Barbarians Rising

Previously on Barbarians Rising...

Rome grows from a city state to an empire.

But its path to power is furious and fatal.

As the barbarians rise against them time and time again,

Rome crushes each rebellion.

The Empire relies on total domination,

but now it faces a traitor on the inside.

Arminius, a son of Germany, surrendered to Rome,

emerges as the Empire's greatest threat.

The boy hostaged by his tribe to Rome,

what an abomination.

Sent to destroy his own people,

he turns on Rome instead.

Rome is unbeatable. No, they'll bleed.

Hatching a secret plot...

They will never suspect me.

I know their movements, how they fight.

To drive the Romans out...

If we can gather enough men, we can beat Varus and his leaders.

And reclaim their freedom.

Arminius...

These are for you.

They were your father's.

Arminius and his army of Germanic warriors

wait as Governor Varus' legions march directly into their ambush.

Go, go, go.

We can't strike until the vanguard has passed.

We wait for Varus.

If we hit them too soon, they'll regroup.

Do not let them get into formation.

At last, no viper.

You cease to hiss.

The Battle of Teutoburg Forest rages for three days.

The bloodiest showdown between Rome and the barbarians

since Hannibal's victory at Cannae 200 years earlier.

The Empire loses nearly all of its 20,000 men.

Arminius' victory is utterly unprecedented.

It should never have happened.

For a bunch of untrained Germanic tribesmen to hem in three legions

and basically wipe the whole of them out,

this should never have happened.

The irony here is that Rome created its own worst enemy.

And Arminius sends a message directly to the Emperor.

Rome is no longer invincible.

For Augustus, this is a betrayal of the greatest magnitu Augustus expels all Germans from the capital

and withdraws his troops from Germania,

retreating south of the Rhine.

But the Emperor refuses to accept defeat.

He attacks again two years later.

This time he doubles his force,

to 40,000, to destroy Arminius

and bring Germania under the eagle.

Rome never forgives and it never forgets.

The barbariansr tw,

while their leader, Arminius, evades capture.

You can't win a great victory in Germania

if the people don't want you to.

People are spread out, there are trees everywhere,

you've gotta find your enemy before you can defeat them.

People can fight a great guerrilla warfare

against you, more or less forever.

For the Germans,

there is a larger cause that motivates them.

That cause, that reason is freedom.

It was the barbarians who refused to succumb The Empire unleashes waves of violence against the tribes,

but fails to draw Arminius out of hiding...

Until its legions target his own family.

Is this the price of freedom?

Is this to be our lives now?

Hiding in the darkness, watching our world get destroyed.

It will end.

Will it?

It's Thusnelda. They have found her.

Her father struck a deal with the Roman Commander.

It was your brother... Flavus.

No!

Surrendered to Rome alongside his brother Arminius 15 years earlier,

Flavus has proven himself in battle,

and is now one of Rome's most trusted commanders.

He's among those sent to finally conquer Germania.

Capturing Arminius' wife and unborn child achieves the desired result.

Arminius comes out of the shadows

with a response that is swift and apocalyptic.

If your opponent has nothing left to lose

but their honor and their sense of dignity,

he's utterly dangerous.

When the two sides meet,

Arminius commands an army of 20,000 warriors from tribes across Germania.

Rome's force of battle-hardened troops numbers 40,000.

It's the first time in 200 years

that the barbarians face the Empire on an open battlefield.

When Arminius emerged Brother. s

Where is she?

Rome has made you blind.

I can still see you're covered in filth,

some of it even your own.

If only you could see my villas, my baths.

Even the slaves are magnificent.

What do you have to show for your betrayal, brother?

A bed of straw and the loyalty of a pack of beasts.

No, I have something you have never known.

Freedom.

I'm nobody's magnificent slave.

A golden cage is still a cage, Flavus.

The Empire has taken everything from us,

even our brotherhood.

But here you sit like some bastard son of Rome.

Where is she?

She's in Rome...

With your son.

Oh, you didn't know you had a son?

He'll be brought up as a good Roman.

I'll raise him as my own.

My own Roman slave.

I will kill you for this.

I will kill you.

Then let us begin.

Brother.

Your rebellion will fail.

Yet here you are,

on your knees, before Rome.

I will never kneel before Rome.

Germany will never kneel before Rome.

Then you will die along with Germany, my brother.

Remember who you are.

Cherusci, always.

Now, you crawl back to Rome and you tell them

this soil is already rich with Roman blood.

And if they come back, they will bleed by my hand

and for generations to come.

For the first time in nearly 300 years,

the barbarians are shifting the balance of power against Rome.

Still determined to conquer Germania,

the Empire launches a series of attacks over the next eight years.

Arminius repels them all.

But he never reunites with his family.

His son is raised as a captive in Rome.

His story lost to history.

Arminius is murdered in 21 AD

by allies who fear he has grown too powerful.

But he's forever remembered as a liberator,

the first barbarian to expel Rome from his homeland.

Arminius was, undoubtedly, the liberator of Germania.

He fought the Romans when their power was at its height

and decisively defeated them.

Most accepted their lot, the few don't.

They don't wanna be subjected

to somebody else's power over them,

and they fight back.

Germania was to be Rome's greatest prize,

instead, it's their most crushing defeat.

The Empire abandons its campaign in 21 AD,

forty years after its first invasion.

Sets its borders at the Rhine,

and never again sets foot in Germania.

But Rome must expand to survive.

Its strength comes from conquering new lands,

resources and populations to fuel evermore growth.

This underlying Roman ambition to expand,

it affects everything.

The entire Roman civilization is built upon it.

Driven out of Germania in the east,

Rome turns its eye north to one of the last remaining barbarian strongholds,

Britannia. A place unlike any Rome's conquered before.

The Romans viewed Britannia as the land beyond ocean,

as the place beyond the end of the civilized world that lured them forward.

It was a land of mists and mysticism,

where supernatural spirits stalked the land.

It was exotic, it was wild, it was barbarous.

And on the other side, they thought it was very rich.

It had gold and silver they thought.

Hunting dogs, slaves, grain for the army.

The price of victory was a good one.

Over the last 100 years,

the Empire launches five separate invasions of the island,

all of them fail, beaten back by the Celts.

Ferocious pagan warriors who ride chariots into battle

and fight naked or covered in war paint designed to instill fear.

For Rome, Britannia represents something very different.

The people there are as alien as any they've encountered.

They seem, literally, to the Romans, insane.

And, of course, they're also going after your head.

They won't be content to defeat you

until they've got your head.

So that's very frightening to the opponent.

When Rome invades again in 43 AD,

it makes a foothold in the south-east.

Emperor Claudius sends 40,000 troops to take the island.

The Celts rise up once again,

but this time, they are no match for the Roman war machine.

One by one the tribes begin to fall.

Those not defeated in battle are bribed into peace treaties.

Among them are the Iceni, who have been at war with Rome for two decades.

Their leader, King Prasutagus,

accepts the Empire's peace terms.

We've already seen this kind of tactic in Germania,

it's just what the Romans do.

They offer up a treaty in agreement with the tribe,

you sign it, you're a friend, you're an ally of Rome.

You don't sign it, you'll be destroyed.