Mary Beard’s Ultimate Rome: Empire Without Limit

The story of the Roman Empire opens with a fairy tale.

Once upon a time, not far from here,

a princess gave birth to twin sons.

The King, her wicked uncle,

fearing that the boys would one day become his rivals,

ordered his faithful servants to throw them into the river.

But as it was in flood, they just left them

in a basket at the water's edge from where they floated downstream.

Rescued on the bank by a mother wolf who suckled them,

they were later found by a local shepherd who reared them as his own.

Their names were Romulus and Remus

and they went on to found Rome.

This small ordinary town in the middle of Italy

became the centre of an empire...

...stretching from the fringes of the Sahara...

...to the damp moorlands of northern Britain.

From Spain to Israel,

the Nile to the Rhine...

...it has framed the geography of modern Europe

and defined the way we think of empire now,

'transforming the Western world through revolutions in trade...'

This is one of the first examples of globalisation.

'..Agriculture...'

Just olives, olives and more damn olives.

'..Art, law and architecture.'

This is where even I get a bit gobsmacked by Roman engineering.

'There are plenty of conquests and defeats, too,

'battles and butchery. But there are also bigger questions.

'How did it work? And what difference did it make?

'Why did the Empire eventually fall?

'And how did it all come about in the first place?'

Was it ambition? Was it just luck?

If we really want answer that question,

we have to go back to what the Romans themselves said about it,

to their doubts, their debates and their conversations,

cos they wondered just as much as we do about what set them apart.

'It's on the Appian Way,

'one of the main roads out of Rome going south deep into Italy,

'that we first get a clear glimpse

'into the lives of the early Romans.'

Buonasera. Buonasera. Grazie.

'A period long before the marble columns and the Coliseum,

'and one that's often overlooked.'

This tomb was built 500 years after the city was founded.

It's a very long way from Romulus,

but what's written here tells us for the first time

what some Romans felt and thought, what their mind-set was.

In a way, what we really know about the Romans starts here.

This isn't Rome as we now imagine it,

but it is the grandest thing they could do at the time,

and back then it was new.

This is the tombstone of the first man to be buried here.

Scipio Barbatus, that means Beardy Scipio.

And it tells us a bit about his excellent qualities.

He is "fortis, vir" and "sapiens,"

he's a strong, brave man,

but he's clever, he's wise.

This is... quite strange.

It says his appearance was equal to his "virtus",

so his appearance was as good as his virtue.

He really looked the part, he cut a dash.

And it ends with his conquests.

He "Svbigit omne lovcana,"

he suppressed the whole of Lucania,

which is a region in South Italy,

"opsidesqve abdovcit," and he took hostages.

So it's very easy to see what these people's priorities were.

But it's kind of more than that.

Because in some ways, this is just a few lines of an epitaph,

but in another way, this is the first short surviving

historical narrative from any Roman that we have.

I mean, this is the beginning of Roman history writing.

It might be 500 years after the age of the founders,

but this is actually the first place where we can really see the Romans.

We get a very vivid picture of a people committed to conquest

and to the glory that came with military victory.

But that's actually like everyone else around them.

So what set the Romans apart?

With so little direct evidence

the best place to look for the answer

is in the stories that they told

and their own elaborate speculations on the city's origins.

And in particular in the mythical story of Romulus and Remus,

the brothers suckled by a wolf.

It was continually told and retold

and it contained a message about Rome's conquests and internal wars.

There's actually a little more Roman history in the myth.

It'd be easy to dismiss the story of Romulus and Remus

as if it was just a fairy tale, just a myth,

and it certainly isn't history, in our terms,

but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have a lot to tell us

about how the Romans thought about themselves,

what their cultural priorities and anxieties were.

Why a wolf?

The story wouldn't have been the same

if it had been a cow or a sheep.

It was the fact that they were rescued by a ferocious predator

that revealed the destiny of the twins.

Some Romans questioned the detail,

the Latin for wolf, "lupa", also means prostitute,

so was it actually a prostitute who came to the rescue?

But, in broad terms, they believed that the tale was true.

In fact, when later they came to inscribe in the Forum

a list of the names of all those generals

who had scored the biggest or bloodiest victories for Rome,

people like the Scipios,

who did they start the list with?

Romulus.

One person who's not on the list is Romulus' twin brother Remus,

because it's said they had a massive row

over where exactly to establish the new town.

It ended up with Romulus murdering his twin,

an act which reflected the bloody civil wars

that would later blight the politics of Rome.

It must be one of the oddest foundation stories

in the whole history of the world.

Not only does it involve a pair of twins, not a single founder,

but then one of the twins goes and kills the other.

That's to say fratricide lay at the very beginning of the Roman story.

Brother killing brother was hard-wired into Rome.

Establishing his new settlement on the Palatine Hill,

Romulus became its sole ruler.

Romulus' first problem

was that he had hardly any citizens for his new city.

So he declared it an asylum, and he welcomed criminals,

runaway slaves, the dispossessed and the down-and-out

from the whole of Italy.

It's another strange aspect of the tale.

Whereas the average ancient city

liked to imagine that its original inhabitants

had sprung miraculously from the soil of the homeland,

the Romans imagined that their city

had originally been a city of asylum seekers.

It was an attempt to give a mythic dimension

to one of Rome's later most distinctive characteristics,

that it not only welcomed outsiders,

but that eventually it spread Roman citizenship throughout the Empire.

Romulus' next problem was that he had no women

and, therefore, his city had no future.

But none of the people in the neighbouring towns

were prepared to give their daughters to be Roman wives.

They were actually nastily insulting and made no secret of the fact

that they didn't think a band of runaways was great husband material,

so Romulus had to resort to a trick.

So the story goes,

Romulus invited his neighbours, the Sabines, to a religious festival.

In the middle of the proceedings, he gave a signal for his men

to abduct all the young women among the visitors

and to carry them off as their wives.

This is the famous Rape Of The Sabine Women

and it's an almost uncomfortably frank image.

This woman here has been captured and she's trying to get away,

but she's not going to make it.

This one has already collapsed.

And another is trying to flee but it's hopeless.

The rape might have been a response to a terrible Roman humiliation,

but it was still a violent assault.

These women are not willing, they're victims.

It's an instant that the Romans discussed and debated

and displayed ever after.

Some of Rome's enemies

said that this was absolutely typical Roman behaviour.

If they wanted something, they just went out and grabbed it.

In the story, the families of the Sabine women, as you'd expect,

hit back at the Romans

in what would be Romans first war and first victory,

which was commemorated in a rather strange monument

at the heart of the city.

Most people walk straight past here,

but it's where the Romans were convinced

that the heart of that battle took place,

in what became the Forum but what was then not much more than a swamp.

And they marked the spot

where one of Rome's first enemies fell to his death.

This was just one of a series of monuments

that imprinted the origins of Rome onto the face of the later city.

If you wanted, you could go up onto the Palatine Hill

and see what was supposed to be the hut of Romulus himself.

It was still a tourist attraction in the fourth century AD.

The myths of Rome were there for all to see

and with them the problems of being Roman -

fratricide, rape, violence and constant conflict.

Fratricide, rape, violence and constant conflict.

Rome at the beginning was ruled by kings,

Romulus and six others to follow.

But the citizens eventually rejected what they'd come to see as a tyranny

and established a kind of democracy

in which every year the people elected officials

to govern the city and fight its wars.

And soon after that there were signs that Rome was beginning to grow.

Why is it that an ordinary little town by the Tiber

became something much, much bigger than that?

The honest truth is, we don't know WHY it happened,

but we do know WHEN.

We can almost touch it. Almost.

Because in the early 4th century BC

the Romans built this massive city wall around their town.

Now, there's more to this than just defence,

this is a big statement that Rome has arrived.

And even more interesting,