Augustus?
Yeah, he was building this aqueduct
in order to provide water to the thermal bath.
The first big public thermal bath in Rome.
That is exactly what made Rome great
because the quality of life was for everybody and was public.
MILES: Fantastic.
Water from the vergine aqueduct, is today used to supply
some of Rome's best loved fountains.
The Romans' insatiable appetite for such public works,
was born out of two things.
Their extreme competitive ethos
and an overriding sense of something called Civilitas.
It's a word which defined them as Romans.
Civilitas meant far more than just politeness.
It also meant being a good citizen of Rome.
But as Rome's conquests mounted,
so did the pressure, both internal and external
on this delicate status quo.
In the ancient world,
successful civilisations stayed successful by expansion,
through conquest, alliance or absorption.
Rome was no exception.
With Italy under its control,
it looked for the next frontier to cross.
Sicily was the obvious place to look.
A fair, fat, fertile triangle of territory,
separated from the Italian mainland
by just three kilometres of the Messina Straits.
Sicily was not only agriculturally rich
but its seaports were key stopping off points on the lucrative trade routes
linking Greece, Italy and North Africa.
So, it made sense, both militarily and politically,
for Rome to expand into Sicily. But there was a problem.
The western half of the island
was controlled by the greatest superpower of the age, Carthage.
And if Rome wanted to compete there, it was going to have to move up
into the premier league.
Now, Sicily had long been ethnically divided
between Phoenician and indigenous cities in the west
and Greek city-states in the east.
But from the 5th century B.C. onwards,
Carthage regularly had to send armies to protect its allies here.
Particularly from Syracuse,
the most powerful and war-like of the Greek city-states.
Now, the reasons once again, would be primarily economic.
The old Phoenician colonies, on the western coast of Sicily
were essential staging posts on the lucrative terrainian trade routes
which Carthage had long controlled.
And they needed to be held, whatever the cost,
and the cost would be high.
Business in the ancient world was heavily militarised.
Trading monopolies were fought for and trade routes fiercely defended.
The Carthaginians had built an empire
on their network of fortress-like trading posts
manned by mercenary armies.
And no greedy Greek or upstart Roman would be permitted to muscle in.
(SPEAKING ITALIAN)
We often tend to think of the Carthaginians as being a bit dull,
compared with the glittering cultural achievements of the Greeks
and the Roman imperial juggernaut.
A nation of shopkeepers,
hawking their wares across the Mediterranean.
But that is to entirely miss the point.
(SPEAKING ITALIAN)
The city of Carthage, on the coast of modern day Tunisia,
had its own ideas about civilisation and the way its world should be run.
With historic roots
that lead directly back to the great trading cities of Phoenicia,
Carthage was a sea-based power
and its attitudes were shaped by the fluidity and mobility of that element.
The Romans were armed lawyers,
whose instinct was to get and to hold territory, turning the world into Rome.
The Carthaginians were armed merchants.
Their instinct was to build and maintain trade networks,
turning the world into a market, controlled by Carthage.
Roman Carthage offered real alternatives as imperial systems.
Rome was more like an all inclusive club,
with heavy obligations but also generous rewards.
Carthage, well, it was more like a loyalty card
with defined economic benefits,
with little else required of its members.
There were cultural differences too.
And one in particular would become a weapon in Rome's propaganda war
against Carthage.
Child sacrifice.
I worked here in the Tophet, in Carthage, in the 1990s.
And by complete accident, we found 50 of these urns.
And when we opened one of them up,
we found tiny finger rings that could only fit on children
and other small bits of jewellery,
as well as charred, very small, human bones.
I had to sleep in a room with those urns for three weeks after that.
And I've got to admit, I didn't sleep very well.
The archaeological evidence is hotly contested.
On one side you have those that see the Tophet as a child cemetery.
On the other, those that see it as a sacrificial area.
But I think both sides can agree on one thing.
It's time to move on from seeing the Carthaginians
as callous baby killers.
The Tophet was a place where pious people came
to offer up to their gods, the thing that was most precious to them.
Their children.
Carthage and Rome first came to blows in Sicily,
the jewel in the crown of the Carthaginian empire.
The conflict between the two regional superpowers was a world war
that would rage on and off for more than a century,
the longest in the history of the ancient world.
And Rome would emerge from the conflict,
transformed from a Republic into an Empire.
The First Punic War,
as Rome's war with Carthage would be known,
dragged on for over 20 years.
Sicily was the main battlefield,
but neither side achieved a decisive victory on land.
The island's rugged terrain hampered the Roman legions' attempts
to steamroller the mercenary armies of Carthage.
The Carthaginian stronghold of Eryx,
rising 750 metres above the plains of Western Sicily,
shows just how tough it must have been for the Roman forces.
The fields below the fortress are littered with the debris
from Roman siege engines.
Archaeologists, Nicola Savalli and Pier-Francesco vecchio,
have unearthed hundreds of catapult balls.
(SPEAKING ITALIAN)
They are just underneath the surface, 20 centimetres underneath the surface.
And it's a lot of these catapult balls.
So this is, sort of, the remains of the heavy artillery?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Amazing. What sort of damage would something like this do to a city wall?
They have to use this one, like, to make the first break.
So, in other words, you'd need quite a lot of these
before you manage to loosen or weaken the walls.
And just behind you, I notice there are a lot of tiny ones.
What are these for?
Yeah, the little artillery. Fromboliere. How we say in Italian.
-MILES: Sling shot? -Yeah, the sling shot.
Part of the Carthaginian army was made by the Spanish from Balearic.
From the Balearic Islands?
Yeah, Spanish ones were the best for launching these kind of missiles.
Imagine that in my head.
-So, that would kill a man? -Yeah, for sure.
So it's a real war of attrition between the two sides?
MAN: Yeah, yeah, that's it. For 10 years.
MILES: The stalemate would be broken at sea,
though few would have predicted the eventual winner
in this specialist arena.
The Carthaginians reigned supreme at sea.
It was the source of their wealth and the fabric of their empire
and they policed it with the most formidable war fleet
in the Mediterranean.
Behind that fleet, lay shipbuilding expertise that went back centuries.
Now, this is a Carthaginian warship.
And even though it's a small one, about a 120 tonnes,
it still took 68 oarsmen to power this through the water.
But perhaps the most extraordinary thing about this boat,
is that archaeologists found Punic lettering written onto the planks.
And this was perhaps to help non-specialists to assemble it.
So, in many respects, this is like a flat-pack warship.
But Carthaginian ingenuity proved to be their undoing.
The Romans may have been landlubbing farmers,
but they recognised a good idea when they saw it.
When they captured an intact Carthaginian warship,
the flat-pack numbering system,
gave them the blueprint for their own fleet,
and they copied the design plank by plank.
It's one thing to own a fleet, it's quite another to know how to use it.
In their first naval encounter, commanded by the Roman consul,
Scipio, aptly nicknamed, Asina, the ass.
The Romans came here with a small fleet of 17 ships
and captured the main port of the Lipari islands, here.
However they soon found themselves hemmed in
by a much larger Carthaginian fleet.
But Scipio panicked and fled for land.
The Roman fleet was burnt to a cinder.
An inauspicious but hardly unexpected start to Roman Naval history.
But the dogged Romans weren't going to be daunted by a mere naval disaster.
They had more ships to play with and some nautical ingenuity of their own.
The basic rules of naval warfare in this period,
is to try and get as close as you could to the enemy's ship
and to ram it and eventually, hopefully sink it.
But that takes both skill and experience
and the Romans had neither at the start of the First Punic War.
So they needed to find another way of evening out the odds.
What they designed was this. It's known as the corvus or crow
which is essentially a giant gangplank
held up in the air by a series of pulleys,
with a large spike on its underside.
When they got close enough to the Carthagenian ship,
they'd cut the pulley,
and the whole gangplank would come thudding down on the Carthagenian deck.
And then the Roman marines would charge across
and you'd end up essentially with a land battle.
Ingenious and very effective.
And the corvus actually worked.
Just off the Sicilian coast, here, at Mili,
a very overconfident Carthagenian fleet was lured into a trap by the Romans
and almost completely destroyed.
Must have been a terrible humiliation
to be defeated by these Johnny-come-latelies.
More pain was to follow for the Carthaginians.
Just off Cape Ecnomus,
the largest naval battle of the ancient world took place.
It proved to be a pivotal moment in round one of Rome versus Carthage.
The Roman hydra defeated the Carthaginian shark,
and before long,
Sicily would be the offshore treasure island of the new Republican Empire.
But the greatest consequence of the First Punic War
was that the Romans went from being a nation of land lovers
who didn't know one end of a trireme from another,
to calling the Mediterranean, Mare Nostrum, our sea.
But if the Romans surprised the Carthaginians
by defeating them at sea the first time around,
it was Carthaginians who sprang all the surprises
when the two sides went to war again, 23 years later.
That was thanks to one extraordinary man,
whose successes on the battlefield
would turn Roman animosity towards Carthage
into a bone-deep, unrelenting, pathological hatred.
The Second Punic War was no rerun of the first.
Such was the Roman domination of the Mediterranean,
that there were virtually no naval battles.
But in Hannibal Barca,
the Romans would fight against one of the greatest generals
of the ancient world.
From his base in Southern Spain,
and financed by the Carthaginian silver mines there,
Hannibal decided to take the war into the Romans' own backyard, in Italy.
But to do that, he would first have to cross the Alps.
It's only actually when you're here,
you get a sense of the greatness of Hannibal's achievement
in crossing this mighty mountain range.
And to make matters worse, winter was fast closing in
when Hannibal and his troops finally reached the Alps.
With snow falling around them,
man and beast struggled to keep their footing
on the narrow, slippery, precipitous pathways.
And the elephants in particular,
although the stars of the battlefield,
were hardly ideal climbing companions.
In fact, only one of these mighty beasts actually made it to Italy.
With or without elephants,
in Italy, Hannibal ran the Roman legions ragged,
culminating in the Battle of Cannae in 216 B.C.
The Roman losses were stupendous.
One general, over 80 members of the Senate,
virtually the whole of their senior command,
and virtually all of their best legions.
Cannae was a total bloody disaster.
Hannibal didn't just outmanoeuvre Rome on the battlefield.
He made advances on the political front
that threatened the very fabric of Roman unity.
Cannae appeared to change everything,
with several Italian cities
reassessing their relationship with Rome.
One such place was Capua.
The richest and most popular city in Campania.
Hannibal got them onside
by promising that once he'd conquered Italy
that Capua rather than Rome would be capital.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
Humiliated on the battlefield,
and with ancient allies threatening to desert the banner of SPQR,
Rome seemed destined for a repeat of the disaster of 175 years before
when the Celts sacked its sacred capital.
However, in one of history's great mysteries,
the Carthaginian general did not march into the city
and finish off the Romans for good.
In not going for the jugular,
Hannibal was merely following the rules of warfare of the day.
The idea wasn't to annihilate your enemy,
merely to force them to the negotiating table.
And if Hannibal thought the Romans were finished,
then he was very much mistaken.
Rome had no reverse gear.
(MAN CHATTERING OVER PA)
The thing about the Romans
is they always had the ability to come back,
each time harder than the last.
In Scipio Africanus they had a general
who was more than a match for Hannibal's talents.
He defeated the Carthaginian general on his home turf at the Battle of Zama.
The Carthaginians had somehow managed to snatch defeat
from the jaws of victory
and the Romans would make them pay dearly.
There could be no question of the usual Roman strategy of assimilation.
Hannibal had traumatised Rome so deeply that all it could think of
was how to further hurt and humiliate its defeated enemy.
Rome wanted to squeeze Carthage till the pip squeaked.
They imposed a war indemnity of 10,000 talents of silver.
Ten times more than the indemnity they had to pay
at the end of the First Punic War.
Carthage was also forbidden from waging war without Rome's permission.
The idea was to turn Carthage into a Roman client state.
But once again, the Romans had completely underestimated
Carthage's entrepreneurial vigour.
Stripped of its military power,
Carthage got its retaliation in,
by staging a remarkable economic revival.
But this merely served to stoke Roman paranoia.
One Senator, Cato, ended each and every speech he made
with the implacable statement, Delenda est Carthago.
Carthage must be destroyed!
The Carthaginians were clearly expecting trouble.
Behind me, over there, amongst the trees,
they built an ingenious naval complex.
At the front, was a normal commercial harbour.
But behind, was a military port with enough room for a 170 warships.
It was all cleverly camouflaged, away from prying Roman eyes.
But subterfuge on this scale couldn't last for long.
When the Romans learnt of the harbour's existence,
there could be only one conclusion... Delenda est Carthago.
Rome paved the way for the destruction of Carthage with a series of demands,
each more onerous than the last.
It culminated in the outrageous command
that the Carthaginians abandon their city
and found a new settlement 10 miles away from the sea.
The Carthagenians had lived here, by the sea,
for 700 years, as a great naval nation,
and they were not prepared to let that change.
Carthage mobilised to resist the onslaught.
Public spaces were turned into armouries.
But nothing could save Carthage.
It took three years of brutal siege
but in the end the city fell to Scipio Aemilianus
in the fateful year 146 B.C.
Carthage had come back twice from defeat.
This time the Romans made sure it would stay defeated.
They offered what has become known as a "Carthaginian peace",
unconditional surrender followed by utter destruction.
An ancient Hiroshima that would raze the city of Carthage to the ground.
In order to flush out the defenders, Scipio set fire to the city.
And such was the intensity of the heat
that you can still see the scorch marks on the walls here.
There were so many corpses clogging the streets
that Scipio had to employ cleaning squads
to drag the bodies out of the way.
Eventually, it all became too much.
And after a heroic resistance,
50,000 Carthagenians left the city for the last time
and went into a life of miserable slavery.
The remaining diehards were killed in the flames.
Scipio then put a curse on the city and on anyone who decided to rebuild it.
Carthage was not the only great city to be destroyed by the Romans in 146 B.C.
That same year the wealthy Greek port of Corinth was captured,
looted and burnt after its citizens revolted.
The destruction of Carthage and Corinth,
two of the greatest cities of the ancient world,
stood as brutal reminders of the bloody consequences of resisting Rome.
Whilst at the same time providing an apocalyptic fanfare
for Rome's coming of age as a world power.
The Romans were now the masters of their universe.
The whole Italian peninsula had been Romanised.
The fertile triangle of Sicily had been won.
The political and military power of the Greeks had been neutralised.
The Carthaginians had been crushed.
In the Western Mediterranean, Rome ruled over everyone that mattered.
Except itself.
Members of the Senate might have fondly imagined
that things would go back to the way they had always been.
But this vast new empire, and its huge wealth,
meant that things would never be the same again.
Maybe the Romans should have consulted the Greeks,
who could have told them cautionary tales of what happens
to the stability of societies when the spoils of war come home
by the wagon-load.
In Rome, things followed a well-worn path.
The fat cats got the lion's share,
the rest were left with scraps.
Senators used their newfound wealth
to kick their fellow citizens off their family farms
in order to create huge estates.
The naked politics behind the pious myth
of SPQR was cruelly exposed.
But there were two idealistic senators
who were determined to fight for that myth.
Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus.
The issue that they chose to adopt, is the most controversial of its day.
Land reform.
And the Gracchi were prepared to bend the rules
to get what they wanted.
Ignoring the Senate,
they passed land reform legislation through the popular assembly.
The enraged Senate responded by tearing up the rulebook altogether.
Tiberius was beaten to death.
His brother, Gaius, was later stabbed to death.
The bodies of both were thrown in the Tiber.
The murder of the Gracchi
was the original sin of the Roman Republic,
its fall from grace.
These dangerous lessons weren't lost
on the rising generation of Rome's leaders.
The Gracchan Revolution had failed but its legacy was a powerful one.
The Gracchi had shown that it was possible to circumvent the Senate.
And its power and authority would never be the same again.
So the Gracchan Revolution provided the curtain raiser
for the blood soaked finale of the Roman Republic.
(BAND PLAYING)
This was the shape of things to come.
The history of the late Roman Republic
was dominated by powerful generals like Pompey and Caesar.
Both were the political heirs of this man. Sulla.
One of the most controversial figures in Roman history.
He set the pattern that they followed
and within a generation the Republic had become
little more than a military dictatorship.
Sulla grasped an essential truth about Rome,
political power now derived from the army.
With no state provision for paying its soldiers,
Rome depended on its successful generals to do so with the spoils of war.
These essentially private armies would come to increasingly
bedevil the Republic
as their Generals use force to pursue their own political agendas.
The age of the military hard man
unfettered by any respect for the constitution of the Republic
had finally arrived.
Sulla showed just what could be achieved
with an army of loyal veterans at your back.
Fearing that his political enemies were plotting against him,
he marched on Rome.
The terrified Senate voted to make him dictator.
Now armed with legal authority,
Sulla, dictator legibus faciendis,
unleashed a reign of terror.
Sulla's reign of terror was the stuff of nightmares.
Lists of those condemned as enemies of the Roman Republic
were put up here in the Roman forum.
Slaves who had been freed by Sulla would then turn up at their houses
and lead them away never to be seen again.
Well, sometimes, some bits of them were seen again.
The decapitated heads put up on spikes as a warning to others.
This system, Sulla's toxic legacy to Rome,
became known as the proscriptions.
He used it to kill up to 9,000 people.
Fifteen hundred of them, members of the equestrian
or aristocratic class.
Their property was confiscated and divvied up among Sulla's supporters.
But perhaps the most sinister thing about Sulla
is that having terrorised Rome and decimated the Senate,
he then resigned the dictatorship, restored the powers of the Senate
and retired to his estate to a life of debauchery.
Within a year he was dead but he left behind the blueprint
for the dismemberment of the Republic.
Sulla was never going to be able to revive the authority of the Senate
because his earlier actions had fatally undermined it.
It was a bit like a burglar breaking into a house
and robbing it of all its contents
and then putting new locks on the doors.
It was only a matter of time before the house was robbed again.
The burglars who came after are the ones we know so well
Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar
these would be the Republic's undertakers.
The jockeying for power amongst these ruthless, ambitious warlords
is complex and tangled,
but its motivation is brutally simple.
It can be summed up by a rhetorical question attributed to Pompey,
If Sulla could, why can't I?
Pompey was the living embodiment of how all the conquests of Rome
had destabilised the delicate political balance of the Republic.
All the Senate could do was stand around
and flex its increasingly flaccid muscles.
We know so much about the machinations of this period
because of the huge body of letters and speeches
left by one of Rome's most brilliant intellectuals,
Marcus Tullius Cicero.
Cicero was the archetypal politician-lawyer,
a brilliant orator in court and in the senate.
But Cicero was also, fatefully for him, an idealist.
A true believer in the pious myth of SPQR.
And it's this that gives his speeches in this period their poignancy,
because the days of SPQR were long over.
But that wasn't the way that Cicero saw it.
A man whose brilliance was matched by his insecurities.
He told everybody that was prepared to listen
that it had been a coalition between the Senate,
equestrians and people which had saved the Republic.
And, increasingly, he saw this alliance as the future for the salvation of Rome.
But Rome was now far more than just a Republic,
it also had a huge empire.
The complex system that was SPQR
was as out-of-date as Cicero's calls for a coalition of good men.
The problem was that the Roman Republic
simply wasn't designed to manage the great empire it had now acquired.
What was needed was consistency and long term planning.
Not a bunch of squabbling politicians who were only in office for one year.
Julius Caesar was the one who saw most clearly what Rome needed.
A benign autocrat aided and abetted by a tame Senate.
Having famously crossed the Rubicon,
taken Rome by force and defeated his greatest rival Pompey,
Caesar set about introducing a series of reforms,
including land reform modelled on the ideas of the Gracchi.
But the greatest political problem that Caesar faced
was how to accommodate himself, a king in all but name,
into a Republican power structure.
The man who had an answer for everything didn't know what to do about himself.
But others had decided what to do about him.
A group of senators felt that the loss of power and authority
was too great a price to pay for the peace which Caesar offered.
On the Ides of March,
they cut him down outside the Senate House.
It is said that his body fell at the feet of a statue,
his old enemy Pompey.
The sequel following the assassination of Julius Caesar
is a dramatic saga of intrigue, romance and war.
Long in the telling, its political implications are short.
After the civil war and the defeat of Caesar's murderers,
after the inevitable falling out between his successors Marc Antony
and his young nephew and adopted son, Octavian,
after the absurd, touching romance of Antony and Cleopatra,
after the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra
at the Battle of Actium in Greece and their operatic double-suicide.
After all that, Octavian Caesar was quite simply the last man standing.
But there was still the question about what to do with the Republic.
A ramshackle political system no longer fit for purpose
in ruling over this massive empire.
Kingship was out of the question
after what had happened to Julius Caesar.
But there was another solution.
Autocracy, hidden behind the thin veneer of a restored republic.
But to convince the Roman people
to give up many of their political freedoms
in exchange for peace
was going to take every ounce of Octavian's political genius.
With the help of a change of name, the Emperor Augustus,
formerly known as Octavian,
would transform Rome from a Republic into the greatest empire
the world had ever known.
It would dominate the Western world for another 500 years,
only to be challenged by a new religious cult,
Christianity.