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00:00They say that, when in Rome, do as the Romans do.
00:11But in the history of the ancient world,
00:13what exactly did the Romans do?
00:18The story of ancient Rome is a familiar one.
00:21The dynamic republic which was transformed into the greatest empire
00:25the world has ever known,
00:27and which laid the foundations of Western civilisation.
00:31But what was it about ancient Rome that made it so different
00:34from the civilisations that had gone before?
00:37Well, one clue lies in the word civilisation.
00:41It comes from kivis, which means citizen, a Latin word,
00:45not Greek, Punic, Babylonian or Akkadian,
00:48or any of the other mother tongues of the great civilisations.
00:52What Rome managed to achieve had never been done before.
00:55It created a civilisation for export.
01:00Civilisation is so much more than just culture.
01:05Culture is eminently exportable,
01:07as the Hellenistic kings that came after Alexander the Great had shown.
01:14If the Romans wanted culture,
01:16they knew that they could go to the marketplace
01:19and buy it from some clever Greek.
01:22Meanwhile, they were free to focus on something far more complex
01:26than sculpture or philosophy.
01:29Politics.
01:31Civilisation's dark arts.
01:34The Senate.
01:37The law courts.
01:39And when all else failed, the battlefield.
01:42These were the places where Roman civilisation was forged.
01:48Along the way, they developed systems and institutions,
01:51from law to engineering,
01:53who were pragmatic, durable
01:55and free from the clutter of ideology or dogma.
02:00But Rome was no utopia on the Tiber,
02:02and there was no philosopher king
02:04who had planned the civilisation that had been hammered out here.
02:08It was a familiar story of crude improvisation and blind panic,
02:13as the elite desperately clung on to power
02:16and the masses boiled and seethed.
02:19At the same time, external enemies menaced both.
02:23But Rome's response to these crises was entirely unfamiliar.
02:28Rome didn't merely conquer the world,
02:30it transformed the world into Rome.
02:36They made their enemies an offer they couldn't refuse.
02:39The chance to become Roman.
02:41And this turned out to be the key to the success of a civilisation
02:45that would spread from the banks of the Tiber
02:48to the shores of the ancient world.
02:59So the story begins with a bunch of insignificant hill villages
03:04in the back of beyond,
03:06and it ends with a mighty republican empire.
03:09But things are never as simple as that, are they?
03:14After the Romans had conquered the world,
03:16the only people they had left to defeat were themselves.
03:47From the first glimpses we get of Rome,
03:50it's impossible to see the greatness that lay in its future.
03:55In the dark ages that followed the collapse
03:58of the Bronze Age civilisations,
04:00it was just another cluster of clannish villages,
04:03fighting for survival.
04:06But at least the Romans had chosen a good spot for their city.
04:10Situated in Latium in central Italy,
04:13on a group of seven hills,
04:15it was the best crossing point of the River Tiber.
04:21Like Sparta, geography made Rome into a land power,
04:25a nation of foot sloggers.
04:27And its USP was its strategic position,
04:30one of central Italy's most important trade routes.
04:33Then, as now, Rome was awash with foreigners.
04:38Archaic central Italy was the birthplace
04:41Archaic central Italy was a fluid world.
04:47People moved freely between cities
04:50and Rome became a real melting pot.
05:00Rome soon began to develop the institutions and public spaces
05:04that we identify with urban civilisation.
05:07Planned streets, temples and a forum.
05:12These friezes show the early history of the city.
05:16Now, uncovering the early history of any civilisation is difficult,
05:21but with Rome, it's very complicated indeed,
05:24because of its longevity and success.
05:27Later Roman historians clearly embellished the early history of Rome
05:31to disguise its humble beginnings.
05:34After all, any great city needed a great history.
05:39You can tell a lot about a society
05:42from the stories they tell about themselves.
05:45And as creation myths go,
05:47the legend of Romulus and Remus is revelatory.
05:51The Romans clearly liked to see themselves
05:54as a product of the school of hard knocks.
05:57The twin brothers had been chucked into the Tiber
06:01to drown by their great uncle
06:03and were washed up at the future site of Rome
06:06where a maternal-minded she-wolf took over their upbringing.
06:10But what could have been a heartwarming story of adversity overcome
06:15had a sting in the tail.
06:17Romulus and Remus fell out with one another
06:20and Romulus, in a fit of pique, murdered Remus,
06:23spilling his blood all over the foundations of his fledgling city.
06:27For later Romans, who knew all about the civil wars that had wracked their city,
06:32that Rome had been born out of bloody fratricide,
06:35would have seemed very fitting.
06:41Rome's early history reflects two abiding obsessions.
06:45The first was the threat from external forces
06:48and the second was internal dissension.
06:51Weakness in the face of either could lead to only one thing.
06:55Tyranny.
06:58The Romans were instinctive king-haters.
07:02Very early on, they threw out their hereditary monarchs,
07:06a historic moment recalled in another important creation myth,
07:10the rape of Lucretia.
07:14Instead of a kingdom, Rome presented itself to the world as a republic,
07:19from the Latin meaning public affairs.
07:23And the component parts of this public affair
07:26were memorably summarised by the initials SPQR,
07:32which can still be seen all over Rome today.
07:38SPQR.
07:41Senatus Populusque Romanus.
07:44The Senate and the Roman people.
07:47A simple, resonant phrase,
07:49the source of all authority for the actions of the Roman Republic,
07:53a phrase that masked all the unresolved tensions
07:56between the strong and the weak,
07:58the powerful and the powerless,
08:00and the haves and have-nots.
08:05As we've already seen in our story of the ancient world,
08:09when societies give up on the simple hierarchies
08:12derived from royal dynasties,
08:15politics instantly becomes more complex and more unstable.
08:21The Roman Republic was no exception.
08:26Rome's political machine consisted of two consuls, or magistrates,
08:31elected by the Senate and the people,
08:33who held office together for a year at a time.
08:38This deceptively simple system was designed to ensure
08:42that no single individual became too powerful.
08:46But from it, the Romans span a tangled web of intrigue,
08:51power plays, backroom deals and backstabbings.
08:57Politics as usual, in other words.
09:03The Roman Republican Constitution was a slightly creaking crackpot affair,
09:08designed just to keep the show on the road.
09:12The SPQR rulebook turned Roman politics into a kind of bicycle race.
09:18Contenders hung back, jockeying for position,
09:22until someone suddenly made a break for the front.
09:25And then it was every man for himself.
09:29But although elite Romans were hard-wired to achieve power and glory,
09:34the genius of the Roman system was that it managed to avoid competitiveness,
09:39turning into a free-for-all, thanks to another set of rules,
09:43a moral code that expressed the noble Roman ethos.
09:49Courage, clemency, wisdom, duty, modesty, gravitas.
09:58And the moral authority underpinning the Republic of Virtue
10:02was enforced from beyond the grave.
10:05For the budding Roman senator, the words and deeds of his ancestors
10:09provided the standard to which his behaviour should aspire,
10:13and the measure by which his achievements would be judged.
10:18These tombs date to the Republican period.
10:21The first thing you notice is that the Romans were buried as families.
10:26So this is the Quintii, and here we have the Clodii.
10:31And looking at these two guys' ears, they're definitely from the same family.
10:36Perhaps the most important thing of all for the Roman aristocrat
10:39was to compete politically.
10:41Not just for their own individual honour,
10:43but also for the honour of their family.
10:45Because the big senatorial families were like brands,
10:49and the brand with each generation needed to remain strong.
10:54The long shadow cast by venerable ancestors,
10:57was impossible to shake,
10:59especially as their memory was immortalised by wax effigies
11:03which were paraded at regular intervals.
11:07Whatever achievements a Roman aristocrat could point to,
11:10the dead were never satisfied.
11:14But there was a problem with this inbuilt hunger
11:17for political office and individual glory.
11:20There simply weren't enough jobs to go around.
11:23For instance, the most senior office, consul,
11:25well, there were only two of those a year,
11:27and that meant that somebody was always going to miss out.
11:30So there was an inbuilt tension
11:32to, on the one hand, the desire for individual glory,
11:35and the other, the stability and coherence that the state needed.
11:40And then there was that second initial in SPQR,
11:44P for Populus, the people.
11:47The masses, the plebeians, were no passive bystanders
11:50and were willing to fight for their share of the power.
11:55In 495 BC, the senate and the people had a falling out.
12:00The plebeians withdrew to the sacred mount in the north of the city
12:04and declared a kind of general strike
12:07for farmers, craftsmen and, critically, the poor.
12:11Faced with losing virtually its whole army,
12:14the senate offered a compromise,
12:16the creation of a popular tribunate.
12:20Each year, two plebeian tribunes were elected
12:23to protect the interests of the people in the senate.
12:28The plebs now had a stake in the success of their city
12:31and a source of their identity.
12:35The plebeians were forced to leave the city
12:38and a source of their identity.
12:42It's a spirit which still lies at the heart
12:45of the Roman working-class psyche.
12:57One of the things about the Romans was their extreme attachment
13:00to the actual city of Rome.
13:02Not since Athens had a city played such a central part
13:05in the fate of the state.
13:08Alexander's murderous trail across the globe,
13:11the Phoenicians' merchant spirit, the wandering Persian court,
13:15all announced the essential mobility of power.
13:21But for the Romans, Rome would remain an obsession
13:24throughout their long history.
13:30This Roman obsession with their city
13:33can be pegged to one humiliating event.
13:36In 990 BC, a horde of Celts from northern Italy
13:40marched southwards, crushed the Roman army and sacked Rome.
13:48A small number of defenders managed to hold out
13:51up here on the Capitoline Hill,
13:53and they only got away with it because of the sacred geese
13:56that were kept up here, who started honking
13:59when the Celts tried to get up the hill.
14:01But even they had to surrender eventually,
14:04because the Celts only left the city
14:06after the payment of a large sum of gold.
14:11But the pragmatic Romans were always open
14:14to the lessons that adversity teaches.
14:17The marauding Celts taught them
14:19that a dramatic shift in strategy was required
14:22if national security was to be achieved,
14:25and the key lay in its treatment of its neighbours.
14:30In the past, when Rome had defeated its neighbours in war,
14:34it followed the time-honoured traditions
14:37of pillage, plunder and enslavement.
14:43But now the Romans realised that the way forward
14:46was to absorb their vanquished neighbours
14:48rather than pillaging them.
14:50From now on, defeated enemies in Latium
14:53would be turned into Romans,
14:55and their territory turned into Rome.
14:59CHILDREN SCREAM
15:03Generally, in the Hellenistic world,
15:05territory was there to be conquered,
15:08but at the same time, if circumstances dictated,
15:11it could also be given up.
15:13Easy come, easy go.
15:15But with the Romans, it was very different.
15:19All territory that Rome conquered
15:21immediately became Roman land,
15:23as Roman as the city of Rome itself.
15:29The ancient world had never seen anything quite like this.
15:33The Romans had rewritten the rule book.
15:36They came, they saw, they conquered,
15:39and then they assimilated.
15:42Rome's wars with its neighbours
15:44also helped to forge and refine
15:46the signature weapon of ancient Rome, the legion.
15:50That formidable conscript army,
15:52with its centurions and eagles,
15:54its hobnailed sandals and its gladius,
15:57was the stabbing sword that ripped through the opposition ranks
16:01in close-quarter fighting.
16:04As one by one, the Samnites, the Etruscans
16:09and the city-states of Campania fell,
16:12the tactics, efficiency and dogged resilience
16:15of Rome's legionaries increased.
16:18But best of all, their numbers increased too,
16:21as defeated enemies became assimilated fellow citizens,
16:25making it impossible for conscription into the ranks.
16:30One of Rome's enemies complained
16:32that it was like fighting against the Hydra.
16:34The Hydra was a mythical beast with many heads,
16:37and each time you cut a head off, a brand-new one grew back.
16:41Well, he had a point,
16:43because any allies that were given Latin rights
16:46were also expected to supply troops for the Roman army.
16:49So each time Rome conquered a new bit of territory,
16:52the Roman army was replenished.
16:56EXPLOSIONS
17:01By the second century BC,
17:03over half the army was made up of non-Romans.
17:09Rome was transformed from being just another city-state in central Italy
17:14to an irresistible force.
17:20The scale of Rome's conquests were massive.
17:23It's been calculated that by the early years of the third century BC,
17:27Rome controlled more than 14,000 square kilometres of territory.
17:32That was 2.5 times more than it had done 50 years previously.
17:37And there were riches too.
17:39In 293, a triumph was held
17:42to celebrate the final victory over the Samnites,
17:45and amongst the spoils of war were over 1,800 pounds of silver
17:50and over 2.5 million pounds of bronze.
17:56The benefits to Rome were clear for all to see.
18:00Ostentatious new temples were built at the Lago Argentina,
18:04on the field of Mars.
18:07Through ruthless conquest and clever politics,
18:10a cluster of insignificant hill villages had become a city.
18:15Now the task was to build a civilisation.
18:21The brutal realities of war and conquest
18:25were followed by a very efficient system
18:27of incorporating subject populations,
18:30based on a series of legal rights, privileges and responsibilities.
18:35Under Rome, civilisation as a tool of imperialism at last came of age.
18:42The success of Rome was built on systems and infrastructures,
18:46not theories.
18:48The Romans took the machinery of civilisation,
18:51stripped it down and reassembled it
18:54in new, more efficient forms that really delivered.
18:59This was never more apparent than in the arena of the law.
19:04Law was one of the great building blocks of Roman civilisation,
19:08and the Roman legal system was one of the most sophisticated
19:12and enlightened of the ancient world.
19:14It was a mortar that held together its ever-expanding empire
19:18and gave its citizens, both great and small,
19:21the confidence that they'd have recourse to justice.
19:26There had been laws before, of course,
19:28from the Mesopotamians to the Greeks,
19:30but these were usually little more than pious platitudes
19:34about the protection of widows and orphans.
19:38Rome took the principles of justice for all
19:41Rome took the principles of justice for all
19:44and embodied them in a fully-fledged legal system.
19:49As early as the mid-fifth century BC,
19:51the earliest Roman laws were published in the form of the Twelve Tables,
19:56after a plebeian tribune called for laws to be written down
20:00to prevent wealthy senators from exploiting their position
20:03and seizing property.
20:06It was from this that the legal principle
20:09that property is sacred developed.
20:13In Roman society, it didn't matter who you were or where you were from,
20:18you had rights and opportunities, even if you were a slave.
20:25Rome, like every other ancient civilisation,
20:28had huge numbers of slaves,
20:30but the difference with the Romans was
20:32that it wasn't a question of once a slave, always a slave.
20:39Stop, O traveller, and turn left to the tomb.
20:45I presume it's that tomb over there.
20:48There lies the remains of a good and merciful man,
20:53a lover of the poor.
20:57Gaius Attilius Avodis.
21:03Freedman of Serrano.
21:07Cellar of Pearls on the Via Sacra.
21:12It's a wonderful and touching example of the opportunities
21:16which the Roman Empire offered to all sorts of different kinds of people,
21:20not only to foreigners, but also to people who had once been slaves,
21:24had won their freedom and since then had prospered.
21:28In this fluid social world, everything was possible.
21:37The National Archaeological Museum in Naples has a curious memorial
21:41which offers an insight into how citizens' rights, once gained,
21:45could be handed down for generations.
21:49This inscription records that Numerius Poppidius Celsinus
21:53prayed for the reconstruction of parts of the Temple of Isis at Pompeii
21:57after it had been destroyed in an earthquake.
22:00As a reward, he was allowed to join the town council.
22:04Now, there are thousands of inscriptions like this,
22:07but this one is rather strange,
22:09because Celsinus was only six years old.
22:13Now, the reason why his name appears on the inscription
22:16was because his father was a freedman,
22:18and as a freedman, he wasn't allowed to join the town council,
22:22but his son, as a Roman citizen from birth, could.
22:26So money lay at the heart of social mobility in the Roman Empire.
22:31But Rome's masterstroke was the way in which it translated
22:35the benefits of its civilisation into bricks and mortar.
22:39Public works the like of which the world had never seen before.
22:43These weren't just showcase pieces, like temples and palaces,
22:47they were massive infrastructure projects,
22:50like the famous road network, which turned Rome into a joined-up world.
22:56The first of these carriageways was this, the Appian Way,
23:00built in 312 BC to connect Rome with Campania, the blessed countryside.
23:12The Queen of Long Roads, as it was known, spanned 560km,
23:18eventually reaching Brundisium in the south.
23:21A superhighway for trade and troops, whichever circumstances required.
23:30Running alongside the roads were the aqueducts,
23:33those great monuments to the Roman values of public works and utility,
23:38which brought that most basic requirement for life,
23:41clean drinking water, to the people.
23:45The great and the good were justly proud of their aqueducts.
23:50A leading senator, Sextus Julius from Tinus, wrote...
23:54I ask you, just compare with the vast monuments of this vital aqueduct
23:59network, those useless pyramids,
24:02or the good-for-nothing tourist attractions of the Greeks.
24:06The great and the good were justly proud of their aqueducts.
24:11As Rome's empire grew over the centuries,
24:14the aqueduct became the ultimate symbol of Roman civilisation.
24:19From North Africa to Gaul,
24:21Roman engineers made their mark on the landscape
24:24and improved the quality of life.
24:28And they were built to last.
24:32Deep beneath Rome, an underground aqueduct
24:35Deep beneath Rome, an underground aqueduct
24:38still serves the needs of SPQR.
24:41My guide is caver Vittorio Colombo.
24:44So, Vittorio, this is actually a Roman aqueduct.
24:47Yes, indeed.
24:49I'm in Rome at 11 aqueducts and this is the only one
24:52that is still in operation after 2,000 years,
24:55bringing one cubic metre of water every second.
24:58This is the only one that is completely underground
25:01and that's why it's still in operation,
25:04because the barbarians didn't destroy it.
25:07So, in 19 BC, this was built?
25:09Exactly.
25:10And it's in a time of Augustus?
25:12Yeah.
25:13He was building this aqueduct in order to provide water
25:16to the thermal bath,
25:18the first big public thermal bath in Rome.
25:21That's exactly what made Rome great,
25:23because quality of life was for everybody and was public.
25:28Fantastic.
25:30Water from the Virginia Aqueduct
25:32is today used to supply some of Rome's best-loved fountains.
25:40The Romans' insatiable appetite for such public works
25:44was born out of two things.
25:46Their extreme competitive ethos
25:49and an overriding sense of something called cavilitas.
25:53It's a word which defined them as Romans.
25:57Cavilitas meant far more than just politeness.
26:01It also meant being a good citizen of Rome.
26:04But as Rome's conquests mounted,
26:06so did the pressure, both internal and external,
26:10on this delicate status quo.
26:14In the ancient world, successful civilisations
26:17stayed successful by expansion through conquest, alliance or absorption.
26:23Rome was no exception.
26:25With Italy under its control, it looked for the next frontier to cross.
26:31Sicily was the obvious place to look.
26:34A fair, fat, fertile triangle of territory,
26:38separated from the Italian mainland
26:40by just three kilometres of the Messina Straits.
26:46Sicily was not only agriculturally rich,
26:48but its sea ports were key stopping off points
26:51on the lucrative trade routes linking Greece, Italy and North Africa.
26:57So it made sense, both militarily and politically,
27:00for Rome to expand into Sicily.
27:02But there was a problem.
27:04The western half of the island was controlled
27:07by the greatest superpower of the age, Carthage.
27:10And if Rome wanted to compete there,
27:12it was going to have to move up into the premier league.
27:16Now, Sicily had long been ethnically divided
27:19between Phoenician and indigenous cities in the west
27:22and Greek city-states in the east.
27:24But from the 5th century BC onwards,
27:27Carthage regularly had to send armies to protect its allies here,
27:31particularly from Syracuse,
27:33where it was the capital of the Roman Empire.
27:36And it was there that Carthage had its first major battle,
27:39the Battle of Carthage.
27:41Rome had to send armies to protect its allies here,
27:44particularly from Syracuse,
27:46the most powerful and warlike of the Greek city-states.
27:50Now, the reasons, once again, would be primarily economic.
27:54The old Phoenician colonies on the western coast of Sicily
27:57were essential staging posts on the lucrative Turanian trade routes,
28:01which Carthage had long controlled.
28:04And they needed to be held whatever the cost,
28:06and the cost would be high.
28:11The ancient world was heavily militarised.
28:16Trading monopolies were fought for and trade routes fiercely defended.
28:23The Carthaginians had built an empire
28:25on their network of fortress-like trading posts,
28:28manned by mercenary armies.
28:30And no greedy Greek or upstart Roman would be permitted to muscle in.
28:36That's it.
28:38We often tend to think of the Carthaginians as being a bit dull,
28:42compared with the glittering cultural achievements of the Greeks
28:45and the Roman imperial juggernaut.
28:48A nation of shopkeepers hawking their wares across the Mediterranean.
28:52But that is to entirely miss the point.
29:01The city of Carthage, on the coast of modern-day Tunisia,
29:05had its own ideas about civilisation
29:08and the way its world should be run.
29:12With historic routes that led directly back
29:15to the great trading cities of Phoenicia,
29:18Carthage was a sea-based power,
29:20and its attitudes were shaped
29:22by the fluidity and mobility of that element.
29:27The Romans were armed lawyers
29:30whose instinct was to get and to hold territory,
29:33turning the world into Rome.
29:35The Carthaginians were armed merchants.
29:38Their instinct was to build and maintain trade networks,
29:42turning the world into a market controlled by Carthage.
29:47Roman Carthage offered real alternatives as imperial systems.
29:51Rome was more like an all-inclusive club,
29:54with heavy obligations but also generous rewards.
29:57Carthage, well, it was more like a loyalty card,
30:01where you could find economic benefits
30:03but little else required of its members.
30:09There were cultural differences too,
30:11and one in particular would become a weapon
30:14in Rome's propaganda war against Carthage.
30:18Child sacrifice.
30:23I worked here in the Tophet in Carthage in the 1990s,
30:27and by complete accident, we found 50 of these urns.
30:31And when we opened one of them up,
30:33we found tiny finger rings that could only fit on children,
30:37and other small bits of jewellery,
30:40as well as charred, very small human bones.
30:44I had to sleep in a room with those urns for three weeks after that,
30:48and I've got to admit, I didn't sleep very well.
30:58The archaeological evidence is hotly contested.
31:01On one side, you have those that see the Tophet as a child's cemetery.
31:06On the other, those that see it as a sacrificial area.
31:10But I think both sides can agree on one thing.
31:13It's time to move on from seeing the Carthaginians as callous baby killers.
31:18The Tophet was a place of worship,
31:20and it was a place of sacrifice.
31:22Time to move on from seeing the Carthaginians as callous baby killers.
31:27The Tophet was a place where pious people came
31:30to offer up to their gods the thing that was most precious to them,
31:34their children.
31:37Carthage and Rome first came to blows in Sicily,
31:41the jewel in the crown of the Carthaginian Empire.
31:47The conflict between the two regional superpowers was a world war
31:51that would rage on and off for more than a century,
31:54the longest in the history of the ancient world.
31:57And Rome would emerge from the conflict,
32:00transformed from a republic into an empire.
32:06The First Punic War, as Rome's war with Carthage would be known,
32:11dragged on for over 20 years.
32:14Sicily was the main battlefield,
32:17and the Roman side achieved a decisive victory on land.
32:21The island's rugged terrain hampered the Roman legion's attempts
32:25to steamroller the mercenary armies of Carthage.
32:31The Carthaginian stronghold of Erex,
32:34rising 750 metres above the plains of western Sicily,
32:39shows just how tough it must have been for the Roman forces.
32:43The fields below the fortress are littered with the debris
32:47from Roman siege engines.
32:51Archaeologists Nicola Savalli and Pier Francesco Vecchio
32:56have unearthed hundreds of catapult balls.
32:59They are just underneath the surface, 20 centimetres underneath the surface.
33:04It's a lot of these catapult balls.
33:07So this is the remains of the heavy artillery?
33:10Yeah, yeah, yeah. Amazing.
33:12What sort of damage would something like this do to a city wall?
33:16They have to use this one, like, to make the first break.
33:20So, in other words, you'd need quite a lot of these
33:22before you managed to sort of loosen and weaken the walls.
33:25And just behind you, I noticed there are lots of tiny ones.
33:28What are these for?
33:29Yeah, the little artillery, the frombolieri, I would say in Italian.
33:33Slingshot? Yeah, the slingshot.
33:35Part of the Carthaginian army was made by the Spanish frombolieri.
33:41From the Balearic Islands?
33:42Yeah, Spanish fronds were the best for launching these kind of missiles.
33:48Imagine that in my head.
33:50So that would kill a man? Yeah, for sure.
33:52So it was a real war of attrition between the two sides?
33:55Yeah, yeah, that's it, for ten years.
34:00The stalemate would be broken at sea,
34:03though few would have predicted the eventual winner in this specialist arena.
34:08The Carthaginians reigned supreme at sea.
34:11It was the source of their wealth and the fabric of their empire,
34:15and they policed it with the most formidable war fleet in the Mediterranean.
34:22Behind that fleet lay shipbuilding expertise that went back centuries.
34:27Now, this is a Carthaginian warship,
34:30and even though it's a small one, about 120 tonnes,
34:34it still took 68 oarsmen to power this through the water.
34:38But perhaps the most extraordinary thing about this boat
34:41is that archaeologists found Punic lettering written onto the planks,
34:45and this was perhaps to help non-specialists to assemble it.
34:49So, in many respects, this is like a flat-pack warship.
34:53But Carthaginian ingenuity proved to be their undoing.
34:57The Romans may have been land-loving farmers,
35:00but they recognised a good idea when they saw it.
35:03When they captured an intact Carthaginian warship,
35:06the flat-pack numbering system gave them the blueprint for their own fleet.
35:12And they copied the design plank by plank.
35:18However, it's one thing to own a fleet, it's quite another to know how to use it.
35:22In their first naval encounter, commanded by the Roman consul Scipio,
35:28aptly nicknamed Acina, the Ass,
35:31the Romans came here with a small fleet of 17 ships
35:35and captured the main ports of the Lopari Islands here.
35:38However, they soon found themselves hemmed in by a much larger Carthaginian fleet,
35:43and Scipio panicked and fled for land.
35:46The Roman fleet was burnt to a cinder.
35:50An inauspicious but hardly unexpected start to Roman naval history.
35:56But the dogged Romans weren't going to be daunted by a mere naval disaster.
36:02They had more ships to play with and some nautical ingenuity of their own.
36:08The basic rules of naval warfare in this period
36:11was to try and get as close as you could to the enemy's ship
36:14and to ram it and eventually, hopefully, sink it.
36:17But that takes both skill and experience,
36:20and the Romans had neither at the start of the First Punic War.
36:24So they needed to find another way of evening out the odds.
36:27What they designed was this.
36:29It was known as the corvus, or crow,
36:32which was essentially a giant gangplank held up in the air by a series of pulleys
36:37with a large spike on its underside.
36:40When they got close enough to the Carthaginian ship,
36:43they'd cut the pulley and the whole gangplank would come thudding down
36:47on the Carthaginian deck,
36:49and then the Roman marines would charge across
36:52and you'd end up essentially with a land battle.
36:55Ingenious and very effective.
37:01The corvus actually worked.
37:03Just off the Sicilian coast here at Melae,
37:06a very overconfident Carthaginian fleet
37:09was lured into a trap by the Romans and almost completely destroyed.
37:13It must have been a terrible humiliation
37:15to be defeated by these Johnny-come-latelys.
37:19More pain was to follow for the Carthaginians.
37:22Just off Cape Ecnumus,
37:24the largest naval battle of the ancient world took place.
37:29It proved to be a pivotal moment in round one of Rome versus Carthage.
37:34The Roman hydra defeated the Carthaginian shark,
37:38and before long, Sicily would be the offshore treasure island
37:42of the new Republican Empire.
37:46But the greatest consequence of the First Punic War
37:49was that the Romans went from being a nation of landlubbers
37:52who didn't know one end of a trireme from another
37:55to calling the Mediterranean Mare Nostrum, our sea.
37:59But if the Romans surprised the Carthaginians
38:02by defeating them at sea the first time around,
38:05it was the Carthaginians who sprang all the surprises
38:09when the two sides went to war.
38:12That was thanks to one extraordinary man
38:15whose successes on the battlefield
38:17would turn Roman animosity towards Carthage
38:20into a bone-deep, unrelenting, pathological hatred.
38:26The Second Punic War was no rerun of the first.
38:30Such was the Roman domination of the Mediterranean
38:33that there were virtually no naval battles.
38:36But in Hannibal Barca, the Romans would fight against
38:39one of the greatest generals of the ancient world.
38:43From his base in southern Spain
38:45and financed by the Carthaginian silver mines there,
38:49Hannibal decided to take the war
38:51into the Romans' own backyard in Italy.
38:55But to do that, he would first have to cross the Alps.
38:59It's only actually when you're here
39:01you get a sense of the greatness of Hannibal's achievement
39:04in crossing this mighty mountain range.
39:07And to make matters worse, winter was fast closing in
39:11when Hannibal and his troops finally reached the Alps.
39:14With snow falling around them,
39:16man and beast struggled to keep their footing
39:19on the narrow, slippery, precipitous pathways.
39:22And the elephants in particular,
39:24although the stars of the panoramic view
39:28And the elephants in particular,
39:30although the stars of the battlefield,
39:32were hardly ideal climbing companions.
39:35In fact, only one of these mighty beasts actually made it to Italy.
39:41With or without elephants, in Italy,
39:44Hannibal ran the Roman legions ragged,
39:47culminating in the Battle of Cannae in 216 BC.
39:52The Roman losses were stupendous.
39:55One general, over 80 members of the Senate,
39:58virtually the whole of their senior command
40:01and virtually all of their best legions.
40:04Cannae was a total bloody disaster.
40:08Hannibal didn't just outmanoeuvre Rome on the battlefield.
40:12He made advances on the political front
40:14that threatened the very fabric of Roman unity.
40:19Cannae appeared to change everything,
40:21with several Italian cities
40:23reassessing their relationship with Rome.
40:26One such place was Capua,
40:28the richest and most populous city in Campania.
40:31Hannibal got them on the side
40:33by promising that once he'd conquered Italy,
40:35that Capua, rather than Rome, would be capital.
40:42Humiliated on the battlefield
40:44and with ancient allies threatening to desert the banner of SPQR,
40:49Rome seemed destined for a repeat of the disaster
40:52of 175 years before,
40:55when the Celts sacked its sacred capital.
40:58However, in one of history's great mysteries,
41:01the Carthaginian general did not march into the city
41:05and finish off the Romans for good.
41:08I'm not going for the juggler.
41:10Hannibal was merely following the rules of warfare of the day.
41:13The idea wasn't to annihilate your enemy,
41:16merely to force them to the negotiating table.
41:18And if Hannibal thought the Romans were finished,
41:21then he was very much mistaken.
41:23Rome had no reverse gear.
41:31The thing about the Romans
41:33is they always had the ability to come back,
41:36each time harder than the last.
41:40In Scipio Africanus, they had a general
41:42who was more than a match for Hannibal's talents.
41:46He defeated the Carthaginian general on his home turf
41:49at the Battle of Zama.
41:56The Carthaginians had somehow managed to snatch defeat
41:59from the jaws of victory,
42:01and the Romans would make them pay dearly.
42:04There could be no question
42:06of the usual Roman strategy of assimilation.
42:09Hannibal had traumatised Rome so deeply
42:12that all it could think of was how to further hurt
42:15and humiliate its defeated enemy.
42:18Rome wanted to squeeze Carthage till the pips squeaked.
42:22They imposed a war indemnity of 10,000 talents of silver,
42:26ten times more than the indemnity they had to pay
42:30at the end of the First Punic War.
42:32Carthage was also forbidden from waging war
42:36without Rome's permission.
42:38The idea was to turn Carthage into a Roman client state.
42:42But once again, the Romans had completely underestimated
42:46Carthage's entrepreneurial vigour.
42:54Stripped of its military power, Carthage got its retaliation in
42:58by staging a remarkable economic revival.
43:03But this merely served to stoke Roman paranoia.
43:07One senator, Cato, ended each and every speech he made
43:11with the implacable statement,
43:13the Lender es Catago.
43:16Carthage must be destroyed.
43:20The Carthaginians were clearly expecting trouble.
43:23Behind me over there, amongst the trees,
43:25they'd built an ingenious naval complex.
43:28At the front was a normal commercial harbour,
43:31but behind was a military port
43:34and room for 170 warships.
43:37It was all cleverly camouflaged, away from prying Roman eyes.
43:42But subterfuge on this scale couldn't last for long.
43:46When the Romans learnt of the harbour's existence,
43:49there could only be one conclusion,
43:52the Lender es Catago.
43:56Rome paved the way for the destruction of Carthage
43:59with a series of demands, each more onerous than the last.
44:04It culminated in the outrageous command
44:06that the Carthaginians abandon their city
44:09and found a new settlement ten miles away from the sea.
44:14The Carthaginians had lived here by the sea for 700 years
44:18as a great naval nation,
44:20and they were not prepared to let that change.
44:25Carthage mobilised to resist the onslaught.
44:28Public spaces were turned into armouries.
44:36But nothing could save Carthage.
44:38It took three years of brutal siege,
44:41but in the end, the city fell to Scipio Melianus
44:45in the fateful year 146 BC.
44:53Carthage had come back twice from defeat.
44:56This time, the Romans made sure it would stay defeated.
45:00They offered what has become known as a Carthaginian peace,
45:05unconditional surrender followed by utter destruction,
45:09an ancient Hiroshima that would raise the city of Carthage to the ground.
45:16In order to flush out the defenders, Scipio set fire to the city.
45:21And such was the intensity of the heat
45:24that you can still see the scorch marks on the walls here.
45:28There were so many corpses clogging the streets
45:31that Scipio had to employ cleaning squads to drag the bodies out of the way.
45:38Eventually, it all became too much,
45:41and after an heroic resistance,
45:4450,000 Carthaginians left the city for the last time
45:48and went into a life of miserable slavery.
45:51The remaining diehards were killed in the flames.
45:55Scipio then put a curse on the city
45:57and on anyone who decided to rebuild it.
46:03Carthage was not the only great city to be destroyed by the Romans in 146 BC.
46:11That same year, the wealthy Greek port of Corinth
46:15was captured, looted and burnt after its citizens revolted.
46:22CARTHAGE
46:27The destruction of Carthage and Corinth,
46:30two of the greatest cities of the ancient world,
46:33stood as brutal reminders of the bloody consequences of resisting Rome,
46:39whilst at the same time providing an apocalyptic fanfare
46:43for Rome's coming of age as a world power.
46:47The Romans were now the masters of their universe.
46:51The whole Italian peninsula had been Romanised.
46:55The fertile triangle of Sicily had been won.
46:59The political and military power of the Greeks had been neutralised.
47:04The Carthaginians had been crushed.
47:07In the western Mediterranean, Rome ruled over everyone that mattered...
47:13..except itself.
47:16Members of the Senate might have fondly imagined
47:19that things would go back to the way they had always been.
47:22But this vast new empire, this huge wealth,
47:25meant that things would never be the same again.
47:34Maybe the Romans should have consulted the Greeks,
47:37who could have told them cautionary tales
47:40of what happens to the stability of societies
47:43when the spoils of war come home by the wagon load.
47:50In Rome, things followed a well-worn path.
47:55The fat cats got the lion's share.
47:58The rest were left with scraps.
48:01Senators used their newfound wealth
48:04to kick their fellow citizens off their family farms
48:07in order to create huge estates.
48:13The naked politics behind the pious myth of SPQR was cruelly exposed.
48:21But there were two idealistic senators
48:24who were determined to fight for that myth.
48:27Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus.
48:31The issue that they chose to adopt was the most controversial of its day.
48:36Land reform.
48:38And the Gracchi were prepared to bend the rules to get what they wanted.
48:44Ignoring the Senate,
48:46they passed land reform legislation through the popular assembly.
48:51The enraged Senate responded by tearing up the rule book altogether.
48:59Tiberius was beaten to death.
49:01His brother Gaius was later stabbed to death.
49:04The bodies of both were thrown in the Tiber.
49:10The murder of the Gracchi was the original sin of the Roman Republic,
49:15its fall from grace.
49:18These dangerous lessons weren't lost on the rising generation of Rome's leaders.
49:25The Gracchan revolution had failed, but its legacy was a powerful one.
49:29The Gracchi had shown that it was possible to circumvent the Senate,
49:33but power and authority would never be the same again.
49:36So the Gracchan revolution provided the curtain raiser
49:39for the blood-soaked finale of the Roman Republic.
49:46This was the shape of things to come.
49:51The history of the late Roman Republic
49:54was dominated by powerful generals like Pompey and Caesar.
49:58Both were the political heirs of this man, Sulla.
50:02One of the most controversial figures in Roman history.
50:07He set the pattern that they followed, and within a generation,
50:11the Republic had become little more than a military dictatorship.
50:16Sulla grasped an essential truth about Rome,
50:20political power now derived from the army.
50:23With no state provision for paying its soldiers,
50:26Rome depended on its successful generals to do so with the spoils of war.
50:32These essentially private armies
50:34would come to increasingly bedevil the Republic
50:37as their generals used force to pursue their own political agendas.
50:41The age of the military hard man, unfettered by any respect
50:45for the constitution of the Republic, had finally arrived.
50:54Sulla showed just what could be achieved
50:56with an army of loyal veterans at your back.
51:00Fearing that his political enemies were plotting against him,
51:03he marched on Rome.
51:08The terrified Senate voted to make him dictator.
51:12Now armed with legal authority,
51:14Sulla Dictator Legibus Vicendus unleashed a reign of terror.
51:22Sulla's reign of terror was a stuff of nightmares.
51:26Thousands of those condemned as enemies of the Roman Republic
51:29were put up here in the Roman Forum.
51:33Slaves who had been freed by Sulla would then turn up at their houses
51:38and lead them away, never to be seen again.
51:41Well, sometimes some bits of them were seen again,
51:44their decapitated heads put up on spikes as a warning to others.
51:50This system, Sulla's toxic legacy to Rome,
51:54was known as the Prescriptions.
51:56He used it to kill up to 9,000 people,
51:591,500 of them members of the equestrian or aristocratic class.
52:04Their property was confiscated and divvied up amongst Sulla's supporters.
52:11But perhaps the most sinister thing about Sulla
52:14is that having terrorised Rome and decimated the Senate,
52:18he then resigned the dictatorship,
52:20restored the powers of the Senate
52:22and retired to his estate to a life of debauchery.
52:27Within a year, he was dead,
52:29but he left behind the blueprint for the dismemberment of the Republic.
52:35Sulla was never going to be able to revive the authority of the Senate
52:39because his earlier actions had fatally undermined it.
52:43It was a bit like a burglar breaking into a house
52:46and robbing it of all its contents
52:49and then putting new locks on the doors.
52:52It was only a matter of time before the house was robbed again.
52:58The burglars who came after are the ones we know so well,
53:02Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar.
53:05These would be the Republic's undertakers.
53:10The jockeying for power amongst these ruthless, ambitious warlords
53:15is complex and tangled,
53:17but the explanation is brutally simple.
53:20It can be summed up by a rhetorical question attributed to Pompey.
53:25If Sulla could, why can't I?
53:29Pompey was the living embodiment of how all the conquests of Rome
53:33had destabilised the delicate political balance of the Republic.
53:38All the Senate could do was stand around
53:40and flex its increasingly flaccid muscles.
53:44We know so much about the machinations of this period
53:48because of the huge body of letters and speeches
53:51left by one of Rome's most brilliant intellectuals,
53:54Marcus Tullius Cicero.
53:58Cicero was the archetypal politician-lawyer,
54:02a brilliant orator in court and in the Senate.
54:07But Cicero was also, faithfully for him, an idealist,
54:11a true believer in the pious myth of SPQR.
54:16And it's this that gives his speeches in this period their poignancy,
54:20because the days of SPQR were long over.
54:25But that wasn't the way that Cicero saw it,
54:27a man whose brilliance was matched by his insecurities.
54:31He told everybody that was prepared to listen
54:33that it had been a coalition between the Senate,
54:36equestrians and people which had saved the Republic,
54:40and increasingly he saw this alliance
54:42as the future for the salvation of Rome.
54:48But Rome was now far more than just a republic.
54:51It also had a huge empire.
54:54The complex system that was SPQR
54:57was as out of date as Cicero's calls for a coalition of good men.
55:03The problem was that the Roman Republic simply wasn't designed
55:07to manage the great empire it had now acquired.
55:11What was needed was consistency and long-term planning,
55:15not a bunch of squabbling politicians who were only in office for one year.
55:23Julius Caesar was the one who saw most clearly what Rome needed,
55:27a benign autocrat, aided and abetted by a tame Senate.
55:32Having famously crossed the Rubicon, taken Rome by force,
55:36and defeated his greatest rival, Pompey,
55:39Caesar set about introducing a series of reforms,
55:43including land reform, modelled on the ideas of the Gracchi.
55:49But the greatest political problem that Caesar faced
55:53was how to accommodate himself, a king in all but name,
55:59into a republican power structure.
56:02The man who had an answer for everything
56:05didn't know what to do about himself.
56:09But others had decided what to do about him.
56:13A group of senators felt that the loss of power and authority
56:17was too great a price to pay for the peace which Caesar offered.
56:22And on the Ides of March, they cut him down outside the Senate House.
56:27It's said that his body fell at the feet of a statue of his old enemy, Pompey.
56:37The sequel following the assassination of Julius Caesar
56:41is a dramatic saga of intrigue, romance and war.
56:46Long in the telling, its political implications are short.
56:51After the Civil War and the defeat of Caesar's murderers,
56:56after the inevitable falling out between his successors,
57:00Mark Antony and his young nephew and adopted son, Octavian,
57:06after the absurd, touching romance of Antony and Cleopatra,
57:12after the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in Greece
57:17and their operatic double suicide,
57:21after all that, Octavian Caesar was quite simply the last man standing.
57:31But there was still the question about what to do with the Republic,
57:35a ramshackle political system no longer fit for purpose
57:39in ruling over this massive empire.
57:42Kingship was out of the question after what had happened to Julius Caesar.
57:46But there was another solution.
57:48Autocracy hidden behind the thin veneer of a restored Republic.
57:53But to convince the Roman people to give up many of their political freedoms
57:57in exchange for peace was going to take every ounce of Octavian's political genius.
58:06With the help of a change of name, the Emperor Augustus,
58:10formerly known as Octavian, would transform Rome from a Republic
58:15into the greatest empire the world had ever known.
58:20It would dominate the Western world for another 500 years,
58:25only to be challenged by a new religious cult, Christianity.
58:35Stay with us, there's drama coming up next on BBC HD with Luther.
58:45Thanks for watching.