RICHARD MILES: The Roman Empire was the most successful
the world had ever known.
At its peak, in the second century AD, it covered 5 million square kilometres.
From Hadrian's Wall in the north
to ancient Mesopotamia in the east.
All of it run by a system of remarkable efficiency and stability.
They called it Pax Romana, the Roman peace.
And its benefits were enjoyed by 60 million people.
(BLEATING)
The Romans would proudly boast of having come up
with the final word on civilisation.
Peace, security and prosperity, all underwritten by an imperial power
with a civilising mission.
As long as you got with the programme, paid your taxes,
committed to the Empire and, of course, kept the peace,
the benefits of civilisation would come to you.
What more could anyone want?
The answer was more than the Pax Romana could supply.
This mighty empire would endure some mad, bad and dangerous emperors,
but in the end it would be subverted
by an obscure religious cult from the East.
(CONGREGATION SINGING)
Its followers would reject, not just Rome
but all that Rome had come to mean in the story of civilisation.
The city of man would be eclipsed by the city of God.
Here's a rare thing in our story of the ancient world,
a massive, expensive public monument,
dedicated not to some blood-soaked triumph over a cringing enemy
but to that elusive, precious thing called peace.
Surely the greatest good that human civilisation can aspire to.
It was created at the behest of the man who established the Pax Romana.
Augustus, Rome's first Emperor.
This is the Ara Pacis, the Altar of Peace,
built by Augustus in 13 BC.
On this frieze here,
it shows Augustus coming back from campaign.
The gaurantor and author of peace.
Quite a transformation from the teenage warlord
who repeatedly ripped out the eyes of one of his enemies.
Eighteen years earlier, plain old Octavian Caesar, as he was then,
was the last man standing in the brutal civil wars
that had torn the Roman Republic apart.
As victor, he'd faced a simple choice,
resuscitate the Republic ruled by the Senate and the people
or put it out of its misery.
But the canny Octavian, rebranded Augustus, found a third way.
He killed the Republic's soul but kept its body alive.
On the frieze, we see Augustus with three main constituencies.
The first of these is the Senate,
because Augustus was going to claim
that he was going to restore the Roman Republic.
And to do that he needed to restore the dignity and authority of the Senate.
The second group are the priesthood,
because Augustus was going to claim that he is going to restore
traditional Roman religion.
But the third group is a real novelty.
We can see them up here. Women and children.
These are members of Augustus's immediate family.
It was Augustus who wanted to get
the people of Rome used to a new concept.
An imperial dynasty.
As Augustus knew, Romans had a visceral hatred of kings.
To plant his dynasty firmly in this hostile soil,
Augustus had to master a tricky political manoeuvre.
A Roman writer would later define it as "getting higher by stepping down".
You can see what that meant in practice in another public monument,
erected 30 years after the Altar of Peace.
The Res Gestae, literally "The Things Done" by Augustus,
is the carefully doctored CV
of the man who brought the principles of monarchy back to Rome after 500 years.
As a public testament, the Res Gestae,
is a very odd document indeed.
Most Roman aristocrats on their epitaphs
will be boasting about their honours and offices that they are decrewed.
But the Res Gestae does the diametric opposite.
On it, Augustus boasts about the offices that he has turned down.
So up here, we've got...
The dictatorship, which was offered to me
in my absence and presence by the people and Senate of Rome,
I didn't take it.
The consulship, offered to me annually and eternally,
I didn't take it.
The coronation crown that was offered to me,
I didn't accept it.
One title that the self-denying Augustus did accept
was Pater Patriae, Father of the Country.
And he garnished it with a disingenuous little phrase
that added more smoke and mirrors to this monarchy in disguise.
Primus inter pares, or first amongst equals,
would remain the modus operandi for all emperors after Augustus.
Augustus would maintain the charade of visiting the Senate House
and seeking advice from its leaders.
And even half the provinces would remain in senatorial control,
but they tended to be the ones that didn't have large standing armies,
just in case.
The dead hand of the Father of the Country
weighed heavily here in the Senate.
Woe betide the Senator who failed to do Augustus's bidding.
And so the habits of debate and dissent shrivelled and died.
(BELL TOLLING)
Augustus lived long enough to see his imperial system take firm root.
But its resilience was tested by what came next,
a succession of rulers that gives the term "Roman Emperor"
its lurid associations with vanity,
debauchery
and insanity.
This hall is literally full of emperors
and as you can see, they come in various shapes and sizes.
One of the interesting things about the Empire
is it often didn't seem to matter what the man at the top was like.
He could be mad, bad and dangerous.
But the Empire just carried on regardless.
The machinery of Empire, trade, tax collecting and public works,
rarely missed a beat, but the imperial system
distorted the values and ideals of Rome.
For Rome's elite, life under an emperor was a form of exquisite torture.
The closer you got to the centre of power,
the greater your chances of an untimely death.
Such unspoken inequalities often created embarrassing
and even dangerous situations.
The Emperor Claudius, who often got things wrong,
used to turn up at senators' houses for dinner, uninvited,
leaving his hosts to sit there quaking in their boots over dinner
as his bodyguards served up the food.
And one obsequious senator threw himself at the feet
of the aged Emperor Tiberius, knocking him over.
And he almost ended up with a guardsman's sword in his guts.
Many senators embraced Stoicism.
The cultivation of indifference
in the face of life's trials and tribulations,
as a psychological defence mechanism
against these arbitrary and dangerous times.
Many of them decided to exercise the ultimate freedom
that they still had left under a tyrant.
And that was choosing the manner and the time of their own deaths.
So there was a whole series of senatorial suicides.
Including men inviting all their friends to dinner,
where they read poetry, ate something, and then they went off to the baths
where the guy who was going to commit suicide slashed his wrists.
But then in another twist, one of these guys
had his hands bandaged up again,
and he went out again, spent some more time
discussing things with his friends before going back in
and having the bandages removed where he bled to death.
While Rome's imperial system drove its elite to suicide,
the masses were encouraged to behave like spoilt brats.
(INDISTINCT CHATTERING)
The million-strong population of Rome was always one grievance away
from becoming a million-strong mob.
And so smart emperors kept it sweet with panem et circenses,
bread and circuses.
The bread came first.
Augustus handed out a free monthly dole of grain to 200,000 Romans,
one-fifth of the city's population.
He could afford to be generous
because Rome had acquired the ancient world's great bread basket,
North Africa.
The abundant fruits of empire helped fill the bellies of the Romans
and kept them quiet.
There was a trading boom in the Mediterranean
unprecedented in the ancient world as ships headed to Rome,
laden with grain, building materials and amphora full of olive oil.
So much for the bread,
but the plebs also demanded stronger meat.
(CROWD ExCLAIMING)
The circuses.
The Roman games had gladiators, chariots and wild beasts.
These Las vegas-scale spectaculars were paid for by the emperor
or his representatives.
(CROWD CHEERING)
And death was always top of the bill.
In this murky, subterranean world, animals and men would wait
before they were taken up to the arena above,
to die for the entertainment of the crowds there.
The Roman Empire, built on bread and circuses,
cheap food and cheap thrills.
(PEOPLE APPLAUDING)
The grim theatre of death that played out on the sandy floor
of the amphitheatre was accompanied by cut and thrust
of a more subtle kind.
The political interaction that took place between the crowd
and their emperor.
There were ways of doing it, and ways of not doing it.
So, Tiberius got it completely wrong and came across as being very aloof
because he didn't turn up at all.
Then, there were others like Claudius, who just enjoyed it a bit too much.
He used to like looking at the expressions
on the faces of the dying gladiators.
Others, also didn't get involved enough, so Demition
liked to sit in his box but he spent most of his time chatting
to a dwarf in a red cloak.
And then there was Nero, who went too far
and actually became the star of the show himself
and performed as a musician.
So for emperors,
the games were a time when you had to get the balance right
between participation and maintaining your dignity.
But keeping the Romans in Rome, happy and docile,
(INAUDIBLE)
was only one part of the challenge of running the empire.
What about the 59 million other citizens and subjects of Rome
scattered over its vast territories?
To keep them in their place as compliant, tax-paying units,
emperors depended upon the loyalty and commitment of local elites.
It was they, in thousands of towns, large and small,
who really ran the Roman Empire.
Extracting revenues, building public works
and keeping order by imitating the bread and circuses programme
developed in the capital.
The system was remarkably efficient and streamlined.
The whole of the Empire was administered by just 10,000 of these bureaucrats.
Modern Britain has half a million.
To cultivate and maintain their loyalty,
they were granted full citizen rights and generous tax concessions.
And perhaps most importantly there was the Imperial cult
which turned emperors and their families into gods.
Here the Emperor Antoninus Pius is being elevated to the heavens
on the wings of an eagle.
In Ephesus in Turkey, the divine Hadrian had his own temple.
And members of Augustus's dynasty were worshipped here in Nimes in France.
This bronze statue behind me is of the Emperor Claudius,
and it comes from the temple of Augustus,
Herculaneum in Southern Italy.
But the Imperial cult wasn't just about religion,
it was also about political control.
The problem that an emperor had was how to connect
with his millions of subjects over a huge empire,
people who he was never going to meet personally.
The Imperial cult acted as a kind of hologram,
beaming the emperor right across his vast empire
and allowing him to create some kind of personal connection with his subjects.
But when it came to religion, the Romans were not fundamentalists.
Here at the Temple of Luxor in Egypt,
it was perfectly acceptable to worship the ancient Egyptian gods
alongside the deified emperors of the Imperial cult.
And elsewhere in the Empire, there was plenty of other evidence
for Rome's religious tolerance.
We're here in the Bekaa valley in Lebanon,
what was once Heliopolis, the City of the Sun.
A little bit of Rome from Rome.
Before it was called Heliopolis,
this was known as the Phoenician City of Baalbek.
Dedicated to the god, Baal.
Alexander Greekified the name.
But the Romans, when they took control, preferred to keep things as they were.
Imperial Rome was just not interested in name changes,
preferring instead to add new labels rather than erasing the old.
In spiritual matters, the Empire was a sponge,
absorbing foreign gods as readily as it had gobbled up foreign territory.
This was the Temple of Jupiter.
But the Jupiter worshipped here was also understood to be Baal-Hadad.
A local storm deity
who had been honoured here for centuries before the first togas arrived.
The Temple of venus over there was also the Temple of Astarte,
the Phoenician goddess of love.
And at the Temple of Bacchus, the wine god,
it was also possible to pray to Dionysus,
an ancient eastern fertility deity.
The Romans were big tent polytheists.
All were welcome to local and traditional gods.
Just as long as they were willing to offer up
a pinch of incense to the Imperial cult.
Rome tolerated everything, except for rebellion, political disorder
and the non-payment of taxes.
For a region like this, which had known the scourge of war in the past,
that must have sounded like a pretty good deal.
But the ironic truth about the Roman Empire was this.
The further you were from the toxic centre that Rome was becoming,
the more the stability and security created by the Pax Romana
could be enjoyed and exploited.
In the second century AD, where I'm standing now
would have been on the very edge of the Roman Empire.
This way lies Rome, 1500 miles,
as the Imperial Eagle flies.
And this way lies Mesopotamia, Persia,
India, China,
and the very edges of the known world.
When we talk about the edge of empire,
we tend to think of Hadrian's famous wall,
clambering over the rain-soaked hills of Cumbria and Northumberland,
manned by homesick squaddies grumbling about their chilblains.
Well, here, there was no wall or chilblains.
This was Palmyra, the queen of the desert,
and it tells a very different story of what life could be like
under the Pax Romana.
Rome had acquired this desert territory during the last decades of the Republic.
And Palmyra was first garrisoned during the reign of Augustus.
Even then it was a vital link in the east-west trade route,
providing an essential stopover point
between the upper waters of the Euphrates
and the Mediterranean coast.
For the Palmyrans, the arrival of the Romans simply meant
that a whole new market opportunity had opened up.
From the workshops and factories of Rome, supplies of manufactured goods.
From India and the east, spices and silk.
(INDISTINCT CHATTERING)
Of course, we've met these people before.
The bronze-age merchants travelling with their mule trains
from Ashur to Anatolia.
The iron-age Phoenicians crisscrossing the Mediterranean
in their sturdy ships.
Well, they're here too, in Palmyra, the essential middlemen,
stitching together to the political map of the ancient world
with the thread of trade.
And as the Assyrians had their mules, and the Phoenicians had their ships,
so the Palmyrans had their favourite mode of transport.
The camel.
(BELLOWING)
By mastering the art of crossing the desert with their camel trains,
the Palmyrans were able to join together
what nature had put asunder.
But like all traders, what the Palmyrans needed most
was peace and stability.
Reliable supplies of stock and stable markets
so that they could pursue their ultimate objective of getting rich, quick.
This wasn't always easy.
To the immediate east of them, lay the kingdom of Parthia,
a thorn in the side of Rome for centuries.
Like others before him,
the Emperor Trajan decided to solve
Rome's eastern problems once and for all.
He led his legions into Parthia
and then beyond, to the ancient cities of Mesopotamia
following the footsteps of Alexander the Great.
Whereas Alexander's victories had fuelled an appetite for further glory,
Trajan came to a rather different conclusion.
This country is so measurably vast and separated from Rome
by such incalculable distance we cannot possibly administer it.
He then turned around and went back west.
That was AD 117.
And if you wanted to date the high watermark of the Roman Empire,
then Trajan's, rather world-weary conclusion, would arguably be it.
Under Trajan's successor, Hadrian,
Rome reverted to a policy of peace with its eastern neighbours.
After 500 years of expansion, Rome finally decided enough was enough.
Fuzzy borders became lines in the sand,
and Palmyra, on the critical interface between the Roman
and the non-Roman world became a free city.
And that was when the good times really began to roll.
Sometime in the 2nd Century AD, over around a 150 years afterwards,
the Palmyrans achieved the perfect formula
in their relationship with Rome.
First of all, they were important because they provided Rome
with something it wanted. Silks and spices.
And second, there was no conflict of interest there
because the Palmyrans were only interested in profits,
whereas Rome, like all empires, was obsessed with its own destiny.
Finally, and best of all,
the Palmyrans were far enough away from Rome
to be left alone to get on with it.
And today we can see the virtues of being left alone,
in the elaborate mausoleums
put up by some of the leading families of Palmyra,
both above ground and underground.
Memorials to their wealth and status,
but also the benefits of being in the Empire
rather than of the Empire.
But it wasn't just merchant princes who enjoyed the benefits of Empire.
The ancient Greeks always used to say that the basis
for any successful society was Eunomia, good order,
and that's what you can sense in a set of remarkable archaeological finds
from some of Rome's Egyptian cities.
The banal blessings of good order writ large.
As any private eye worth his salt will tell you
what people throw away is often more revealing
than what they keep and cherish.
And it was certainly the case here, in the Roman City of Antonopoulos
are amongst the tonnes of broken pottery, archaeologist struck gold.
Papyri, thousands and thousands of them.
So many that it's going to take generations of scholars
to decipher and publish them all.
This wealth of written material
allows us to reconstruct in minute detail
what life was like here in the heyday of the Empire.
Most of it is the ancient equivalent of those mountains of paper
that clog up our lives today.
Bills, tax returns, personal letters,
invitations, certificates,
contracts, to-do lists.
The kind of stuff that's either too important to throw away
or too trivial to be bothered with.
In the nearby city of Oxyrhynchus comes more of the same.
This one addresses the serious problem of donkeys being driven too quickly
through the busy streets of the city.
And this little note was written by two friends,
Apium and Epimus, to a school mate of theirs, Ephroditos.
And it contains the most extraordinary suggestion.
If you let us bugger you, if it's okay with you,
we shall stop thrashing you.
And there's even a helpful little illustration here.
So Aphrodidius knew exactly what was expected of him.
And then there's this.
This is a letter by Diogenes, to one of his employees.
A thousand times I've written to you to cut down the vines of pohaya.
But today again I get a letter from you asking what should be done.
To which I reply -
Cut them down. Cut them down. Cut them down. Cut them down
and cut them down. There I say it again and again.
Go on, Diogenes, why don't you say exactly what you mean?
But there's a twist to this tale of hotrod donkey riders
smutty teenagers and slow-witted servants.
And it suggests that the people of Antonopoulos and Oxyrhynchus
had other things on their minds.
And you could say that these concerns
presaged the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.
Amongst the charming trivia,
archaeologist also found this rather different text.
The Kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you.
When you come to know yourselves, when you'll become known
and you will realise that it is you who are the sons of the living father.
But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty,
and it is you who are that poverty.
These words are from the Apocryphal Gospel of St Thomas,
from which three extracts have been found
amongst the bills and the junk mail
and what it shows is that alongside the everyday concerns
about vines and donkeys, that there were people here
grappling with profound and unsettling questions
about the meaning of life and the fate of their immortal souls.
Questions which the Roman Empire, despite its material wealth
was simply unable to answer.
In many ways, the Roman Empire represents
the zenith of ancient civilisation.
Its values had taken root throughout its far flung territories.
But its inability to address the spiritual anxieties of its subjects
would prove to be a fatal flaw.
This weakness would be exposed and exploited by an obscure Jewish sect
that begun in the Roman province of Judaea
with the execution of an unorthodox religious leader
called Yeshua Ben Yosef.
(BELL TOLLING)
Christianity would go on to become the official religion of Rome.
And the major contributor to its downfall.
The cult's extraordinary growth began after the Jewish revolt of 66 AD,
and the destruction of the High Temple in Jerusalem
by Titus, the son of the Roman Emperor, Vespasian.
This triumphal arch was built to commemorate
Titus' suppression of the Jews.
And inside it, there are two friezes.
On one side, we have the Emperor,
flanked by the winged goddess of victory in his chariot
and surrounded by his troops.
And on the other, we have the spoils of victory.
The most sacred objects from the temple on the mount.
The Menorah and the silver trumpets amongst them.
So, this arch was as much about issuing a severe warning
of the dangers of resisting the Pax Romana
as it was about tasting the sweetness of victory.
But what the Romans actually did was sow the seeds
for their later problems.
After the failed revolt,
Jews dispersed throughout the Mediterranean world
carrying with them the beliefs of Christianity.
These beliefs would put Christians on a collision course with Rome.
They were fiercely monotheistic and baulked at the Imperial cult.
They made a sharp distinction between the sacred and the secular.
And they looked forward to a glorious life after death,
making a mockery of the Empire's worldly devotion
to the here and now.
Christianity initially took root away from the Imperial centre
in places like Carthage in North Africa.
For the authorities here, to be a Christian
was to be a revolutionary and a target for persecution.
A new word will enter the religious lexicon.
Martyr.
The problem for the Romans was that for the Christians
martyrdom was a privilege, not a punishment.
After all it offered a guaranteed pass into the kingdom of heaven.
In Carthage in 203 AD, the amphitheatre here
was the site of a notorious killing of Christians.
Worryingly for the authorities, one of the female victims,
Perpetua, came from one of the cities' elite families.
Perpetua had been arrested with a group of other Christians
including her pregnant servant, Felicitas.
Both women refused to renounce their faith,
and both were sentenced to die in the amphitheatre.
Even though just two days before the execution,
Felicitas gave birth to a baby daughter.
Felicitas and Perpetua were brought up naked into the arena
and the crowd immediately started shouting
for them to be sent down below again.
Not because they wanted to show them mercy
because they felt squeamish about Felicitas' lactating breasts
which were dripping milk all over the arena floor.
When they were sent up again, they were fully clothed.
They were whipped and then a wild cow was sent
into the arena to trample them.
But even after that, they were still alive
and swordsmen were sent into the arena to finish them off.
The swordsman that was sent in to kill Perpetua,
his hands were shaking so much that she had to hold them
so he could cut her throat.
Perpetua had got what she wanted, a martyr's death,
and this bloody ritual would be repeated sporadically
in amphitheatres across the Roman Empire,
over the next century.
But persecution was never a coherent policy.
And when the Roman authorities abandoned it,
frustrated martyrs had to find other ways
to express their rejection of the Roman world.
If it couldn't be achieved quickly through the executioner's blade,
salvation would have to be earned the hard way
through extreme asceticism.
This is the world's oldest Christian monastery
St Anthony's in Egypt.
Anthony was born into a wealthy Egyptian family
around 250 AD.
At the age of 34, he decided to renounce
his material possessions and dedicate his life to God.
So, he headed into the desert to live the life of a hermit in a cave.
-MILES: Father Damien. -Yeah.
How many steps are there up to the cave of St Anthony?
I think maybe one thousand and three hundred.
You know that it's like the way to the heaven.
It's a very narrow way and very tough way
but when you reach there you'll get the prize.
(BELL TOLLING)
So now we arrived. Here is our treasure, actually.
This is the real monastery, I believe.
This is the cave of St Anthony where he used to live here.
And I believe that his blessing is still present inside the cave.
-Just go and have... And enjoy the time. -Thank you very much, Father Damien.
Okay.
Christianity was particularly attractive to those who wanted to opt out
from the comfortable certainties of the imperial system.
They wanted spiritual rather than material enrichment.
For these young men and women, asceticism offered an escape
from the straitjacket of public service,
private enterprise and family commitments,
whilst at the same time offering a blueprint for a new life.
One of poverty, abstinence, charity and penance.
(CHURCH BELL TOLLING)
(PRIEST SINGING)
For them all the achievements of the Pax Romana,
the laws, the aqueducts, the peace and the prosperity,
were essentially meaningless.
But it's hard to see how a small, isolated group of gentle ascetics
with their eyes fervently focussed on the promise of a world to come
could be a problem to the mighty Roman Empire.
(ALL CHANTING)
Well, for a start, Perpetua in Carthage, Anthony in Egypt
and the thousands who followed their example
were precisely the kind of wealthy, educated people
who would have been expected to take up active roles
in the running and the administration of the Empire.
By dropping out they sapped the energies of a system
that ultimately depended on the active commitment of its elites
to keep the machinery of empire ticking over.
But it would take something far more radical
to turn this revolutionary movement
into a force to be reckoned with.
The spiritual restlessness that drove some to martyrdom
and others to the desert
went to the very top of the imperial system.
This is Constantine.
The man who would turn a Pagan Empire into a Christian one.
He was a man of action rather than a man of faith.
But even he seems to have been looking for answers
that his civilisation couldn't supply.
Constantine was actually quite promiscuous
when it came to one-to-one relationships with individual gods.
By the time he got to Christianity,
he'd already been through Apollo and the sun god Sol Invictus.
But his relationship with Christianity would endure.
It was possibly because of Christianity's monotheistic tendencies
fitted very well with the man who had ultimately been responsible
for the collapse of the Tetrarchy.
One emperor, one god.
The Tetrarchy had involved the carving up of the Empire
between four different emperors.
It had been created by the Emperor Diocletian
at the end of the 3rd century AD
because the Empire had become too large and unwieldy
for one man to rule.
But after Diocletian's death
the rival emperors, inevitably, went to war.
This climaxed in 312 AD
at the battle of the Milvian Bridge on the outskirts of Rome
where Constantine defeated his rival Maxentius,
who drowned in the Tiber.
Christians travelling with Constantine's army
were quick to attribute the victory, commemorated on this arch,
to the divine favour of their God.
Constantine, always ready to give a god the benefit of the doubt,
showed his gratitude a year later,
by passing an edict of toleration
granting Christians freedom of worship throughout the Empire.
A decade later, when Constantine emerged as sole emperor,
the obscure Messianic cult from Judaea really came in from the cold.
Constantine demonstrated his commitment to Christianity
with hard cash.
He endowed a series of magnificent churches,
including Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome,
and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem.
Which was built on the supposed site of the Son of God's tomb
on the orders of Constantine's pious mother, Helena.
These would become new centres of political as well as spiritual power
in Constantine's empire.
In return for political support and generous patronage,
Constantine expected one thing above all from his church.
A consistent message on Christianity's core beliefs.
The Council of Nicaea held in 325 AD in present day Turkey
was the first and most famous attempt of the Christian establishment
to get its story straight.
As you can see, there's not much left of the place
where the first Council of Nicaea was held.
However, although the bricks and mortar are long gone,
the legacy of the meeting of bishops that took place here
in 325 AD has endured.
Because it was here that the Rome of Romulus and the Republic
and Augustus Caesar and the Empire began to make way for a new Rome.
A Rome of priests, popes
and the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.
Constantine presented the Council
with what seemed like a reasonable request.
A firm date for Easter
and agreement on the precise nature of the relationship
that stood at the heart of Christian faith.
That between the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.
Easier asked than answered.
These seats were used for a much later Council of Nicaea
which was held here in the Church of Hagia Sophia
centuries after the first one.
But I don't suppose the seating technology had changed very much.
And the point of this
is that these seats are incredibly cramped and uncomfortable.
And every time you sat down they must have served as an invitation
to come up with a quick compromise.
And that's exactly what Constantine wanted.
A quick, political fix
to what he said were nothing more than small and trifling matters.
But what he didn't appreciate was that this was a new type of politics,
the politics of faith.
And in this new political landscape nothing was small or trifling.
The bishops ended up compromising
on a form of words familiar to all Christians today.
We believe in one God, the Father Almighty,
and in one Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God,
and begotten of the Father and in the Holy Ghost.
(HORN BLOWING)
Constantine was not finished yet.
He made a decision that effectively brought to an end
five hundred years of Roman history.
On the 11th of May, 330,
Rome was finally eclipsed as the capital of the Roman Empire.
Of course there had been contenders before
but this time it was for real.
Five hundred miles east of Rome on the straits of the Bosphorus,
Constantine founded the city of Constantinople.
And he planned it to be nothing less than the new Rome.
Constantine based himself in Constantinople,
present day Istanbul, until he died in 337 AD
when he was finally baptised on his deathbed.
(BELL TOLLING)
With just one exception, Constantine's successors
would follow his example and be Christians.
Their support made the Church a real power in the land
and towards the end of the 4th century AD
began to assert its independence from its imperial patrons.
The main driving force on the Christians' side
was Ambrose, Bishop of Milan.
A clever and energetic man
who was clearly unfazed with dealing with emperors.
Before he joined the Church, Ambrose had had a successful career
as a senator and governor.
Now, Ambrose was firmly of the belief that it was the Christian church,
not the Roman Emperor who was God's main representative on Earth.
And this position was bound to set him on a collision course
with emperors who were used by this time
in intervening in religious affairs whenever they felt like it.
So, the scene was now set for a dramatic and very public showdown
here, in Imperial Milan.
It pitted Ambrose against the Emperor Theodosius,
a battle hardened campaigner but also a pious Christian.
The spark was the massacre of 7,000 rebellious subjects
under the orders of Theodosius, in Thessaloniki in Greece.
Many of the victims were Christians and Ambrose felt compelled to respond.
He banned Theodosius from the congregation in his cathedral
and threatened him with excommunication if he didn't repent.
Theodosius took the hint,
and for the next couple of months the citizens of Milan
were treated to the extraordinary spectacle of their emperor,
the most powerful and feared man in the Roman world.
Doing the acts of public penance, stripped of his imperial insignia.
But when eventually, the chastened emperor
was readmitted back into the Catholic fold,
Ambrose insisted that he stood with the congregation,
rather than joining the priests in the sacred sanctuary.
Ambrose had emphatically and literally put Theodosius in his place.
Ambrose's spectacular humiliation of the Emperor
impressed the ambitious men about where real power now lay.
One of these men was a brilliant scholar called Augustine.
Baptized here in Milan by Ambrose himself.
Augustine had been born into a fairly prosperous family in North Africa.
And after a good education in Carthage,
had landed a professorship here in Milan.
But after being baptized, he decided to return home
and devote himself to God.
This was a decision that would not only change his life
but also the whole course of Western Christianity.
Augustine returned to Africa,
intending to follow the example of St Anthony,
leading a simple monastic life.
But his plans were changed for him when he visited Hippo Regius,
a port city on the North African coast.
When he worshipped at the church here,
he soon got noticed.
With his classical education and oratorical skills,
the congregation urged him to stay on, which he did,
and eventually he would become their bishop.
Augustine was soon playing an active part
in the religious battles that raged,
using pulpit and pen to attack pagans and heretics alike.
He'd been bishop for 15 years
when history gave him a controversy that he could really get his teeth into.
In the late summer of 410, shocking news reached Hippo Regius.
Rome, the founding capital, the greatest empire
that history had ever known
had fallen to Aleric and his visigothic army.
Three days of looting followed.
And many of Rome's finest buildings were destroyed.
The mausoleum at the Great Augustus was ransacked.
Burial urns were overturned.
And the ashes of Roman Emperors were scattered on the streets.
Rome may have been stripped of its pre-eminence by Constantine,
but it still retained a symbolic importance,
and its fall to German barbarians
sent reverberations throughout the Empire.
In the weeks and months that followed,
Hippo filled with traumatised refugees from Rome.
They wanted to know why the Mother City had fallen.
Augustine took up his pen and gave them an answer.
It was a blistering attack on the myth and mystique of Rome.
Writing a Christian counter history of the city,
a no-holds-barred, decline and fall,
from the city's virtuous founders
to the decadent, selfish, materialistic citizens of his own day.
"If Rome fell", Augustine argued, "it was because it deserved to."
In his coup de grace, Augustine attacked the very ideals that Rome,
and indeed all the great civilisations of the Ancient World aspired to.
These earthly cities were doomed to fail
because they were the work of corrupt mankind.
It took Augustine 13 years to finish his masterpiece,
The City of God.
And for me, there are a few bleaker assessments
of the futility of civilisation building.
For Augustine, no purpose or meaning could be found in the Earthly City.
Only the City of God offered these.
And that could only be reached beyond the grave.
Until that glorious release,
the righteous man should act like a pilgrim
in the fallen world of mankind.
Taking advantage of the peace and security
that civilisation offered,
but without ever mistaking it for anything substantial or enduring.
The good man was just passing through
in the great technological, political,
and cultural achievements of civilisation
were mere stepping stones to the eternal glory of the City of God.
(MUEZZIN CALLING)
It's been 1500 years now,
since the City of God took on the City of Man.
And in that time, other prophets from other religions
have added their voices of criticism.
Despite its manifold and serial failures,
the City of Man has endured.
Elaborate schemes for political reform,
social justice or national greatness
have been tried and tested, often to destruction.
And in the darkest days,
many of which have fallen in our own times,
the very idea of civilisation has been called into question.
But despite all the calamities, crises, and dead-ends,
we have returned again and again
to the possibilities offered by the City of Man.
Hoping to get it right next time.
There's no going back to the comfortable securities
of family, kin, and tribe.
Civilisation has transformed us into a species
which for better or worse chooses to live with strangers.
And we need to keep on trying to find ways
of making that unlikely choice work.
Personally, I'm optimistic.
Homo sapiens, they say, has been around for at least 160,000 years.
The City, for less than 6000.
So it's early days yet,
we must keep the faith and try and make it work.