Rome... the greatest empire the world has ever seen.
With our grip on the Mediterranean, we conquer all.
Deep into Africa and as far north as Britannia,
and all under the ultimate control of one man, the Emperor.
Or so it seems.
HORSE WHINNIES
Let emperors strut the world stage,
and let us, the humble women in the wings, build our dynasties.
For the first time,
we are seeing women altering the history of the Western world.
Julia,
Messalina,
Agrippina,
and of course, me, Livia.
All women who can shape the world, changing it forever.
The empresses are the ones that actually
push the emperors into position.
Driven by sex, power and violence.
But if you slip for even an instant, you're gonna be torn to shreds.
My name is Livia Drusilla.
I nurture the first great imperial dynasty.
Augustus, Tiberius,
Caligula, Claudius, and Nero,
One way or another, they are all men under my control.
Without Livia pulling the strings,
would any of them have reached the heights that they did?
There's nothing she won't do to protect her dynasty.
This is the strangest, baddest family that history has ever known.
It may take a Caesar to lead an empire,
but it takes a woman to make it work.
Everyone thinks they know the true story of Rome,
but nobody knows it like me because I lived it.
And it was I who ruled Rome.
When I was young, I was so beautiful.
I was the greatest prize in Rome.
But I was just a humble senator's daughter,
yet I still became the most powerful woman in the world.
Forget what you think you already know,
I am about to tell you the real story
of the world's greatest, bloodiest dynasty.
In this first act of the story of Rome,
dear old Julius Caesar, the great disrupter,
is cut down in his prime.
He sets it all up for the first emperor,
my beloved husband, Augustus.
Now I, Livia Drusilla, ever the dutiful empress,
must remove every obstacle in our path to ensure our dynasty survives,
and with my own son at its head.
Before Augustus and I, there is the Roman Republic.
Five centuries of no kings and queens,
no emperors and empresses,
just a ruling class of infighting, self-important blue bloods
calling themselves the Senate.
The Roman republican system is really not functioning very well.
This is a system that had been developed very effectively
to run a city state in Rome.
It's now running the whole Mediterranean world,
and the systems that had worked so well when it was just a city
are really breaking down. It's simply not
a system that's built for the running of a vast empire.
The Senate, all men, of course, and fond of their own voices,
is no longer fit for purpose.
Thankfully, one great man sees his chance.
A brilliant general and leader of men puts a cat among the pigeons.
His name is Julius Caesar.
So Julius Caesar was one of a number of essentially warlords
that emerged during the late Republic,
when the kind of old republican system of Rome
is somewhat breaking down.
SHOUTING
Over the course of his many years, he's risen, he's fallen.
He's had alliances with other prominent figures,
but he's also won this great success recently in the Gallic Wars.
And it's very clear from his personality that he believes
he is destined for greatness.
To a teenage daughter of a senator,
watching this dashing war hero bring his swagger
to the dithering forum is quite a thrill.
A wonderful lesson in getting things done with a mixture of charm,
charisma, and utter ruthlessness.
It's hard not to be a little bit infatuated.
He wins military glory for himself. He becomes Pontifex Maximus,
the most important religious figure at Rome,
and he holds the consulship.
So he has this glorious public career,
and he really gets a taste for holding that power.
So he just keeps essentially trying to maintain his position
at the top of the Roman political system.
And I think it eventually gets to a point where he thinks,
"Why would I ever give this up?"
He defeats a lot of his enemies,
and he makes himself dictator of Rome.
Brilliant, but a little too far, too fast, I fear.
He ignores the golden rule of power and forgets to watch his back.
In modern terms,
I think we'd refer to Caesar as a populist.
And the problem with populists is that they're popular
with the people, but unpopular with politicians.
They try to take him to court, they try to indict him.
But ultimately the only method they could see
as a way out was, of course, to murder him.
A word of advice, if you're going to plot an assassination,
do try to consider all the consequences.
The Ides of March, the 15th of March, 44 BC.
One of the most famous days, or shall we say infamous days,
in ancient history.
Julius Caesar was due to attend a meeting of the Senate
in the theatre of Pompey in Rome.
There had been a number of ill omens
about his attendance at this meeting.
His wife begs him not to go.
And then, one of the conspirators sends him a letter
and says, you know, "We really need you at the Senate today.
"There's all this really important stuff that's gonna happen."
And so Caesar changes his mind. He says, "OK, I'm being ridiculous.
"Of course, I'm just gonna go to this senatorial meeting."
And there was a seer, a sort of clairvoyant,
who'd warn Caesar to beware this very day.
He said to beware the Ides of March.
When he's on his way to the Senate's meeting, he sees the soothsayer,
and Julius Caesar was boasting, saying,
"Hey, the Ides of March are here, and I'm still here."
And Spurinna basically goes,
"Ah, yes, they're not finished quite yet."
He's led towards the temporary senate,
at which point he's separated from his guards
and led to a place that is very easy for him to be murdered.
One of the senators approaches Caesar.
He grabs Caesar's toga and pulls it off of his shoulder,
and that is the sign to strike.
Suddenly he feels a stab in his back.
A man called Casca stabs him from behind,
but botches the job - doesn't do it very well.
Caesar turns around and basically expletive Casca,
"What do you think you're playing at?" Is what he says.
And then as soon as one has stabbed him, it is an absolute frenzy.
He's stabbed, I think, 23 times.
It's shameful. Not only Casca,
but Cassius, Bucilianus, and Decimus,
many of them Caesar's own men.
Traitors, the lot of them.
Not fit to lick his boots.
And Caesar was a hardened soldier, one of the best Rome had ever had.
And he actually put up a really good fight.
Cornered as he was, he grabbed a stylus, which is like a metal pen.
He stabs one of the senators in the eye.
But it's when he realises that Brutus,
who's supposedly his illegitimate son, is amongst the conspirators,
he gives up.
And famously, he says, in Greek, "And you, my child."
If even Brutus wants him dead,
it seems that Caesar's willing to go.
Caesar then kind of covers himself with his toga,
and falls, and bleeds out.
And I think that's the moment in which he realises, you know,
it's-it's really game over.
Everyone that I believed supported me has now turned on me.
Over 60 conspirators plunged the knife. Shame on them.
But what is their plan?
It's very clear to me that they have no plan.
All the foresight of naughty children.
People flee in every direction, and there is just utter chaos in Rome.
Eventually his body is-is taken out.
One arm allegedly falls off the bier.
There is this absolute sense that everything is to play for now.
But so begins the history of Western civilisation.
Caesar's brutal murder unleashes 17 years
of power-grabs and bloodshed as never seen before.
Frankly, it's utter chaos.
But this is also my chance.
Back the right horse, and my future is made.
Then I can make sure my own son Tiberius is next in line...
whatever the price.
Julius Caesar,
the greatest general Rome has ever known,
has just been brutally murdered by a sickly bunch of senators,
supposedly his friends.
Vermin, every last one of them.
But I, Livia Drusilla, your narrator, am about to rise
to the most powerful position any woman has ever reached.
When Caesar died, he left a power vacuum,
and so it had to be filled.
There was really a moment in which Rome as we know it didn't happen.
No doubt I'm biased, but only one man can fill this void.
Only 19 years old when civil war kicks off,
his name is Octavian, Caesar's nephew and my future husband.
He has brains and youth on his side.
Oh, and he also has his uncle's blessing and his money.
Julius Caesar is Octavian's uncle.
And Julius Caesar, I think, sees something potentially
in the young Octavian and takes him under his wing.
Caesar names him his principal heir in his will,
which means he gets his money.
And not only does he say that, "I'm going to accept this legacy.
"And when I come to Rome, I will declare
"that I am not just Caesar's heir, I am his son."
Every move Octavian makes is smart.
He buddies up with Mark Antony,
Caesar's greatest friend and favourite general.
The brawn for his brains.
Together, they are unstoppable.
One by one, they take out the traitors who killed Caesar.
And all the time, he watches his back.
But the greatest power moves play out
not on the battlefield, but in the bedroom.
Whenever the sources talk about Octavian having affairs,
they suggest that his affairs are all politically motivated.
That he is sleeping with the wives of senators
in order to procure information or strengthen his position.
One day, when he's entertaining a senator,
he takes a fancy to his wife, and he takes her to bed.
And then they come back a bit later,
and supposedly, her hair is all over the place
and very much giving an indication of what's going on.
This is the young me. Aren't I pretty?
When Octavian's eyes find mine, I am far too clever to resist,
and he knows it, too.
It's win-win for us from the start.
And my existing marriage is a detail easily fixed.
Octavian and Livia meet for the first time in the summer of 39 BC.
He is about 24 and one of the most powerful men in Rome.
She is about 20.
And the sources all kind of claim
that this is love at first sight,
and he is immediately obsessed by Livia.
What happens is extraordinarily strange.
And it's not what you expect from Octavian
because he forces Livia's husband to divorce her.
And then within a couple of days, he marries her.
He is in need of some social credibility
with the old Roman aristocracy.
Livia can provide that for him,
and Octavian can provide Livia with security and a route to power.
After 17 tiresome years,
the civil war is reaching its climactic ending.
My darling husband, Octavian, controls the west of the empire,
and Mark Antony the east, cosying up to his new queen,
the former lover of Julius Caesar, Cleopatra.
A beautiful woman, but a dreadful narcissist.
As ever, when there's this much power at stake,
there's only room for one winner.
Augustus and Mark Antony go from brothers-in-arms to bitter rivals.
Each one wants Rome for himself.
By the time Octavian clashes with Antony at the Battle of Actium,
he is no longer the gauche 19-year-old,
but a seasoned warrior.
Now it's his time.
Our time.
Mark Antony and Cleopatra, they're defeated,
and they realise at this point that there is no way back for them.
They have lost this war, and so both of them end up committing suicide.
And Octavian is now the undisputed sole ruler of Rome.
Well, Caesar didn't adopt my husband for nothing.
He knew a ruthless winner when he saw one.
Now we have peace.
This is where I can help cement his power.
It's the beginning of 27 BC.
Octavian, he's just been consul,
the leading figure in Rome for the last two years.
And he's very much promoting himself
as the man who is restoring peace and stability in the ways of old
to the Romans.
And the Senate, they gather and decide
what honours they can heap on Octavian,
to thank him for all that he's done.
And one of the honours that they decide is to give him a new name.
Augustus.
Augustus, leader of the Republic.
How far we have come in such a short time.
Not long ago, they were sneering at his gaucheness.
Now watch them bow and scrape.
Never underestimate my husband.
Young Octavian was very lucky
because he got a masterclass by Caesar in politics,
in how to accrue power, but also how to maintain it.
He used that formula of power and pleasure to seduce people.
He gave them what Caesar gave them -
games, distraction, wealth, abundance, extravagance,
and all these things seduced the populace
to such that they decided,
"Why do I need democracy? Actually, I don't."
With me at his side, Augustus is not going to make
the same mistakes as Uncle Julius.
The Republic secretly yearns for the strong man,
but is squeamish about titles like "king" or "dictator".
It's all really just semantics.
Augustus's real genius is that he pretends,
he maintains to the end
this fiction that he is not an autocrat.
You see, Rome had an allergic reaction to kings.
I mean, the Republic was born out of the fact
that the Romans no longer wanted kings.
And I think what is really key to Augustus's success,
where Julius Caesar had failed, is his public relations.
He essentially maintains this fiction,
despite all the evidence to the contrary,
that this is not really an autocratic system.
This is actually a restoration of the old Republic.
Everyone is equal,
he just happens to be the one who holds literally all of the power.
He develops a new word with no negative connotations around it,
the word of "princeps",
which might be saying "first amongst equals."
But unlike words like "rex", meaning "king",
which a very dirty word, the title of princeps
has less negative, if any, negative connotations surrounding it.
Really, it's genius.
Augustus has ultimate say, however the Senate vote.
They call him "first among equals".
You may know it by another name.
Emperor.
And as an old-fashioned, virtuous wife
living only to serve her husband,
I am the key to unlocking the hearts of the Roman public.
Livia made whatever Augustus was wearing.
He would let people see her weaving clothes for him.
She'd make these simple, modest garments
so that people didn't think they were too ostentatious.
He didn't want people thinking they were showy and they were rich.
I think it's remarkable testament
to the fact that Augustus clearly views Livia
as an indispensable life partner.
They say the way to a man's heart is through his stomach.
But some of us know better.
Livia recognises Augustus has manly needs,
and she provides him with virgins to sleep with.
Why virgins? Because they're untainted,
and she doesn't want him to fall into relationships
with the more elite women who might get their claws into him
and see themselves as the next empress.
You may ask yourself, "What kind of a wife would do such a thing?"
But again, here, we see the intelligence of Livia.
She's there for the long game.
She knows that she has to keep Augustus happy.
Oh, please, don't be so provincial.
The odd, energetic virgin is not going to shake our marriage.
Let him have his fun. There are bigger games to play.
That's why she stays in power.
She plays a blinder in the role of empress,
and nobody really can copy her.
Livia is very much on view.
She sits with her husband in the imperial box
to watch the gladiatorial shows.
She is very, very active as well,
writing letters to important dignitaries.
She is part of the internal administration with Augustus,
but she is also sort of taking on this mantle
of being this virtuous wife.
Together, we bring Roman citizens prosperity, peace and food for all.
By uniting Rome, we win the hearts of the grateful citizens...
..only for the gods to threaten it all.
Suddenly, in 23 BC, Augustus falls ill,
and it really looks for a couple of months
like this is the end, that he's gonna die.
Everything was going great -
the empire was growing, prosperity, political stability.
And then everything changed because Augustus becomes ill.
As he lies on his sick bed, I grasp a terrible truth.
We broke all the rules to make him emperor,
which means there are no rules to decide who succeeds him.
But every cloud has a silver lining.
You just have to see it and act.
So it looks like Augustus is going to die,
but he makes a miraculous recovery, and so all is good again.
From then on, Augustus realises that he needs to solidify further
the succession of what's going to happen after him.
Augustus, obviously, doesn't have a son.
It's become clear by now that Livia is not going to give him a son.
And so the question becomes,
who is going to take on this power when Augustus dies?
Rome needs a successor, or the empire will fall.
For my bloodline to survive, blood must be spilt.
Darling Augustus has been the first emperor of Rome for four years now.
I love him, the people love him.
With my guiding hand, some say,
he's put an end to civil war and brought stability to Rome.
Now we must become a dynasty.
Augustus must name an heir,
and that's where it gets tricky.
I can only bring him a stepson,
another man's blood.
Augustus isn't happy.
He starts considering his daughter, Julia,
a frightful little whore with terrible hair.
So, all of his focus now fell upon his daughter
and his sole surviving offspring, Julia.
She is the only conduit for Augustus's heredity.
His first choice of person to succeed him
would be a descendant of Julia.
The daughters of powerful figures are used basically as pawns.
This is exactly what happens to Julia.
She's very young, and she is married to Augustus's nephew,
and he is called Marcellus.
That makes Marcellus first in line.
Not my plan at all.
My son Tiberius is what the empire needs.
That is going to take some doing.
But I've always liked a challenge.
It looks like Marcellus has this crown-prince role,
that Augustus is lining him up.
But it's not for very long, because, soon after, Marcellus dies.
This is a total shock.
It comes completely from out of the blue,
and it really hammers home the fact
that succession is going to be a problem.
Augustus is heartbroken
to have his closest male heir snatched away so young.
Of course, the blame game begins.
And who do you think is in the cross hairs?
Why is it always the wives that people point the finger at?
And so the thinking emerges that, "Ooh, maybe because, look,
"he was a young man, he may well have been in the prime of life.
"Surely he didn't just die of disease. Maybe it was poison."
And that means, maybe, did someone in that imperial family poison him?
And goodness forbid that that was a woman.
And there are later rumours that emerge
that supposedly Livia poisoned Marcellus.
Poisoning was very common in ancient Rome.
It was the most commonly used way of getting rid of political rivals,
jealous husbands,
people you didn't want around, predominantly because it was subtle.
You didn't go and openly stab somebody.
So when that person died, you could put your hands up
and deny you had any involvement in it.
With Marcellus dead, the prospects for my Tiberius are improving.
But Augustus will insist on looking to Julia to give him a grandson.
Augustus couldn't afford to waste any time.
He felt it was really important that she was married off once again.
So Augustus had Julia betrothed to his right-hand man, Marcus Agrippa.
Again, that wretched daughter of his keeps side-lining my Tiberius
with the prospect of a grandson.
I have no choice but to be patient.
This is a long game.
Meanwhile, there's an empire to run.
Rome's armies have brought us peace,
give or take the odd, unruly German tribe.
And together, Augustus and I bring moral reforms
and a new sense of discipline to the empire.
Peace and decorum.
It's a fine time to grow old together.
Decades go by, and now Augustus is old...
..as am I.
But I have worked my way into the heart of the empire.
Whereas when other women tried to do this,
it doesn't tend to go so well.
Livia is known throughout the empire.
She gets revered throughout the empire early on.
And even though they're childless, Augustus doesn't divorce her.
Granted, being popular with the people has its uses,
but now Julia delights Augustus
with grandsons - priceless direct descendants.
This is bad news for me,
but fortunately, Julia has what we might call a reputation.
Augustus was scared from the very beginning,
when she married Agrippa, that she would be unfaithful.
Augustus was actually relieved when she had her first children
and they bore some resemblance to their father, Agrippa.
This was proof that these were indeed her husband's children.
But rumours start to swirl about Julia's fidelity,
and it's said that she even openly jokes
about being unfaithful to her husband,
that her friends kind of say to her,
"How come all your children look so like Agrippa
"when, you know, you're cheating on him all the time?"
And she makes this comment that's like,
"Oh, because I'm very careful only to take on passengers
"when the ship's hold is full."
So as in, she only sleeps with other men
when she's already pregnant with Agrippa's child.
Well, that sort of behaviour would not sit well
with Daddy's trademark decorum.
And then the poor, forsaken husband, Agrippa, dies.
The emperor loses another heir.
They are remarkably careless with their young men.
There is just... Every single man
that Augustus makes his heir seems to die.
Time to make my move.
Julia is a widow.
If my son Tiberius divorces his wife, he can marry into the family.
Julia is being passed around from one figure to the next,
and ultimately, she has to marry Tiberius,
and Tiberius has to marry her.
Their marriage is not a happy one.
Tiberius's nature is taciturn and surly
and ungiving and undemonstrative.
And what these two people discover once they're married
is they're almost entirely incompatible.
So what you see is a very natural rebellion to her position.
She exudes that rebellion through being promiscuous,
through drinking, through wild parties.
The stories become increasingly colourful,
including the idea
that Julia offers herself at night in the forum
as a sexual partner to any passing willing fellow.
And so there is a story of her having sex on rostrum in the forum,
in full view of anybody who may be passing.
Tiberius is well aware of these rumours,
and he's humiliated by them.
He's not in control of his wife.
Tiberius decides that he has absolutely just had it up to here
with life at Rome.
He does something that is a complete shock to Augustus
and to a lot of people in Rome. He resigns.
My foolish boy withdraws from the race.
If only he had my patience,
he would see that Julia's shameful behaviour may yet be our gain.
Livia knows that Julia's nature is the way it is.
Sooner or later, she's going to make a huge mistake.
As this is all going on, Augustus, in fact,
is promoting these morality laws
where adultery is made a crime.
Augustus's moral legislation imposed requirements on cuckolded husbands
to divorce their wives at once or face a penalty of pimping.
If the law forces my Tiberius to divorce the adulterous Julia,
he will be back out of the family, out of the line of succession.
And when Augustus dies, his heirs will cast me aside, too.
And you have the story of Julia telling Livia,
"Well, you know, that's fine. You're married to Augustus,
"but I'm the daughter of Augustus. That's a bigger deal."
That is a silly mistake.
Julia is forcing my hand.
If I do nothing, she may ruin us all.
Augustus has a really difficult position here.
Does his loyalty lie with his wife, Livia?
Or does his loyalty lie with Julia?
And we all know that father-daughter relationship
is a very special relationship.
Dear old, deluded Augustus is blind to it all.
If only he could see the real Julia.
Soon enough, a list of lovers was passed to Augustus,
and at least five men were named as being Julia's lovers
while she's married to Tiberius.
So, in 2 BC, Augustus takes this extraordinary step
of writing a letter to the Senate in which he denounces Julia
for having done all of this kind of scandalous stuff.
And he's said to be so ashamed
that he can't actually appear in the Senate to read it himself.
Julia shamed my son into self-imposed exile.
Now, her arrest means she reaps what she sows.
The punishment for Julia is one of the most severe
you can possibly imagine.
Julia is sent off to a prison island far from Rome,
near the Bay of Naples.
She's deprived of all of her possessions.
She has no nice clothes. She's given no nice food, no wine.
She can't even receive visitors unless Augustus is asked first.
He calls her a disease of his flesh.
And for a daughter, I don't think you could hear anything worse
coming from the mouth of your father.
Augustus won't relent. He is furious.
He is so damaged by Julia's alleged behaviour
that he actually files for divorce from Tiberius on her behalf.
He says that fire will sooner mix with water
than Julia be returned to Rome.
I couldn't have said it better myself.
No more troublesome offspring to get in the way of my Tiberius.
The plotting and scheming of Livia has paid off.
Julia, her rival, is out of the picture.
Her son Tiberius is back in the picture,
and he's right there as the potential successor to Augustus.
My dear Tiberius is no longer a boy,
but at least he can now hold his head high and return to Rome.
Now I can get busy here, looking after the empire's interests.
But abroad, some of our generals are meeting uncharacteristic failure.
Those ghastly German tribes!
A horde of barbarians annihilates three of our legions
and takes their standards.
It's a disastrous blow to morale that shakes Rome to the core
and calls the authority of our rule into question.
These losses have hurt Augustus's reputation badly.
And now all the talk on the street is who will succeed him as emperor.
Augustus has two grandsons, Gaius and Lucius,
who look like they're gonna become his successors.
Even with Julia shamed, it appears that my son Tiberius
is still a lowly third in the line of succession,
behind the two young princes, Gaius and Lucius.
But with their father dead and mother banished,
one can only hope the little lambs are safe.
A few years later, the joint heirs, the intended successors of Augustus,
they both die.
One of them dies of illness in southern France,
the other in Turkey from a wound.
Augustus's preoccupation with dynasty,
with extending his rule beyond his own lifetime,
led to more than one heir.
And each heir, save Tiberius,
would find the same outcome -
almost certain death.
Marcellus first, Lucius, Gaius.
They're either just incredibly unlucky,
or there is something more sinister going on.
On every occasion, the finger of rumour pointed to Livia.
I would say that Livia's a pretty good inspiration
for Game Of Thrones.
One by one, she gets rid of all the competition
until the only viable heir is, of course, her son Tiberius.
I will not deny I have ambitions for my son.
But murder, poisoning and character assassination?
I will not dignify these accusations with a denial.
However, I will say this...
once more, the door is now ajar
for my poor, cuckolded, exiled Tiberius.
Tiberius is recalled to Rome because really
he has become Augustus's only hope at having a successor.
At this point, it's his only option.
And so Augustus ends up passing on power to Tiberius,
who is his stepson and Livia's son from her first marriage.
There is only one person standing in my way now.
Only one man who could jeopardise Tiberius crowning as emperor.
My own husband of over 40 years.
My dear, beloved Augustus.
To ensure my dynasty is safe,
he will have to go.
Rome, the greatest empire in the world.
For years, my son Tiberius has waited to take his rightful position
as heir to Emperor Augustus.
And his nymphomaniac daughter Julia is banished,
but she's left offspring all over the place.
One in particular alarms me -
a dubious character by the name of Postumus Agrippa.
Despite Postumus being previously struck off the list of succession,
Augustus now appears to be wavering.
Could it be that Augustus is about to change his will
and make Agrippa Postumus his heir, rather than Tiberius?
The question mark is too big,
and so Livia ultimately finds that that question mark can't exist,
and she has to get rid of Augustus
to ensure that Tiberius is gonna become heir to the throne.
"Get rid of my Augustus"?
A grubby way of putting it.
There really are some poisonous rumours
around the imperial palace these days.
I have only Rome's best interests at heart.
Augustus and I have done great things together,
but now... it's all about our legacy.
Nothing else matters.
There is one rumour said that Livia poisoned Augustus,
and she does it through a very ingenious way.
There is no fruit my Augustus enjoys more
than the plump figs from his own trees
growing outside his villa in Nola.
He liked to pick the figs straight off the tree
to ensure that they hadn't been poisoned.
Augustus is an old man. He's well into his 70s.
They feared of his life quite a few times before.
So he'll only trust figs he picks himself and all this sort of thing.
Livia employs the use of poisoners
to actually poison the figs on the tree before they're picked...
..so that there's no way that she plays -
at least from a point of view of public perception -
a part in his murder.
She directed Augustus to one of the poisoned figs.
Augustus ate.
So, you've gotta imagine you're in Tiberius's shoes.
When he receives word that Augustus is dying,
he races down to Nola.
Livia refuses to publish the information that Augustus is dying
until her son Tiberius can make it onto the scene.
This delay allows Tiberius to ensure
that there is no kind of potential questioning of his authority.
He can really be asserting his power from the outset.
Augustus's final words showed how he thought about Roman politics.
"Acta est fabula, plaudite."
"The tale is over, applaud."
The Roman historian Tacitus says that it's not sure
whether Tiberius arrives after Augustus has died or before.
Other sources say that Tiberius does arrive in time,
and Augustus has a very good death, that he talks with Tiberius
about the succession, about what should happen next.
He then does things like he combs his hair,
and then he dies in his villa.
Oh, how I mourn him.
We were married for over 50 years,
most of that, building Rome to its greatest glory yet.
But now I must hold fast onto that legacy.
Augustus dies in 14 AD at the ripe old age of 76,
and this is obviously a moment of potential crisis for the empire.
Augustus has been in power for 45 years,
and this could be a point at which everything falls apart.
This is the first time that this has happened, a succession.
So it's very much brand-new territory.
Do not be so quick to judge me.
I need to act decisively if Tiberius is to claim the empty throne.
Augustus saved Rome from destroying itself,
and together, we created an empire unsurpassed in power and prosperity.
Leaving undisputed succession to Tiberius
was his final act of unwavering duty.
I am simply proud I could help,
and I will ensure nothing destabilises that legacy,
even if that includes Julia's last living son.
With Augustus out of the way, who's left to stop Tiberius?
The other one is Postumus Agrippa, and so guards are sent
to the island where he's being held to get rid of him.
Imagine his shock when he sees a centurion, a Roman soldier,
approaching him and informing him that he's been sentenced to die.
Tiberius, my son, is Augustus's legacy.
I'm honestly lost for words.
But I worry for my son.
Despite all I've done for him, he doesn't seem to share my joy.
I see that once again, I have my work cut out.
Tiberius first-hand witnessed what his mother had to do
to get him into that position.
He witnessed what Augustus had to do to maintain that position.
And now, unfortunately, he has to play the game,
and he sees danger absolutely everywhere.
He's waited so long.
But how long will he hold this prize?
Who will get him? Is he safe?
No-one is safe in early imperial Rome,
not least with a family like Tiberius's.
Next time, the reign of Tiberius takes a darker turn...
You see the most horrific rumours emerging.
A Pandora's box of perversion is opened.
..but his depravity is child's play compared to his awaiting heir...
He was savage. He was sadistic.
Caligula had incestuous relationships with all his sisters.
..who threatens to ruin Rome itself.
Rome... the greatest empire the world has ever seen.
With our grip on the Mediterranean, we conquer all.
Deep into Africa and as far north as Britannia,
and all under the ultimate control of one man, the Emperor.
Or so it seems.
HORSE NEIGHS
Let emperors strut the world stage,
and let us, the humble women in the wings, build our dynasties.
For the first time,
we are seeing women altering the history of the western world.
Julia.
Messalina.
Agrippina,
and of course, me, Livia.
All women who can shape the world, changing it forever.
The empresses are the ones
that actually push the emperors into position.
Driven by sex, power and violence.
But if you slip for even an instant, you're going to be torn to shreds.
My name is Livia Drusilla.
I nurture the first great imperial dynasty.
Augustus,
Tiberius,
Caligula,
Claudius, and Nero.
One way or another, they are all men under my control.
Without Livia pulling the strings,
would any of them have reached the heights that they did?
There's nothing she won't do to protect her dynasty.
This is the strangest,
baddest family that history has ever known.
It may take a Caesar to lead an empire,
but it takes a woman to make it work.
Everyone thinks they know the true story of Rome,
but nobody knows it like me because I lived it.
And it was I who ruled Rome.
When I was young, I was so beautiful.
I was the greatest prize in Rome.
But I was just a humble senator's daughter.
Yet I still became the most powerful woman in the world.
Forget what you think you already know.
I am about to tell you the real story
of the world's greatest, bloodiest dynasty.
It's time for my son Tiberius
to become the second emperor of Rome.
Under my guiding hand, of course.
But he's about to slip the reins and drag the Imperial Court
into an age of depravity that shocks our world.
But then his successor, my wicked, entitled grandson Caligula,
will put all of Tiberius' successes in the shade,
threatening to ruin the Empire itself.
I am only 15 when our beloved Republic
sees its first great dictator, Julius Caesar, murdered.
Years of bloodshed and civil war follow.
50 years on, and my beloved husband Augustus rules undisputed.
The first true emperor of Rome.
With me by his side at every step.
Now, tragedy.
No sooner have I charmed Augustus to make my son Tiberius his heir
than Augustus dies.
Poison is to blame,
someone very close, the poisoner.
Who? My lips are sealed.
Tiberius knows that he owes his power to his mother.
Livia knows this as well, and because of that,
Livia is determined to help Tiberius on his way
as he learns the ropes of being a new emperor.
And initially, this seems to work quite well.
My dear Tiberius woos the public as only a great soldier can.
He wages war against the unruly,
unwashed Germanic tribes who humiliated Augustus.
He crushes them, bringing home
the priceless eagle standards they stole from Augustus.
Morale is riding high.
The people adore him.
He's a great general. He's a successful soldier.
But that's very different from being a politician.
And above all, he didn't play the games
that were needed politically to maintain power,
which Augustus played perfectly.
Tiberius was the opposite of Augustus.
Tiberius' reign starts off quite well.
He seems to make an effort to treat the Senate
with as much respect as possible,
but quite quickly, things start to degenerate.
Tiberius becomes increasingly tyrannical,
increasingly paranoid.
You start to see cracks in that relationship
between Tiberius and Livia.
They are not a completely solid force,
because one of the early acts the Senate wants to do
is to honour Livia by giving her the title of Mother of the Nation.
And Tiberius says no, he doesn't allow that honour.
He basically vetoes it.
The ingratitude, the paranoia, the foolishness.
Fear not. I won't go quietly.
But other women are less resilient to his cruelty.
Within a year of coming to power, he's settling scores.
And the first target is his wanton ex-wife, Julia,
who humiliated him with her promiscuous ways
and now lives in exile, banished from men and wine.
The only punishment that could truly hurt her.
He actually worsens Julia's situation in exile.
He cuts off the allowance that Augustus had allowed her.
He cuts off even her supply of food.
And lets her starve to death.
Julia is just the start.
My son's mission is to destroy all his enemies,
both real and imagined.
It's here that things turn really dark.
There are a lot of infamous stories of Tiberius' reign,
but one that goes down in the history books is his introducing
of the so-called Treason Trials.
Tiberius now makes it treason for people to speak against him.
He could pull you in and murder you for any charges.
It becomes quite quickly a reign of terror.
Executions are a daily occurrence,
even on sacred days like New Year's Day.
No-one was spared, even women and children.
They were dragged with hooks
from the Stairs of Mourning right to the Tiber,
and thrown away as if they were nothing more than trash.
No-one in Rome felt safe.
The age of Augustus seemed like a distant memory.
Tiberius sees enemies everywhere
until there is only one person whom he really trusts, Drusus,
his 29-year-old son from his first marriage.
Sadly, Drusus, who has his father's temper,
makes a mortal enemy of Tiberius' right-hand man,
the conniving, ruthless Sejanus.
Sejanus decides to do away with Drusus.
He does so by seducing Drusus' wife,
and together they slowly poison him.
So it looks like Drusus dies of a natural death.
Dies of illness over a period of time.
His beloved son, his priceless blood heir, murdered.
Tiberius' reign descends into full-blown, rage-filled tyranny.
I think the death of Drusus
was the last bit of humanity left in Tiberius.
The loss of his son, the loss of power for someone
who was used to being in power and in control,
I think absolutely broke him.
And he goes on to become one of the worst figures in Roman history.
My whole life, I worked to make him Emperor.
And now my wretched son is throwing it all away...
..dragging my dynasty into a nightmare of torture,
paedophilia and murder.
You see some of the most horrific rumours
emerging from the whole of this period.
LIVIA: For 12 years, Rome is in the iron grip of my son,
the second Emperor Tiberius.
When he spills German blood, the people cheer.
He restores our pride and secures our peace.
Then he ignores the hard won love of his people.
Paranoid, he slaughters the innocent and guilty alike.
Worst, he turns his back on me.
And without a woman to guide him, there really are enemies everywhere.
Tiberius is in his 60s now.
He's had enough of Rome.
Either he's paranoid of being assassinated,
or he's just fed up of being in the public eye.
And he wants a retreat to a quiet life, to seclusion.
Tiberius' popularity begins to crumble.
His mood darkens, and he becomes tired of running the empire.
He retires to Capri.
Capri, I never cared for the place.
A dreary island full of wasps,
much like the Senate Tiberius was desperate to escape.
But so distant from his duties,
a man's mind can wander into darkness.
Once he's vacated Rome,
he has this additional layer of freedom
that he wouldn't have when he's being looked upon
by this very sort of crowded population.
So on the island of Capri,
he really gives full rein to his desires.
He gets to Capri, and it's like there's a kind of Pandora's box
of perversion is opened and something flies out.
Give him credit where credit is due,
Tiberius does his self-imposed exile in style.
His Villa of Jupiter is spectacular,
perched high on the cliff tops.
Free from prying eyes, no excess is spared.
Tiberius' life on Capri is rich material
for scandal-mongering historians.
He didn't have an attachment
to physical or material luxury in Rome.
He was much more serious minded.
And if we believe the ancient record,
then Tiberius nevertheless gave in to a life of incredible licence.
And that situation is the perfect environment
for... for rumours to start to grow.
People are like,
"Why is Tiberius not at Rome? What is he hiding from us?"
The stories very quickly circulate that he's gone to Capri.
Not because he doesn't like being involved in politics,
it's to hide the depravity that's going on.
On Capri, he tries to gain this isolation,
this seclusion from the rest of the world.
And straight away,
you see some of the most horrific rumours emerging
from the whole of this period.
The Villa of Jupiter on Capri
has these incredibly steep cliffs going right down to the sea.
And so Tiberius can take people that he is suspicious of
for nice little cliff-side walks, and then throw them off.
There's a 297 metre tall cliff
in which he would just push them off, get rid of them,
and then get on with his day as if nothing had happened.
The Tiberius leap will be the moment when transgressors will die,
but only after an intensely painful period of punishment,
which would frequently involve, we're told, some element of torture.
Capri is a den of iniquity,
and my son Tiberius is at the centre of it all.
And don't just take my word for it.
Even that pedant of a historian, Suetonius, cannot turn a blind eye.
Suetonius is the one who has the great line about it,
where he says about Tiberius,
"His criminal obscenities are almost too vile to discuss,
"let alone believe."
"Almost" being the key word here, cos Suetonius then goes
and lists them all, one by one by one.
There are young children, young boys and young girls,
who are brought to the villa for Tiberius' sexual pleasure.
He has abused these small boys.
He has a team of what he calls his minnows.
As he swam, they swam below him and nibbled his genitals.
These minnows...
..peasant boys, most likely, and hardly missed, I suppose.
But there are limits even an emperor cannot break.
And Tiberius has crossed that line.
These stories that, you know, he interrupted a religious ceremony
because he took a fancy to the boys taking part in it.
He rapes the boys,
and when they complained, he has their legs broken.
Even being friends with Tiberius comes with its own problems.
My son has a very dark sense of humour.
Tiberius tricked male guests
into drinking enormous quantities of wine.
When they were drunk beyond reason,
he then tied their penises tightly with string
so that they couldn't possibly pee.
The pain was excruciating. They writhed on the floor.
They begged for release, and Tiberius laughed.
It's three years since Tiberius leaves Rome
and his Imperial responsibilities behind.
But in an age of prosperity and peace, the people barely notice,
and the Senate manage the Empire in his absence,
under the watchful eye of the leader of the Imperial Guard.
Thankfully, I, as mother of the Emperor,
remain in Rome to maintain a sense of Imperial control.
Tiberius becomes quite resentful of his mother's political status,
but more so, he becomes resentful of the notion
that somehow him becoming Emperor is her doing and not divine right.
And so, eventually,
this relationship really breaks down.
Livia's power and influence over Tiberius declines.
He sidelines her politically.
The gods are loosening my grip on my deviant son's rule.
I sacrifice everything to secure his throne.
And now my 86 years are weighing heavy.
Livia suffered a fall in her old age.
Her death was certainly protracted enough for Tiberius
to have returned to Rome to see her before she died.
And she waited. And she waited.
But he didn't come.
Tiberius doesn't leave Capri,
doesn't go to her deathbed to be with her in her last moments.
Is it too much to ask that my ungrateful swine of a son,
who I made Emperor, respects his mother with a visit?
She then died at the age of 86.
Everyone awaited for the Emperor's presence,
but Tiberius cared so little that he kept them waiting,
to the point that the body had decayed
and had to be buried out of necessity
rather than out of funeral rites.
When Livia died,
the Senate agreed to build an arch in her honour.
And Livia would have been the first woman in Rome
to receive such an honour,
but Tiberius ensured that this arch was never built.
Tiberius flat out refuses.
This is not what Tiberius wants.
He does not want his mother getting further honours
even after she's dead.
Turning his back on me,
Tiberius now has no mother, wife, or goddess to guide him,
and no son to claim his throne.
The fool needs to name a successor
if our dynasty is not to die with him.
There is a big problem for Tiberius
in that, if he doesn't have any sort of heir at all,
then what's to stop another senator from saying,
"Well, look, the Emperor is nearly dead. He's very old.
"He's going to go away soon, one way or the other.
"Nature will do it. Why don't I get in first?"
Tiberius invites, under conditions of utmost secrecy,
a member of his family to share his self-imposed exile with him.
A teenage boy called Caligula.
An odd choice, but he has good blood.
After all, he is my great-grandson.
Unfortunately, Tiberius,
thinking Caligula's parents are plotting against him,
has them killed,
and his brothers too for good measure.
Leaving poor little Caligula the last man standing
and the very last choice as a successor to Tiberius.
Tiberius takes in Caligula because he doesn't have a son,
and he's aware that he,
like Augustus before him, is going to need a successor.
The mind of a tyrant is always hard to understand.
To everyone's surprise,
Caligula was taken under Tiberius' wing,
probably because he needed company,
but most importantly because he needed an accomplice.
So Caligula goes to Capri,
and he basically now has to stay with the man
who has ordered the executions of several members of his family,
and just stay there and basically be emotionless,
to not fight Tiberius, to be his heir,
and to just kind of be there passively
and watch what Tiberius is doing.
He was a teenager,
and it's said that Caligula, actually, there,
is witnessing things he'd never seen before in Rome.
Increasingly depraved way of life for both men.
The decision to bring Caligula to Capri
would turn out to be one of Tiberius' worst.
Tiberius needs Caligula
because he needs someone to say there's a future,
and Caligula is all that's left now.
And I think witnessing the murder of his family members,
and then being brought up
in this incredibly strange environment
by the uncle that had murdered them,
maybe contributes to Caligula not being...
the most well-adjusted man.
That's bound to make you look around pretty nervously and think,
"Well, I've got to tow the line very, very carefully."
The saying "keep your friends close and your enemies closer"
is usually good advice.
Tiberius is about to realise that keeping his family close
is probably the worst advice that anyone could give him.
Tiberius, he's a very old man.
Hardly anybody has seen him for a long, long time.
And it shouldn't really surprise anybody when he falls ill.
Least surprised is cunning little Caligula,
watching from the wings.
As my son's grip on power falters,
this is a golden opportunity to seize the crown.
Tiberius appears to die,
and the people around him rush to acclaim Caligula
as the next Emperor.
And everyone is excited because Caligula,
he's seen as young blood, a fresh face.
This is the dawn of a new era.
The old, boring, pretty infamous Emperor Tiberius is dead.
And then it turns out that Tiberius isn't dead after all.
Rather than let this word spread,
as they're already celebrating the accession of Caligula,
the head of the Praetorian Guard, a man called Macro,
he gets a pillow and he smothers Tiberius in his bed
just to make sure that he's dead and to avoid any embarrassment.
There's a rumour that he's actually been smothered
on the orders of Caligula.
And by doing so, Caligula got rid of, first of all,
somebody who had tortured his family, tortured his life,
but also the only person
standing in the way of ultimate power.
Caligula, to give him credit, is our first emperor to show
that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
But when he loses his last female anchor,
a deranged torrent of vengeance consumes Rome.
LIVIA: The dynasty I founded as the first Roman empress
continues with my great-grandson, Caligula,
the youngest and dumbest emperor Rome has yet known.
Tiberius may introduce tyranny to the Imperial Court,
but he is at least prudent with the Empire's wealth.
Caligula? Not so much.
When Tiberius dies,
he leaves the treasury in a really good position.
There is tonnes of money because he's been really careful with it.
And with him dies an accomplished bureaucrat,
a man of extraordinary military record, senatorial record.
And he's replaced by somebody who,
in terms of training in the way Rome works,
is effectively a child.
After 22 years of Tiberius' miserly rule,
Rome is desperate for change.
Caligula, unknown, untested, is their great new hope?
Oh, dear.
A 24-year-old boy by the name of Caligula
becomes the most powerful man in the world.
He hasn't had a career.
He hasn't done anything by Roman standards.
This is a new chapter.
Caligula leaves Capri and he returns to Rome.
He is young, he is energetic.
People line the streets
and they celebrate Caligula's arrival.
He gives money out to people in Rome. He feasts them.
He declares public games on a lavish scale.
People are initially very excited when Caligula becomes Emperor,
and the initial signs are very promising.
So people are encouraged.
My great-grandson loves to put on a show,
no matter the cost.
An expensive, cheap trick
pioneered by Caesar to win over the masses.
But it works. All they need is a little blood, bread and wine,
and they'll be eating out of your hand.
It was an almost sure-fire way
of garnering at least short-term public support
to stage an elaborate spectacular.
DOGS BARKING He's a showman at heart.
He just has this urge to put on this spectacle,
to make everything bigger and gaudier and more colourful.
My dear great-grandson plunders the Empire for lions and tigers
to fight his gladiators.
Feeding them is an expensive business.
But Caligula, always ingenious,
cuts his costs by feeding them on Rome's undesirables.
It's win-win.
He loved gladiators.
It just wasn't bloody enough for him.
Cos, contrary to belief,
there are rules involved in gladiator fights.
He threw all those away.
He wanted more bloodshed.
It's more exotic, it's more spectacular.
It's more lethal.
But it's also... It's a time when,
in most cases, he can go there and the crowd is loving him
because he's giving them just what they want.
There's no doubt the young buck knows how to play a crowd.
But fate has other plans.
People are excited about Caligula's reign at the start,
but things start to go downhill very quickly. He gets ill.
It does seem to be a very serious illness,
to the fact that many people believe that he won't survive.
It's a wake-up call to Caligula.
He's become Emperor and everyone's cheered him,
and he's gone and spent all his money
and everybody's cheered him.
But then he's looked as if he was going to die,
and everyone's thinking,
"Well, OK, he's not gonna to be here anymore.
"So what's next?
"How do I make sure that I'm doing well under the next regime?"
When he gets better, what he realises, first of all,
is the falsity of everyone around him.
All those who, until that point, had worshipped him,
had said how wonderful he was.
Suddenly, we're thinking he was going to die,
and they were already looking at replacing him.
Caligula is openly autocratic, openly tyrannical,
and he wants to put that power on display.
So when a senator, during his illness,
sycophantically says, you know,
"I would give my life so Caligula could survive this illness,"
Caligula makes him follow through on that when he survives,
and he forces the Senator to kill himself.
Poor, orphaned Caligula
has no mother's influence to calm his cruel outbursts.
But make no mistake,
there are women pulling his strings - his sisters.
Caligula, he had three sisters - Drusilla, Livilla, and Agrippina.
He makes them very central to his rule.
Believe me, they are very close.
So close, most believe he sleeps with all three.
I'm all for keeping it in the family,
but there are limits.
Yet Drusilla is his true soulmate.
His desperate need to satisfy her whims
is the only thing that's keeping him sane.
He gives her his ring when he's ill.
Kind of indicates that she is the heir of his power.
He gives her unprecedented honours.
Caligula was very, very close to his sisters,
particularly Drusilla,
who sadly will die not long into Caligula's reign.
And this is seen as another turning point in Caligula's story.
That this kind of drives him over the edge even more.
When Drusilla dies, Caligula's reaction is very extreme.
He completely falls to pieces.
He's absolutely devastated.
He barely functions,
and it just destroys him kind of emotionally and kind of mentally.
His sister Drusilla kept Caligula in check.
Now that she's dead,
he's consumed by anger at the ruling class
that manage the Empire.
Maybe Caligula starts to realise that these senators are sycophants.
They are saying what he wants to hear.
But in fact, those are the figures who ratified the order
for his mother to be exiled and killed,
for his elder brothers to be killed.
His attitude towards the Senate is dismissive, contemptuous.
He intends to inspire fear. He successfully inspires fear.
And so the power that he has is absolute.
He ruled by fear.
In fact, his motto was "oderint dum metuant" -
let them hate so long as they fear me.
He grows this insatiable desire to humiliate them, to deride them.
He wants to show how much he can get away with,
almost because he is the man in charge.
So he dresses in clothing
that wasn't appropriate for a Roman emperor.
What they would class as effeminate.
He's wearing lots of silk and women's gowns.
There are even stories of him dressing up as Venus, as a goddess.
Time and again, Caligula is a man
who is using sex as an expression of power,
and I think, very definitely,
a way of expressing contempt towards the Roman senate.
His favourite trick was inviting senators and their wives to dinner.
He would walk around the couches, take the wives off,
have sex with them, return them to their husbands,
and then give the husbands a detailed report
of how bad they were in bed,
which is just like an added humiliation for them.
So much in the Roman world is about sex,
except sex.
Sex is about power.
And there's no denying that Caligula had a lot of power.
For Caligula, sleeping with the senators' wives
helped him to feel great about himself,
but he also knew that, for the senators,
it would help them to understand that they were powerless.
And he was powerful.
True, he is using sex to belittle his senators,
but the wives can now speak to the Emperor
in ways their husbands never can.
This twisted pillow talk is the only way
the egomaniac is persuaded to settle down and produce an heir.
He marries a woman who is already
significantly pregnant with his child,
and they have a daughter together.
And Caligula is completely enamoured of his child,
and he names her Drusilla after his beloved dead sister.
When the baby was born, he took it as good evidence
that he really was the father of this little girl,
because this little girl started scratching people's faces,
and he said, "That is a sure sign that I am the father."
A daughter can melt the hardest of hearts, but not Caligula's.
His contempt for the Senate grows stronger by the day.
There's a story that's always associated with Caligula
and this claim that he made his favourite horse a consort.
And it's used as... as an indication that,
you know, he's really lost the plot and he's going mad.
It's saying to the Senate,
you've got about as much brains as my four-legged friend,
and I don't care because all the important decisions
I will make anyway.
He's saying, "I have so little respect for you
"that I think that my horse could do a better job than you are."
Who can blame him for needling those impotent, self-important senators?
The Empire's middle managers,
always with their heads in the trough.
But his ego is blinding him.
And now he picks a fight with our magnificent army.
A bad mistake.
These soldiers are the Empire, and they can easily break it.
Caligula is aware he's never won any military victories for himself,
so he decides that he's going to go campaigning in Germany and Gaul,
potentially even eyeing up a conquest of Britain.
Caligula heads north with his legions,
and they go through what is now northern France.
And they prepare the ships and the provisions
for an invasion of Britain.
They're going to cross the Channel.
This feared waterway to Britain, which is still quite mysterious.
But then you have this odd story.
He gets his soldiers to attack the sea.
Parades them on the beach, and they attack Neptune.
And then he tells them to go and pick up seashells
on the shore in their helmets.
And he claims that this is the bounty
that the sea owes to the glory of Rome.
Some people say that this is a sign of Caligula's madness.
I think it may well be a sign of Caligula
once again wanting to humiliate more people.
He's done it with the Senate.
Now he's got these battle-hardened soldiers in front of him.
But Caligula knows that he's the man with the power,
and so he decides to humiliate them, in what way?
Than by making them as if they were children collecting seashells.
If only this moment on the beach were a one-off moment of madness.
But no. Caligula's behaviour is spiralling out of control.
In 39AD, Caligula embarked on what might seem to us today
an extraordinary folly.
Which is the bridge to nowhere.
He is going to put his power on more theatrical display
than he has ever done before.
So what he decides he's going to do
is create a bridge over the Bay of Naples,
and he does it by kind of finding all these boats,
tying them together,
and then having a dirt road built on top of these boats.
It is incredibly expensive
and extravagant, and ultimately pointless.
We know how helpful it could be to any Roman leader
to give a display of power.
Here, effectively, we have somebody riding across water,
and that absolutely fits with Caligula's idea of himself
as somebody who is more than human.
He's wearing what he claims to be
the breastplate of Alexander the Great,
and then he rides in this exceptional procession,
in which he forces the Senate to kind of take part,
across this bridge that he has created
purely for this reason.
And this is just the ultimate visualisation of Caligula's power.
There's also an element of brutality in the whole thing,
which seems typical of Caligula's short reign,
because, of course, crowds of spectators gather on the cliffs.
We hear instances of spectators who plunge to their deaths
when they fall from the cliffs, straining to get a view of this.
And I can't imagine that Caligula was anything but flattered
by that level of interest,
and not unduly concerned by the outcomes.
Emperor or not, Caligula must pay for his outrageous lusts.
They launch an attack that is so savage
that people claim that they'd seen people eat parts of Caligula's body.
LIVIA: My impetuous great-grandson, Caligula, parties his way
into the public's affection as their third Emperor.
He pays with money that my son Tiberius
so carefully saved for Rome.
Time for the boy emperor to grow up before he cripples our fortunes.
When Tiberius died,
he left a surplus of what we consider billions of dollars.
Within a year, Caligula had used them all up.
He led a very lavish, extravagant lifestyle.
He loved gemstones, he loved parties.
The problem is, where's the money coming from?
So he resorts to the most terrible thing.
He turns the palace into a brothel.
Not any old brothel.
A unique brothel, unique to the palace,
in that the prostitutes you could sleep with were freeborn women.
And not just freeborn women, elite freeborn women.
It's a humiliation for the Senate
because it's their wives and their daughters
who are forced into prostitution to make money for Caligula.
They take us to an absolute extreme of this sense
that emperors are becoming debauched,
that they have lost their grasp on morality,
and they've also lost what should distinguish them
from the sort of ignoble common people.
This is how a debauched tyrant behaves.
It certainly shouldn't be happening publicly.
But again, when you're actually there,
do you say to the man who's got the power
of life and death over you,
"Oh, look, this is shameful. You shouldn't be doing that?"
Of course you don't.
Who wouldn't be seduced by all that power and wealth?
But Caligula is taking his role as first among equals too far.
The fool.
As you'd expect, the inevitable happens,
and Caligula proclaims himself a god.
The problem is, it doesn't really mean much
when it's you doing it and not the people.
That is not a way to win people's affection in Rome.
Romans are religious people. They cultivate their gods.
For an emperor to claim to be a god in their own lifetime
is just not the done thing.
Perhaps, at this point, he truly believed he was a god,
that he could make any decision he wanted without ramifications.
But, unfortunately, he was completely wrong.
Believe me, megalomania has its own unstoppable momentum.
But how many enemies can you make?
How crazy can your decisions be before the people snap?
Emperor Caligula is about to find out.
Personally, I don't believe that Caligula was mad
so much as he had moments of madness.
He was very clever, he was very astute,
but he was also very brutal, very cruel,
and he was prone to making insane decisions,
no more so than when he decides that the capital of Rome
should no longer be Rome, but Alexandria.
Throughout Caligula's short reign, we've seen this contempt for Rome,
and the ultimate expression of contempt
comes with Caligula's apparent plan
to shift the centre of power from Rome to Alexandria.
That move, that move away from Rome,
that rejection of Rome and Romanness,
that embracing of something Hellenic,
something foreign, something exotic,
which all Romans would regard with deep suspicion, is a catalyst.
And at that point, Caligula has to go.
There's a poetic irony that the last day of Caligula's life
is centred around one of his passions - blood sports.
Unfortunately for Caligula, on this particular day,
the blood wasn't going to be anyone else's but his.
Sadly, the boy doesn't realise
there are greater expectations of an emperor
than cruelty and ridicule.
If you push men too far, they will turn against you.
I should know.
There is a certain member of the Praetorian Guard,
a man called Cassius Chaerea, who Caligula mocks unforgivingly.
Because Chaerea, he is a little bit past it,
and Caligula mocks him for having a slightly high voice,
and in his eyes, an effeminate voice.
And ultimately, Chaerea snaps.
And him and a few other officers decide enough is enough.
We are going to assassinate Caligula.
It's from this bloody and violent arena
that Caligula begins his final journey.
He leaves the games, and you've got this tunnel
that takes you from the palace to the games and back.
One of the guards asked Caligula for the password of that day.
He responds in a contemptuous way...
..and the guard's response is to raise his sword
and strike Caligula with all his might.
Chaerea lands the first blow.
As it happens, he misses the Emperor's heart,
strikes him on the shoulder,
and the Emperor's response is to cry out, "I live. I live."
And then a great slaughter fest erupts.
Blows rain down upon him.
They launch an attack that is so savage
that people claim that they'd seen people eat parts of Caligula's body.
That's just testament to how brutal an attack this is.
The way that Caligula was murdered
shows you the amount of scorn that the upper class,
the politicians had for him.
There is chaos throughout the palace and throughout the city.
There is chaos throughout
Some people say that he's alive. Some people say that he's dead.
No-one knows what's going on.
His bodyguard are going insane.
This is the end of Caligula,
but it isn't the end of the bloodbath,
because the guards recognise
that there can be no future Caligula.
And so, next to be killed
are Caligula's wife and his young daughter.
Husband, wife, baby. All are dead.
And then they've got a problem of what next?
Because there isn't an heir.
As news slowly seeps through,
the Praetorians realise what's happening,
and they start searching around the palace,
trying to figure out what's going to happen next.
In the palace is the figure of Claudius.
Claudius is the uncle of Caligula who'd always been pushed aside
because he had a couple of disabilities.
He had a stammer and he had a limp.
A member of the Praetorian Guard is going through the palace
and spots the feet of Claudius
pointing out from behind the curtain.
He tears the curtain back...
"Spare me. Spare me!" shouts the man in question.
The guard raises his sword, drops his sword.
Realises that this is Caligula's uncle,
and decides that this would be a kind of a good candidate
to replace Caligula, and so falls to his knees.
Hails the elderly man as Imperator, Emperor,
Rome's fourth Emperor, Claudius.
Least likely leader of the greatest empire on earth.
Caligula's depraved behaviour
sees him cut down in just five years.
This is what happens when an emperor doesn't have
an empress keeping him in line.
Next time, from the bizarre to the ridiculous.
Now is the time for my uninspiring grandson,
Claudius, to rule over Rome.
Two women guide his reign,
Messalina the whore empress,
and Agrippina, whose lust for succession
not only dooms herself and her own son Nero,
but also brings my precious dynasty to a bitter end.
Rome... the greatest empire the world has ever seen.
With our grip on the Mediterranean, we conquer all.
Deep into Africa and as far north as Britannia,
and all under the ultimate control of one man, the Emperor.
Or so it seems.
Let emperors strut the world stage
and let us, the humble women in the wings, build our dynasties.
For the first time,
we are seeing women altering the history of the Western world.
Julia, Messalina, Agrippina,
and, of course, me, Livia.
All women who can shape the world, changing it forever.
The empresses are the ones
that push the emperors into position.
Driven by sex, power and violence.
But if you slip for even an instant, you're gonna be torn to shreds.
My name is Livia Drusilla.
I nurture the first great imperial dynasty.
Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero.
One way or another, they are all men under my control.
Without Livia pulling the strings,
would any of them have reached the heights that they did?
There's nothing she won't do to protect her dynasty.
This is the strangest, baddest family that history has ever known.
It may take a Caesar to lead an empire,
but it takes a woman to make it work.
Everyone thinks they know the true story of Rome.
But nobody knows it like me because I lived it.
And it was I who ruled Rome.
When I was young, I was so beautiful.
I was the greatest prize in Rome.
But I was just a humble senator's daughter.
Yet I still became the most powerful woman in the world.
Forget what you think you already know.
I am about to tell you the real story
of the world's greatest, bloodiest dynasty.
In this final act of the story of Rome...
I may be dead now, but at last, I become a goddess.
Deified by my faithful grandson, Claudius,
on his accession to Emperor.
But as ever, it's the women running the show.
His shameless wife, Messalina, the whore empress,
and Nero's mother, the seemingly unkillable Agrippina
whose incessant scheming ends my dynasty forever.
60 glorious years ago,
my husband Augustus and I found the first dynasty of emperors.
Under five infamous rulers,
Rome enjoys a golden period of prosperity and peace abroad
while getting its fix of blood and violence at home
with bloody gladiator games.
But these omnipotent emperors have a fatal Achilles heel -
the knives and poisons of their nearest and dearest.
Not even I am beyond suspicion.
And as Caligula takes his cruel streak a step too far,
his assassination leaves a dangerous break in my bloodline.
Caligula is dead.
Rome no longer has an emperor.
What might happen at this point is almost impossible to predict.
But not impossible to think that civil strife, civil war,
internecine fighting among the Senate could be a consequence.
In 41 AD, it was the turn of Claudius
to play his role in the production of ancient Rome.
Enter stage right, Rome's next emperor.
Poor, bumbling Uncle Claudius,
surprised as anyone to be declared emperor.
He becomes emperor by chance,
not because he's considered the best man for the job.
He's made emperor because in the wake of Caligula's assassination,
the Praetorian Guard, who were the imperial guard to the emperor,
suddenly realised, no emperor, no guard.
And they happened to find Claudius hiding behind a curtain
during this kind of bloody massacre and decided to make him emperor.
He's not expecting what's going to happen to him.
He doesn't know at that point
that he is gonna become Emperor of Rome.
It's a shock. It's a shock to him. It's a shock to everybody else.
Claudius, runt of the imperial litter.
Disrespected and ignored. No threat to anyone.
Yet here he is, thrust under the laurels,
simply because he is one of my own.
No-one ever expects Claudius to become emperor.
He's incredibly well-born.
He's a grandson of Livia.
But he is born with certain disabilities or illnesses.
Well, what you have to understand about Claudius
is that he was mocked his whole life.
He was insulted because of his physical attributes,
because of his problems.
His own mother said he was an abortion
that was never fully started and never fully finished.
We know from the sources that people say that he slobbered.
A lot of saliva would escape from his mouth when he got excited.
He would stutter. His head would twitch and other parts of his body.
So some people suggested maybe he had Tourette's.
He's so far out that nobody's ever considered killing him, really,
up till, you know, when he becomes emperor,
because nobody's really considered him before.
Is this what the bloodline of Julius Caesar has come to?
Our proud legacy of soldiering and conquering
falling into the hands of a stuttering bookworm.
My husband, Augustus, is turning in his mausoleum.
At that time, people didn't have the understanding
of illness and disability that we have today.
Romans were quite harsh towards anyone who was different in any way,
so this was typical of the time.
There is an element of utter disdain,
but also almost shame in Claudius's condition.
When he would come to banquets,
people like Caligula would throw pit stones of olives at him.
Augustus expresses his concern that, essentially,
if they're laughing at Claudius, they're laughing at us.
Caligula is in on the joke too,
mocking his Uncle Claudius with the cruellest joke of all.
He dictates that this infirm 47-year-old uncle
must marry the staggering beauty of the court,
the wild and mesmerising Messalina, 30 years his junior.
There is a kind of teasing to the idea
that the elderly Claudius should be married to Messalina,
who is so much younger, so much more vigorous.
But as always, this is a political and a dynastic union,
and, initially, there is an element of success to the marriage.
Messalina, who is interested in power,
who is interested in making this marriage work,
initially plays along with this.
Clever girl.
Even before Caligula meets his end,
Messalina is getting busy,
making powerful friends, building her influence.
She's creating networks of informants
and people who can essentially do her bidding
in this world of court intrigue and court politics.
She removes anyone who looks like a potential threat to her,
and she establishes her position
as the pre-eminent woman on the Palatine.
What perfect timing.
Just as Claudius is made emperor,
Messalina has him totally under her thumb.
But after a lifetime in the shadows, has he any chance of glory?
Before being emperor, he doesn't hold any public positions
like the rest of the clan are sent off to the provinces
to do various things and put up front at the games and that.
He was very much kept in the background.
He's got no experience of government,
no experience in the military.
He's really coming in kind of completely, completely blank.
But he is a survivor.
He may dribble and he may stutter, but Claudius is no fool.
After all, he is one of mine.
To win the people's hearts,
He plays the oldest trick in the book: waging war.
He invades a God-forsaken land
where Rome's greatest have already tried and failed.
A drab, damp little island full of barbarians,
but rich in tin and gold.
A place we call Britannia.
Julius Caesar, he ventured to Britain twice.
Two invasions gained some success,
but they were very much temporary successes.
The Romans conquer things,
and Claudius has the conquest of Britain.
It's one of the first conquests of new territory for many, many years.
So Claudius meets up with the rest of the army north of the Thames,
and together, they head up to Colchester,
this important centre in late Iron Age Britain,
where they received the surrenders of British chiefs, and boom.
With that, the province of Britannia is declared.
It is remarkable that this, of all emperors,
should be the man to ride in the equivalent of triumph
on British shores.
That an elderly man of some form of nervous and physical infirmity
should appear in heroic guise,
riding an elephant on what is nowadays
the streets of modern Essex.
Once the British invasion had been a success
and Britain was now a Roman province,
a temple was built to Claudius in Colchester,
and he was made a god there.
So he was worshipped.
Who would have expected it?
The boy unable to hold a sword,
acclaimed by the Praetorian Guard,
victor in Britain in a way that even Julius couldn't rival.
And Claudius's victory is very good news indeed
for his empress, Messalina.
Right on cue, she delivers him a son.
Claudius, the all-conquering living god, now has a male heir.
Messalina has her first son
who will come to be known as Britannicus,
in honour of Claudius's invasion of Britain.
And this is a cause for huge celebration throughout the Empire.
There could not be a better omen for the new regime.
This is the first time that a reigning emperor
has had a son born to him.
So this is a period of immense excitement.
Everything has been so difficult, so chaotic.
And here is a promise that we have this new emperor,
and we already have an heir in place.
Who would have thought it?
Claudius gives his people new lands, new wealth, a better life.
Best of all, he gives them a new god.
A woman, no less.
His darling late great grandmother, Livia.
In other words, me.
No wonder they love him.
He decided that he should turn her into a goddess.
He decided she needed to be deified.
He had her image carried by elephants through Rome.
This wasn't done every day.
This was a brand-new way of honouring a woman.
It was incredibly unusual.
Alas, the worshipping of women is not without its complications.
Claudius's devotion makes him blind to Messalina's rampant bed-hopping,
and that is a real problem.
It takes a lot to be called the most promiscuous woman
of the Roman Empire, and Messalina managed to gain that title.
LIVIA: Rome, the mightiest empire in the world,
is built from bloodshed, intrigue and sex.
Victorious, cunning and fertile -
the unfancied runt of the imperial litter, Claudius, is a triumph.
He scales new heights with the conquest of Britannia,
a feat that eludes even the great Julius Caesar.
And to top it all, he produces a vigorous male heir, Britannicus.
Making up for the lost years of Caligula's vanity,
Claudius gives his people more bread
and even the miracle of running water.
Clever boy.
He recognises, too,
the power he has to do good and the importance of public support.
A number of public works schemes are carried out
under Claudius's rule.
Schemes that are successful
and that do win the ageing emperor popularity among the people of Rome.
He was just incredibly sort of able when it came to planning.
And he didn't just talk, he actually did.
And that made the difference.
Claudius's public programme is a successful one.
We need to remember that he had a long time waiting
because he never anticipated this job coming his way.
Claudius has given himself time and opportunity to think about Rome,
to think about what works with Rome.
It gives me no joy to say it,
but there is a fly in Claudius's ointment,
albeit a very beautiful fly.
Messalina.
So bewitching, every great man in Rome desires her.
And thanks to her lust for power and adoration,
it seems that very few are to be disappointed.
Juvenal once wrote of Messalina
that her eyes had the ability
to drag the most beautiful patrician men to the most wretched of ends.
In fact, by reputation, she is known to have slept
with every officer in her husband's palace.
Messalina knows how to use her body to advance her position.
She's an insatiable empress.
She's never satisfied.
There are some very outlandish claims about her sexuality,
and in fact, she's called, in some sources,
The Meretrix Augusta, the Whore Empress.
All noble women exploiting their charms for pleasure or power
understand it is a tool that must be used with caution.
All women, that is, but Messalina.
Sex, it turns out, is her blunt instrument of choice,
and people are beginning to talk.
Lots of men wrote about her prostituting herself.
Messalina was so insatiable
that she would go out in the night
dressed up with a blonde wig over her dark hair.
She'd gild her nipples so that they'd be shining gold,
and then she'd cover herself over so she could escape to the Lupanar.
And the Lupanar was the ancient brothel of Rome,
and it was said that she used to spend the night there,
and she'd return at dawn.
And even then, she wouldn't be satisfied.
There's also this other story that she challenges
the most notorious courtesan in Rome
to a competition of sexual stamina.
It's a kind of almost gladiatorial battle.
They're going to each try and sleep with
as many men as possible in 24 hours.
And Messalina allegedly wins this competition with a total of 25 men.
Claudius, in his love for Messalina, both blind and deaf,
is the only citizen in Rome to see no impropriety or hear no gossip.
As they say, there's no fool like an old fool.
As for the insatiable Messalina,
she, too, is powerless to a fatal attraction of her own.
I fear this will not end well.
The story is that Messalina has fallen so deeply in love
with a man called Gaius Silius, who is a noble man.
He is said to be the most beautiful aristocrat in Rome.
Claudius then left town
to oversee the harbour that he was building in Ostia.
While he was away,
Messalina decided to marry Gaius Silius.
What does she mean by this? Was she actually committing bigamy?
So, they tell Claudius what's happened,
and he just kind of goes catatonic. He can't believe it.
And he says a line which is really rather sadly prophetic, which is,
"Am I still emperor?"
This wasn't just a case of a woman committing adultery.
It was a case of a woman marrying a man
who might actually be a threat to Claudius
and want to usurp him and become emperor himself.
Claudius sort of prevaricated.
He's like, "Oh, you know, maybe I should talk to her the next day."
But his advisors would not allow this to happen.
So they actually gave the orders that she should be killed
before Claudius had actually given the official word.
This is the first time that we see a kind of imperial woman executed
for adultery and adulterous behaviour.
A few days afterwards, he's like, "Oh, where's Messalina?
"Where's my wife?" And they're, like, having to keep telling him.
So whether it's such a shock that he can't comprehend it,
but they have to keep telling him that his wife is dead.
Oh, don't worry, he'll get over it.
Still, it's an impressive claim to fame.
Claudius, the first emperor to have his empress killed.
Full of contrition, he declares he will not remarry.
Poor man. As if he has any choice in the matter.
You have an environment
in which power is being transferred dynastically.
And so suddenly, you need women to produce heirs
so that you can pass your power down.
The woman who comes out on top is a woman called Agrippina,
who is actually Claudius's niece,
and it requires special dispensation from the Senate for them to marry
because that is incest according to Roman law.
She was the younger sister of Caligula.
Caligula supposedly committed incest with all three of his sisters,
including her,
but he accused her of plotting against him,
so he sent her off into exile.
So she'd had a really miserable time.
She'd seen how ruthless men would be,
even with the women they were closest to.
Incest is such a loaded word,
but this is no time for being squeamish.
There is a dynasty to build and a bloodline to preserve.
Agrippina, yes, my own great granddaughter,
is not only the perfect choice,
she is the only choice.
Given what has happened in recent years,
this is a family that could have sprawled,
but its members have been regularly culled.
And it's important to preserve the health of the dynasty.
No doubt the shameless Messalina plays her part
in keeping Agrippina in exile.
But the fates have a wicked sense of humour.
Once outcast, now Empress,
Agrippina embraces her chance to rewrite history.
One of the most powerful tools you can have as an empress
is the destruction of reputation.
Agrippina did this with Messalina.
Focusing on a woman's sexuality is a very classic,
and has always been a very effective way,
of diverting attention
from the more serious things that she's done in her life
and of, erm, making them look less legitimate.
There was an order by the Senate
to destroy all the statues of Messalina,
to scrub out her name from inscriptions.
This process called damnatio memoriae,
the condemnation of that person's memory,
this was inflicted upon Messalina.
Nero is Agrippina's son from her first marriage.
She's desperate for Claudius to adopt him
so he can join the line of succession
and potentially be the next emperor.
She doesn't ask for much.
She was determined that that son Nero
should take precedence over Messalina's son, Britannicus.
So even though Messalina was dead,
this new tension developed between which of those bloodlines
should prevail within the succession of ancient Rome.
It's a tangled web, indeed.
Both young boys descend from me.
Claudius's own son Britannicus, by rights, comes first.
But he's only eight years old.
Nero, apple of Agrippina's eye, is 12.
Britannicus was still at the child's table at dinner.
He was sitting there with the children.
He hadn't yet come of age.
Agrippina was determined to accelerate Nero's role
through the rites of passage that a young man undertook
as he went towards his political career.
So Nero was dressed in the adult toga.
He was sort of initiated into the kind of life
that an emperor lived.
Here, we see the classic evil stepmother
putting her biological child before her stepchild at whatever cost.
Through some very good manoeuvring, Agrippina gets what she wants.
In 50 AD, Claudius adopts Nero as his son,
which means that he's next in line for the throne.
That's the end game,
is that Agrippina wants Nero to become emperor.
She has to make sure that he's gonna be next in line
before she can make her move.
Once it is secured that Nero is the heir,
then Claudius has no value whatsoever.
Perhaps I am Agrippina's inspiration.
If so, I am flattered.
What mother doesn't want the best for their son?
And if possible, without delay.
But how?
How else?
Poison, of course.
LIVIA: Rome.
An empire conquering the Western world with domination and bloodshed.
Even my sickly grandson Claudius defies all expectations
and invades new territories.
Now over 60 million subjects call him Emperor.
He's even restoring a sense of decency to the family
by disposing of his unfaithful wife in the Roman style.
But Agrippina, wife number two, is also making her move.
And just like that, Nero, Agrippina's own son,
leapfrogs Britannicus to be first in line.
The old fool makes himself redundant.
History is repeating itself,
and the future is all about Nero.
Claudius considered himself the historian of the family.
He knew what happened to Augustus, he knew the stories of Livia,
and he took every precaution to make sure that he didn't meet that end.
He had food tasters. He had guards around his kitchens.
Claudius loved his food.
He was a real foodie of the time.
He particularly liked mushrooms.
One day, in AD 54,
he sat down to a lovely, rich dinner of mushrooms.
The next morning, he was dead.
And so ends Claudius, the unlikeliest emperor of all,
achieving greatness, matched only by my husband Augustus,
but brought down by a plate of humble fungi.
Claudius, it was rumoured, wasn't the first husband
that Agrippina had killed by poisoning.
Her first husband, filthy rich Crispus,
had died of something he ate.
What a coincidence (!)
Rumour quickly circulated that his wife, Agrippina,
had poisoned his mushrooms,
and it was a result of that
that he died so unexpectedly and so suddenly.
But in his final moments,
he realised that he'd underestimated Agrippina.
And he uttered the words, "Oh, dear, I've made a mess of it."
I think he realises he's been manipulated again
in leaving Rome in the hands of Agrippina.
And Nero, he's... he's ruined everything.
You know the score - Claudius is dead. Long live Nero.
Continuity is everything. The empire is all.
And now in the hands of a 16-year-old Nero
and his devoted mother.
She presented herself almost as his co-ruler at the beginning.
And this message was really popular across the empire.
They're seen as a pair.
Having a very, very young emperor
is slightly nerve-wracking for them.
You know, having Agrippina by his side
offers potentially some confidence in those people.
Agrippina may be a shockingly bad wife, but she is no fool.
She schools her precious son Nero, my great-great-grandson,
as it happens, in the dark arts of power.
Lesson one - charm the people.
She really helped Nero to cultivate this image of himself,
almost in the mould of Augustus.
From early on, he immediately appealed to the people of Rome.
He put on lavish games.
The only danger is if the power goes to Nero's head.
As if (!)
So, it starts very well,
and everything's going smoothly and wonderfully.
But teenage boys reach a certain point
where they don't wanna listen to their mum any more.
And Nero, you know,
Nero's hard enough to get to do anything
because he's not that interested in being emperor.
He wants to be an artist.
He wants to be a chariot racer. He wants to be a poet.
The more Nero's mother tried to pull the reins and control him,
the more Nero would lash out.
His behaviour became increasingly erratic.
He would have open brawls in the middle of the night.
He would murder people.
He would have relationships with men and women openly.
There really was no stopping him.
What we often see with overbearing parents
is that they have the best interests of themselves at heart,
and then secondary to that is the best interest of their child.
It can lead us feeling very angry and very resentful.
And I think this is what we've seen here with Agrippina and Nero.
They fall out quite spectacularly
and are not speaking for a long period of time.
And then she makes the mistake
of kind of bigging Britannicus up a bit.
Now, that is a risky move.
No doubt Britannicus has something about him,
but it's Nero who has the power.
Britannicus is not shy of Nero. He's not frightened of Nero.
And that's probably one of his biggest mistakes,
of underestimating Nero.
And that's probably what leads to his downfall,
as well as letting Agrippina get close to him,
which really puts the wedge there
and really makes it clear to Nero he needs to get rid of Britannicus.
He doesn't openly kill him or stab him. He has him poisoned.
Britannicus was poisoned at dinner.
Like his father Claudius, he probably suffered from epilepsy.
So when he started to show the effects of the poison taking hold,
people assumed that he was having a fit.
And nobody moves because Nero doesn't move.
Cos Nero, the emperor,
controls who can stand, who can move.
And, yeah, Nero sits there, and he's just drinking his wine,
and he's just watching.
And everybody else is just frozen in horror around him
as Britannicus coughs and chokes.
And that is the point at which Nero becomes
truly ruthless and frightening.
The boy has no subtlety, but he is effective.
Surely his mother will take heed.
Put yourself in Agrippina's shoes. What would you do?
Would you run away, or would you stay?
Power is an incredible drug, and an addictive one, too.
And in Agrippina's case, irresistible,
which is exactly why she didn't run away.
She chooses to stay instead.
So the story goes is she tries to seduce her son
and have sex with him.
And the evidence is apparently that they travel in a carriage
which is closed.
And when they open the doors and step out,
there are stains on their clothes that look like semen
and look like some rumpy pumpy has gone on
within that carriage there.
Is it just me, or is there a hint of desperation about Agrippina?
My rule of thumb - never show weakness.
He came to a sense that it was wrong to be manipulated by a woman,
any woman, including his mother.
Nero comes up with an extraordinary plan,
which is to kill his mother.
And as so often happens in ancient Rome,
there were people who were willing to help him.
His plan is he decides he's gonna kill her in a collapsible boat,
which is like a kind of...
a dreadful kind of Bond villain kind of death.
He invites her to a dinner down by the Bay of Naples
that she'll have to go to by boat.
He has some lead
put on the canopy of the boat.
And when she's installed there with her serving women...
..she'll be crushed.
It's a ridiculous scheme that only a kind of teenage boy could make up.
Miraculously, Agrippina sits down on a couch
which has these two elevated sides.
A canopy crashes down...
..and she's actually saved from being crushed
by these higher sides of the couch.
Wisely, she escapes from the boat and jumps into the sea
with one of her attendant women.
The female attendant shouts out, "I am Agrippina! I'm Agrippina!"
At which point, she's clubbed to death by men in a boat
who have been dispatched by Nero.
Agrippina herself was much cleverer than this,
swims silently to the shore.
Her return to the shore, obviously, is the cue for panic on Nero's part.
Agrippina is no fool. She knows exactly what's happened.
She contacts Nero and tells him that she's had a lucky escape.
Nero cannot allow her to escape
now that he knows that she knows what he's attempted,
and guards are sent to kill Agrippina.
When she realises that her time has come,
she looks straight in the eyes of the soldiers,
she points to her womb, and she says, "Do it there."
She's saying, "Stab the origin of the evil."
Killing your own mother?
That's worse than killing your wife, your brother, even your husband.
This is a new low and does not bode well for anyone or anything.
With no woman to control him, Nero spirals out of control.
Rome burns to the ground...
..and blood will be shed.
LIVIA: Rome, the most powerful dynasty
the world has ever seen, and all thanks to my bloodline.
Livia Drusilla, first Empress of Rome.
My great-great-grandson, Nero, the fifth Emperor,
holds the people in the palm of his hand.
Guided by his mother, the ruthless Agrippina,
he starts no wars for them to die in,
and he gives them bread and circuses.
But killing his own mother, the power behind the throne,
proves to be a terrible omen of things to come.
The sense that public opinion is potentially turning,
this inspires a degree of fear in Nero,
and his response to fear is to act yet more viciously and violently
to remove yet more opposition, real or imaginary.
It all starts so well for Emperor Nero,
but he's descending fast into a spree of paranoid violence.
Not even the people are safe from his rage.
And when an emperor turns on his people,
he is playing with fire, if you'll excuse the pun.
So, in 64 AD, you have one of these iconic moments of Nero's reign,
which is the Great Fire of Rome.
The city burns for days.
Nero happens to be outside of the city when it began,
but the rumours began to circulate very, very quickly
that he had purposely caused it himself.
And by the end of it,
like, more than half of the city is reduced to ruins.
So one of the things we remember Nero for now,
and actually, one of his great legacies is he's very theatrical.
He likes to perform with the lion and fiddle and so on.
He's watching on from the distance,
and what he does is he stands there and he fiddles while Rome burns.
And whether or not the story is true,
you actually feel there's a good chance he'd be tempted to do that.
Nothing is more dangerous than a rumour, truth or lies.
Not even an empress can control it.
Your only chance is to change the story,
show the people you care, rebuild their homes.
So, what did Nero do? What do you think?
He says, "Rather than rebuilding all your houses,
"what I'm gonna do is demolish everything
"and build this incredible palace for me!
"Because that's great. That's what Rome wants."
He's built this wonderful golden palace,
which includes, in its grounds, a 30-foot gold statue of himself,
because why wouldn't you have that?
It has hundreds of rooms,
vaulted ceilings, studded with gems and jewels.
To build such constructions requires money.
And he started using up the state funds,
so he starts impoverishing the people.
And that's a bad turn because the moment
that people start suffering
is the moment your reputation's gonna suffer.
For the love of Augustus, Nero, read the room.
But, no.
As the fingers start to point at you, you point yours at others.
So, Nero looks for a scapegoat, which is what tyrants do.
They deflect attention from themselves onto other people.
So, let's find a group of weirdos,
some people who are different from everybody else.
So, who could he blame? He blamed the Christians.
Christians at this point were seen as almost sort of a weird cult.
Personally, I'm no big fan of the followers of Christ.
Loving this, forgiving that, the whole one God thing.
Not very Roman, but this feels like an act of desperation.
So, Nero starts to arrest Christians,
blame them for the fire and execute them.
And a lot of public executions
were made as gruesome and spectacular as possible.
The idea was they were a deterrent.
People like Nero and many other Romans feel,
"If they're gonna be a deterrent, they can also be entertainment,
"so let's go big."
One of the stories is that he has people crucified
and covered in tar and set on fire so that their body fat burns,
after they've screamed themselves to death,
to light a nice feast he's gonna have in the gardens.
And this really backfired for Nero
because people looked at these people suffering,
and they felt really bad.
They felt sorry for them, and they just took this
as evidence of the depravity and the sheer evil of the Emperor.
So as a plan, this was disastrous for Nero's reputation,
and he never recovered from it.
How far Nero falls.
Using Rome's suffering for his own gain.
No longer a man of the people, he is now their enemy.
Financially, the coffers run dry.
And when there's a time of sort of financial desperation,
people become more desperate to blame somebody.
Nero's the obvious person to blame.
He realises he's completely alone. He's hated.
And in fact, the Senate has now declared him a hostis,
a public enemy of the Roman people.
This is the final straw. It is over for Nero.
No matter how powerful you are, sooner or later,
you will have to face up to the music.
And Nero's funeral march was about to begin.
Nero is the final insult to my once-great dynasty.
The ruler of 60 million people now faces his fate practically alone.
He was completely abandoned. He wakes up in the palace.
There's no-one around him, he's in a panic.
He's not used to it. There's always someone there.
He realises something's wrong,
and he starts to basically make a run for it.
But then he gets the news
that he's been declared an enemy of the state,
and he's gonna be killed the ancient way.
And he doesn't know what this means, so he asks one of the servants.
And they tell him he's gonna be stripped naked,
his head is gonna be put between branches,
and he's gonna be dragged through the streets.
So, he decides to end his own life
rather than be killed by somebody else.
It's very difficult for him at that point.
Nero fails even to kill himself
at the moment when it's obvious that his only option is suicide.
He invites a servant to do it for him.
The fatal blow strikes him in the throat.
Even at that moment,
Nero cannot learn the lessons that have brought him to this point.
Instead of suffering in silence, he cries out,
"What an artist was lost in me."
Supposed to have said, "What an artist perishes in me."
That sense that he's almost thinking of his singing voice, his music,
as the biggest thing about him,
which is... it's very self-indulgent.
What a great line because it just shows you
that, even in his final moments,
he's thinking what a loss to humanity he was.
The last of my troubled boys lies dead.
Leaving me, Livia Drusilla,
to grieve the pathetic end of my great dynasty.
Perhaps all great houses must fall into disrepute.
Perhaps. But what a legacy.
With the establishment of the Julio-Claudian empire,
all that really matters is that trace of blood shared
with Julius, Augustus and Livia.
Livia's genius is to do all this, to wield this power,
to wield this influence, and nobody knows.
People weren't known as Empress at that time.
It was really Livia who created the role.
She set the standard for later women to look up to.
It is a period of immense and monumental political change
that altered the course of Western history forever.
The story of Rome is one we can fully understand
because it's a story about us at the end of the day.
I hope you enjoyed the greatest story ever told.
I certainly did.
For better or worse, the world I made lives on.
As legacies go, I really shouldn't complain.
But has history been kind to my unruly boys?
Augustus the autocrat, Tiberius the deviant,
Caligula the lunatic, Claudius the cuckold,
Nero the psychopath.
They may have had their faults, but their names live on.
And isn't that immortality?
But who remembers me, the mother of the Empire?
Some would blame me for everything.
Poisoner, gold-digger, backstabber, goddess.
Call me what you like.
I confirm or deny nothing.
My name may not be as famous as my boys,
but if you watch the most powerful men in the world,
ask yourself... who is really pulling the strings?
Look carefully, and you'll see me in the shadows.