Transcription
Three thousand years ago, extraordinary people rose from humble beginnings to force their will on the world. They created the greatest empire mankind had ever seen—an empire that stretched from Britain to the Middle East. It lasted a thousand years and shaped the way we live today. I'm Larry Lamb, actor, radio presenter, and history fanatic. Like a kid at Christmas, in this series I'm going to travel back beyond the marble monuments to ask who these people were and why they were so successful. From the Empire's earliest ruins to her first conquests in Africa, from Kingdom to Republic, from Romulus and Remus to Julius Caesar, I want to uncover the extraordinary story of how Rome became the world's first superpower.
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Rome may be ancient, but round here history lives. It's the 21st of April, the date Romans celebrate the birth of their city. So here we are, for Rome's 2,767th birthday—don't look a day over 2,000! It's a street party, Roman style, where all the icons of the city's history are on show: gladiators, Centurions, senators, Vestal Virgins.
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But they all come later in Rome's story. I'm going to start a thousand years earlier. This is one of my favorite cities; I spend as much time as I can here, so I want to start at the beginning by finding out how Rome was founded.
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The story I've heard begins with the iconic legend of two orphaned twin brothers. Today, their names are on the lips of every Roman here.
From that aroma Queens aroma hello seniority question did you get you get your perfect Oh gracias Senora. There it is. Right, this image is everywhere, the very symbol of Roma self. According to legend, Romulus and Remus were the semi-divine sons of Mars, the God of War, thrown into the Tiber by a jealous uncle, only to be saved and suckled by a she-wolf. But what happened next? I'm turning to the earliest accounts I can find. The history is written by the ancient Romans themselves, but even these have their problems. This book is the work of the Roman historian Livy. It was born in 59 BC. Now, evidently, it's the best surviving account of early Rome that we have, but of course, the founding of Rome that he describes happened 700 years before he was born. I mean, by the time he wrote it, Rome was already an ancient city. Still, I'm intrigued by Livy's description of what happened, so I've come to the Circus Maximus, once the valley floor beneath Rome's Seven Hills. Livy writes that it was here in 753 BC that it all began, when Romulus and Remus decided to build a city but ended up in a deadly struggle. According to Livy, the twins couldn't agree on a location for their city. Remus wanted to build on the Aventine, over there, whereas Romulus wanted to build on the Palatine, over there. Livy then goes on to tell us how they settled it. Since the brothers were twins, and respect for the Aged could not determine between them, it was agreed that the gods should choose, by all URI, who should give the new city its name, who should govern it. When bill or Gary is basically the art of reading signs from the gods. So they both camped out on their respective hills and waited.
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First, Remus sees six vultures circling the sky above him. For him, it's the sign the gods have chosen him to build the city and to govern it. But then Romulus sees 12 vultures and is convinced he is the Anointed One. Both brothers claimed victory—one because he'd seen the birds first, the other because he saw more of them. Livy goes on: they then engaged in a battle of words and angry taunts leading to bloodshed. Remus was struck down in the affray; thus Romulus acquired sole power, and the city that founded was called by its founder's name: Rome. Founded on murder, but not yet a city. And Romulus needed more than a plot of land and a handful of followers to turn it into one. What he needed was people to boost the population. Romulus threw open the gates of his city, basically saying, "Bring me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses." As a result of which he was inundated with what Livy called "an obscure and lowly multitude." But of course, there was a problem: there were nearly all men; there was a very chronic shortage of women folk. So what did these ever-resourceful Romans do? They threw a party. On the guest list: chieftains from a neighboring tribe called the Sabines, along with their wives and daughters. But the Romans didn't invite them out of the goodness of their hearts. As the festivities reached fever pitch, Romulus gave a sudden signal; his men rushed forward, grabbed the Sabine women folk, and carried them off to make them their wives. This has gone down in history as the rape of the Sabine women. That were a tough bunch, these Romans. I mean, they just grabbed anything they wanted. But I suppose what I'm beginning to realize already is that if you want to start a superpower, that's the way you've got to be. So there we have it: Rome was founded by a murderer, and its first citizens were vagabonds and kidnapped women. It's a great story, but is it true?
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I'm on a mission to dig deep into Rome's history, back beyond the marble city of the Caesars, to this civilization's fairy beginnings. I want to find out how Rome's earliest citizens grew this city into the greatest power the world had ever seen. I've discovered the ancient legend of Rome's founder and first king, Romulus. Now I want to find physical evidence of the settlement he's supposed to have founded that could show where and how it all began. It's what archaeologists have been searching for in Rome for decades. Then, in 2007, in the heart of the city, they found this. These are postholes of an ancient dwelling—not much to you and me—but the amazing thing is these date to 750 BC, almost the very year Livy said that Romulus founded the city. Now, could this be the site where he and his followers first set up shop? And if so, what would their settlement have looked like?
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Not what I'd imagine Rome to look like in the very early days. So who would have lived in a house like this? What was their life about? Well, you see, it's a very simple space; all you needed was a fireplace to cook food and for heating, yeah, it plays sleep, the place for storing foods. Rome's mud huts might look basic to you and me, but parallel tells me all the elements were in place here for a sophisticated culture. Society living in these kind of structures was not so simple; they had writings, they had politics, they have religious, they here in aristocracy, very powerful aristocracy; they had trade, they had agriculture, right, and from this it went to that extraordinary. Now I can imagine early Rome: a few hundred huts on a hillside, home to two or three thousand people—a modest beginning for Europe's greatest civilization, but that would soon change. By 550 BC, two hundred years after the foundation, Rome's population was around thirty thousand people, spread over seven hills along the Tiber. It could now call itself a proper City. But there was a problem: a wide area of uninhabitable, stagnant marshland choked the city's expansion. Rome needed a solution. To find out what, I'm going to a part of Rome most people never get to see: underneath the city. I'm going down into Rome's sewer network.
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Parts of it are over 2,500 years old, but still in use today. These tunnels carry rainwater and sewage into the river Tiber. They were built by Rome's earliest kings, the successors to Romulus himself. So Adriana, can you tell how did this extraordinary system of the sewage stop? There was a need of clearing of the marshy waters around the capitolium and the other hills. So what happened was, first of all, to make an open-air channel, yeah, and to channel all this water to the fiber. For 200 years, Rome's Kings extended, repaired, and improved the entire system, until what started out as open channels grew into this complex network of arched tunnels.
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Today, no one knows the full extent of the tunnel network, but Adriano and his team of archaeologists are at last exploring it. Walking through these sewers is like traveling back in time; the deeper we go, the older the tunnels get. We passed through a section built at the time of Jesus Christ, then another even older, constructed under Julius Caesar, then at last the oldest stretch of tunnel, from the sixth century BC. This is it, here we are, right here, the oldest part of the system, and it's absolutely unique, and it's never been seen before on television. So there you are, first this tunnel is one of the oldest examples of what became an essential feature of Roman engineering—the arch, about this high in the floor, the basic floor level of the ancient forum. Without this ancient engineering, Rome might never have become a city. But these sewers were built at a terrible human cost—by slaves, enemy soldiers spared on the battlefield, but marched to Rome to die building the new stone city. Reading in Livy, what with what we're told is that this would have involved the work of about a million slaves, and some of them were preferred in the end to commit suicide rather than work on this project. The Romans were resourceful and ruthless; they borrowed the best their neighbors had to offer and stole what couldn't be borrowed; they'd let nothing stand in the way of the city's ambition. One of the key architects of the new Rome became a notorious figure in the city's history; his name: Tarquinius Superbus, Tarquin the Proud. He was a brilliant engineer but a ruthless political operator. Now I'm heading for the very spot where, in 535 BC, he made a bloody grasp for power. Tarquin and his wife, who I'm told would have given Lady Macbeth a run for her money, staged an outrageous coup against the ruling King, her father, and he was killed in a brutal assassination. And I'm told that she drove her chariot right across his body as he lay in the street, somewhere around here. And ever since, this has been known as the vicus scholartis, the street of wickedness. Tarquin seized the throne; he was now Rome's seventh, a most ambitious King, and began to transform Rome from a settlement of mud huts into a city of stone. Tarquin built one of the biggest buildings in Roman history, dedicated to their supreme God; it was the Temple of Jupiter.
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Remarkably, parts of it still survive, and I am going to see them. Well, we certainly come a long way from simple houses made of mud and wood to this. Well, I suppose this has to be the beginning of the monumental city of Rome. The temple was as big as a football pitch. Ordinary Roman citizens were forced not just to pay for it; some had to labor on it. Thousands would work to death, turning Tarquin into a figure of hatred. But the signs were that, with his giant temple, he'd won the favor of the gods. The story goes that while they were digging the foundations, they came upon a perfectly preserved human head, and they took it as a sign that Rome would become the head of the world. Wow. That much may be true, but it wouldn't be ruled by Tarquin or any other king for that matter. Tarquin was a tyrant; he intimidated Rome's Nobles, bullied its workers, and murdered those who disagreed with him. I want to meet the man who finally gave him his marching orders. This is thought to be the face of Brutus. He is the nephew of King Tarquin, and he he will bring an end to the rule of the kings, and he would start a revolution right at the heart of Rome. But for now, he was biding his time; his brother had already died at King Tarquin's hands. Brutus wanted to avoid the same fate and spent much of his life keeping a low profile until he saw something that filled him with fury. It concerns a beautiful and virtuous noble woman named Lucretia and the tearful confession she made to her father, her husband, and—Brutus. Lucretia described how Tarquin's son Sextus forced himself upon her. Lucretia refused his advances, but then Sextus threatened to kill her and her male slave; he said he would leave their naked bodies beside each other, making it appear Lucretia had committed adultery. Rather than bring shame on her husband and family, Lucretia relented, and that Sextus have his way. Brutus listened, horrified, but worse was to come. Racked with shame and guilt, she suddenly produces a dagger, and before Brutus and the others can stop her, she plunges it deep into her chest, piercing her heart and ending her life instantly. Now this is our Livy describes what happened next. Brutus drew out the knife from Lucretia's wound and, holding it up dripping with gore, he exclaimed, "By this blood, most chaste until a prince wronged it, I swear that I will pursue Lucius Tarquinius Superbus and his wicked wife and all his children with sword, with fire, with whatsoever violence I may, and that I will suffer neither them nor any other to be king in Rome." Brutus was as good as his word; he and his followers drove Tarquin and his supporters out of Rome and together gave birth to a new ideal: that no King would ever rule Rome again. It became every Roman's duty to defend this founding principle. But as I'm about to discover, it wasn't long until Brutus himself was forced to choose between his instinct as a father and his duty as a citizen of the Roman Republic.
You 509 BC. Rome is 250 years old, home to 50,000 people, and on a knife-edge. Brutus has overthrown the tyrannical King Tarquin and declared that never again would one man rule Rome. We take away the king; what happens next? Well, Larry, they clear away the whole political board to start with. All of them. All of them. Now, unlike in the game of chess, we need to start with two kings, and these guys are called consuls, and these are the like the CEOs of Rome, and together they're going to rule, so they cancel each other out, and each year they're elected by popular election. So this means that they're accountable to the people and also to their fellow aristocrats. These twin consuls would govern a new Rome known as the Republic, from the Latin Res Publica, the concern of the people. At its heart was an ideal that, over the next five hundred years, would propel Rome from New Republic to global superpower. So this was to stop one person having all the power, but presumably within those two there would have been a lot of competition set up, wouldn't there? Within the Roman political system, within its DNA is competition. So the elites, right from the time when they're very small, when they're just young boys, are trained to compete with one another, and that's one of the things that makes Rome great is that all of these guys are striving to do better than their fellow, you know, their fellow aristocrats. Yes. So is there any one thing you think that kind of typifies Roman political mentality? I think in terms of the collective psyche of the Roman people, it's this: a hatred and fear of this man, the King. There could never be another King in the Roman Republic; they would never allow it. This was the Republican ideal that had to be defended at all costs, and it turned out it was Brutus himself whose loyalty to the new ideal was first to be tested. Within months, the exiled King Tarquin is plotting to seize back power in Rome. Among his fellow conspirators: Brutus's own two sons. When the plot is discovered, the two brothers are brought before him. Brutus is consul of Rome. Will he pardon his sons or execute them in the name of the Republic? Brutus was in no doubt. The culprits were stripped, scourged with rods, and beheaded, while through it all men gazed at the expression on the father's face, where they might clearly read a father's anguish as he administered the nation's retribution. I mean, if this is true, and I have to say as a father I find it very difficult to believe it, it would at least explain the ruthlessness and the absolute conviction at the core of the New Republic. By executing his sons, Brutus made it clear that duty to the Republic's founding principle was more important than his own flesh and blood. This new republic was supposed to be a more inclusive place, but there was a legacy from Rome's earliest days still to be grappled with: the rift between rich patricians and poor plebeians. I'm heading south to one of the most iconic sites of Roman history: Pompeii, captured in time by the ash from a volcanic eruption. Today, this is as close as we can get to how Rome was at the time of the Republic. The buildings here reveal a society deeply divided. Vast villas like this one were home to Rome's rich nobility, the patricians. So parallel, would there have been houses just like this in Rome in the early Republic? The shape of the room is the same as an early Republican houses, right? That was a standard design; it's a standard design, a very old-fashioned a standard aside because, well, the Roman called Adamas Domus was a private house, yeah. This was the the focus of the houses were center of the house, the most important room, misconduct atrium, and there were bedrooms all around with small rooms here. So, so who would have been the owner of a home like this? What sort of level in society? A very high level of hey would ya, yes, the noblest part and the worthiest part of this, what they call the patrician, right? And and would he would have lived here with just his family? With his family, yeah. His family owned slaves and ham. How many slaves would it have taken to running a slave family? Could count up to fifty members, really? Yes. Was a very huge, but not everyone enjoyed the luxury of a Roman Thomas, right? Next door, you can see how the other half lived. This family was plebeian and had to make do with life in a single room at the back of their business—in this case, a bar. So parallel, would there have been bars like this along all the streets in Rome? Of course, we're almost crowded with places like this. You have a second room inside which was actually the house of the family who worked in this bar, right? So these were the living quarters? Yes. Quite a change from the pajamas house? Yes. So in the big house, there's a family, maybe five, six people, and 50 slaves to look after them. What would what would this household have composed? Well, maybe the same family, five or six people, yeah, no slave, all living in one room, yeah, and working up there. These two houses show just how divided Roman society was, and this division was not just a cultural one; it was enshrined in law. Obviously, Republican Rome is a very complicated society, but just can you explain the difference effectively between the patrician and the Peruvian? The patrician, where the aristocracy are wrong, there were the members of the noblest families, and the plebeians were not the problem; they could not marry a patrician; they could not have commerce with the patrician; they could not be elected neither magistrate nor judges; they had to vote by their political influence was nothing; they had to vote the head, right? So they as a plebeian had to vote for a patrician, yes, to run their lives. Patrician, plebeian, rich, poor—call them what you like—ancient Rome was as unequal as any modern city, and as a Londoner myself, I have no trouble imagining struggling families living cheek by jowl with the well-to-do. I'm beginning to realize that the noble principles of Brutus and the founders of the Republic were just that: noble, designed by the nobility for the nobility. And of course, now we have an underclass with no say in the way things are run, and I reckon that something is going to have to give.
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The plebeians had no real power, yet represented over 80 percent of the population and were the lifeblood of the Roman Republic. They farmed the land, and in times of war were expected to abandon their farms and fight. But many battle-weary plebs returned to find their land taken over by rich patricians. Finally, one indignant farmer shook Rome to its foundations. In 494 BC, an old man appeared at the forum. He was thin, dirty, and dressed in tattered rags. He was soon recognized as a former soldier, renowned for his bravery, had returned to find his home ransacked. As he began to tell his story, a crowd gathered around him. As a soldier, the man had fought hard for the Republic, but now his farm was destroyed; he was broke; he could no longer pay his taxes and was forced to borrow money he couldn't afford to repay. He'd been carried off by his creditor, not to slavery, but to the prison and the torture chamber. He then showed them his back, disfigured with the welts of recent scourging. Now, this single incident sparked off a shock wave of outrage that spread through the city like wildfire. Very soon, the entire working class was threatening to leave Rome and establish a city of their own. It was more than a general strike; plebeian workers and tradesmen actually shut up shop and abandoned Rome. The patrician nobility watched in horror as their workforce and army deserted them.
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Something had to be done, and as you'd expect from the practical Romans, it was done. Their solution was a revolutionary new set of laws called the Twelve Tables. They were engraved on bronze, put up in a public space so you could see them, which would have given the Romans their first legal code. So it's a sort of Bill of Rights, is it? The critical thing is that what it's doing is writing down and setting out very publicly what your position in law is, what the rules are for society. The laws were written by a Council of patrician senators around 450 BC. Plebeians were invited to study the laws, discuss them with their families, and to suggest refinements. So Christopher, kitty, give us just a sort of an idea of the range of things that these these covered. So one of the things that is protected here is not being defrauded, not being taken advantage of by somebody that you're in a relationship with, and we recognize that if you're employed by somebody that shouldn't tip over into an exploitative relationship. Some of them are about crimes that are perhaps a little more unusual to us. So, for instance, what happens if I cast a magic charm on your crops, and your crops all die? Good question. So in terms of the struggle between the rich and the poor, but what sort of a solution did this present? It's a really important moment in regularizing relations between two groups in society which have managed to become defining themselves in opposition to each other, and this is one of the ways in which that opposition begins to dissolve because it gives a very clear statement of process of penalty which can't be tampered with by a rich person. These are fixed so that you know what to expect if you get into trouble. Within weeks, the 12 tables ended the strike in Rome, and the plebeians marched back into the city. This newly united Rome was represented by four iconic letters: Senatus Populusque Romanus, the Senate and the people of Rome. You see that sign all over the city; it was the brand of Rome that united the city's rich and poor under one common cause: the Republic. Rome's internal conflict was resolved when the Senators and people of Rome now looked beyond their city; they eyed up their enemies and prepared to take their first decisive steps towards building an empire.
You
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SPQR, the Senate and the people of Rome. I've discovered how, three hundred years after its foundation, these four letters unified Rome. Said that by around 450 BC, the Republic's power and influence rivaled that of the Etruscans, their greatest foe. The Etruscans predated the Romans and controlled a large area of Italy. They were also ambitious, and the two sides fought running battles for centuries. But now Rome was spoiling for a fight. It was only the river Tiber separating these two civilizations, with Rome and the Latins controlling the east and the Etruscans controlling the west. So a flashpoint was bound to occur; it was inevitable. But where would it happen, and more importantly, who would make the decisive move? For hundreds of years, the Romans had been asking that question, or rather they'd been asking the heavens, which is why I want to explore the ancient Roman tradition of augury, the art of reading signs from the gods. It was key to every decision made in Rome, the city first founded on a divine blessing. Historian Darius Area is taking me to the augurculum, a holy site where Romans practiced the mysterious art of augury, which, as well as bird spotting, included sacrificing animals to study their internal organs. Rome is on the brink of war; I need divine approval. How do they know they've got it? Well, that's a great question. Now, of course, they had their experts that were well versed in the knowledge of the various lobes and components of a liver, but of course
You also have a little bit of a guide. This is a schematic of a bronze liver from Ph Insa that was found. So basically, it's sectioned off, so you've got all the major gods going around the edges, and then you've got a subdivision for the subdivision with lesser gods. You've opened up the animal, and they step in, and they take the liver, and they kind of parse it out. And if there's any kind of a deviation from the standard—oh my god, that's a really huge gallbladder—well, that could be a kind of clue to you what a particular god is feeling or thinking, and who you have to then further appease. Now, if you don't get the answer or you don't like the results, you can sacrifice another animal; you kill another animal. So the Romans are very pragmatic.
Yes. Then in 450 BC, the gods told the Romans to go for it, and the city geared up for total war against the Etruscans. But pragmatic Rome didn't rely on the will of the gods alone to guarantee victory. The Republic turned to the policy they designed for just such a situation: they would nominate a dictator, a power founded on the principle that no one man should ever rule. It seems remarkable now to appoint a dictator, but this was an extraordinary measure for use in extraordinary circumstances. The man they chose was Marcus Furius Camillus, a trusted statesman, given a daunting task: to destroy the Etruscans' major stronghold, the city of VAE.
In 396 BC, Camillus led a great army across the Tiber to lay siege to the city. 2,500 years later, I've traveled to the same spot in the hill country outside Rome to discover what happened to Camillus and his army. The archaeology shows one thing clearly: the battle was huge.
All these artifacts were found here on the site.
Yes, yes, they were, and most of them are evidence that can be related to the battle itself.
Yeah, there's wonderful project holes. It's so heavy.
Well, they are so happy there inland; they laid their lad. Yes, there. What would these have been fired like? Bullets from a sling?
Oh, yeah, exactly. They were thrown. We do have different types of arrowheads, and they are in bronze, and they were probably used during the battle. They are much more than this; this is just a small selection. All these elements are the typical finds that we found during the course of the excavation. Spent ammunition covers nearly 500 acres, the sign of a massive, drawn-out campaign during which Camillus needed to keep his troops motivated. Up until now, every Roman male was expected to serve in the army as a matter of duty. Camillus was the first to offer a financial incentive to his men, as well as a share of the spoils. And after a decade, his radical plan finally paid off. The dictator saw that victory was at last within his grasp and that a city of great wealth was on the point of being taken, with booty more than if all previous wars had been put together. So not only were they getting wages for the first time, but Camillus was offering his men a share in the greatest haul of war booty Rome had ever seen. Now that was certainly gonna get the boys fired up—if only they could find a way in.
But ten years after they'd arrived, Camillus's army was still outside the walls, laying siege to the city, until, according to Livy, they made an extraordinary breakthrough. And this could be a clue to it. This is an underground structure which the University of Rome discovered three years ago. This tunnel could prove an ancient myth is true. Livy describes how Camillus's men desperately searched for a way into the city and got lucky when they found a tunnel all the way to the city's temple. Hundreds of Roman soldiers scrambled in and lay in wait. Then, out of the blue, a sign from the gods: the sound of the Etruscans making a sacrifice. As they were hiding there, they had a priest talking to the king of the Etruscans as the king of the Ventes was sacrificing. The Roman soldiers in the mine overheard the soothsayer declare that to him who should cut up the innards of that victim would be given the victory. The Romans in the tunnel grabbed their chance, burst into the temple, seized the sacrificial innards, and carried them off to their dictator, Camillus. He took this as the blessing Rome needed. Camillus ordered a full-scale assault and obliterated their oldest foe. The Etruscan civilization was doomed, and Rome left them a forgotten people, whilst the Republic marched on.
Over the five centuries that followed, the Roman army and their gods would impose Divine Will all over the known world as they became the world's first superpower. Next time, my journey continues to Africa as I discover how the Republic took to the waves to build an empire, face down its greatest enemy, Hannibal, and wipe out an entire civilization. [Music] You