[dramatic music]
- This day will decide everything!
[all chanting]
I order you now.
Advance!
- Over the centuries, Rome grew from a tiny kingdom
to an empire driven by conquest.
- The fact is, it was the sword.
It was fear.
It was blood that conquered the Roman Empire.
- And the ambition of its leaders.
- Let the dice fly high!
- Now the old republic
has been replaced by a dictatorship.
- Now! [whip cracks]
[lion roars]
[crowd cheering]
- Its emperors are out of control.
♪
- You have put Rome in more danger.
♪
- The empire is faced with disaster and change.
- The city is plagued by famine, fires, earthquakes.
♪
The empire's nearly broke.
♪
- Its enemies close in.
- This Attila, is he the devil?
- No. Much worse.
♪
- The people of Rome are starting to think
perhaps this city is not eternal after all.
- Rome is ultimately a cautionary tale to us.
You are never too big to fail.
- It's all there:
the blood, the glory, the magnificence,
and the flaws that made Rome
the greatest empire that Europe has ever seen.
- The story of Rome is ultimately the story of us.
♪
- 107 C.E., Rome.
[horn fanfare]
[crowd cheering]
The great emperor Trajan has been on the throne
for seven years.
His empire thrives as he celebrates
one of his many triumphs.
- [grunting]
[crowd cheering]
♪
- When Trajan succeeds the Roman Empire,
Rome is at its greatest.
It's vast, it's successful, it's rich,
and Trajan really personifies that,
the energy, the success, and the sophistication
of this extraordinary institution.
♪
- Trajan had an interesting self-image.
Best emperor.
That was his self-image-- the best.
And he saw himself as Rome's emperor par excellence.
He took all the best qualities of his predecessors,
but also expanded Rome's empire to an unprecedented level.
- During his 19-year reign,
Trajan pushes the boundaries of the empire
to encompass more territory than ever before,
adding Arabia, Armenia, Mesopotamia,
and Dacia in Eastern Europe.
It now covers 2 million square miles,
over half the size of the United States today.
- The conquest of Dacia was one of the Roman Empire's
very last major conquests,
one of the very last extensions of the border.
♪
- Trajan is all about investing as much money
into the public as possible.
This is through the creation of aqueducts, of roads,
of public edifices.
He believes in that ideology.
You know, being Roman is almost like, today,
you could say it's the American dream of its time.
They believed that Rome truly was the light.
- Trajan's conquests meant that
there was a massive delivery
to the Roman people of slaves, of spoils, of new buildings,
of new baths, of new temples.
♪
He puts up this massive column showing his conquest,
showing his conquests of Dacia,
and basically advertising himself
as an amazing conqueror.
♪
- To complete the celebrations,
Trajan gives the Roman people
123 days of games with over 9,000 gladiators,
including a fight to the death
between a free Roman woman and Dacian prisoners.
♪
- Women are fairly low on the social strata
of the Roman citizenry.
A woman's role was primarily constricted
to the domestic sphere.
She was expected to be a wife and mother,
to be loyal, frugal, and obedient.
[both grunting]
[crowd shouting]
- Trajan might have looked at a female gladiator
as yet another sign of his greatness, and his ability
to bring ever-new and more exotic spectacle
to the people of Rome.
♪
[crowd cheering]
- But the games also feature more typical entertainment
for this period in Rome's history--
the slaughter of criminals and Christians.
♪
- The number of Christians is growing.
And what started as a very small movement
based around Jerusalem has now spread across the empire.
[crowd chanting]
- Christians.
When they see a few of their high priests eaten by lions,
they'll turn to our gods.
♪
- In 107 C.E., Ignatius, a prominent Christian leader,
is accused of disrupting the Roman order.
♪
- Ignatius of Antioch, he is clearly
the target of Trajan's anger, because he is arrested,
brought to Rome to be executed by being fed to lions.
[crowd cheering]
[lion roars]
- So we have the expression in English,
"being thrown to the lions."
We use it sort of metaphorically, right?
But it was very literal in the Roman Empire.
People actually were thrown to the lions.
♪
- However much we talk about civilization and baths
and all the things that we think of as rather Roman,
the fact is, it was the sword, it was fear,
it was blood that conquered the Roman Empire
and kept it under control.
♪
- At this time, most Romans are polytheistic,
worshipping multiple gods.
Christianity is a small but growing faith,
especially among Rome's poor,
and the elites are growing suspicious of it.
♪
- The Romans were beginning to see the Christians
as troublemakers.
Why?
Because when groups start to assemble together,
they start to grow.
They start to spread new ideas.
And Rome doesn't want any new ideas.
They don't want anybody challenging
the Roman power structure, the Roman ethic.
♪
- Under Trajan, the Christians are among those
getting hit with the violence.
But those harsh tactics can backfire.
- While Ignatius is on his way to Rome,
he's able to write seven letters,
and it's because of these letters that we know who he is.
- These are first-person accounts
of what happened to him and how he feels about it,
why he thinks it matters or might make a difference.
♪
- Ignatius would have traveled
along a major east-west thoroughfare,
which is known now as the Via Egnatia,
and that connected the cities
in the eastern half of the empire with Rome.
♪
- The Via Egnatia is one of 372 major roads,
a network totaling a quarter of a million miles
that connect the empire's 40 provinces to Rome,
allowing armies and trade to move.
♪
- Ironically, it was this very system of roads
that allowed Ignatius to write letters ahead
that actually helped the spread of Christianity.
[lion roars]
[crowd cheering]
- Ignatius's execution is supposed to send
a message to Christians.
[lion growls]
But Ignatius uses it to send a message to the Romans.
♪
- Ignatius is convinced that he's going to die violently.
And this is okay with him because Ignatius wants
to follow the model of Christ.
♪
- There's no touching him.
- There are great stories of Christians
being thrown before the beast, before the lions,
and instead of the lions devouring them,
the lions lie down at their feet.
[lion roars]
- Our Lord is protecting him.
- Who doesn't like that idea of a lion,
who's supposed to tear you apart, instead
rolling over to get a belly rub instead of eating you?
[lion growls]
♪
[lion roaring]
♪
- He held to his beliefs.
And died for it.
Why?
For something he believed in.
And that must have been astounding to the Romans.
♪
- Well, I think our point was made clear enough.
- I'm not sure.
♪
I'm not sure at all.
♪
- At the time that Ignatius dies,
nobody would expect Christianity
to become what it is today.
Little by little, these figures like Ignatius
were the pieces that were building a mighty wall.
Because it was his belief system that would prevail.
It was his belief system that was
going to take over the empire.
♪
- By the end of Trajan's reign,
there are an estimated 40,000 Christians in the empire.
♪
But in the years to come, that number skyrockets,
upending ancient Roman values
and remaking Roman society.
♪
- Romans believed that the greatness of Rome was founded
on the old gods, and that that was threatened
by the conversion to this new-fangled sect, Christianity.
♪
- Under Trajan's heirs, Rome will soar to new heights.
Until its rivals go on the attack.
- The northern frontier was crumbling.
There were very serious incursions.
- And an invisible enemy
brings the empire to its knees.
- Panic spreads, and it paralyzes Roman power.
- As despots seize the imperial throne,
betrayal and backstabbing follow.
- Do you wish power for yourself?
- Setting in motion Rome's decline...
- [grunts]
- And fall.
♪
[dramatic music]
- The 2nd century C.E., Rome's Golden Age.
For decades, the imperial throne passes peacefully
from one emperor to the next.
The Roman Empire flourishes, and its population
is hitting its peak-- around 75 million people,
double that of California today.
♪
The empire stops expanding
and focuses on securing its borders:
Hadrian's Wall in Britain,
the Rhine and Danube Frontiers,
and the deserts of Africa and Arabia,
all protecting its beating heart,
the city of Rome itself.
♪
- Rome is really the cultural center of the universe
in this moment.
Authors, doctors, architects, philosophers flock to the city
because they are enticed by Rome itself.
- Among the new arrivals is Galen of Pergamon,
a brilliant medical scientist.
The first to describe heart valves and cranial nerves,
he's a symbol of the empire's sophistication at this time.
- Galen is probably the single most influential figure
in the history of medicine.
[both grunting]
- He was an author, philosopher,
a scientist, a doctor,
and an incredibly ambitious man.
[both grunting]
[crowd cheering]
- For Galen and others, the capital city
is the place to be, in part because of its emperor.
- Marcus Aurelius comes at the tail end
of the Five Good Emperors.
These were the emperors who ruled during what's known
as the Pax Romana, during the very height
of the Roman Empire in the 2nd century A.D.
♪
- He was an extraordinary character.
He'd been chosen as a very young man
and trained to be emperor.
And for once, they got it absolutely right.
♪
- But Marcus Aurelius does not rule alone.
For the first time in Roman history,
two emperors govern side by side.
♪
- Marcus Aurelius's adopted brother, Lucius Verus,
they were almost opposites.
They reigned together perfectly because
they were two sides of a coin.
♪
- Under their enlightened rule,
the city of Rome, on its seven hills,
has grown into the world's first megacity.
♪
- Rome had a population of a million people.
That is the largest population in any city
anywhere in the world for 1,500 years.
The next city to be that size population is Victorian London.
♪
- But as the Romans reap the rewards of empire,
others are stirring.
♪
In the 160 C.E., entire nations are on the move
in the uncharted lands to the empire's north,
pushing against the Danube frontier.
For once, Rome's army can't drive them back.
- The northern frontier was crumbling.
There were very serious incursions
threatening Roman interests, especially by a very dangerous
tribe called the Marcomanni.
- What starts as what might seem a fairly small invasion
turns into what are known as the Marcomannic Wars,
and they occupy Marcus for the rest of his reign.
♪
- The Marcomannic Wars on the northern frontier
may be seen as the first of the barbarian invasions
from the north that will chip away
at the very foundations of the Roman Empire.
- In response, Rome's two emperors
travel 350 miles north
to reach their military headquarters at Aquileia,
on the border of Italy and modern-day Slovenia.
- Marcus Aurelius had a very strong sense of duty.
And also, he was a political realist.
And as much as he would have preferred
to leave the fighting to his subordinates,
or even to his co-emperor, Verus,
he realized that this required his personal intervention.
♪
- But when they arrive at the camp,
an even bigger threat to Rome's empire
is running rampant through the cramped legions:
a new disease that the men in Aquileia
haven't experienced before.
♪
- By all accounts, the plague was
a horrible, horrible disease.
I mean, in addition to the expected diarrhea and vomiting
and fevers, scabs would form and then fall off,
leaving horrible lesions.
- It was devastating in its effects
and killed a large percentage of the people that it infected.
♪
- The emperors summon the physician Galen,
the only man they believe can tackle this.
What we know about the plague comes from his writings.
He arrives at Rome's military headquarters
to find an army in crisis.
- The situation that Galen found
when he reached Aquileia was more severe than anything
he could have imagined.
♪
- Galen gives us some pretty detailed description
of symptoms, and based on those symptoms,
we think it was likely smallpox.
It might have been the first appearance of smallpox
in the Mediterranean world.
♪
- This crisis becomes, in many ways for the empire,
the defining challenge.
More than perhaps at any point in human memory,
disease had become an existential threat
to Rome itself.
♪
- The Roman Empire has never been free of disease,
but epidemics like the one
that's running rampant through his army, that's something new.
This is the first of a whole series of diseases
that are going to strike the Roman Empire
over the next couple of centuries.
♪
- As the plague continues to wipe out their troops,
the two emperors return to Rome
to replenish their diminished legions.
They leave the army under Galen's care.
♪
But during the emperor's journey home,
Lucius Verus dies.
♪
- Verus didn't make it very far--
only 50 miles from Aquileia.
For Marcus Aurelius, he is left on his own
to rule an empire that's stricken by plague,
has enemies at the borders, an army that's been
devastated by this disease.
He knows that the responsibility is his
to rule the Roman Empire by himself.
♪
- It doesn't take very long for the plague
to ravage all of Italy, and to spread from the legions
to the civilian population itself.
♪
- There was nowhere in the world
that was more conducive to the spread
of a highly transmissible and lethal disease
than the city of Rome.
You have tons of people who are living
in cramped quarters.
Sanitary conditions are often poor.
This is a population that is going to drop like flies
as smallpox starts to spread among them.
♪
Perhaps as much as 10% of the Roman Empire's population,
or even more, dies in this one plague
over the course of the next several years.
- And, of course, panic spreads.
And it's actually-- for a moment,
it paralyzes Roman power.
The plague is a huge crisis for the Roman state.
♪
- With enemies at the border and a depleted army,
the emperor turns to an unlikely group for help.
- Help me to protect the citizens of Rome,
and you will win your freedom!
[all cheering]
- But Rome's worst enemy is much closer to him.
♪
- If you're looking for a dividing line
between the glory that was Rome and its long decline,
Commodus is it.
♪
- In 169, the Roman Empire's Golden Age faces two threats--
invasion and a deadly plague.
- Galen returns to Rome,
and he finds a transformed city.
And, in fact, Galen's family itself is not spared.
♪
Almost everyone in his own household dies.
And it's the scale of this plague, of this disease,
is just overwhelming.
And of course, no one knew for how long it would go on.
♪
- His observations of an understanding
of what was happening were ahead of many other doctors.
And of course, that brings him close to Marcus Aurelius, who,
first of all, doesn't want to become a victim
of the plague himself, but is also desperate
to understand how to stop it.
♪
- Galen's mission is to keep Marcus Aurelius alive.
♪
- Added cinnamon this time.
♪
- While on one hand, the reign of Marcus Aurelius
marks something of a high point in the Roman Empire...
- It didn't help.
- It also marks the point when the seeds were planted
that were going to define the next couple of centuries
of Rome's existence.
♪
- To face down the invaders,
Rome needs fresh fighters to replenish
its plague-ravaged army.
So Marcus Aurelius makes a daring move
to recruit the fittest men in Rome...
♪
Whoever they may be.
- The gladiators live in a sheltered community.
They don't have any connection to the outside world.
They're exceptionally healthy.
They're getting three square meals a day.
They've got great medical care.
So, they're probably the fittest people
in Rome at that moment.
- We have to remember, of course,
that what the gladiators were trained to do was fight.
That is what Marcus Aurelius needed.
♪
- But gladiators are convicts and slaves.
♪
- How could these degenerates and criminals
defend the honor of Rome?
Could they be trusted on the battlefield?
♪
- The gladiators were often drawn from, in the Roman view,
the lowest-born peoples of the empire
and engaged in a sordid occupation.
To have them vaulted into a kind of prestige role
of soldiers on behalf of the empire itself
was a startling transformation.
♪
- This obviously causes a great amount
of furor throughout the city, mainly because
gladiators are entertainers.
They are people who fight for money,
they're mercenaries,
and they're the lowest of the low.
♪
- Line up for the emperor!
♪
- Take up these arms.
You are now Roman soldiers.
♪
When I look at you, I don't see prisoners.
I don't see criminals.
Or slaves.
I don't even see gladiators.
I see legionaries
dedicated to protecting this great empire.
Help me to protect the citizens of Rome,
and you will win your freedom!
[all cheering]
- History often throws up these moments
where those who are on the fringes of society
ultimately come to save that society,
and this is certainly the case here.
The gladiators make sense.
They're trained combatants,
and so they know the art of war.
♪
- Marcus Aurelius goes north once again...
♪
And his new legions clash with the barbarian armies.
♪
After months of fierce fighting,
Rome's ad hoc army turns back the invasion.
It's a triumphant moment, but the war continues,
and the threat on the empire's border never really goes away.
♪
- This marks a turning point in Roman imperial history.
What Marcus Aurelius was seeing was really
the future of the Roman Empire.
There's going to be waves of incursions
from Goths and Vandals and many northern tribes
all out to vanquish Italy.
♪
- As a buffer against its enemies,
the empire creates new provinces on the frontier
and allows friendlier Germanic tribes to settle there
in return for a promise to defend the land,
a decision with far-reaching consequences.
♪
As for Marcus Aurelius, he knows he needs to plan
his succession carefully.
But his son, Commodus, is far from the ideal heir.
[swords clanging]
[crowd shouting]
♪
[crowd cheering]
- Marcus Aurelius can't have been unaware
of the character defects
that were going to plague Commodus later in life.
- Halt!
♪
- The apple really did fall pretty far from the tree,
because Commodus went in exactly the opposite direction
as his father.
♪
- In 177, Marcus Aurelius decides
to name his son as co-emperor and the heir to the throne.
You know, one of the questions that historians ask is that,
how could someone as wise as Marcus Aurelius choose his son?
- One of the things that makes the high point
of the Roman Empire so remarkable
is the fact that the emperors chose their successors.
They adopted sons to serve as their successors, as emperors.
So really, this is a fairly meritocratic process.
Marcus Aurelius departed from this.
♪
- Three years after naming Commodus
his co-emperor and heir apparent,
Marcus Aurelius falls ill.
♪
- Caesar.
Caesar?
- What? - It's your father.
It's time.
♪
[somber music]
♪
- It's the 17th of March, 180.
And Marcus Aurelius dies.
Very possibly of the plague that had dogged his army.
♪
- Commodus becomes the most powerful man
in all the Roman Empire.
And it doesn't take very long for Commodus
to show that this is going to be a very different reign
from the one of his father.
[dramatic music]
♪
- Commodus turns out to be one of the worst emperors
in the history of the Roman Empire.
If you're looking for a dividing line
between the glory that was Rome and its long decline,
Commodus is it.
♪
- Commodus grabs the reins of power...
- Bring me his head.
- And drives Rome down a dangerous course.
- How dare you?
♪
- 180 C.E., Commodus, the new emperor,
is in command of the Roman army
as it fights German tribes on its north.
200 years after Augustus, the first emperor,
the Roman Empire is still
the ancient world's superpower.
♪
Then Commodus makes the first in a series
of decisions that sets Rome on a downward trajectory.
- Caesar, where are you going?
- I'm going to Rome.
- Commodus does not want to be out in the freezing mud,
fighting, living in a camp or in a tent.
He wants to be back in Rome, in the luxury,
enjoy the fruits of being an emperor.
♪
- Rather than pursuing the war with the Germani
to its conclusion, which, in Roman eyes,
would have to be a victory, Commodus decided
to make peace with them.
This was a huge departure because
in the Roman imagination, Romans didn't make peace.
They won.
♪
- Almost immediately, the relationship
between Commodus and the Senate is off to a bad start.
There's a wedge driven between them
right from the very beginning.
♪
- We were at war!
- And now we're not, Cassius.
- You have put Rome in more danger.
- Tell me, how is peace more dangerous than war?
- From the Senate's position,
it's just storing up trouble ahead,
that they know these tribes will come back in the future
where they'll probably pose an even bigger threat.
♪
- Cassius Dio is privy to the inner workings of the empire.
He's in close proximity to the emperor himself.
And so his studies, his observations, his writings
are the incredible source to go to the knowledge of Commodus.
- Even under the emperors, the Senate
counted for a great deal.
They were an important go-between the emperor
and the Roman people.
It was very important for the emperor to have
the senators on his side.
♪
- The history of Rome's emperor shows that
it's pretty dangerous to cross the Senate.
But Commodus had a plan,
and it really was to ignore the Senate
and to appeal directly to the people.
- To win the people over, Commodus has
an incredible tool at his disposal.
He has the games.
- Appealing to the people is a strategy that goes
all the way back to Julius Caesar.
Commodus throws lavish games
to celebrate the end of the war,
which means free food and entertainment...
[crowd chanting]
Even though years of conflict and plague
have drained the empire's finances.
♪
[grunting]
[cheers and boos]
- For the Senate, they understand
that this is an absolute joke.
Triumphal games were put on at the end
of great wars fought for many years,
wars that established the power of Rome.
This was the opposite of that, and yet here he was,
parading himself as some sort of triumphant general.
♪
[crowd chanting]
♪
[crowd cheering]
♪
- Do you hear that, Cassius?
People love it.
- But the treasury can only stretch so far.
- I'll find the money.
- Every single day of games
costs an enormous amount of money.
You have to fund the import of sometimes
tens of thousands of wild animals.
You have to hire gladiators, some of whom
are extremely high-priced help.
- In today's terms, we'd be talking about an event
that would cost millions of dollars per day,
and these games could last for months.
The cost of the games were unbelievable.
- Throughout history, taxes have been a way
to generate more revenue for the state,
and Commodus sees them as a way to pay for the games,
curry favor with the people, and stick it to the rich.
- Commodus directs his attention
toward the 1%, the senatorial class,
and he imposes a new tax on them
to finance his games in the Colosseum.
♪
- The Senate were never going to just lie down and take this.
♪
- From the Senate's perspective,
Commodus was becoming a real threat.
It was enough to prompt them to act.
Commodus had to be dealt with.
♪
- Within the first years of Commodus's reign,
there's an attempt on his life.
- Who sent you?
Who sent you?
- He later finds out that it's his own sister,
Lucilla, who's involved, and a handful of senators.
- The idea, apparently, was that she
would substitute her own husband
and eliminate her brother in order
to make room for her husband.
♪
- Bring me his head.
- There is no possible way that a plot
on the emperor's life did not include the Senate.
They viewed him as dangerous, they viewed him as somebody
that should have been gotten rid of a long time ago,
and they were going to try their best to do it.
♪
- His relations with the Senate
have always been tense.
Now they've become intolerable.
♪
- It's fair to say that any semblance of a normal person
that remained in Commodus left
the moment that the assassination plot took place.
♪
- How dare you?
♪
[grunts]
♪
- He was already a very unstable and violent
and cruel person, and I think this, in many ways,
validated his behavior and sent him
on a complete mental downward spiral.
♪
Commodus unleashes nothing short of pure bloody vengeance
on the Senate.
Anyone he suspects that was involved,
that will be involved,
that poses even a minor threat to him,
in his eyes, absolutely has to go.
The praetorians round up senators
and systematically torture each and every one of them,
at which point, of course, they give up more names.
The web becomes bigger and bigger and bigger.
A huge amount of Rome's political class is wiped out.
Of course, one of the side effects of this
is that they, being wealthy men,
they have lost all their rights to all their wealth,
their villas, their businesses,
and quite conveniently,
Commodus takes it all for himself.
- Cassius Dio and a handful of other senators
escape the carnage by fleeing the city.
- You can understand that this shook the Senate to its core,
seeing members of the Senate being put to death
as nothing more than common criminals.
They knew that Commodus was not somebody
who was mentally stable or someone that you would
want to mess with at all.
♪
- Commodus's sister, Lucilla, isn't spared.
She's exiled to the Island of Capri,
then murdered by her imperial guards.
♪
As the emperor descends into violence and madness...
- Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.
- He drives his empire closer to ruin.
- Rome is at a moment of disaster.
- Commodus, this is madness!
- The highlight of these new games
is going to be something which the Roman people
have never seen before.
♪
- In the late 2nd century, the Roman Empire is still
the most powerful of its time.
But cracks have formed.
♪
- Commodus decides that Rome is no longer
a safe place for him to be, and so he leaves the city
for his own safety.
- Caesar--
- I'm leaving Rome.
- I'll have our things packed to--
- Not this time, Cleander.
You're staying.
I'm leaving you in charge while I'm gone.
- Really, Caesar, but I--
- Dear Cleander, I'm relying on you.
- He delegates the running of the city and the day-to-day
affairs of Rome to one of his former slaves,
a freed man called Cleander.
♪
- Cleander, being a freed slave,
is basically from the bottom of society.
Now he's been imbued with this power and responsibility
from the emperor himself.
It's putting him above the Senate, and that, of course,
is going to ruffle feathers in the Senate.
♪
- Whenever you look at the bad emperors,
I always think of the famous maxim of "Power corrupts;
absolute power corrupts absolutely."
So many Roman emperors fell prey to paranoia
and increasing megalomania.
Caligula and Nero are two perfect examples
of emperors who simply lost their minds,
and the disintegration of their reign
because of their own cruel behavior,
because of their megalomania,
and because of their systematic fighting
with the other powerful figures in Rome, the Roman Senate.
♪
- Commodus, at the time of his birth, had it all.
However, perhaps no other human being in history
has squandered so much.
He was cruel, he was power hungry,
but with no sense of responsibility.
He had no serious interest in governing
or even being emperor.
♪
- While all of this is going on,
Commodus stays safely in his villa outside Rome.
Commodus's villa contains its own mini-amphitheater.
And while he's there, he decides
to train as a gladiator.
- There's no record of why Commodus decided to do this,
but we might say that it had
something to do with his insecurity,
the desire to associate himself with a symbol
of masculine virility.
- He becomes even more paranoid.
And paradoxically, he felt safer
surrounded by these trained killers
than he did with the Senate.
- As Commodus plays gladiator,
Rome slips toward financial collapse.
♪
- The economy is failing.
There's unrest amongst the people.
There is death in the streets.
Rome is at a moment of disaster.
And there was a very serious threat at that point
that Rome itself could be finished,
all because of the actions of one very selfish individual.
♪
- There's a famine of the kind that Rome hasn't suffered
for hundreds of years.
And this is joined by a resurgence
of the Antonine Plague.
So a major pestilence strikes the city as well.
It is mayhem in the city, and thousands of people a day
are dying from hunger or from disease.
♪
- He debases the coinage, which means that
he lowered the silver content in each coin,
therefore meaning that the same amount of silver
could go further.
Now, superficially, it gave him more money to buy his food
and spend it on games, but in reality,
it will have generated inflation.
It would be a disaster for the city's finances.
♪
- Commodus knew, with all the pressures on the Roman system,
he was losing the goodwill of the Roman people,
and he had to do something big.
[crowd chanting]
- Commodus thought to himself,
I'll just give them more circuses.
♪
- This time, Commodus has a surprise.
♪
- The highlight of these new games
is going to be something which the Roman people
have never seen before.
The emperor himself is going to take center stage
and fight as a gladiator.
- Commodus, this is madness!
You are not some slave.
You are the emperor of Rome.
♪
- One of the big draws of becoming a gladiator is,
we forget how much power, how much adulation,
how much excitement they caused.
♪
But the Romans were elitists.
So the fact that someone born of nobility,
one of the emperors,
would degrade himself to that degree,
that he's going to present himself
in the same profession of infamia, the infamous,
the scum of the scum, it wasn't just shocking,
it was absolutely disgusting to them.
♪
- Commodus charges the bankrupt Roman treasury
1 million sesterces to appear, $10 million in today's money.
And he's not finished.
[both grunting]
♪
[crowd booing]
♪
[crowd cheering]
♪
- After the games, Commodus embarks
on a still-grander project.
He intends to rebuild Rome with himself at the center.
♪
- He renames Rome Colonia Commodiana,
the Colony of Commodus.
And we wouldn't believe that this was true
if it were not for the fact that the coins
of Commodus's era show that this was the case.
He really did name it after himself.
- That could not be tolerated,
even by Commodus's world-weary contemporaries.
♪
- When Commodus announces yet another set of games,
with himself as the star again,
the Senate know they must act.
- [grunting, groaning]
♪
- Commodus meets his end at the hands
of his gladiatorial trainer, at the hands of Narcissus,
acting on the orders of the Senate.
♪
- There's a sort of poetic irony that in the end,
it was the very figure that he so admired, so wanted to be,
that put an end to his life--
the gladiator.
- But for Rome, the Senate's actions come too late.
The death of Commodus
marks a tipping point in Roman history.
♪
- The barbarians he'd settled inside the Roman Empire
turned and invaded Italy once again.
And the Roman Empire, which had been drained
financially by Commodus's expenditures,
could do very little about it.
♪
- Commodus, after his death, suffers what's known
as the damnatio memoriae.
This means that every reference to Commodus
was literally wiped out.
So inscriptions with Commodus's name
were rubbed out.
Documents with his name
and about him were destroyed.
♪
- The reign of Commodus is probably best summed up
by Cassius Dio when he says that
Commodus was a greater curse to the Romans
than any pestilence and any crime.
♪
[all shouting]
- Now the Roman Empire teeters on the edge...
- No! Stop!
- As new enemies close in.
♪
- Attila the Hun stands as one of the most ruthless,
if not the most ruthless, military leaders of all time.
♪
- Following the death of Commodus in 192 C.E.,
Rome enters an extended period of turbulence.
- This is now a new era of Roman history.
Rome is no longer what it was. Rome is in decline.
♪
- Over the next 200 years, its frontiers
are often under attack.
- The empire was beset on all sides
by barbarian invaders who sensed Rome's weakness.
There were Saxons in the north,
there were Goths along the Danube frontier,
Franks along the Rhine, Persians in the east.
Rome was under threat.
[horse neighs]
- The once-invincible Roman army struggles
to hold back the tide of enemies on multiple fronts.
♪
The empire spends all its resources on defense.
And military leadership becomes the key quality
for any Roman emperor.
♪
In 330 C.E., Emperor Constantine the Great
founds a new capital, closer to the legions
on the northern frontiers, Constantinople.
But his rule triggers upheavals
of a different order.
♪
- There's a kind of a watershed moment
with the emperor Constantine.
So Constantine is born a pagan, but he's the first emperor
to convert to Christianity.
And it sets the stage for everything to change.
For Christianity to be legal.
For churches to be built.
For the new religion to become legitimized,
to become imperialized,
and to grow like it has never done before.
♪
- By the end of the 4th century C.E.,
we think possibly as many as 50% of the population
had become Christian.
- And the values that drove Rome's expansion
are turned upside down.
- With the rise of Christianity,
you have a lot of hostility toward the ancient practices.
Not just toward the ancient gods,
but toward the recognition that much of Roman culture
is suffused with conquest and violence,
and that goes against the principles of Jesus.
♪
- We moved from a situation in which the Christians
had been persecuted towards a situation in which
the Christian emperors moved with greater
and greater certainty and strength against paganism.
- Under the emperor Theodosius,
there's a whole set of anti-pagan legislation
that gets set into place.
The shutting down of pagan
religious rituals and holidays.
The banning of sacrifice.
And closure of pagan temples and the withdrawal
of their funding.
[crowd chanting]
[both grunting]
- Such is the revolution in values
that even the cornerstone of Roman culture,
the gladiatorial spectacle, finds itself under attack.
♪
- In the name of the one true God!
- For Christians, what's happening in the amphitheater
had to be stopped.
- In the name of the one true God!
[crowd cheering]
- The Colosseum has been standing
for close on 350 years.
It was built as an extraordinary statement of PR
that Rome was succeeding.
♪
But at the end of the Colosseum's life,
it really represents the divided nature
of the end of the Roman world.
There are people who are saying,
we have to have a new way of being.
♪
- In the name of our true God, stop!
♪
This is against God's teachings!
♪
Leave or face his wrath!
♪
- This was a turning point in history.
It sounded the death knell of the Colosseum,
and things were never going to be the same.
♪
- The deep change creates tensions within Roman society,
pitting Christians against pagans.
♪
- You'd have seen the changes on the streets.
People were taking down pagan monuments,
which were now regarded as idolatrous.
Statues, for example, of gods
or men who were regarded as gods were being taken down,
were being disfigured, were being dismantled.
[all shouting]
- The city of Rome is filled with statues,
and to Christians, these statues present a huge affront
because they violate two of the Commandments,
"Thou shalt make no graven images,"
and "Thou shalt have no gods aside from me."
♪
- No!
No! Stop!
Stop! Stop!
♪
[crowd cheering]
- For pagans, watching a Christian mob
destroy a statue, that was a tremendous affront,
and it was deeply offensive to this traditionalist worldview.
- Amidst all this, in 395 C.E.,
Rome's rulers decide
to split the empire into two to survive,
an eastern and western half.
- It was simply too big for any one person to handle.
So each half of the Roman Empire
is ruled by one of the sons of Theodosius,
the last man to rule a united Roman Empire.
18-year-old Arcadius
rules from Constantinople in the east,
and the 15-year-old Honorius rules from Milan in the west.
- They are very young, they're very inexperienced,
and they're clearly not up to the job.
- Neither of them ever visits Rome.
This means that the city that is
the ideological and spiritual heart of the empire
is something of a backwater.
[horse neighs]
- Rome, at this period,
is almost completely unrecognizable
from the way that it was in its heyday.
♪
The city is plagued by all kinds of problems,
like famines and fires, earthquakes.
And the buildings stand in ruins.
The empire is nearly broke.
♪
People leave in droves,
and they're not coming back in.
It's a pretty dark time.
♪
- With the empire divided and vulnerable,
more and more barbarian tribes press down on its borders.
♪
- This is a major threat to the empire.
They have to act.
♪
- There is chaos.
There is confusion.
And there is a sense of desperation.
♪
- The Roman Empire, recently divided
between the young brothers Honorius and Arcadius,
is facing existential threats,
but its leaders are falling short of the challenge.
- The contrast between Arcadius and Honorius and, say,
the Five Good Emperors like Trajan or Hadrian,
could not be stronger.
They are too young and too inexperienced
to make any kind of sound judgments.
They are entirely ruled by the people around them.
♪
- Honorius and Arcadius are symptomatic
of a much larger disease that we associate
with hereditary systems.
From the Chinese emperors to medieval kings
to the Russian tsars, systems that are based on heredity
and not on skill often yield rulers who are born into power
but unable to wield it effectively.
♪
- And as the empire grows weaker,
its rivals grow bolder--
among them, the Visigoths.
- The Visigoths are a barbarian group
that has been settled inside the Roman Empire
for a little less than a generation.
They're a source of recruits for the Roman army,
but in the past, they have fought against the Romans.
And in the future, they could just as easily do so again.
♪
- In 395 C.E., the same year Honorius and Arcadius
come to the throne, the Visigoths unite
under a king of their own--
Alaric.
- Alaric is just 25 years old.
He has been around the limes, the fringes of the empire,
all his life.
He's actually fought for the Roman army before.
And so he understands the psychology
of both the Romans and the barbarians very well.
♪
- Within a year, Alaric's Visigoths
storm across Eastern Roman provinces,
sacking Athens and other large cities.
- This is a major threat to the empire.
They have to act.
They have to deal with Alaric now.
♪
- Then, in 402 C.E., Alaric attacks Italy.
♪
Then Western emperor Honorius retreats with his court
to Ravenna, leaving the defense of Italy
to his magister militum, or commander-in-chief,
a man named Stilicho.
♪
- Stilicho is a brilliant general.
He's of mixed barbarian,
possibly Vandal, and Roman ancestry.
He's risen high through his talents
within this Roman system.
In fact, he occupies the kind of position
that someone like Alaric is aspiring to.
♪
- When Stilicho meets Alaric,
he chooses to talk rather than fight.
♪
- Stilicho is the most powerful general,
and therefore, politician in the Roman world.
If you're looking for a Roman to negotiate with,
Stilicho is your man.
- There is no need for us to be at war.
♪
- You have power.
We have none.
There'll be no peace until my people
have a land to call their own.
- I can give you that.
Help me fight our enemies, and I promise you,
you'll have your land.
You have my word.
♪
- To spare Italy from war,
Stilicho offers Alaric lands in the Balkans.
♪
But Stilicho knows he is merely buying time.
♪
Over the next few years, Stilicho struggles to cope
with crisis after crisis.
Groups of barbarians from outside the empire
and rebels within it all chip away at his hold on power.
♪
Then, in 407, Alaric returns, demanding more gold for peace.
And Emperor Honorius makes a disastrous mistake.
- [shouts]
♪
- The Roman Empire is watching as the central part
of its territory is being taken over
and held by non-Roman peoples.
A rising tide of anti-barbarianism
is growing and leads to suspicion of Stilicho.
- Stilicho becomes a victim of a whisper campaign
that paints him as disloyal,
in large part due to his barbarian background,
and that's enough for the emperor Honorius
to turn against him.
[bell tolling]
♪
- The immediate consequence for Alaric
of the assassination of Stilicho
is that the deal is dead in the water.
♪
- It was a colossally stupid move
to have Stilicho executed.
It eventually led to the defection
of huge numbers of barbarian troops over to Alaric's side.
♪
- Alaric wanted his homeland.
The Romans constantly took it away from him.
So what he decides to do is that he'll take away
the homeland from the Romans.
He's going to go and sack Rome.
♪
- Thousands of Visigoths, and thousands more
of Stilicho's men, who now pledge loyalty to Alaric,
march on Rome.
♪
For the first time in 800 years,
the barbarians surround the city,
cutting off supply lines,
trying to starve Rome into surrender.
But the war of attrition takes its toll
on Roman and barbarian alike.
♪
- You get dire consequences on both sides.
At Rome, there's plague and famine.
There are calls to legalize cannibalism.
On the Gothic side, there's plague in their army.
So they really need to come to a resolution.
- Eventually, Alaric sends an offer of peace
to the Roman Senate.
- Unwen, send them a message.
If they grant us this last night
to prepare our dead for burial,
I'll make a gift to the senators of Rome.
- A gift, my lord?
- 300 of our best men as slaves.
♪
- The Senate agrees to the deal,
but Alaric does not intend to retreat.
♪
- The brilliant and really rather ironic thing
is that the Romans trace their ancestry back
to the Trojans, and what Alaric has given them
is effectively a Trojan horse.
These slaves are not any old slaves.
They're actually 300 of his finest warriors.
♪
Rome essentially undergoes the Sack of Troy again.
The slaves have completely infiltrated the city.
They go on the rampage.
And they open the gates to the waiting Goths who are outside.
[all shouting]
♪
- The sack of Rome is Alaric's greatest victory--
a strike so devastating that the empire never recovers.
- The tide has really turned now.
Essentially, once upon a time,
the barbarians were at the mercy of Rome,
but now, Rome is at the mercy of the barbarians.
Its days are numbered.
- There is chaos, there is confusion,
and there is a sense of desperation.
When he hears the news,
the Roman Christian writer Jerome says,
"If Rome can perish, what can be safe?"
♪
- Rome recovers from its sack
only for new dangers to appear.
- Who are you?
- I'm Atilla, the Whip of God.
- [groaning]
♪
- For the first time in generations,
the Roman Empire is no longer fighting for domination;
it's fighting for survival.
♪
While the imperial family struggles
to hold on to Italy and North Africa,
Germanic peoples carve up
the rest of the Western Empire.
The Visigoths settle in Southwestern Gaul,
while Southern Spain falls to the Vandals.
♪
Their unlikely leader
is the illegitimate son of a king.
His name is Gaiseric.
- The Roman sources report that Gaiseric
had a physical disability, but apart from that,
what they emphasize is his intelligence.
- Gaiseric was an almost uniquely perceptive statesman.
♪
He was ruthless in negotiations,
and ruthless when he chose to put his army into action.
- Gaiseric, of all the late Roman
barbarian leaders, is the only one who really
seeks to create a kingdom.
He wants to control his own agenda for the long run.
- In 439, Gaiseric strikes at the jewel
in the empire's crown...
♪
Carthage, a crucial territory that Rome has held
since its defeat of Hannibal nearly 600 years earlier.
♪
- North Africa is the breadbasket
of the Roman Empire, and Carthage is
the gateway to North Africa.
There's an extraordinary symmetry
between the construction of the Roman Empire
on the basis of taking Carthage
and its effective fall as a viable superpower
through the Vandals' capture of Carthage.
♪
- Gaiseric's capture of Carthage
is the single most devastating blow to the Roman Empire.
Gaiseric now controls the food supply
to the armies of the Western Empire,
the food supply to Rome.
He is in complete control.
- With the Vandals now controlling the Mediterranean,
Italy cannot feed itself.
Rome is about to go through decades
of famine, of decline,
of loss, of permanent fall.
♪
- And as Rome's enemies circle,
its politics weaken it from within.
♪
The Eastern emperor Theodosius II
rules from Constantinople.
His empire is mostly intact.
But in Ravenna, his young cousin, Valentinian III,
rules a much reduced Western Empire.
- The Emperor Valentinian came to the throne as a child.
He was young, he was weak, he was not taught the politics
that earlier Roman emperors had been taught,
and he was not a soldier.
He was also very much under the thumb of his mother,
the imperial princess, Galla.
- Galla is an astonishing woman.
Not only is she the sister of one emperor,
she's married to another,
and then she's the mother of a third.
And she exercises a great deal of personal power
within the imperial political circles.
♪
- She and her son turn to the only man capable of saving
their crumbling empire, General Flavius Aetius,
who's replaced Stilicho as the commander-in-chief
of the Western armies.
- The problem Aetius faces is that he's
distrusted by the royal family, basically because
he becomes too powerful.
He manages to take over complete control
of Roman military forces in the Western Empire himself.
♪
- Aetius,
Magister Militum of the Western Army,
patriarch...
of my empire.
♪
Give this to my cousin Theodosius.
♪
I have decided to petition the Eastern Empire
to ally their armies and their fleet
for you to drive the Vandal king from Carthage.
♪
This Attila.
Is he the devil, as they say?
- No.
♪
Much worse.
♪
- Even as the Romans make plans to face
the Vandals in Carthage, they know other barbarians
are growing in power.
None more than the Huns, who appeared from the steppes
of Eurasia in the 4th century.
♪
- Who are you?
- I'm Attila, the Whip of God.
- [groaning]
- Attila the Hun stands as one of the most ruthless,
if not the most ruthless, military leaders of all time.
He would slaughter thousands, tens of thousands,
to send a very strong message to those that stood in his path
about the fate that awaited them.
♪
- While Attila's Huns menace Rome's eastern borders,
the Western and Eastern Empire
launch their combined operation against the Vandals.
♪
Rome's combined forces, numbering 100,000 men,
meet in Sicily, ready to sail to Carthage.
It's the largest invasion force
the empire has ever assembled,
but it leaves the eastern border virtually undefended.
♪
- Attila sees this, he seizes the moment
to unleash his Hunnic hordes, while the rest of the Romans
are over there 600 miles away in Sicily.
♪
- Attila turns Roman tactics and technology against them.
Using towers, catapults, and battering rams,
the Huns can take a fortified city in a matter of days.
♪
- This is a seismic shift in the strategic balance of power.
Earlier enemies rampaging through the Balkans
like the Goths couldn't take defended cities.
They never conducted successful sieges.
The fact that the Huns can do it,
and they can take really major Roman bases,
that changes everything.
♪
- As the end game approaches,
Rome's defenders have no easy options.
♪
To act against one
means letting the other grow stronger.
- The Western and Eastern Empires
come together to push back their enemies,
but as the Huns advance in Eastern Europe,
in Sicily, the combined Roman forces charged
with defeating Gaiseric's Vandals
find themselves grappling with the fallout.
[dramatic music]
- We have orders to withdraw.
Emperor Theodosius has called back
the entire Eastern Army
to defend Constantinople from the Huns.
We leave at dawn.
I'm sorry, my friend.
♪
- Without the Eastern fleet, we're done.
We cannot sail alone.
What do you suggest?
- We leave Carthage to Gaiseric for now.
Agree terms with the Vandals to let grain into the empire.
- If and when we defeat Attila,
I will return and remove that traitor's head.
♪
- By turning its invasion force north
to confront Attila,
Rome grants Gaiseric a crucial window of opportunity,
one the empire will come to regret.
- The fact that the expedition never sails from Sicily
means everything to Gaiseric.
It allows him to start to build
a real kingdom in North Africa.
It basically secures his existence
as an independent power.
- Gaiseric is possibly the most underestimated factor
in the decline of the Roman Empire.
He's a famously effective military strategist,
but he's also infamously cunning.
♪
- Western Emperor Valentinian is forced to grant Gaiseric
a treaty in 442 C.E., recognizing an independent
Vandal Kingdom on lands that were once Rome's.
♪
And to cap it all off, Emperor Valentinian
agrees to marry his daughter to Gaiseric's son...
♪
Giving the Vandal king a fateful claim
on the imperial family.
♪
- The Romans have no choice but to turn back.
This is the ever-present nightmare of a two-front war,
and the Romans respond accordingly.
They have to keep the Vandals on their side,
but the treaty leaves them seriously weakened.
♪
- While on the Danube frontier,
the situation only becomes more desperate
as Attila plunders city after city,
moving closer to the Eastern Roman capital.
♪
- Attila was fundamentally predatory.
He did not have a massive taxation system
set up in order to extract revenue from his subjects.
Instead, his goal was to use the Roman Empire
as a sort of bank from which he could draw whenever he needed
more money in order to supply, above all, those people who
were his leaders with gold.
♪
- Eastern Emperor Theodosius
knows he must keep Attila away from his capital,
Constantinople, now almost equal in size and wealth
to the city of Rome.
But he's not prepared to pay the ransom, 1 ton in gold,
that Attila demands in return for leaving the city alone.
♪
- Theodosius has grown bold.
He has refused the Huns' peace terms.
Attila is apocalyptic.
Asks that his army moves on the east as we speak.
♪
- They say Attila has found the Sword of Mars in Scythia.
They say it has magical powers,
that it proves his divine right to lead.
- It's nothing but folklore, superstition.
- I know that!
♪
But his armies don't.
♪
They believe it.
They think they are following a god.
♪
- Attila escalates his attacks,
sweeping through the Eastern Empire towards Constantinople.
- He took over most of the cities
in what is today Bulgaria and Serbia.
Something on the order of 80 cities were captured.
Probably on the order of 100,000 people
were taken into captivity.
♪
- In 443, with the Eastern Empire
on the verge of collapse, Theodosius surrenders.
♪
Attila now demands 3 tons of gold,
plus another ton to be paid every year.
♪
The settlement causes a crisis within the Eastern economy
and turns the Huns towards Valentinian in the west.
♪
- I have no doubt that Attila rides on us.
- Then send the legions to reinforce the northern borders.
Hunt him down.
- With all due respect, we do not have enough men.
If and when he attacks, we will not be able to hold him.
We cannot defend our borders.
We cannot rely on the East for reinforcements.
It leaves us with just one option.
We must send word to the barbarian tribes
to form a coalition.
If we unite together, we may hold.
If we fight alone, us and every other tribe will fall.
♪
- To call the Roman Empire at this point
a husk of its former self is, frankly, being too generous.
Huge areas have fallen out of its effective control.
Its resources are dramatically diminished.
Even assembling an army is extraordinarily difficult.
If you wanted soldiers, you were going
to have to turn to the Goths.
- The Goths are the best military force,
apart from the Roman army,
that's available on Western territories.
♪
Up to this point, the whole of the strategy of the empire
has been to try and keep the Goths in line.
Now the empire has to go cap-in-hand to the Goths
to keep itself in being.
♪
- Theodoric, my old friend, you have two choices.
Fight alongside us or face the Hun alone.
And watch the Goths being driven into oblivion.
♪
I'll await your answer.
♪
- The unnatural alliance is made just in time.
♪
Attila's horde, as many as 100,000 warriors,
cross the Rhine into Roman Gaul,
attacking city after city.
Aetius scrambles his forces to confront them.
♪
Romans and Visigoths will meet the Huns in Gaul
in one of the bloodiest battles of the Roman age.
♪
Its outcome will decide the fate of the empire.
♪
- In its 1,000-year history, Rome has survived invasions,
uprisings, and disease.
Now it unites with its old enemies, the Visigoths,
to fight an even more terrifying one,
Attila and his Huns.
- This is the most powerful Hunnic army
there has ever been.
This is confrontation on a colossal scale.
♪
- Aetius commands a combined force of Romans
and Goths numbering 80,000 men on the north
of the battlefield.
On the opposite side, Attila leads as many
as 100,000 warriors set to charge.
♪
- Today, we will rip their empire from their dead hands.
There will be great sacrifice, but we will be victorious!
[all cheering]
♪
- Sound the advance!
♪
- The Battle of the Catalaunian Plains
is one of the bloodiest in the history of the Roman Empire.
♪
Roman historians describe a slaughter
on an unprecedented scale.
♪
- Very clearly, upwards of 50,000 men total
died during the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains.
These are numbers that are comparable to some
of the largest battles in World War I and World War II.
♪
- The Huns never regained their previous strength.
A victory for Rome and its allies.
♪
Aetius returns to Italy as the commander
of the depleted army.
The battle is a strategic victory for the empire,
but its military losses are so great that
it is vulnerable to the threat from Gaiseric's Vandals.
♪
- We lost seven legions in the battle.
The northern border's a mayhem.
We do not have enough manpower to reinforce them.
Gaiseric continues his blockade of Sardinia,
severing us further from the sea.
We must again ask the Eastern Empire for reinforcements.
- You dare to question my rule
by blaming the troubles of the empire on me?
- I blame no one-- - Oh, enough.
♪
Do you wish power for yourself?
♪
- I seek nothing.
- You seek to usurp me.
You won't get the chance, you traitor!
- [grunting]
♪
- For Aetius, he should be celebrated as the great hero
who has defeated the Huns.
He has done the impossible.
Arguably the greatest military figure Rome has known.
Certainly the greatest military figure Rome
has known for a long time.
♪
- The death of Aetius deprives Rome
of its most effective protector.
His reputation alone is probably enough
to keep barbarians away from the gates of Rome.
But without him, they've become much more vulnerable.
- The decline of Rome accelerates
as the barbarians dismantle the once-great empire.
♪
The imperial household begins to implode.
♪
- [grunting]
- Within a year, Valentinian is assassinated
by soldiers loyal to Aetius.
♪
By the time of his death, Britain, North Africa,
Spain, and most of Gaul
have passed out of Roman hands.
♪
Using the excuse that his son is still
engaged to Valentinian's daughter,
Gaiseric seizes his chance.
♪
- Gaiseric is the dark knight.
He is the one that really
brings the Western Empire to its knees.
♪
- The Vandals arrive at the gates of Rome in 455 C.E.
♪
- Gaiseric's intention is not to conquer Rome,
but to plunder it.
What he's seeking to do is to increase
the strength of his own kingdom at the expense of Rome.
He wants to carve out a domain for himself
from the ashes of the empire.
♪
- It takes the Vandals less than two weeks
to defeat the city's defenses.
For days, the Vandals loot at will.
♪
The Second Sack of Rome is a fatal blow
from which the empire will never recover.
♪
A succession of emperors and pretenders
will squabble over the ruins for another 20 years
while Goths, Franks, Vandals,
and others move in for the kill.
♪
In 476 C.E., the last Roman emperor in Italy
is deposed by a Gothic king.
The Western Roman Empire has fallen.
♪
From its humble beginnings to its spectacular decadence,
the story of Rome's rise and fall
echoes through the ages.
♪
- Rome rose to power by making the most of its strengths.
Its army. Its values. Its engineering.
But ultimately, its ambition also proved to be its downfall.
[tiger roars]
- The Roman Empire didn't die a natural death.
It wasn't murdered by outsiders.
It accidentally committed suicide.
Rome was a victim of its own success.
♪
- Internal divisions, invasions, economic collapse,
religious upheavals.
Even a phenomenon as resilient as Rome
could not stand up to all those attacks.
♪
- There's many empires that have claimed
to carry on the flame of Rome,
but no one has really succeeded in coming close.
♪
- Roman law continues.
Roman religion continues.
Roman ideas and philosophy continue into the present day.
- Let the games begin!
[crowd cheering]
- We are, to an extent, the grandchildren of Rome.
And so in looking at Rome's collapse,
we would be foolish not to look at ourselves
and see how those same events would affect us.
♪
- Rome is ultimately a cautionary tale to us.
You are never too big to fail.
♪