[crowd cheering]
- At its height, Rome was the greatest superpower
the world had ever seen.
[crowd chanting "Caesar"]
[dramatic music]
For nearly a thousand years, Rome rules
everything it touches.
- Advance!
♪
[choir singing]
- The Romans were masters of law, architecture, culture.
- I will show you what we can do together!
- But they were also capable of staggering brutality.
- [screaming]
- When they see a few of their high priests eaten by lions,
they'll turn to our gods.
- [screaming]
- They wanted an empire that stretched
to the very limits of the known world and even beyond.
- Let the dice fly high!
[all grunting]
[horse whinnies]
- But no empire lasts forever.
♪
- Once Rome's emperors gained absolute power,
it was inevitable that some highly destructive individuals
would rise into that role.
- Commodus, this is madness.
- As it turns out, Rome's greatest enemy
was not an invader.
It was itself.
♪
- The rise and fall of Rome is a thousand different stories
of the quest for power.
People like Caesar, Attila, and Spartacus.
♪
- It's all there-- the blood, the glory,
the magnificence, and the flaws.
- Rome is ultimately a cautionary tale to us.
You are never too big to fail.
- The story of Rome is ultimately the story of us.
- Let the games begin!
♪
- According to tradition, Rome was founded
in the 8th century BC
by a series of villages unifying together
under the auspices of an elected monarchy.
♪
Now, this monarchy lasted until about 509 BC,
when the last Roman king was driven off
by the Roman people, who decided to instead create
a power-sharing system, which they
referred to as the Republic.
- The Roman Republic was largely
controlled by its aristocracy.
This was a powerful group of families
who competed with one another for the offices
that the Republic had to offer.
But to achieve those offices, they had to go out and fight.
War was the way that Roman aristocrats made their name.
And before long, this led to Rome becoming
the largest and most powerful city in central Italy.
- The young Roman Republic is ambitious and aggressive.
Over centuries, thanks to its disciplined citizen army
and a network of alliances,
it gradually takes over Italy.
To keep growing, it must confront
its first major rival, Carthage, the richest state
in the western Mediterranean.
♪
- By the 3rd century, Rome has
essentially run out of space.
They have no place else to go now
but into the wider Mediterranean,
where they are going to now run into the next largest
regional superpower.
[warriors yelling, weapons clashing]
- Rome's wars with Carthage are the tipping point.
This is the gateway to empire
and the foundations upon which the great Roman Empire
will be set.
♪
- The first war with Carthage ended in a Roman victory.
And for a while, they thought they
had crippled Carthage's ability to make war.
[wind whistling]
But Carthage found a new leader.
This is the general Hannibal.
Hannibal wanted to strike the first blow
in a second war with Rome.
- He takes tens of thousands of men and 38 war elephants,
and he marches them up overland
from Spain across the Alps
and down through northern Italy.
- The Carthaginians win battle after battle.
Eventually, the armies meet again at a place called
Cannae in southern Italy.
Its future on the line, Rome has gathered its forces.
♪
Its army of 80,000 is the largest it has
assembled in history so far.
Facing them are 50,000 Carthaginian warriors
and their allies from across the western Mediterranean.
[all yelling]
♪
- The Romans have every reason to expect
success against Hannibal.
They have a much larger force.
But Hannibal has something they don't,
and that is extraordinary talent
and quality as a general.
[all yelling]
♪
- Hannibal's strategy is to essentially allow
the Romans to charge directly at his forces
and actually commands the center of his line
to fall back before the Roman onslaught.
[all yelling]
Then as soon as Hannibal sees that the Romans
have driven as far forward as they can...
♪
[horn blows]
He gives a signal.
♪
And the Carthaginian cavalry engages the Roman line
in the rear, completely surrounding them,
destroying the entire Roman army.
- [grunts]
- And he does so in a single maneuver
on a single battlefield in a single day.
♪
- Rome loses a staggering 70,000 men,
more than 80% of its troops.
- The battle at Cannae was a bloodbath.
And there are more people killed in one battle
than all the Americans killed in the Vietnam War.
- The horrific nature of this battle
matches anything in human history.
Imagine thousands and thousands of men
clawing, scratching, cutting.
It would be something straight out of a modern horror movie,
except on a much, much larger scale.
♪
- Such a defeat on the battlefield
should lead to the Romans seeking terms
and the Carthaginians imposing them.
♪
- If you count up all the Romans who are lost in these
various battles leading up to Cannae,
as well as Cannae itself, they've lost about 150,000 men.
That's 1/5 of the entire population of men in Rome.
The Roman historian Livy wrote, "There is
"no other nation that could have survived
such a calamity."
♪
- But Rome is different.
One of the officers who survives the battle of Cannae
is Publius Cornelius Scipio.
He comes from a noble family, and he is determined to fight.
♪
- Why are we talking of peace?
- We lost. And now we await their terms.
- You dare--dare speak of surrendering?
It need not be over yet.
♪
- Scipio is an embodiment of this kind
of Roman spirit of carrying on, of aggression
and the lust to win.
And so he rallies the troops around him.
He emphasizes Roman values like honor and discipline
to try to bring everybody together.
And these are qualities that will
turn Rome into the phenomenon that it becomes.
[all yelling]
- For the next 15 years, Hannibal and Scipio
battle for control of Italy.
The rival powers fight themselves into a stalemate.
And Hannibal never reaches the city of Rome.
- The Romans are very fast learners when
it comes to their military.
They are very adept at taking the best bits
from their enemies, of analyzing their tactics
and their formations and their troops
and assimilating those into their own tactics
and to turn the enemy's strengths
into Roman strengths as well.
♪
- Scipio breaks the standoff in 204 BCE.
He invades North Africa, forcing Hannibal
to leave Italy and defend the capital city, Carthage.
Their final showdown takes place at Zama,
where Scipio defeats Hannibal using
the same maneuver Hannibal unleashed on him
at Cannae 14 years earlier.
- One of the sad ironies of Hannibal is that in the end,
he ends up being Rome's military school master.
♪
- Hannibal is eventually exiled,
reduced to fighting as a mercenary
in the armies of other countries,
and Rome is free to expand at will.
♪
In the century following Cannae,
Rome annexes Carthage and much of North Africa.
Greece also becomes a Roman province.
By 75 BCE, the Roman Republic is roughly the size of Alaska,
controlling half a million square miles
from Spain to Libya.
- There are no rivals left.
This is a unipolar system, much like the United States
after the Cold War, where there's nobody left to fight.
This created an enormous amount of opportunities
to exploit the conquered territories.
[indistinct chatter]
- They're bringing in the olive oil, the grain,
the minerals, all these things.
And one of the most important things
that they're also bringing in at this time are slaves.
They're primarily drawn from prisoners of war,
and they're all brought in to serve this growing population.
♪
- An estimated 20% of the population of Italy,
as many as 1 million people, are now foreign slaves.
♪
- Slavery is nothing new to the ancient world.
What's different is the scale of Roman slavery.
This is slavery on a massive scale.
- The fiercest men are forced to become gladiators,
trained fighters whose low status is dangerously at odds
with their lethal skills.
♪
[all yelling]
♪
- While ownership of thousands or tens of thousands
of enslaved people makes the Roman elite
extraordinarily wealthy, this also
creates a ticking time bomb.
They're making them work in incredibly harsh conditions.
Death rates are extraordinarily high.
At a certain point, people placed under those conditions
are going to rebel.
♪
- And in 73 BCE, one enslaved gladiator
starts an uprising that will transform the Republic.
- Spartacus.
My name is Spartacus.
♪
- Rome will expand to take on the known world...
- For victory! - [yells]
- And build a civilization for the ages.
[crowd chanting "Caesar," lion roars]
The obstacles along the way bring out the best
of Rome's strengths...
- The conquest of Gaul stands as one of the most impressive
achievements in human history.
- And reveal its weaknesses.
- This is an amazing power grab by Cleopatra.
But it's also a challenge to Rome and the Romans.
♪
- By the 1st century BCE, the Roman Republic
is on its way to becoming an empire
when its ambitions are nearly derailed.
- After the conquest of Carthage,
the Romans have North Africa and all its revenues
and its food sources and new slaves,
more than they even know what to do with.
It was exploitation, pure and simple.
And this created vast inequalities
and, as a result, rebellion.
- Spartacus.
My name is Spartacus.
- Spartacus is a bit of an enigma to us.
It seems that he came from Thrace.
- It's a place known for great fighters,
so much so that the Romans incorporate those fighters
into their military.
But ultimately, he is sold into slavery.
And he ends up in a gladiatorial school in Capua.
[crowd yelling]
- [grunting]
♪
[crowd chanting "Spartacus"]
♪
- No man would want to be in that situation.
And if there was any opportunity to get out of it,
you would.
- It's unclear how it starts,
but something prompts the gladiators to rise up.
[keys rattling]
♪
- [gasping]
- [grunting]
♪
- Spartacus and about 70 slaves break out
and escape into the countryside
armed with stolen weapons.
And soon their numbers begin to grow.
♪
Rome responds by dispatching a small militia
to put down the burgeoning threat.
♪
But instead of running, Spartacus and his band
make a stand on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius.
♪
- Spartacus has his men fashion ropes out of vines
that they find growing on Mount Vesuvius
and launch a surprise attack on the Romans.
- His men attack the Romans from the rear.
And it quickly becomes a massacre.
- [groans]
[all yelling, weapons clashing]
♪
- The defeat at Vesuvius was a complete surprise
to the Romans.
They weren't expecting to be ambushed.
They thought they were dealing with fugitives
and the fugitives would run rather than that the fugitives
would take the fight to them.
♪
- It begins, after all, as a prison break,
a relatively routine matter.
And suddenly, it leads to a military defeat
in the heart of Italy.
This is something that the Romans
can't afford to ignore.
- In a society that is based at an economic level
around slavery, a slave revolt is not just a threat.
It's an existential threat.
And having a charismatic leader like Spartacus,
to whom all those thousands and thousands
of enslaved people can look for leadership,
creates a situation where Rome's very existence
is at stake.
- Every slave owner is thinking,
will my slaves be next?
Will they join Spartacus?
Just how far is this going to go?
♪
- By the autumn of 73 BCE, Spartacus' army is growing
at the rate of hundreds a day,
25,000 and counting, bolstered by working-class Romans,
who have also been left out of Rome's booming
post-Carthage economy.
♪
- Spartacus knows that the Romans will
be bent on his destruction.
He has no choice but to not only lead
but to train an army.
- [grunting]
- They had this great mass of people
that could be slaughtered if they fought as individuals.
So he took that time that he had during the winter
to train his forces and to turn them
into an army themselves
that could meet the Romans on the field of battle
with a good chance of success.
♪
- As the rebels prepare, the Roman Senate dispatches
two legions to crush them.
- Spartacus reportedly has a massive following
across the entire Italian peninsula.
So much so, in fact, that he is able to potentially threaten
the city of Rome itself.
[all yelling]
- When the two sides meet,
it's the Romans who are crushed.
♪
They flee back to Rome in disarray,
leaving Spartacus to threaten neighboring Sicily,
which grows much of Rome's food.
♪
Panicked, the Senate turns to Marcus Licinius Crassus,
a general known less for battlefield victories
and more for being the richest man in Rome,
having made a fortune in property speculation.
- Crassus is the type of politician
who will lead to the destabilization
of the Roman Republic.
When you have very powerful, very wealthy,
very influential Romans working as individuals,
you start to upset that power balance.
[soldiers chanting "Pompey"]
- Crassus' main political rival
is the great general Pompey, who at this point
has won a dozen military victories.
And what Crassus hopes to do is to
put down the Spartacus revolt before Pompey
has a chance to rally his forces,
thus robbing Pompey of the glory.
This desire for glory and unrestrained competition
is part of what helps Rome's rise.
But it's also gonna store up trouble for Rome to come.
♪
[all yelling, weapons clashing]
♪
- In April 71 BCE, Crassus' Roman legions
finally kill Spartacus and defeat his army.
40,000 rebels die in the fighting.
♪
[hammer banging] - [screaming]
- Others suffer a worse fate.
- [screams]
- When Crassus crucifies all 6,000
captured rebels along the Appian Way,
Rome's warning is clear.
But the conditions that created the uprising
aren't going away.
- It was now not so much citizens versus noncitizens,
but it was haves and have-nots.
And it's, in fact, part of a pattern that plays out
many times in human history, certainly into the 20th century
with czarist Russia, into the 21st,
which is that massive inequality
is going to lead to violence and sometimes revolution.
♪
- As Pompey and Crassus compete for glory...
- Pompey the Great.
Great at stealing credit for other men's victories.
- They make a deal with a young man who will
transform Rome itself.
- The three of us, we'd be invincible.
- With Caesar, we have all of the elements of family power,
political power, economic power all coming together
in a single individual
at the very end of the Republic.
♪
- After putting down Spartacus' rebellion,
Pompey and Crassus return to Rome, their rivalry
setting the stage for one of the most consequential
Romans in history.
- The slave army is defeated!
[crowd cheering]
The gladiator rebellion has been crushed!
[applause]
♪
- Pompey the Great.
Great at stealing credit for other men's victories.
- Glory is for generals, Crassus, not moneylenders.
- Pompey and Crassus had hated each other
from the moment they first met.
Crassus saw Pompey as someone who was
undeserving of the glory and credit he had received,
while Crassus had been denied those same honors.
Pompey saw in Crassus really the only major threat
to Pompey's exaltation.
- It's in this world that a junior officer
by the name of Julius Caesar takes his first steps
in Roman politics.
♪
Caesar was born into an ancient family, the Julii,
which claims a divine origin.
- Julius Caesar believed that he was descended
from Venus, the god of love.
Most Roman families, patrician families,
believed that they had a descent
from one of the gods.
- All Roman citizens belonged to a complex class system
based on birth and wealth.
They could be patricians, the old aristocracy;
equestrians, who were once the cavalry
and are now wealthy businessmen;
or plebeians, the commoners.
Although a patrician family, the Julii have by this point
lost much of their wealth and prestige.
Still, it hasn't dented Caesar's personal ambition.
- In terms of Rome's rise and fall,
well, Caesar is the pivotal figure.
Rome's Republic was not quite a democracy,
but Caesar really took advantage
of all the cracks in the system
and inserted himself into them.
And this really paved the way
for the creation of Rome's empire.
♪
- For two years, Caesar builds his reputation
for political office.
He's intent on being a populist, a man of the people.
And soon he turns a genuine personal tragedy
into an opportunity to advance.
♪
- In the summer of 69 BC, two years after Spartacus' revolt,
his wife, Cornelia, dies.
We can't be sure exactly how, but there's a very good theory
that it may have been childbirth,
which did kill up to 1/3 of women.
♪
- Caesar decides to give her a public funeral.
Now, this is something that generally
was not done for Roman women.
In Roman tradition, funerals were a way
of displaying everything that your family had done
on behalf of the Roman state.
♪
- My name is Gaius Julius Caesar.
I've come here to honor my wife.
I've also come here to make a promise to you all.
- For Caesar, this funeral oration
is a political awakening.
- My family has the sanctity of kings.
But more than this, I am one of you...
[crowd cheering]
A Roman!
- He announces that he is going to
try to move forward,
to make things better for the ordinary people of Rome.
- Join me!
- Yes! - Yes!
- And I will show you what we can do together!
[crowd cheering]
- And he doesn't care who stands in his way.
His political aspirations have never become clearer.
♪
- With financial backing from Crassus,
Caesar enters the Senate, the lawmaking assembly
of the 600 richest and most influential men in Rome.
- Julius Caesar.
- Senators.
- For the next several years, Caesar and Crassus
are both political allies and economic partners.
Caesar has to rise for Crassus to be paid back.
And now only one office remains for Caesar
to take, the consulship.
- So the consuls acted as the commander in chief
of the Roman military.
They were proposing all bills to the Senate.
The consuls also acted as the chief judicial officer.
They were the ones who passed judgments
and who executed punishment.
- As Crassus buys influence in Rome,
Pompey's conquests expand the Republic's territory.
It's now larger than it's ever been.
And with the two men perpetually at odds,
Caesar seized an opportunity to continue his own rise.
♪
- Caesar is an incredibly savvy political operator.
Roman politics is a snake pit,
and Caesar navigates it with incredible dexterity.
♪
- You two should be the most powerful men in Rome,
but you put all of your energy into fighting each other.
What if instead, you worked for each other?
- Why would we?
- Back me to become consul, and I'll make sure
the Senate works for you.
The three of us...
[laughs] We'd be invincible.
[thunder booming]
- The secret deal that Caesar persuades
Pompey and Crassus to agree to is called the triumvirate.
It literally means "rule of three."
Individually, they've all been able to get
some of what they want but never all of it.
Together they can dominate Roman politics
for years to come.
- With the alliance's backing,
Caesar sets his sights on conquest...
- It becomes an opportunity for Caesar to engage militarily.
- As a route to seizing supreme authority.
- For Caesar, Gaul is a powder keg of warring tribes
ready to explode.
If he's able to conquer this territory,
he could become the wealthiest, most powerful man in Rome.
♪
- 450 years into Rome's Republic,
three rivals come together to rise to share power.
But one, Julius Caesar, has bigger plans.
- Caesar immediately leans on his deal
with his fellow members of the triumvirate,
Crassus and Pompey, to make sure he's elected consul.
♪
- Caesar knows he only has one year as consul.
From day one, he sets out to pay back his allies
and build a power base for the future.
- The first law Caesar has to pass as consul
is a land bill that gives land to Pompey's veterans.
- The land is there to be farmed.
- The former soldiers of Pompey risked
their lives for the Roman Republic
but are now reduced to poverty.
Pompey wants to give them farms as a reward.
- Should it not be given to destitute men
who once fought for us all?
- [clears throat]
- Cato, you wish to support my bill?
- Cato is one of the leading members of the optimates,
the conservative.
He is perhaps the most conservative man in Rome.
- Cato has a kind of personality cult going on.
He has a very distinctive way of dress,
what he imagines was the attire
of the earliest leaders of Rome.
He goes barefoot and even commando.
And he does this to style himself as a man
who is returning to simpler days.
But really, what he's doing is representing the aims
of a very small group of aristocrats.
- Cato's faction wants to maintain the status quo
and the policies that favor the rich,
while Caesar's land reform
promises to redistribute the wealth.
- Consul, there is much to admire in this land bill.
Your hand is elegant.
The papyrus is of the finest quality.
[laughter]
But it would be a very grave mistake
to set such a precedent at this point in time.
- Like senators in the United States today,
Roman senators could effectively stop legislation
simply by talking...
- There are points aplenty
that are wrong with this text.
- And talking.
Cato is a master at the filibuster.
- That's enough, Cato.
♪
- Maybe one that--what is this? What is this?
[all clamoring]
- Let us give the honorable senator
some time alone to think about the land bill.
- Caesar sends attendants to manhandle Cato
and lead him off towards the prison,
hoping that this will simply stop Cato in his tracks.
- Before I was so rudely interrupted...
[laughter]
- Caesar doesn't have the power to keep Cato there
for very long, but he's broadcasting a message.
♪
He is not above using violence
to get what it is that he wants.
So he wields a very heavy stick.
And the optimates hate him for it.
♪
- Over the next year, Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus
resort to any means necessary, legal and illegal,
to push through their agenda.
But Caesar's term as consul is just
step one in his pursuit of a new kind of power in Rome.
And he's already eyeing the next level.
♪
- We don't have much more time with you as consul.
What comes next?
- I need a border province,
one with a military command.
- Caesar's plan is to get a governorship.
He would be immune from prosecution.
Perhaps more importantly for Caesar is,
he doesn't have military glory at a larger scale,
and that's what he would get if he became a governor.
- Where do you propose?
♪
- With help from Pompey and Crassus,
Caesar becomes governor of Italian Gaul.
At this time, Rome's territories
surround the Mediterranean, with Italian Gaul
the northernmost province.
- So while Italian Gaul is under Roman control,
the rest of Gaul is a wild, independent area
that covers France, Belgium, the Netherlands,
even up to the Rhine River in Germany.
- For Caesar, Gaul is not only a vast,
untapped reserve of wealth.
It's a powder keg of warring tribes ready to explode.
If he's able to conquer this territory,
he could become the wealthiest, most powerful man in Rome.
♪
- It's also the Roman Republic's
best opportunity to enrich itself
since it plundered Carthage.
And a few weeks after Caesar takes command,
an opportunity presents itself.
♪
- Speak.
- The Helvetii are a tribe living
in modern-day Switzerland,
but they're looking for somewhere else to go.
- As the Helvetii migrate, they clash with other tribes.
There's violence, and there's death.
Some of these tribes are allied to Rome.
- Those loyal tribes will come to Caesar seeking help.
And it becomes an opportunity
for Caesar to engage militarily.
♪
[all yelling]
- As the Helvetii continue their migration,
Caesar intercepts.
[all yelling, weapons clashing]
[fire crackling]
- This really isn't a great military conquest
on Caesar's part so much as it is an atrocity.
♪
But Caesar is able to turn this into a story
of a military victory that helps make him popular in Rome.
[horns blow]
- Defeating the Helvetii
supercharges Caesar's fortunes...
- For victory! - [yells]
- For victory!
- Caesar's cavalry forces slam into the rear
of the Gallic army, taking them completely by surprise.
- And puts Rome's fate in his hands.
- Now he begins to lose his mind with hubris.
This was a man who used to be a reformer,
and now he just wants absolute power.
- [grunting]
- That hunger for power sets the stage
for the empire to come
and for tyranny to replace the centuries-old Republic.
- By the 1st century BCE,
the Romans have extended their rule
all around the Mediterranean,
transforming the conquered lands
with paved roads, aqueducts, and dozens of new cities.
But they have no intention of stopping there.
Now Caesar turns Rome's armies north.
- Just months after defeating the Helvetii,
Caesar decides to go for broke.
He wants all of Gaul.
♪
- It's a huge gamble for Caesar.
He's miles from home.
The tribes outnumber his troops.
And he doesn't have proper supply lines for his army.
And yet for him, it's worth the gamble.
♪
- Over the next years, his troops venture
deeper into Gaul.
He even takes his men over the Rhine
into Germany and across the channel to Britain,
going where no Roman has ever been before.
In some ways, this is a publicity stunt.
♪
- Caesar encouraged the men personally,
ordering the men to open ranks
so they might use their swords more easily.
- Caesar manages the narrative of the Gallic War
back in Rome in a way that's absolutely classic.
- Every man was eager to do well
in his commander's... sight.
- He does so by writing his own history.
But Caesar turns it into something new,
exciting, even cinematic.
- He snatched a shield
from a soldier at the rear
and walked straight to the front line.
- And his reports are read to the people of Italy
in public year after year,
glorifying Caesar's achievements in Gaul.
- "So he snatched a shield from a soldier at the rear,
made his way to the front line."
♪
- Caesar's popularity with ordinary Romans grows
with every report that he sends back.
To them, he is the hero defending the glory of Rome.
- While Rome's power grows, senators like Cato
see Caesar's appeal as a growing threat.
- Senators, what he is doing in Gaul
is completely against the law.
- Cato is already making the argument
that Caesar has violated Roman law.
- This is not war.
This is crime.
- Cato can't actually do anything
as long as Caesar is governor
and as long as he has the support of Crassus and Pompey.
But if that situation should change,
then Cato can strike.
♪
- By the mid-50s BCE,
the triumvirate starts to come apart.
It begins with a hammer blow for Caesar--
the death of his daughter Julia,
whom he had given in marriage to Pompey five years before.
- Not only is this a personal tragedy.
It's also politically very dangerous
because she had cemented the alliance with Pompey,
and that was part of the gel
joining the triumvirate together.
But all that has suddenly gone.
- To make matters worse for Caesar,
not long after Julia's death, Crassus is killed
on a military expedition in modern-day Iran.
The legend has it that he was killed
by having molten gold poured down his throat
by an enemy who had heard of his love of money.
♪
- In 52 BC, a new threat emerges,
Vercingetorix, son of a chieftain
who is very charismatic.
He is intent on liberating his people from Roman rule.
- The entire population of Gaul
is estimated to be around 5 million.
[crowd chanting]
This is a population that far outstrips
the army that Caesar has deployed and, in fact,
would present a direct threat...
- Who is with me?
- To the Roman Empire itself.
[crowd chanting]
- Vercingetorix fights Caesar for six months
until finally, he brings things to a head
at a place called Alesia.
♪
- The Battle of Alesia will either end or secure
the Roman control over Gaul.
With Caesar's men heavily outnumbered,
it's the latest test of Rome's military power.
- Comrades, everything we've been fighting for
for the past seven years is now on the line.
We must fight!
And we must win!
Victory or death!
Which will you choose?
- For victory! - [yells]
[all yelling, weapons clashing]
- [grunting]
- [yells]
♪
- Caesar's cavalry forces slam
into the rear of the Gallic army,
taking them completely by surprise,
spreading panic throughout their entire ranks.
- They think that they're completely surrounded
by the Roman army, and they start fleeing.
[all yelling]
♪
- As men start to run for their lives
rather than fight for their lives,
Roman cavalry will ride them down,
and it becomes a bloodbath.
♪
[horns blow]
♪
- After seven years of war,
Caesar crushes Gallic resistance once and for all
and accepts his enemy's surrender.
- Caesar's conquest of Gaul stands as one
of the most impressive achievements in human history,
the fact that he has really a minimal amount
of manpower to pull off this huge campaign.
♪
- Caesar's conquest of Gaul adds more than 300,000 miles
to Roman territory.
Rome now extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the west
to the River Rhine in the east.
♪
- He himself claimed to kill 1 million people
in the conquest of Gaul
and to have enslaved 1.1 million people.
He killed or enslaved, what,
20% of the entire population of northern Europe.
And we have to be reminded of that
because we're so preconditioned
by the shape of history
to think of Caesar as a remarkable figure.
It's absolutely incredible.
- Our great Caesar
hurried to join into the...
- After his total victory at Gaul,
Caesar's popularity with ordinary Romans
goes higher and higher.
- They regard him now as the very definition
of a successful Roman warlord.
- The conspicuous color of the cloak
he always wore into battle proclaimed his arrival.
[crowd cheering]
Massive slaughter followed.
- Caesar wants to return to Rome in triumph.
He wants to win a second term as consul
and be Rome's undisputed first man.
But Caesar has a problem.
♪
Cato has different plans for how Caesar's life
will turn out.
- This is too much power for any man, let alone Caesar.
Can we forget how he behaved when he was consul?
♪
I move that Caesar be stripped of his command.
[all yelling]
- The Roman Senate backs Cato and Pompey
and declares Caesar a public enemy...
- Who is in favor?
[all yelling]
- Leaving Caesar to face the most consequential
decision of his life.
♪
- The Rubicon was a river, so small at the time,
it was more like a stream, about 200 miles north of Rome.
And the reason this stream was so important was, it marked
the boundary between Italian Gaul
and territory directly controlled by Rome itself.
- Caesar can either surrender or march on the capital.
What he decides will mark a turning point
in Rome's rise...
- Let the dice fly high!
[all cheering]
- And Caesar's fall.
- [groans]
[water rushing]
♪
- It isn't too late.
Any man who wishes to turn back,
go now with no dishonor.
But cross this stream,
and we are fighting all the way to Rome.
Are you with me?
all: We are with you, Caesar!
- According to one source,
Caesar quotes a line from Greek drama
as he prepares to cross the Rubicon...
- Let the dice fly high!
[all cheering]
- "Let the dice fly high."
In other words, let's take a risk and come what may.
[soldiers chanting]
♪
- Crossing the Rubicon is treason.
Caesar is putting his dignitas,
or personal prestige, above all else.
He drives his legions deeper into Italy,
toward the capital city of Rome itself.
- Caesar makes one final offer to Pompey.
They'll both leave Italy, and they'll
leave things for the Senate and the other bodies
of Roman political society to figure out.
We don't know how Pompey reacts to this,
but we know how the Senate does.
- No, his offer will not be accepted.
Caesar needs to face punishment.
And that means you crushing him in battle.
- Then we need to leave the city.
- I will not run.
- He is approaching right now with his entire army.
We don't have enough loyal soldiers in Italy
to defend Rome.
We must leave the city.
Anyone who stays to welcome Caesar
is a traitor to the Republic.
♪
- When Caesar hears Pompey and the Senate have fled Rome,
he pursues them through southern Italy
and on to Pharsalus in Greece,
where his veteran legions face down
Pompey's hastily assembled army.
- This day will decide everything.
I order you now, advance!
[all yelling]
[all chanting "Caesar"]
- Pompey's men have not fought together before,
whereas Caesar's men have tasted victory before.
They have greater confidence.
They smash through Pompey's line.
[all yelling]
♪
- Realizing that he has lost the battle,
Pompey decides to flee.
It's his only chance to live and fight again another day.
♪
- Caesar stays on Pompey's heels, following him
through Greece and Cyprus to the ancient kingdom of Egypt,
where both men hope to find support.
♪
- When Caesar arrives in Egypt,
the country is tearing itself apart.
The boy king, Ptolemy Theos,
is at war with his older sister, Cleopatra.
With the help of his regent, the eunuch Pothinus,
Theos manages to oust Cleopatra from power for now.
♪
- Majesty, I understand
my countryman Pompey is here in Egypt.
I only wish to speak with him.
- Caesar, please, join us.
We have a gift for you.
♪
- Pompey is stabbed to death and beheaded.
The Egyptian rulers at the time saw the Battle of Pharsalus
as decisive in the civil war.
And they wanted to curry favor with the new overlord
of the Roman world.
♪
- Caesar has his rival buried with proper Roman rites.
And with that, his victory is complete.
♪
His bitter enemy Cato takes his own life.
♪
Finally, after more than ten years,
Caesar returns to Rome,
not as a rebel but as its ruler.
[crowd cheering]
♪
Rome's empire under Caesar now stretches
more than 2,500 miles,
from the Atlantic Coast
to the River Euphrates in Syria.
And Rome's rise seems unstoppable.
- Julius Caesar is bestowed with the highest honor
that a Roman official could receive, a triumph.
It's an extensive military parade
that welcomes him back into the city.
- Caesar has his face painted red
because for one afternoon only,
the triumph symbolizes that this one man
is being given the privilege of becoming a god.
♪
- It's a very clever way of saying,
there's something godlike about me,
and that could certainly be a comment
on what the Romans thought of themselves.
- Part of it also is religious.
By this time, Romans believed that it was
the gods' will that Rome should rule the world.
[crowd cheering]
- Caesar has the Senate declare him dictator.
At this point, the Senate has no fight left in it.
Caesar has won.
- Dictator is a form of exceptional power
that was supposed to be temporary.
Caesar is using this as a fig leaf
to hide the fact that there are no limits
to his influence and power.
- For Caesar, the only place he has left to go
is to become an outright king
and fulfill that political mission
that he had set for himself years previously.
- At a public festival, he has Mark Antony
try to crown him to see how the crowd will react.
- The people ask me to give Caesar this crown.
♪
- Caesar is gambling that the Roman people
will accept him as their first king
in nearly five centuries.
[crowd booing]
It's a wager that backfires.
♪
- Jupiter alone is king of the Romans.
I'm no king
but only Caesar.
[applause]
- Senators could never accept the possibility
of a king in Rome.
That would be the death of the Republic,
the death of everything that they held sacred.
For them, this would be a line that they would
never be willing to cross.
♪
- One month after the failed crowning,
on March 15th...
[thunder booming]
The ides of March,
Caesar is invited to meet a group of senators.
♪
- One of the leaders of the conspiracy against Caesar
is a man named Marcus Brutus.
♪
- Caesar, please, petition.
- [groans]
- [grunting]
- [groaning]
♪
Even you, my son?
[dagger clatters]
- The words that are known throughout the world
as being Caesar's final words are, "Et tu, Brute?"
"And you, Brutus?"
But these words don't originate
in the ancient sources.
They actually originate with Shakespeare.
- Every gambler will tell you that eventually,
their luck is going to run out.
Caesar gambled and gambled and gambled until eventually,
he lost.
♪
- As the Republic dissolves, the struggle between
Caesar's heirs is about to descend into civil war.
- Octavian and Antony split the empire between them.
- Now dangerous power plays...
- Octavian recognizes that Cleopatra is now a threat.
- Culminate in a decisive battle
that ushers in an age of emperors.
- It really reshapes what the world will look like
for centuries and millennia to come.
♪
- Caesar's assassins are hoping to kill him
and to bring the old Republic back.
In practice, the result is a disaster.
The assassins do not
successfully restore democracy.
- When Caesar dies, there are just
too many ambitious, powerful men around him.
There's Mark Antony, who thinks of himself
as his protégé.
- Mark Antony is a relative of Caesar's
and had been his most trusted general
from the conquest of Gaul
all the way through to the recent civil war.
♪
Soon after Caesar's assassination,
Mark Antony presents Caesar's will to the Roman public.
- "To the people of Rome, I leave 75 denarii each.
"The rest of my estate will fall to my pr"--
♪
"To my principal heir, Gaius Octavius.
- The big winner in Caesar's will
is his grandnephew, Gaius Octavius.
He is named as Caesar's heir,
heir to most of Caesar's fortune,
and Caesar offers him posthumous adoption.
- Octavian is just 19 by this point
and completely inexperienced.
But he and Mark Antony join forces
and hunt down Caesar's assassins.
- After the defeat of Caesar's assassins on the battlefield,
Octavian and Antony split the empire between them.
- So Mark Antony controls the eastern part
of the empire, which includes Greece
and Syria and Turkey and Libya.
Octavian rules the territories to the west,
like Gaul and Spain.
And he's basically close to Rome,
where he can cultivate his image.
♪
- But the unnatural alliance between the two men
is short-lived.
Both want to be the sole ruler of all Roman lands.
[gull calling]
- In order to shore up his position
against Octavian,
Antony decides to engage in military campaigning.
This, for the Romans, is the classical way of getting ahead.
This is a way for Antony to stay in the forefront
of Roman politics.
♪
To do this, though, he needs resources.
And so, as many Roman generals have in the past,
he turns to Egypt.
♪
- Since Egypt's not a Roman province,
it's open territory for either man.
♪
Its ruler, Cleopatra, came back to power
after an affair with Caesar.
Their son, Caesarion, shares her throne.
♪
For Antony, Egypt and its wealth
can fund armies and tip the balance.
And Cleopatra, looking to secure her position,
aims to impress.
♪
- Cleopatra has to charm Antony.
She has to form an alliance with him.
And she knows that the best form of alliance
is a personal one.
♪
- Please.
- Antony was a partier.
He was a ladies' man.
He liked to drink. He liked to gamble.
He liked pleasure.
And so she's really speaking right to Antony's soul.
♪
- Antony falls in love with Cleopatra.
And what emerges is one of the most passionate
love affairs ever recorded in the ancient world.
♪
- But their alliance is also military.
In 36 BCE, backed by Cleopatra's gold,
Antony invades neighboring Parthia,
aiming to expand his lands and assert his position
as Rome's first man.
[all yelling, horses whinnying]
[weapons clashing]
Parthia is a formidable empire in its own right,
which had crushed Crassus' legions 17 years before.
- Keep formation!
- Antony is forced to retreat
after suffering heavy casualties.
♪
But he still returns to Egypt to celebrate a triumph
by Cleopatra's side
and openly defy Octavian in Rome.
♪
- They are claiming rule over a kingdom
that stretches from the Nubian Desert
to southwest Asia
to eastern Mediterranean to Europe.
I mean, they were claiming lands, namely Parthia,
that they hadn't even conquered yet.
♪
- This is an amazing power grab by Cleopatra,
but it's also a challenge to Rome and the Romans.
♪
- When news of their claim reaches Rome,
it's one statement in particular
from Antony and Cleopatra
that pushes Octavian to his breaking point.
- "At the end of the ceremony..."
[crowd cheering]
- "The royal couple
presented a teenage boy to the adoring spectators."
- We present you, Ptolemy Caesar...
- "The one and only heir..."
- To the late Julius Caesar.
♪
- Octavian sees himself as the true heir of Julius Caesar.
So he sees Caesarion being named as the heir of Caesar
as a personal insult.
- At the very least, Octavian recognizes
that an ascendant Egyptian empire is a potential reality.
He recognizes that Cleopatra is now a threat.
♪
- He is clearly under the spell
of the foreign witch, Cleopatra!
- The Romans are weary of civil war,
and so they might not look too kindly upon the idea
that Octavian is trying to spark another war
against a fellow Roman.
Instead, he's able to paint Cleopatra
as the real enemy of state and Antony essentially as her dupe.
♪
- The Senate backs Octavian.
And in 31 BCE, the two opposing navies,
totaling nearly 1,000 warships,
meet near Actium in western Greece.
It's one of the largest naval battles in history.
Fighting lasts all day, until Antony and Cleopatra's fleet
loses its formation.
Panic sets in, and they abandon their burning ships.
They've lost.
- The impact of Actium on Cleopatra and Mark Antony
is catastrophic.
Most of the army defects to Octavian.
So they are not going to recover from this loss.
And the dream of Egypt at the center of a world empire
has been shattered.
- Like other great battles,
such as Waterloo or Gettysburg,
it really reshapes what the world will look like
for centuries and millennia to come.
♪
- Rather than surrender to Octavian,
Antony and Cleopatra kill themselves.
She's the last independent ruler
in Egypt's 3,000-year history.
Her 17-year-old son, Caesarion,
is murdered on Octavian's orders.
And the once mighty kingdom of Egypt
becomes yet another Roman province.
♪
Rome once more has one undisputed ruler, Octavian.
♪
Under him, the Republic is at an end,
but the stage is set for the Roman Empire
and a new, complicated era of glory.
- Let the games begin!
- Octavian, now known as Caesar Augustus,
meaning "venerable," becomes Rome's first emperor.
He reigns for 40 years and extends Rome's territories
in every direction.
[warriors yelling, weapons clashing]
Eight centuries after its founding,
Rome rules supreme over most of Europe,
North Africa, and western Asia.
It has tripled in size in just a century
and is now twice the size of Alaska.
- It's a colossal empire,
one of the largest the world's ever known.
♪
- Augustus passes power to his heirs,
known as the Julio-Claudian dynasty--
Tiberius, Claudius, Caligula, and Nero.
The dangers of one-man rule become evident.
- Nero, of course, has a terrible reputation.
He had built himself the biggest palace
that had so far been built by the emperors,
the Golden House.
- Nero's Golden House was absolutely enormous.
About 200 acres, it's the size of 40 Manhattan blocks,
all of it in the most valuable real estate
in the Roman world.
The people of Rome and the Senate of Rome
were not happy about the construction
of the Golden House because what had previously
been at least semipublic space
that had been open to other Romans
into something that was reserved
just for this one person,
that was deeply offensive and deeply troubling.
♪
- In the end, Nero's selfish extravagance
drives the Senate to declare him a public enemy,
and he takes his own life.
- After Nero's death, the Roman Empire
was convulsed by a series of brief but quite violent
and quite disruptive civil wars.
There was a year of four emperors.
- And it's at this point that everyone
looks to somebody reliable and competent to take control,
and they naturally think of the successful, rather boring,
rather unglamorous general Vespasian,
who's putting down the Jewish rebellion,
and hail him as emperor.
♪
- Vespasian has a plan to stay in power--
use Roman engineering to reshape the city
and build something for the people.
- Vespasian wants to show that he's the anti-Nero.
And so he's gonna build the greatest entertainment center
that Rome has ever had,
an amphitheater, the Colosseum.
♪
- He wants to completely destroy
most of the Golden House, drain the artificial lake
that was one of the beauties of the Golden House,
and build this Colosseum smack on that site
where the lake once was.
♪
- So the place that had belonged to the emperor
and that was private will actually belong
to the entire Roman people.
♪
- The Roman writer Juvenal sums up
how the Colosseum could keep the people
loyal to their rulers.
♪
- Juvenal famously said that bread and circuses
were all that an emperor needed to do to lead the Roman people.
The bread was a reference to the official Roman dole,
or handout, of wheat.
Along with keeping them full, you needed
to have games that keep their attention away
from the problems of daily life.
Karl Marx's famous statement about religion
is the opiate of the masses,
well, circuses were the opiate of the masses
in Roman times.
[crowd yelling]
- The Colosseum will also showcase
the extraordinary skill of Rome's builders,
who are already leaving their mark across the empire.
- The Roman engineers are really at the heart
of Roman power and her ability to expand.
They're the ones who design war machines,
but they're also the ones who provide
roads, bridges, aqueducts,
everything that you need to expand.
- The Roman Empire was a real opportunity
for anyone in the construction business
because Rome was essentially one big construction zone.
♪
- The Colosseum is their showpiece,
and the whole of Rome was fascinated by this building.
The scale of it was bigger than anything ever built before.
♪
- In the first year of construction,
we're told that workers, by hand,
dug out 220,000 tons of dirt
to create 30-foot-deep foundations.
♪
- The amount of material that had to be moved around
to make this happen is mind-boggling.
Stone that's coming in is coming from 19 miles away,
from modern-day Tivoli.
3.5 million cubic feet in 6-ton blocks.
♪
Now, this travertine faced a brick structure,
and it's a million bricks that went into the Colosseum.
And on top of this, you need clamps
to hold the stones in place.
And that amounts to 300 tons alone of iron clamps.
♪
- But it's another material that makes the Colosseum
and other key Roman building projects a success--
concrete.
- Something that the Romans didn't invent, per se,
but they certainly perfected it.
And the way they perfected this was by mixing in volcanic ash,
especially from Mount Vesuvius, near Pompeii.
And this created a building material
that was both strong and flexible.
♪
The fact the Colosseum is still standing today
is a testament to Roman concrete.
♪
- It's not a very kind of glamorous substance,
but there is no doubt that it
completely changed the fortunes of Rome.
♪
- Beyond the concrete, the Colosseum
relies on an endless supply of slaves,
whose situation has hardly improved
since Spartacus' rebellion 150 years earlier.
♪
- The slaves are integral to the building of the Colosseum.
They ultimately are the machine by which
the Colosseum is constructed.
Life for them is extremely difficult.
♪
The enslaved people
were basically treated as human livestock.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of these enslaved persons
will die in the construction of the Colosseum.
♪
- And the Colosseum is the product of another conquest.
♪
- We know the funding source because over the main gate
to the Colosseum, it said, "Built from the spoils of war,
a new amphitheater."
- When Vespasian becomes emperor,
he leaves Titus, his son, to destroy Jerusalem.
And Titus does this absolutely pitilessly.
He breaks into the temple, massacres everybody,
enslaves everybody else, and really destroys
the sort of Jewish state.
The building of the Colosseum is completely connected
and based on the successful crushing
of the Jewish revolt in Judea in today's Israel.
♪
- The Arch of Titus that stands just outside
the Colosseum memorialized Titus' victory over Judea
and the sacking of Jerusalem.
This was the source of the wealth
and many of the people who were enslaved
and became the builders of that Colosseum itself.
[thunder booming]
♪
- Yet when Emperor Vespasian dies in 79 CE,
his bold vision is not complete.
♪
It will fall to his heirs to finish the project.
When they're done, the Colosseum
will help usher in an age of greatness and barbarity.
- [screaming]
- Roman power, at its most brutal,
was continuously reenacted.
The play of empire,
the act of conquest that brought it into being.
♪
- The Colosseum is the Roman Empire
distilled to its most basic essence.
- 79 CE, Titus inherits a vast and powerful empire
and the greatest building site Rome has ever seen.
♪
Within a year, he brings the project to completion.
[crowd cheering]
- The building of the Colosseum,
especially the replacement of the Golden House,
gave a huge statement to the people of Rome.
And that is like, this is a huge palace,
an extravaganza of popular entertainment.
This is the glory of Rome, and it's for you.
- Let the games begin!
[crowd chanting "Caesar"]
♪
- Although there are hundreds of amphitheaters
in the Roman world at that time,
in size and scale and scope,
the Colosseum was the ultimate.
This was a magnificent structure to behold.
♪
- As gladiators and their contests grew in popularity,
they might have reenacted historical
or mythological events in Rome's history.
You might have reenactments of battles
from the Punic Wars against Carthage.
You might have reenactments of Caesar in Gaul.
You have all of this vast array of historical
and mythological battles to draw upon.
[crowd cheering]
- Roman power, at its most brutal,
was continuously reenacted.
The play of empire,
the act of conquest that brought it into being.
♪
- The Colosseum is the Roman Empire
distilled to its most basic essence.
[crowd cheering]
- It is a symbol of conquest.
It's a symbol of dominance.
It's a symbol of imperial power
radiating throughout the Roman world.
♪
- As a showcase for the power of the emperors,
the Colosseum also reveals the dangers
of a weak or unfit ruler.
♪
Weeks after the opening games, Emperor Titus dies of a fever,
and his ambitious younger brother,
Domitian, succeeds him.
- Domitian and Titus were not close at all.
So when Titus fell ill after only two years
of being emperor, some thought that maybe Domitian
was responsible for his death.
- [grunting]
♪
- He certainly didn't rush to his brother's bedside.
Instead, he awaited his brother's death
so that he could immediately be named emperor.
♪
- At this point in history, the Roman emperor
is the single most powerful person in the world.
But as that power grows, so does the ability
to damage the empire through misrule.
- While Titus had been charming and suave,
Domitian was all harsh edges
and paranoid.
In fact, over a dozen senators are killed by Domitian,
and he is extremely unpopular.
- The more paranoid you are, the more people you offend,
the more people you execute,
and the less your own circle trusts you,
then they begin to fear you too.
♪
- Using the Colosseum as his stage,
Domitian makes a show of the power of life and death
he holds over his subjects.
[crowd chanting "Death"]
[crowd booing]
♪
- Get him out of here!
♪
- You have something to say?
♪
- Domitian was a tyrannical emperor.
He wasn't about even pretending to believe
in any kind of democracy.
He created a cult of personality around himself
and wanted no one else's input.
♪
- I see.
You wish to volunteer for the next event.
[all clamoring]
♪
- Domitian is signaling a break with the past,
that there was a new emperor in town.
It's a way to mark him off as really an autocrat,
as an authoritarian ruler,
a strict disciplinarian to the point of cruelty.
- [screams]
♪
- His chilling outbursts extend to every layer
of Roman society.
- All rise.
- Thanks to the writer Cassius Dio,
we know Domitian held an infamous dinner party
styled like a funeral to terrify those present.
- When guests arrived at the palace,
they were ushered into a black room, black couches.
Individual guests were presented
with what looked like a tombstone
with their name on it.
♪
- This was a way for Domitian to petrify his guests
and really to show his autocratic powers
and that it was he who held the power of life and death
under his regime.
♪
- Over two years, Domitian's builders
equipped the Colosseum with a hypogeum,
a labyrinth of structures underneath the arena floor,
so emperors' spectacles can be bigger and bloodier.
♪
- The hypogeum housed about 2 miles of tunnels
on two floors that contained all of the rooms
where the gladiators would be kept
and the animals that were going to be shown.
So it's almost like an underground city.
- Julius!
♪
- Under the floor of the Colosseum,
there were elevators.
There were ramps. There were trapdoors.
There were all sorts of things that could
enhance the spectacle for the crowd up above.
- If you're a spectator sitting in the Colosseum,
all you can see is the sand.
All you can see is one flat floor.
You have no idea of what's going on beneath.
♪
- Waiting under the floor of the Colosseum
for the festivities to begin
would have been kind of a hellish and surreal experience.
- [growls]
- You would have heard the cries of injured people.
You would have heard the growls of wild beasts.
You would see chained criminals who were awaiting execution.
♪
- All of this underneath the floor
of an arena that was in use.
So you could hear the elephants running across.
[elephant trumpets]
You could hear the crowd shouting
and cheering and chanting.
[crowd cheering]
It must have been an intoxicating
but pretty horrifying experience.
[horns blowing]
♪
- People of Rome, welcome, one and all,
to the greatest games ever witnessed.
- Nice and strong.
The men are ready.
- By order of the emperor Domitian,
a spectacle...
[continues indistinctly]
- Let the games begin!
- As the crowds cheer on the day of the arena's reopening,
Domitian shows Rome what true power is.
- Domitian really wanted to demonstrate that he,
in fact, was master of all.
♪
He was autocratic and despotic and wantonly cruel.
This is a tried and tested technique of tyrants.
But those who live by the sword die by the sword.
♪
[crowd yelling]
- Welcome, one and all,
to the greatest games ever witnessed.
♪
A lone warrior will fight
not 5 or 10
but 20 of the fiercest beasts.
♪
[crowd yelling]
- 83 CE, the opening day of a new series of games
that Emperor Domitian promises will be dazzling.
The headline, the most extravagant beast hunt
ever staged.
♪
- The beast hunts were much more than just
fighting animals.
It was a way to demonstrate Roman control
over the entire world,
both the human world and also the natural world.
[gears clattering]
[crowd yelling]
♪
Domitian really wanted to demonstrate that he,
in fact, was master of all.
- [snarls]
- He decides to use the power of the Colosseum
by putting on the greatest show
that anyone had ever seen.
[crowd cheering]
♪
[crowd yelling]
- At the center of this deadly spectacle
is a beast master, or bestiarius,
charged with facing 20 wild beasts one after the other.
- Beast masters were enslaved people.
And so therefore, they were also
a display of Roman domination over the people
subjected by the Roman Empire.
♪
- The animals underscore the empire's reach
at a time when it's approaching its peak.
♪
- You had bears and wolves
and boars from the north lands.
You had crocodiles and ostriches from Egypt,
the big cats from North Africa,
tigers from Asia.
The range of animals that appeared in the arena
were, in a sense, a showcase of the power
and the extent of the empire.
♪
- We can estimate perhaps a million animals
were killed in the Colosseum, many of whom
were slaughtered at the hands of beast masters.
[crowd clamoring]
[lion roars]
The result is, the considerable number
of major species of animals were eliminated,
simply eliminated, as the result of Roman appetite
for animals to kill for sport.
♪
[lion roars]
[crowd cheering]
- Domitian's games were a great success.
The fact that they were written about to that extent,
that people remembered them,
meant that he had been a hit with the Roman people.
The games had served their purpose.
Of course, that didn't last forever.
In Rome, the love of the people wasn't enough.
In 96 AD, an increasingly paranoid and tyrannical
Domitian made enemies among the Senate, among Rome's elite.
And on their orders, he was knifed to death.
♪
- Domitian's reign ends in bloody humiliation.
♪
But his family's legacy remains
one of Rome's greatest achievements.
♪
- [growls]
- The Colosseum will come to symbolize
the rise and fall of Rome.
- It's all there--
the blood, the glory, the magnificence,
and the flaws that made Rome
the greatest empire that Europe has ever seen.
♪
- As the empire expands,
it becomes harder to hold together.
- This was really the future of the Roman Empire--
waves of incursions from the Goths and Vandals,
all out to vanquish Italy.
♪
- Its strengths turned to weaknesses.
- Bring me his head.
- Rome itself could be finished,
all because of the actions of one very selfish individual.
♪
- A religious revolution
upsets everything once held dear.
- Don't! Stop! Stop!
- This was a turning point in history.
Things were never going to be the same.
♪
- And one of the greatest civilizations
in human history begins to fall.
- This is confrontation on a colossal scale.
♪
- I'm Attila, the whip of God.
♪