Rome seemed to own the world. Her empire stretched from Scotland to the Sahara. Her army controlled
three continents. Fifty million people lived under her laws. Rome's empire was the greatest
political prize the world had ever seen. This is the story of those who would do anything
to win it.
It's a warm spring night in 82 BC and Rome is struggling to control one of its generals.
Lucius Cornelius Sulla has camped 50,000 soldiers just outside the city to intimidate his opponents
in Rome. Sulla is a cunning politician and a brilliant general. He's returning from a
successful four-year campaign in the East and is used to getting his way. He meets with
the Roman Senate and demands they give his soldiers land as a reward for their conquests.
For the first time in Roman history, the general is bullying the government. The senators refuse.
That issue is the very future of the Roman state. Can Rome's civilian government control
the ambition of her generals or will brute force triumph over the rule of law? That night
Sulla posted his answer. Lists of his political enemies with cash rewards next to their names.
Sulla had tried to persuade his opponents. Now he promised to kill them. It was a blood
bath. Thousands died. Husbands were slaughtered in the embraces of their wives, sons in the
arms of their mothers. Those who were killed in the passion of the moment were as nothing
compared with those who were just butchered for the sake of their property. Plutarch.
Sulla's reign of terror only lasted four years, but a fatal precedent had been set. A general
had returned from war and persuaded a Roman army to help him seize power in Rome. Yet
four hundred years earlier, Romans had dreamed of something very different. When Rome was
nothing more than a village on the banks of the River Tiber, Romans made a revolutionary
commitment that would change the course of history. After years of tyranny under Etruscan
kings, they dreamed of a government based on restraint, trust, and the rule of law.
In 509 B.C. they created the Roman Republic, the world's first representative government.
SPQR, Senatus Populus Quae Romanus. The Senate and the people of Rome was its motto. The
Republic was a bold experiment in communal government. Wealthy and poor farmers agreed
to share power. The rich served as Rome's leaders, the poor as her soldiers. In return,
everyone had a say in how the government was run. Romans knew the key to the Republic's
success was responsible leadership, and in Gaius Quintius Sincinatus they found a legendary
role model. The Senate granted Sincinatus, a Roman landowner, absolute power to defend
Rome from an aggressive local tribe. He accepted the position and defeated the enemy. Fourteen
days later he voluntarily resigned and humbly went back to work on his farm. His sense of
duty, sacrifice, and loyalty to the state embodied everything the new Republic stood
for. The Roman Republic has served as a model for Western democracies ever since. Everything
from its public architecture to its political rituals is strangely familiar. Once a year
the whole city would turn out to vote for its leaders. Competition for the consulship,
the most important public office, was intense. The election of a consul in the Roman Republic
is like the election of the American president. You call people friends who you would not
normally call friends. You shake hands, you kiss babies, and what you're trying to do
is to get a bandwagon going, to appear a winner, and very gradually, as in American presidential
elections, people drop by the wayside, something goes wrong with their campaign. The remaining
candidates then turned to their spin doctors. If it can be managed at all, there should
be scandalous talk of character about the crimes, lusts, and briberies of your competitors.
It was up to the senators to ensure that politics didn't get too frivolous. They were the guardians
of Rome's traditions. The Roman Senate and the American Senate are the two greatest senates
of all time. Roman senators got no pay. They served for the honor of serving their state
as a senator. The Senate was intended to be made up of old men. Not the swiftest of the
swift, or the strongest of the strong, but the wisest of the wise. Why were they the
wisest of the wise? Because they were old men. They had experience.
Under their watchful eye, the young republic fostered a sense of civic pride, the foundation
of Rome's empire. Her volunteer army carried Roman power to unimaginable places. By the
second century B.C., Rome was mistress of the Mediterranean. Yet beneath the surface
of Rome's success lurked serious contradictions. Women had few rights, and it was never one
man, one vote. Elections were always rigged in favor of the wealthy.
Political equality was never a Roman ideal. They lived in a world of extremes. While the
rich redefined the meaning of decadence, ninety-five percent of the people struggled below the poverty
line. This social imbalance would fuel the most disruptive tradition in republican Rome,
patronage. Every morning at dawn, the poor gathered in the courtyards of the rich.
These wealthy patrons saw to the needs of their clients. Some needed work, others legal
advice. In return, clients promised patrons their vote at election time. But Rome's great
patrons were also Rome's great politicians, and obligations to their clients often clouded
their duty to the state. Loyalty was divided, and the ideals of the republic compromised.
The conflict between patronage and politics was set to explode.
A small group of wealthy families ruled Rome. Notoriously conservative, they protected their
own interests and quietly resisted reform, until one of their own broke the code of silence.
Tiberius Gracchus was born to privilege, grandson of Scipio Africanus, conqueror of Hannibal,
and son of Cornelia, an intelligent, ambitious woman who poured her ideals into her two sons,
Tiberius and Gaius. She told him she was tired of being called the daughter of her father,
Scipio. She wanted to be known as the mother of her sons. In 143 BC, the young Tiberius
left Rome to join the army in Spain. It was a very disturbing journey.
While Tiberius was traveling through Italy, he saw for himself how the country had been
deserted by its native inhabitants, and how those who tilled the soil or tended the flocks
were barbarian slaves introduced from abroad. But it was above all the people themselves
who did most to arouse Tiberius' energy and ambitions, calling upon him to recover the
public land for the poor. Plutarch.
The ambitious aristocrat had found his cause. In the third and second centuries BC, the
Roman Empire had more than doubled in size. The conquering soldiers were still volunteers,
poor Roman citizens who owned small farms. When the Roman Empire was small, this citizen's
militia had worked well. Men served for only part of each year, coming home regularly to
work their farms. But getting home to harvest became impossible as the empire grew and armies
were conquering faraway lands in Africa or Asia or Northern Europe.
If you're serving abroad for years and years in a long process of imperial conquest, the
result is that when you put down your sword at the end of the campaign, there is no plowshare
left because your brother nicked it ages ago and it wasn't just your brother, it's the
big landlord next door who's extended his estate. So that you do have very large numbers
of people who don't have land to return to.
Their new estates netted the Roman aristocracy obscene profits which they used to buy foreign
slaves to work the land. So when veterans returned from war, they'd lost their land
to the wealthy and their jobs to slaves. Tiberius Gracchus promised to change all that.
The wild beasts that roam over Italy have their dens and holes to lurk in. But the men
who fight and die for our country enjoy the common air and light and nothing else. It
is their lot to wander with their children, houseless and homeless over the face of the
earth. The truth is that our soldiers fight and die to protect the wealth and luxury of
others. They are called the masters of the world but they don't possess a single clod
of earth which is truly their own. Gracchus.
Gracchus proposed something radical. The government should divide public land among Rome's homeless.
The senators were horrified. His plan threatened their own huge estates and also their political
livelihood. If passed, it would make Tiberius Gracchus the patron of Rome's massive underclass.
He'd be the most powerful man in Rome.
The story of Tiberius Gracchus is the Roman aristocrat who cheats. He does the thing that
they've all got a little convention among themselves. There's some things you do, there's
some things you don't do. And you don't bust the system by going straight to the people
and offering them things. You can see it as breaking a system of patronage.
The Roman elite panicked. A group of senators confronted Gracchus as he was speaking to
his supporters. In a fit of rage, they beat him to death with the chairs they were sitting
on. Rome's boldest reformer was then dumped into the River Tiber. Yet Gracchus had revolutionized
Roman politics. By championing the needs of the poor, Gracchus had shown how an ambitious
aristocrat could outmaneuver his conservative peers. But people power would do more than
divide Rome's leaders. Ultimately, it would threaten the Republic.
By the beginning of the first century BC, the Roman Republic was imploding. Roman values
were under siege. Slave revolts stunned Sicily and Italy. Something had to give.
The collapsing Republic found an unlikely supporter. Born in a wool-dying shop in central
Italy in 106 BC, Marcus Tullius Cicero dedicated his life to opposing the greed and violence
that threatened his world. He was a self-made man, earning a name for himself as an orator
and lawyer in Rome, relying on his eloquence and intelligence to outwit wealthier opponents.
Cicero believed the key to the Republic's future was in her past. There, Cicero saw
the image of Cincinnati and the ideals of restraint and self-sacrifice he embodied.
But there was another role model. Romulus, Rome's legendary founder, who was reared
by a savage wolf and killed his own brother in a struggle for power. In legend, greed
and treachery were Rome's founding virtues, and they threatened to be the most enduring.
I would rather be the first man in a barbarian village than the second man in Rome, Julius
Caesar. Rome's most notorious citizen was born to
wealthy parents in 100 BC. As with all young Roman aristocrats, Julius Caesar had a strong
sense of destiny. As a child, he dared to claim he was descended from the goddess Venus.
Caesar's first official post was as a military officer in Spain. There, the 30-year-old Caesar
stared at a statue of Alexander the Great. How had he achieved nothing, he wept, when
at his age, Alexander had conquered the world. Roman politicians had always staged huge spectacles
to impress the voters. In 63 BC, Caesar outdid them all. 640 gladiators fought to the death
at his first public games. It was an unprecedented display of power.
He was lavish in his spending. He purchased a short-lived fame at great expense, Plutarch.
But Caesar knew there were two secrets to gaining power in Rome. One was playing to
the people. Commanding a successful army was the other.
In 59 BC, Caesar became military commander over Gaul, modern-day France. Nine years later,
a million Gauls were dead or enslaved. It was a flagrant act of genocide.
Caesar would now summon the ghost of Sulla, Rome's first warlord. Like Sulla, Caesar was
returning from war with an army loyal to him, not Rome. Like Sulla, Caesar wanted something
the Republic could never allow. In January 49 BC, Caesar committed the ultimate act of
treachery. Following in Sulla's footsteps, he persuaded a Roman army to cross the Rubicon
and march into Rome. The monstrosity of Caesar's character is concealed
in his gay and friendly manner. No one knows what to do. If we resist, there will probably
be bloodshed. Cicero. The Senate quickly chose Pompey, conqueror
of the East, to defend the Republic. But Caesar wanted absolute power, even at the price of
civil war. Rome's two greatest generals met in Greece.
Brother against brother, eagle against eagle, flag against flag. Citizens, what is this
madness? Lucan. Pompey was no match for Caesar and his brutal
fighting force. He fled to Egypt, but was eventually captured by Caesar's spies. The
fate of the Republic hung in the balance. But Caesar had other things on his mind. In
Egypt, in 48 BC, he met the young queen of the Nile, Cleopatra. They fell in love and
had a child. Cleopatra persuaded Caesar to help her overthrow her brother and gain the
throne of Egypt. Then, in 46 BC, she accompanied Caesar back to Rome.
Cleopatra represented for the Romans every threat you can imagine. She was African, a
woman, beautiful. She was powerful. You find her seducing Julius Caesar. Julius Caesar
who conquered the Gauls, who was this great soldier, who was this politician, who wanted
to be the dictator in Rome. Cleopatra reminded them of their vulnerability, and that frightened
them very, very much. Vulnerability was not something Caesar understood.
Bani bidi biki, I came, I saw, I conquered, was the motto of his dazzling return to the
city. That evening, he threw a banquet for 22,000 of Rome's poorest citizens. Hypnotized,
the people did the unthinkable. They voluntarily voted Caesar the absolute powers of the dictator.
Caesar then shocked everyone. He used his total control not for revenge, but social
reform. Like Gracchus, Caesar gave the Roman poor what they wanted. He made sure no Roman
citizen ever went hungry. He gave grain to the poor and land to his soldiers, paid for
by himself. Caesar, the benign dictator, was incredibly popular. Like Gracchus, he was a
little too popular for some. Here was a man who was desperate to be king of the Roman
people, master of the whole world. A man who believes such an ambition to be morally right
must be insane. Cicero. In February 44 BC, he went too far. Caesar
asked the people to elect him dictator for life. To accept absolute power forever was
an open insult to his Republican peers. Cicero was disgusted and retired from political life
in protest. The Senate wasn't so meek. They invited Caesar to explain his actions. It
was the Ides of March. By mid-morning, the crisis was over. At the foot of a statue of
Pompey lay Caesar's body, stabbed 35 times. Rome's poor were outraged. At Caesar's funeral,
they lit torches from the pyre and set fire to the houses of the assassins. That night,
a comet blazed across the sky. It seemed an omen. Julius Caesar, the champion of the poor,
the citizens of Rome declared him a god. That changed everything. For the poor had made
it clear they valued the gifts of a dictator more than the empty promises of a republic.
You could get rid of Caesar, but you couldn't get rid of Caesarism. Cicero says at one point,
it's a strange thing we've killed the man and confirmed everything that he's done, because
you couldn't do away with it. And in fact, those last years after Caesar's murder are
not about the destruction of the republic. The republic was destroyed by Caesar. It's
simply about who's going to replace Caesar. Two rivals came forward to vie for the dead
dictator's absolute power. Octavian, Caesar's 18-year-old son-in-law and heir, and Mark
Anthony, Caesar's closest friend and ally, no stranger to the politics of intimidation.
In 43 BC, Anthony raised an army and surrounded the Senate. The republic was once again under
siege. Cicero came out of retirement to attack Anthony. He thought Octavian was the republic's
last chance. Cicero confronted Anthony in the Senate. Your ambition to reign is as fierce
as Caesar's. I would gladly offer my own body if my death could redeem the freedom of our
nation. Anthony took Cicero at his word, and two months later, his thugs murdered the republic's
boldest defender. His hands were cut off and put on public display in Rome. Its conscience
dead, the Roman republic was in crisis. In 33 BC, ten years after the assassination of
Julius Caesar, Mark Anthony and Octavian were still fighting for control of the Roman world.
The ghost of civil war was back. The Roman people were desperate for a change. The rule
of a single man is the only remedy for a country in turmoil. Tacitus. Octavian finally defeated
Anthony in 31 BC to become the undisputed ruler of the entire Roman world. But his greatest
victory would be one of statesmanship. Octavian was poised to redefine the very meaning of
power in Rome. He understood patronage was the secret to control in Roman society. With
Rome's vast treasury at his disposal, he set about making every Roman his client, obligated
to him the universal patron. Octavian handed out huge cash bonuses to Rome's army. He now
had the undivided loyalty of over 400,000 soldiers. He then played to the people like never before,
chasing the grain handout and building huge aqueducts to bring fresh water to Rome's poor.
Octavian then focused on the most important ritual of all. He staged the most lavish games
Rome had ever seen. Wild beasts and gladiators fought for days in the Pactoreno. Seduced,
the people voted him all the power he asked for. The Roman Senate then stunned everyone.
In 27 BC, they allowed Octavian what they had denied Caesar, the constitutional right
to absolute power for life. Octavian took the name Augustus, the sacred one. Rome, once
a bastion of open government, had willingly become an empire, ruled by a single man. Octavian
Augustus had become the Roman Empire's first emperor. 2000 years later, Benito Mussolini,
Rome's last fascist dictator, styled himself on Rome's first emperor in revealing ways.
Like Augustus, Mussolini seized power by force. Like Mussolini, Augustus forced a consensus
through intimidation. But for the vast majority of people in the Roman Empire, that didn't
matter. For them, Augustus was a savior. He offered the peace and stability they had craved
for nearly a century. From the Atlantic to the Euphrates, from Spain to Syria, people
were free to think about something other than war. It was the Pax Romana, Rome's golden
age, the longest period of peace Europe has ever known. Yet the architect of peace would
never enjoy his own triumph. For Augustus was obsessed by a question that plagued all Roman
emperors. What would happen in Rome when he died? The dilemma of dynastic succession would
haunt Augustus for the rest of his life. His marriage to Livia had produced no male heirs.
The burden of producing one fell on his young daughter, Julia. Augustus carefully selected
her partners. Julia was married first to her cousin, Marcellus, but he died tragically
at the age of 19. She was then married to Marcus Agrippa, her father's military advisor.
He was 30 years older than her. He died too. Finally, Julia was paired with Tiberius, her
own stepbrother. The only thing they shared was a mutual dislike for each other's company.
Poor Julia was overwhelmed by the arranged marriages. Inevitably, she looked elsewhere
for intimacy. Rome's gossip mongers had a field day. His daughter was shameless beyond
imagination. She had been accessible to scores of lovers. The very forum in which her father
had proposed a law against adultery, she had chosen for her debauchery. She daily resorted
to the life of a whore, selling her favors to even unknown lovers. Seneca. Augustus was
trapped. Ten years earlier, he'd passed draconian laws banning adultery on punishment of exile
or death. The emperor was forced to banish his own daughter to an island off the coast
of Italy. Julia was never allowed to return to Rome. The pressures of dynastic succession
had claimed its first victim. Rome's first emperor eventually died in 14 AD at the age
of 76. He'd ruled Rome peacefully for over 40 years. I restored. I completed. I built.
I gave. Augustus. Augustus had given Rome a sense of pride, stability, and prosperity.
And he'd failed to provide what every dynasty needs most. A sense of security. Imperial
power seized by force could always be lost to force. Insecurity plagued Augustus's successors.
And their paranoid delusions would be the undoing of his dynasty. Ironically, the biggest
threat came from the Praetorian Guard, the elite troops meant to protect emperors, not
kill them. Problems soon surfaced in the reign of Tiberius, Rome's second emperor, who struggled
in the shadow of Augustus throughout his reign. In 23 AD, after nine years on the throne,
Tiberius retired to the island of Capri, exhausted by the pressure of power in Rome. Anyone who
holds power is challenged all the time. Tiberius said, holding onto power is like holding onto
a cool wolf by its ears. It's this thing that can come around and bite you at any moment.
Tiberius left Rome in the care of Sejanus, his trusted Praetorian commander. But Sejanus
did not want to help the emperor. He wanted to be emperor. And with Tiberius away from
Rome, he played on the emperor's paranoia. Sejanus told Tiberius conspiracies existed
all over Rome. But they were just a smoke screen to justify the murder of anyone who
stood between him and the imperial throne. He even imprisoned the emperor's family.
Oblivious, Tiberius made Sejanus his co-consul in 31 AD. The truth finally reached Capri.
The emperor acted quickly. He invited Sejanus to the senate, promising a promotion. But
it wasn't a letter of promotion. It was a warrant for his arrest. Sejanus never made
it to trial. His treachery highlighted a fundamental problem in imperial Rome. Everyone knew that
the Praetorian guard watched over the emperor. But who watched over the Praetorian guard?
Sejanus responded just in time. Caligula, his successor, wouldn't be so lucky. Rome's
third emperor was notoriously brash, particularly towards the senate. But Caligula is best remembered
for another relationship, with his racehorse, Incytapus. The emperor gave the horse a marble
house and an ivory bed. He regularly invited the horse to dinner in the imperial palace
and even threw huge parties for him. But Caligula topped everything when he recommended his
horse be elected consul, the leading magistrate in Rome. To some people, it was more than
the whim of a madman. Say you're sitting in the White House and, as usual, Congress is
being difficult. You want to say, I want to go in front of the American people and I want
as president to demonstrate my contempt for Congress. How am I going to do that? I'm going
to make my dog a congressman. I'm going to say to the American people, I value the Congress
and what they have to say as much as I do what my dog says when it barks. So when Caligula
made his horse a consul, that's a fantastically clever political insult to the senate.
Rome's rich and powerful were not so impressed. On the 24th of January, 41 A.D., they bribed
the Praetorian Guard to murder the emperor. But they wouldn't have killed Caligula if
they knew of the horror to come. By the middle of the first century A.D., Romans thought
the worst had passed. Yet Nero, Rome's sixth emperor, would change all that. In the beginning,
they were just rumors. Nero practiced every kind of obscenity and after defiling almost
every part of his body, he finally invented a novel game. He was released from a cage
dressed in the skins of wild animals and attacked the private parts of men and women who stood
bound to stakes, sewatonious. Had imperial power gone mad? Romans, to see their past
as this mixture of heroes and villains. Don't forget it's senators who are writing the history.
This history is not straight reportage of objective fact. This is a political battle
between the aristocracy and the emperors. It's in the aristocrats' interest to belittle
emperors. They can't belittle them while they're alive. They belittle them while they're dead.
But Nero was as much a victim of imperial power as its villain. His father died when
he was only three. He was brought up by his overbearing mother Agrippina, who had one
ambition, to make her son emperor. The young Nero never shared her passion for the throne.
As a child he showed more interest in art than politics, but his mother deliberately
ridiculed his musical talents. In 54 A.D. at the tender age of 16, Nero became an unwilling
emperor. He began by doing what emperors were supposed to do. He provided for the poor,
building massive public baths and handing out cash to every Roman citizen. Rome, it seemed,
was in capable hands, but whose hands were they? Agrippina still exercised a humiliating
influence over her son. She minted coins that showed her necks to the emperor. Nero was
furious. He turned to the one thing he loved and thought he was good at, the theater.
But Rome's performing artists were normally slaves, courtesans or foreigners, never emperors.
How could one endure to hear, let alone see, a Roman, a senator, a Caesar, an emperor named
on the program as a contestant? Putting on the mask of an actor, he has thrown off the
dignity of his sovereignty. Cassius Dio. When Agrippina joined the public outcry, Nero snapped.
He immediately banished his mother from Rome. But distance did not solve the problem. Agrippina's
repeated criticism incensed Nero. In a fit of anger, he asked the Praetorian guard to
silence his mother once and for all. Romans were appalled. It was their first glimpse
of the emperor's brooding insecurity. Nero scrambled to resurrect his public image.
What Nero then does is a very dangerous experiment in playing to the people because he plays
in ways which traditionally have been defined as beyond the pale. To perform as a charioteer
is definitely breaking all sorts of status barriers. And yet the charioteers are the
pop stars of the day. Nero's antics seemed to have saved him. In 64 AD, a huge fire swept
through Rome, destroying a third of the city. Half the population was left homeless. Nero's
response was equally tragic. In the ashes of the devastated city, he built a massive
50-acre palace. His golden house had lavish gardens and huge lakes, even a private zoo.
The emperor finally had what he'd always wanted, a peaceful retreat from political life. Rumors
quickly circulated that the emperor had intentionally started the fire to clear space for his new
palace. Nero panicked. He frantically searched for a scapegoat and settled on an obscure
cult that had recently arrived in Rome. Nero's substituted as culprits and punished with
the utmost refinements of cruelty a class loathed for their vices, who the crowd called
Christians. Vast numbers were convicted and derision accompanied their end. They were
covered with wild beast skins and torn to death by dogs or were fastened to crosses
and burned to serve as lamps by night. Tacitus. Most Romans felt sympathy for the victims.
Nero's propaganda exercise had clearly failed. Once again, he took refuge in his own artistic
fantasies and set off on a singing tour of Greece. The Greeks alone are worthy of my
efforts. They really listen to music. Nero. Not surprisingly, the most powerful man in
the world won every competition he entered. The emperor bribed judges and forced audiences
to sit through every performance. No one was allowed to leave the theater during recitals,
however pressing the reason. We read of women in the audience giving birth and of men being
so bored with listening and applauding that they shamed death and were carried away to
burial. Suetonius. Romans were outraged by Nero's indulgence and incompetence. On June
9th, 68 A.D., the Senate declared Nero a public enemy and sentenced him to death. But Nero
chose a far more theatrical end. He took his own life. His final words. What an artist
the world is losing. It was the end of Rome's first imperial dynasty. Augustus had ruled
with restraint. Tiberius had ruled with indifference. Nero hadn't really ruled at all. The tragic
demise of Rome's first imperial dynasty would echo for centuries to come. There would be
emperors in Rome for another 400 years, but their dynasties would all rule with the same
rhythm of power. Like Augustus, they'd start off promising the best of times. Their generosity
would give Rome its grandeur. Their armies would guarantee the empire its peace. But
like Nero, their reigns would end in catastrophe. Excess would undermine Rome's greatness. Delusions
would condemn millions to die. Power and glory, the curse of imperial Rome.
END