Original subtitles

Previously on "Rome: Rise and fall of an empire"

The Spartacus slave rebellion awakens the seething power of the poor and downtrodden.

But ultimately, money still rules

for the most destructive force in Rome is the growing greed that poisons its politics.

Now:

The lust for power reaches a fever pitch as three men vie for absolute supremacy in the Roman republic.

Only one will emerge the victor, and to him go the spoils.

Honor, riches, and a name that will echo through history as the archetype of ruthless ambition and tyranny:

Julius Caesar.

ROME RISE AND FALL OF AN EMPIRE

JULIUS CAESAR

It is the middle of the first century, B.C., and democracy is breaking down in the Roman republic.

It is a time of riots and violent political upheaval.

People saw blood and death every day.

Murder was as important as the ballot box.

Violence was not supposed to be the way that romans decided the big political questions

that set the course for the country.

But violence breeds violence.

And Rome had descended almost into a state of anarchy by Caesar's time.

This is the troubled world in which young Julius Caesar grows up.

By the age of 16, his father has died and Caesar knows his life will be a struggle.

Julius Caesar inherited the most distinguished family history a Roman could have.

But by the time Julius Caesar was born in 100 B.C.,

his family wasn't as rich and wasn't as powerful as legend said it ought to be.

Julius Caesar wanted to restore to his family

the glory and the leadership position that his family stories said his ancestors had had.

While still a teenager, and sailing to study on the isle of Rhodes,

Caesar is kidnapped for ransom by notorious pirates.

These were the biggest pirates and slave traders in the Mediterranean.

So the pirates captured Caesar and held him ransom.

It took a long time to raise the money, so Caesar spent a great deal of time in the pirates' camp.

Holding his own against these murderers and thieves,

young Caesar proves to be more than his captors bargained for.

Caesar isn't your ordinary Roman. He's not going to be terrified.

Pirates are the great threat to aristocratic society.

So what Caesar is showing is that even when he's encountered this greatest of threats, he's risen above it.

In the end, Caesar wins his freedom and the pirates are brought to Roman justice,

crucified and left for the carrion birds.

Caesar matures, and by 65 B.C., now an experienced soldier in his thirties,

he is sent to the Roman province of Hispania to suppress a dangerous band of rebels.

It is here that he shows the dynamic leadership and charisma that would mark his later life.

Caesar was able to interact with people from every level of society.

He could be friendly with his ordinary soldiers,

because he showed that he had as much courage and as much guts, and as much stamina as they did.

And, it is here as well, that Caesar's military reputation begins to build.

If you're a member of the elite who shows courage and clear-headedness and ability on the field of battle,

that's going to translate into some political clout in Rome.

Returning to Rome, Caesar enters politics,

using his soaring popularity in an attempt to win the election for the office of consul.

To be consul is to hold Rome's most prestigious position

and comes not only with the lucrative governorship of an entire Roman province

but the military command of the legions stationed there.

Caesar is a natural politician.

Julius Caesar was brilliant in his ability to relate to people, to make them like him.

But he was also one of the greatest writers and one of the greatest public speakers.

Julius Caesar could make you do what he thought you should do by giving you a speech.

Among his admirers is Marcus Brutus, the child of his favorite mistress.

He quickly becomes Caesar's loyal prot�g�.

Brutus is inspired by his mentor's populist campaign and will one day move into politics himself.

Caesar's campaign for the office of consul wins him many supporters.

But his appeal to the commoners of Rome and his campaign for change

lose him the support of the conservative aristocrats.

He sets himself up quite deliberately as a person who will try to change the system of government

and he's a real threat to conservatives because Caesar appears as somebody who stands for something new.

He stands out in every way as their antithesis and there's very little they can do about it.

Still, even if Caesar is elected consul in Rome,

the conservative senators can deny him the one thing he wants and needs the most,

the governorship of the profitable province of Gaul.

Caesar needed money badly.

He was so far in debt that he had literally to run away from his creditors.

All of Caesar's financial difficulties will be over if the senate will grant his wish for the province of Gaul.

For Caesar, it was absolutely crucial to get Gaul assigned to him by the senate, as his province.

If Caesar was successful in Gaul, he could make a lot of money from the enemies

that he captured and sold into slavery and from the booty that he took.

It is essential that Caesar win the election and the governorship of Gaul.

He develops a plan to ensure this happens.

In the brutal arena of roman politics, one should never fight alone.

Caesar arranges a meeting with the two most powerful men in the republic.

One, an old friend, Crassus, the richest man in Rome. He funds all of Caesar's political campaigns.

The other is the celebrated general Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, better known as Pompey the great.

Cunning as a gladiator in the arena, Caesar convinces Crassus and Pompey

to work with him to win the election, and control the senate.

Caesar really was the third man.

He wasn't as distinguished as Pompey militarily and he certainly wasn't as rich as Crassus.

But Caesar had that glow, that aura, that charisma that nobody else had.

This extraordinary alliance becomes known as the Triumvirate.

The Triumvirate is so powerful that they gain control of the political apparatus.

They're able to almost, in a sense, bestow offices at will.

And of course, this is going to put the bit in the bridle on the political freedom of the aristocracy, which it greatly cherished.

To seal the deal, Caesar proposes a marriage contract between his daughter Julia and Pompey.

Marriages, especially among Roman aristocrats are not so much love matches between a husband and wife.

It's more as if one family is marrying another family and the women are simply tokens of the exchange.

With their newly combined political muscle, Crassus and Pompey, manipulate the system.

Caesar wins the election for consul, and the two of them gain immense power for tax breaks and land grants.

And then, for Caesar, who has arranged it all, they confer a magnificent assignment -

a five year term as the governor of not one, but two provinces in Gaul.

And beyond them, a whole continent to conquer.

Caesar heads north in search of glory and gold.

At the same time, on a collision course with Caesar's army,

a desperate and hungry horde of barbarians move south, preparing to invade Roman territory.

Known as the helvetii, they are 300,000 strong, seeking new lands to settle, by force if necessary.

For reasons that are hard to know, maybe environmental, probably because of wars,

the northern barbarians were moving south, lock, stock and barrel, with men, women and children.

This Caesar will not allow.

Along the banks of the Rhone river, the romans throw up a barrier, a wall, 18 miles long.

The helvetians cannot pass.

They must go instead through the lands of the Aedui tribe, beyond the imperial border.

But this poses a problem.

Caesar has no authority to lead his army out of Roman territory.

To collect the booty, slaves, and new territory he craves, he must convince the senate that he has no choice.

He had to construct a threat of monumental proportions.

And it so happened that the helvetians managed to fill this role for him.

Sending back reports of this dangerous group of savages on the march,

Caesar pursues them, thinking them an easy target.

He is quickly proven wrong.

Without warning, the helvetians melt back into the forest and ambush Caesar's rearguard.

These groups had substantial military infrastructure.

They had weaponry. They had military organization.

They organized themselves into units that were ready to defend themselves.

Despite the chaos of the moment, Caesar spots a superior battle position,

a sloping hillside, where he arrays his troops.

He understood how to put his men in a position where they were most likely to succeed.

He also took very few risks.

He had a tendency to stake out bold positions,

but always positions where the enemy would be at a disadvantage in responding to him.

Sure that their overwhelming numbers will carry the day, the helvetians rush headlong towards the Roman hill.

Caesar himself describes the battle:

"From our commanding position, the troops easily broke the enemy's phalanx.

With a single spear my men could pin together the Gaul's overlapping shields, forcing them to drop them.

Then we drew swords and charged."

Briefly, the romans seem to take the upper hand, but the helvetians outmanned the romans five to one.

In 58 B.C., the helvetians, a violent barbarian horde, turn the tables on the romans.

They ambush their rearguard, forcing Caesar to fight.

Terror sweeps through the Roman ranks as the barbarians attack.

They're already taller than the romans, yelling at the top of their lungs,

ready to charge in a mass, seemingly in a frenzy.

I mean, what could be more frightening than trying to fight someone that you think is crazy?

That is frenzied.

Though horribly outnumbered, the romans command the superior position.

As the battle slowly shifts in their favor, they take no quarter,

killing helvetians as if they would wipe them from the face of the earth.

Genocide is probably acceptable at this point, and even preferable

because do you really want how many, would it possibly be 200, 300, 400, 500,000 Germans in Italy after the revolt of Spartacus,

after we've seen what slave populations en masse can do to Italy?

The better technique is simply to exterminate them.

But survivors escape.

An expert manipulator, Caesar raises the specter of a German invasion to garner popular support for his war.

But in the senate, conservatives suspect the real danger lies in Caesar, himself.

He is even seen as a threat to his ally, Pompey.

He is beginning to look like somebody who will take Pompey's place as the leading figure in Rome.

And the difference, of course, between Caesar and pompey at this point

is that pompey had supported the status quo, where Caesar has always stood for its overthrow.

Tension fills the city.

The conservatives try to convince Pompey to break with Caesar.

Too late. His new wife, Caesar's daughter, Julia, has completely beguiled the great general.

Pompey was so in love with his teenage bride, he began neglecting politics so he could spend all his time with her.

Pompey took his teenage love on constant tours to visit all the most beautiful gardens and parks in Italy.

Pompey's generosity to Caesar even includes a member of his extended family, his prot�g� Marcus Brutus.

As a favor, Pompey grants Brutus a lucrative post in one of his eastern provinces,

allowing the young noble to rise in the political ranks, just like his mentor.

With Pompey protecting Caesar's interests in Rome,

Caesar turns his attention to rumors of invasion from the gallic kingdom of Aedui.

It is a quiet and pastoral region, unaccustomed to violence - Aedui.

Most people, most of the time were not involved in military activity.

Most people spent most of their time farming,

building their houses, making clothing, raising their children, and so on.

In 58 B.C., peace is shattered when Caesar reports

that tens of thousands of barbarian warriors flood into Aedui led by the terrifying warlord, Ariovistus.

Ariovistus becomes virtually a Saddam Hussein figure in the Roman imagination.

He's virtually equipped with weapons of mass destruction in Roman terms.

He's got this terrible, violent army that is, again, evocative of the barbarian leaders of earlier generations.

He is rumored to be oppressing Rome's allies left, right, and center to be in that way directly attacking the prestige of Rome.

Such aggression, according to Caesar, must not be tolerated.

Caesar learns that Ariovistus plans to set up his base in the fortified town of Besan�on.

Swiftly, Caesar marches his men across Gaul to meet them.

The renowned classical biographer, Plutarch:

The whole army clamored for the fight as the men followed Caesar to their camp just 20 miles from the enemy.

With the Roman legions closing in, the barbarians look to their pagan gods for guidance.

The German army of Ariovistus, like every ancient army, had priests and seers, and shamans.

In this case, women, who were believed to have the ability to communicate with the gods.

When the time for battle came, then priests, the seers, the soothsayers would be asked,

"Do the gods say that it's not prohibitive for us to fight now?"

Weapons, water, the movement of the stars, all may bear messages from the gods.

Through their totems, the soothsayers divine that Ariovistus will not win if he fights before the new moon.

He must not move until then.

It is the kind of intelligence upon which whole battles hinge, and it finds its way to Caesar's ear.

Ancient peoples took these difficult to understand messages from the gods very, very seriously.

Caesar knows that if he can force the barbarians into battle when they think the gods are telling them not to fight,

that he would have a great psychological advantage.

With the gods themselves seeming to lay his path, Caesar seizes the moment.

Caesar sends his forces right up to the German fortification,

threatening them and shaming them, and forcing, finally, against his will,

Ariovistus to bring his troops out when they are going to be fighting with this dread in the back of their minds.

We shouldn't be doing this, the gods have told us not to go against Caesar.

Caesar presses his advantage and attacks.

Caesar has no compunction about getting rid of vast numbers of people.

So in the battle with Ariovistus he boasts that he killed 80,000 Germans

including two of his wives and one of Ariovistus' daughters, the other one he captured.

Ariovistus himself manages to escape and flees to Germany. leaving Caesar as the new master of Gaul.

In 58 B.C., Julius Caesar slaughters tens of thousands of violent German warriors.

Their leader, Ariovistus, flees in dishonor, releasing the Germans' hold on Gaul.

Now, as he has planned all along, Caesar has a free hand to annex the kingdoms of Gaul himself.

He claims to come as a liberator, but some do not welcome Roman rule.

The principle downside was that you lost your political independence.

And that might not have mattered to some of these elites.

The leaders in particular got all sorts of political and material benefits,

but as we know from later circumstances in Rome and elsewhere, lots of peoples don't like being ruled by outsiders.

Over the next three years, Caesar drops his pose of protector.

Not only does he conquer gallic tribes to the north and west,

but he also crosses the Rhine and the channel to invade Germany and Britain, the first Roman to do so.

In a combination of self-promotion and newscast, Caesar send back the story of his conquest in action packed dispatches.

"Though surrounded by thousands of natives, my men defended themselves

with the utmost bravery for over four hours.

They killed a number of britons at the cost of only a few men wounded.

As soon as our cavalry came in sight, the enemy threw down their arms and fled, suffering very heavy casualties."

It's like he sucks you along into his campaign with him.

They read for the romans like an adventure story, a story of exploration

because romans had not been to northern Gaul, Romans had not been to Britain.

So for the romans in particular it would have been a very exciting story.

Caesar's account is one of the most remarkable political documents

to survive from any age in the history of the world.

It's intended to justify actions that many romans regarded

as completely illegal and outrageous and only justified by their success.

Even Caesar's prot�g� Marcus Brutus studies the dispatches with growing concern.

In between Caesar's eloquent lines, he perceives greed and over-reaching ambition.

All of a sudden, people begin to realize Caesar is gathering enormous wealth and an enormously powerful army behind him.

He's spending a lot of money, buying support throughout the Italian peninsula.

Brutus is troubled and concerned for his political position.

A more powerful Caesar means a less powerful aristocracy.

Conservative leaders vow to stop Caesar.

What the Roman upper class fears most of all will be

one of its members will break ranks and go directly to the people without the consensus of the governing class behind him.

They were always afraid that somebody might do something to upset the status quo,

which was entirely devoted to maintaining their wealth and position.

To stop the growing challenge, Caesar must call in a favor from his longtime ally, Crassus.

He alone does not fear Caesar's booming popularity.

His own enormous wealth insulates him from the vacillation of politics.

With bribes and guile, he manages to block Caesar's enemies

and win for himself another consulship and his first military command in nearly 20 years.

Dreaming of lasting glory, Crassus heads east to invade the kingdom of Parthia, only to die in an ambush.

Caesar has lost his first protector in Rome.

Around the same time, Caesar's only daughter Julia dies in childbirth.

Her husband Pompey, Caesar's last protector, is devastated.

The baby died a couple of days later.

Pompey was distraught and the loss of his love and of his child from his young wife destroyed his alliance with Caesar.

His emotions overcame him and Pompey broke with Caesar.

The triumvirate is finished.

Pompey and Caesar are now enemies.

The die is cast for an ultimate showdown.

As political terror increases, the supporters of the two titans riot in the streets, each side determined to destroy the other.

Rome was in political turmoil.

Violence had become the norm in politics.

There were street gangs fighting each other in political campaigns.

In the mayhem, the senate building, the very home of Roman government, burns to the ground.

The situation in Rome is desperate.

Back in Gaul the situation is turning dangerous for Caesar as well.

A charismatic gallic leader named Vercingetorix rallies the gauls to unite against the romans from his homeland of Auvergne.

Vercingetorix's plan is radical:

burn all the supplies, every last barn full of corn and every bit of forage for the animals.

Then hunker down in the fortified hill towns and starve out the romans.

As their homesteads go up in flames, the cure must seem as bad as the disease to the gauls.

Yet their self-sacrifice astonishes and alarms the romans.

Vercingetorix was trying to destroy the logistics of the Roman army.

Just feeding these people is an enormous problem,

and the farther Caesar goes against the gauls, the longer his supply lines become,

the easier it becomes to cut the supply lines and starve the enemy into submission.

With food supplies plummeting, the romans will have only two options,

stay and starve, or retreat.

Caesar never retreats.

In 52 B.C., a courageous warrior named Vercingetorix

calls upon his people to rise up against Rome and burn their barns and food supplies.

By winter's end the romans must choose starvation or victory.

But now, as spring returns, Caesar calls on his troops to rally and strike back against Vercingetorix and his people.

Among Caesar's most trusted subordinates is Mark Antony.

Antony also has a lot of energy.

He's very brave soldier.

He comes to Caesar with a lot of experience in the field.

The kind of character that Caesar likes to have around.

They attack Gergovia, where Vercingetorix and his people fight a furious defense.

The battle is brutal.

Caesar, fighting shoulder to shoulder with his men, escapes with his life, but the battle is a disaster.

Meanwhile, back in Rome, the political situation deteriorates for Caesar even more, as his enemies gather strength.

The conservative senate declares Pompey sole consul, placing an army at his disposal.

Then, to add insult to injury, Pompey turns down an offer to marry into Caesar's family again.

Instead, he weds a young widow named Cornelia, the daughter of a senator, Metellus Scipio.

Pompey probably wants to offset the prestige that Caesar is accruing.

Pompey, at this point, for years has been sitting on his laurels.

He's been in Rome much of the time, and so he probably wants to hedge his bets at this juncture against Caesar,

and he does this by casting about for political alliances with the aristocracy.

Pompey even gets the senate to make his new father-in-law co-consul

With this final betrayal, Pompey's move away from Caesar and into the conservative camp is, at last, complete.

The situation is becoming critical for Caesar.

He must salvage Gaul or lose face altogether.

He pursues Vercingetorix and his army to the fortified town of Alesia, and orders his men to dig a double entrenchment.

One to keep the alesians in, the other to keep their reinforcements out.

What they did was build up this just wonderful structure of defense works,

which started initially with a thing his men called stimuli or Spears,

timbers planted in the ground with hooks on them.

Then they built a thing that they jokingly called "lilies"

and these were pits about three feet deep that have a three-inch stake protruding out of the ground.

It's a phenomenal achievement, and all done with arm-swinging picks,

a lot of back power, moving earth in wicker baskets,

and you have to imagine about 15,000 guys digging for days on end, and just with sheer back power.

You can just imagine what a chiropractor would have done for that army.

As supplies dwindle, Vercingetorix and his people are starving and desperate.

Things became so bad in Alesia for the gauls who were there, that they were running out of food.

But just as they must surely surrender, Caesar's worst nightmare comes true.

All of Gaul rises up to defend the alesians.

200,000 fresh barbarian warriors march against the romans.

The gauls are a relatively well-organized opposing force.

They can muster a lot of people and muster them relatively quickly.

We see that with the siege of Alesia in which the besieger Caesar finds himself in turn besieged.

With the arrival of reinforcements, Vercingetorix finally bursts out of the city gates.

The romans are surrounded.

The barbarians rush in for the kill.

The battle of Alesia was Caesar's greatest challenge in 10 years of huge military challenges,

because in order to defeat the enemy, Caesar had to fight them both in the front and in the rear.

Only the most seasoned troops could withstand such an assault.

You had to be psychologically prepared to confront the enemy close enough to hack them to death with a two-foot sword.

You had to get into that killing zone that was literally at arm's length,

where you could as easily be killed as kill.

In his first hand account of the gallic wars, Caesar describes the battle.

"Neither ramparts nor trenches could check the Gaul's furious onslaught,

and I knew that the time for the decisive action was at hand."

He has great lucidity to the point that sometimes when his men were losing it,

he would actually grab them by the throat and thrust them back into battle.

So a great clear headedness in the midst of great danger.

"Suddenly, the gauls saw their cavalry in their rear and fresh cohorts coming up in front.

They broke and fled, but we mowed them down."

In 52 B.C., in the fields outside Alesia, the dream of gallic independence dies.

Vercingetorix surrenders to Caesar, bringing much of Northern Europe into the empire for good.

Caesar's campaigns are important because they take the Roman empire away from the Mediterranean

into central Gaul, northern Gaul, he crosses into Germany, he crosses into Britain.

So Northern Europe is now included in the Roman empire

And in long term, this has really important consequences,

so Caesar is now taking the Roman empire away from this Mediterranean world.

Now, in victory, Caesar can return to Rome.

He has eclipsed all the other nobles, even Pompey.

After Caesar's near decade of overwhelming military success in Gaul,

he wants to return to Rome to reap the rewards, to be recognized by everyone as Rome's leading man.

But his rivals fear and hate him above all because he's put them in the shadows.

In 49 B.C., many Roman aristocrats insist that Caesar release his army and return home, but Caesar balks.

Caesar knows that if he were to disband his army and come to Rome, he would be murdered by his rivals

who hate his success and know that Caesar can't be stopped because he's so popular.

So Caesar's life was literally on the line.

Caesar and his enemies are headed for a showdown, and no one can stop it.

By 50 B.C., Julius Caesar has no equal in Rome.

The senate, fearing that he has grown too powerful, insists that he resign his command.

Fuming, Caesar leads an army south, contemplating an invasion of Rome.

He pauses at a small river at the boundary of Rome, the Rubicon.

For Caesar, leaving his men on the shores of the Rubicon and traveling on to Rome alone

means complete capitulation to his enemies.

Caesar's life was literally on the line.

Caesar had to cross the Rubicon river, this little stream that was the boundary between the provinces and Rome itself.

When he did that, he knew that there would be a civil war, but it was that or die in disgrace.

One side of the power struggle is led by Caesar.

Forged by a decade of campaigning, his army's belief in him is unshakeable, its dedication, absolute.

The other side is led by Pompey.

His army is scattered throughout Italy, and its loyalty is in doubt.

Caesar's popularity, he knows, is at its height.

The population of Italy treated Caesar like a returning god and soldiers flocked to Caesar's army.

There was no opposition.

Those who feared him were fleeing like a wave towards Rome

and the city became a scene of absolute tumult and panic.

The people at Rome who loved Caesar are partying in the streets because they can't wait for him to return.

Pompey gathers up the Roman senate and flees to where support for him is deep and strong, Greece.

It buys the great general valuable time.

Months pass before Caesar can build and appropriate enough ships and supplies to follow him.

By the time Caesar's troops disembark in Greece, Pompey has amassed a great army.

In January, 48 B.C., at Pharsalus, the most important figures in Rome square off in tragic civil war.

Pompey commands twice as many men as Caesar.

Yet Caesar's soldiers come armed with a potent weapon, confidence.

Pompey had to fight or had to surrender.

That is the way that Caesar worked,

and Caesar's men knew that he would always put them in a position where the chances of success were very great.

He also has a very well trained army.

You reach a certain point and the army becomes a well-oiled machine.

They're not called veterans for nothing

and they become a very effective fighting force because they're so used to what they're doing.

At Pharsalus, Caesar's long years of campaigning pay off.

His men utterly destroy Pompey's army.

Pompey himself escapes.

Caesar chases him to Egypt, but too late.

In the end, the great pompey is tricked, murdered and beheaded by Egyptian brigands.

The head is sent back to Caesar.

Classical biographer Plutarch:

When Pompey's head was brought to him,

Caesar refused to look at him, but he took Pompey's signet ring, and grieved as he did so.

Did he really do that? It's very anecdotal and it almost defies plausibility, but it is possible in a sense.

It's possible because Pompey had been a colleague and a friend for a time.

And maybe, in a sense, Caesar saw what could happen to himself in the eyes of the dead Pompey.

In 46 B.C., with his rivals out of the way, Caesar has the total power he has craved his entire life.

Rome is his.

Caesar quickly moves to rebuild the city, changes the tax laws, and establishes colonies.

He becomes the first leader of Rome to conceive an empire.

Caesar essentially becomes the new state. Caesar replaces the republic.

Now, this is a great preview of what's going to happen under the emperors,

but Caesar does it in such a way that he seems to disregard the traditions of the republic,

and as a result he essentially cuts himself off and isolates himself.

Unwilling to share his rule with lesser nobles, he proclaims himself dictator for life.

King of Rome in everything but the name.

The fear is if Caesar becomes a king,

the rights of the people, to vote, to choose, to express their opinion will be taken away from them.

Outrage over Caesar's tyranny seeps like poison through the Senate.

Even Caesar's own prot�g�, Marcus Brutus, is persuaded to betray him.

Brutus was a complex and frankly not very attractive man.

Caesar had made him his close companion and promoted Brutus' career.

But I think Brutus couldn't stand being "second banana" to Caesar

and Brutus had this romantic notion of himself as a defender of Roman Liberty by leading the conspiracy against Caesar.

Finally, in 22 B.C, at the Ides of march, in the name of liberty,

40 conspirators take matters in the own hands, led by Brutus.

Classical biographer Suetonius:

23 dagger thrusts went home as Caesar stood there.

He did not utter a sound after the first blow,

though some say that when he saw Marcus Brutus about to deliver the second blow,

he reproached him in Greek with, "you, too, my child?"

Many of them were his friends, some from a long time.

Some perhaps thought that Caesar had destroyed the republic's most cherished tradition

that no one man can be the leader of Rome.

And there was surely spite and jealousy and just human passion

and perhaps some notions that this was what freedom required.

Caesar's death spawns not a rebirth of the republic, as the conspirators hoped.

Only anarchy, more violence, eventually empire.

I think, long term, the infusion of obscene riches into Roman politics,

the turning of the army into clients of the general as a patron,

and the intense rivalry among the aristocrats to defeat each other, instead of serving the country

meant that the republic was doomed even without the genius, the fire of Julius Caesar.

It was his relative Augustus who found the way to make that work and create the Roman empire.

The age of emperors begins, and with it, bloody conquest, brutal repression, and endless war.

Next on "Rome, rise and fall of an empire"

Augustus, first emperor of Rome, begins the romanization of Gaul.

But Rome's conquest meets a devastating blow when barbarians destroy an entire Roman army,

shattering the illusion of roman superiority.