Original subtitles

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

When the empire is attacked by foreign invaders and a deadly plague,

Roman citizens blame the new religion of christianity for angering the empire's pagan gods.

Desperate, emperor Decius turns to violence, sacrificing the lives of christians to win back the gods' favor.

Now:

Threatened by barbarian attacks on all fronts, the people of Rome live in constant fear.

As the crisis deepens, insurgents seize control, dividing the empire against itself until a new ruler emerges.

His name is Aurelian, and he unifies the fractured empire using its greatest reservoir of strength, the army.

ROME RISE AND FALL OF AN EMPIRE

THE SOLDIERS' EMPEROR

By the middle of the third century, the Roman empire is huge

and relies on distant isolated legions to protect every far-flung province.

The troops at this point were forced into a situation where they often had to rely on self-help.

The imperial superstructure was very far away from them.

Emperors made it to frontier conflicts often after they had mushroomed entirely out of control.

In the absence of the emperor, the soldiers sometimes take leadership matters into their own hands.

The emperor can't be there so there's a bit of drift,

and so somebody arises who is able to do the job for him

and probably will call themselves an emperor in order to rally local support

to beat back the barbarians who are threatening the integrity of the provinces.

Having dared to raise their own emperors, the powerful border armies now declare independence from Rome.

As these armies break away on the eastern and western frontiers, forming their own empires,

Rome's northern frontier is attacked by the Alamanni barbarians in 269 a.D.

In his palace in Rome, the true Roman emperor, Claudius II, is troubled by this devastating assault on Roman soil.

Enemies from the other side of the Alps did more than invade the Roman empire.

For the first time in an extraordinarily long time, they actually crossed the Alps into Italy.

Claudius seeks the advice of his powerful cavalry commander, Aurelian,

a man whose military discipline is described by the third- century historian Vopiscus:

"Aurelian, from his earliest years, was very quick of mind and famous for his strength.

He'd never let a day go by without practicing the spear, the bow and arrow, and other weaponry."

Aurelian's skills will soon be tested as news from the frontier worsens.

Distraught refugees from northern Italy bear witness to the devastation.

With this invasion, the danger of a mutiny within the army becomes even greater.

If a barbarian people threaten to invade, then the local people would simply proclaim emperor

whoever happened to be the military commander in the region at the time.

In order to keep the northern frontier from breaking away as well,

Claudius must act quickly to stop the encroaching Alamanni forces.

In the Alamanni camp, the barbarians celebrate,

reveling in the rich spoils taken easily from a weakened Roman empire,

including Roman women and children they intend to use as slaves.

We've got inscriptions actually which talk to us,

which tell us about parties of raiders who have gone into Italy and taken lots of prisoners,

so it's sort of easy pickings to some extent for these raiders.

They're preying on an empire that is not at its peak at this time.

The groups of Alamanni are led by powerful chieftains

who ensure their warriors loyalty by rewarding them with slaves of Roman blood.

But the barbarians' greed knows no end.

Emperor Claudius is forced to march his army from Rome,

meeting the Alamanni warriors at lake Garda in northern Italy.

Claudius and his men face a brutal enemy.

Fourth-century historian Ammianus Marcellinus:

"Rushing forward with more haste than caution,

they threw themselves on our squadrons of horse with horrible grinding of teeth and more than their usual fury.

Their hair streamed behind them, and a kind of madness flashed from their eyes."

Emperor Claudius is also severely outnumbered,

but he has a secret weapon at his side- the powerful cavalry commander Aurelian.

He was known as "manu ad ferrum", that is sort of "hand ready to the sword,"

ready to leap into action when that should be necessary.

True to his name, Aurelian helps Claudius beat back the Alamanni,

killing half their force and driving the rest back over the Alps.

And in an effort to better secure Italy from future barbarian attacks,

emperor Claudius and Aurelian travel to the Balkans to increase the military presence there.

But while on campaign, emperor Claudius contracts the plague.

Claudius' reign was short. He ruled from 268 to 270.

He had a signal military success in the year 269, heavily advertised at the time and much talked about later.

But this success, the defeat of the Alamanni, is not enough to restore the empire.

As emperor Claudius' life slips away, it is clear that this task must fall on his trusted general Aurelian.

He is declared emperor by his troops.

Aurelian repays them by sacrificing to the god of soldiers, Sol invictus-the unconquered sun,

a deity now emerging as the god of victory within the army.

Whatever gives you the victory, whatever it is that's going to be beneficial, that's the...

That's the wagon, as it were, you hitch your star to.

A man of low birth, Aurelian now rises to the highest position in the empire

because of his military brilliance, like many great generals before him.

You can't be a civilian emperor by the middle of the third century.

You have to lead troops in battle.

There's always someplace where you've got to go and fight.

Aurelian will need the loyalty of the soldiers and the strength of their god as he faces a familiar enemy.

In 271 a.D., the bloodthirsty Alamanni return, ravaging northern Italy and making it as far as Piacenza.

Aurelian and his army race west to cut off the barbarians, sending ahead an offer to negotiate.

But the Alamanni have other plans.

He invited the barbarians to give themselves up,

but reportedly, they replied that they were free men and they could show him how free men can fight.

Sure enough, at dusk in the wooded area south of Piacenza,

they ambushed the Roman army, which suffered heavy losses.

In the forest, the Roman soldiers are no match for the barbarians.

Why was an ambush such a successful tactics against Roman troops?

And largely the answer lies in the form of organization of the Roman armies.

They were trained, you know, the discipline consisted in training them to actually fight in a line, in a formation.

And evidently can do so only when the conditions are met where you can develop that formation,

which is not the case in a wooded area.

Needless to say, the barbarians knew that.

Caught in a wooded trap, the Roman army is thrown into confusion and routed.

For Aurelian, the defeat is devastating.

The troops are, in some ways, very loyal to their own commanders,

but they're also very fickle, so if an emperor is winning, they are happy to support him.

Once an emperor starts to lose, then he's almost certainly done for.

Aurelian rallies what troops have survived, praying that they will remain loyal.

He needs them now more than ever, to keep the Alamanni from reaching the city of Rome.

When Rome's frontier armies break away from the rest of the empire,

emperor Aurelian's legions are left helpless against the fierce Alamanni barbarians now heading into the heart of Italy.

Terror grips the people of Rome as they fear the barbarians' arrival is imminent.

Desperate, many flee the city.

The defeat of the Roman army, Aurelian's army,

created panic in Rome because there was no serious force to stand between the barbarians and the city.

Those unable to escape riot in the streets, enraged by Aurelian's failure to keep the barbarians out of Italy.

The population of Rome does seem to have understood

that becoming a vast city in the midst of an empire whose armies were concentrated at the frontier,

left them, as it were, peculiarly vulnerable if an army were actually to make it into Italy.

But before the Alamanni warriors can reach the capital,

Aurelian is finally able to cut them off at Fanum, 180 miles from Rome.

After his recent defeat, Aurelian must win back his army's loyalty with nothing less than absolute victory.

Emperors had always relied upon the support of the army,

and emperors may have presented themselves as champions of the republic,

but the reality, the underlying reality of imperial power always depends upon the army.

Together, Aurelian and his soldiers teach their barbarian foes a lesson in Roman discipline.

They learned now that whenever there was an opportunity for the Roman army to develop in tight formation, they had no chance.

Overwhelmed, many barbarian warriors die a watery death in the Metaurus river.

Aurelian's victory drives the Alamanni from Italy at last.

It's also regaining confidence, and no doubt his triumph served to boost morale at a time when it had been greatly shaken.

But Aurelian's hard-won triumph in Italy is quickly overshadowed

by news of rising conflict from the city of Palmyra on the empire's eastern frontier.

For more than 10 years, beginning well before Aurelian's reign,

foreign invaders struck hard against Rome's eastern provinces, including Palmyra,

threatening to break through the weakening border.

And this ongoing flow of populations,

some of whom were highly militarized and used quite different tactics than the romans were used to

caused very profound problems in the eastern provinces.

On the edges of the Syrian desert, far from the protection of Rome,

the people of Palmyra have faced the devastation of their army alone.

These opponents, they also are taking advantage of the absence of the emperor to take over,

to roll back the frontiers, which they do successfully,

and to extort payments from the romans.

Counting the bodies of their dead, the palmyrenes finally grew weary of waiting for help from a distant Rome.

These people in these various areas, who are threatened by invasion,

they wish they were better protected, so they call upon local defenders

to take on the role that the emperors seem unable to do, because the emperors can't be everywhere.

In a blatant act of revolt, the palmyrene army took matters into its own hands.

As a result, for the past decade,

the eastern provinces have called themselves The Palmyrene empire, breaking away from Rome.

Now they make a direct threat against emperor Aurelian by taking the fertile Roman land of Egypt.

The rich Egyptian granaries are now controlled by the palmyrene queen.

Her name is Zenobia.

We're fascinated by this figure of a woman of the east wielding such control,

perhaps a latter-day Cleopatra type.

And incidentally, I mean, she did try to associate herself with Cleopatra when they took over Egypt.

She sought to sort of establish a connection in order to reconcile the Egyptians to her rule.

With Egypt under her thumb, Zenobia basks in her power, ordering the granaries to stop shipments of grain to Rome,

cutting off one of the empire's main sources of food.

Italy was, of course, the affective heart of the empire. It was where the empire began.

But Africa and Egypt had long been the breadbasket of the empire.

That's where the agricultural wealth was concentrated.

Queen Zenobia, with her loyal general Zabdas at her side,

now holds the empire's grain hostage,

sending a clear message to Rome that the palmyrenes are powerless no more.

Zenobia's power play strikes deep.

In Rome, Aurelian finds the people desperate and starving for lack of grain.

Though he orders his troops to share their bread with the masses, it is not enough.

Naturally, Egypt was the granary of Rome,

and therefore an interruption to the grain supplies to Rome was a huge threat to any emperor,

particularly one who had already had strife to deal with in Rome.

The threat of famine leaves romans restless and angry.

Having lost territory to the armies of the east and west, the empire now faces rebellion in Rome itself.

Having relieved Rome of the alamanni barbarian threat,

emperor Aurelian faces a new crisis when the palmyrene usurper, queen Zenobia,

stops shipments of Egyptian grain to Rome, threatening the city with starvation.

Soon the romans turn against their emperor Aurelian.

The violence, by the way, that these rebellions sparked was on a level not seen since republican times.

Aurelian has no choice but to unleash his own savage warriors against the insurgents.

You're fighting in Rome itself, you know, and this is civil war,

this is something the romans also fear, because they know how divisive it can be and how devastating it can be.

Unaccustomed to battling inside a city, Aurelian's soldiers struggle.

Though virtually unbeatable on an open battlefield,

the Roman army once again shows its weakness when tight formation cannot be maintained.

The actual war, the struggle itself, would have been in an urban context.

And of course, for the Roman soldiers involved at Aurelian's disposal, this must have been highly unusual.

I mean, ancient battles were not typically urban struggles, street by street fighting,

and this is where your trained soldiers would have greater difficulty.

But in the end, Aurelian puts down the revolt decisively.

The fourth-century historian Eutropius:

Aurelian suppressed them with the utmost severity.

Several noblemen he condemned to death.

He was indeed cruel and bloodthirsty and rather an emperor necessary for the times than an amiable one.

Aurelian executes the rebel leaders, reminding the people of Rome that he is their ruler.

The emperor has crushed the resistance.

He now rebuilds the city walls against external forces.

Rome will be strong and safe in his hands.

In the aftermath of the military crisis in northern Italy at the start of his reign,

the emperor Aurelian provided that the city of Rome should be outfitted with a new set of walls.

This was the first significant, really significant new set of walls built for the city of Rome since nearly 1,000 years before.

Aurelian now turns to the crisis of the Palmyrene empire.

He must secure his grain supply in order to avoid famine in Rome.

His dwindling bread rations will not last forever.

Well, Aurelian was determined to reassert control over all areas of the empire, and so he moves east in 272 to regain control.

His first target is the former Roman city of Antioch, then part of the larger region called Syria.

Antioch is a bustling city, invaluable to Rome as a wealthy center of trade.

But now under the control of the palmyrene empire, it becomes a safe haven for the fugitive queen Zenobia.

Zenobia and her generals knew for sure that Antioch would be the first city,

the first thing Aurelian would have to conquer upon entering Syria.

So she barricaded herself in the city, and Zabdas drew the army in the Orontos plain to the west of lake Antioch.

Zenobia enjoys her prestige, happy to let her generals ready themselves for war just outside the city walls.

There, Zenobia's general Zabdas meets Aurelian's army on the battlefield.

You have walls of romans moving in lines, man to man, fist to fist.

You can't kill somebody until you look them in the eye.

You've got arms getting cut off, hands getting cut off, damage to the neck, to the face.

But as his infantrymen fall prey to the swords of the palmyrenes, Aurelian knows his only chance is to outmaneuver general Zabdas.

It is during this battle that Aurelian instructed his highly disciplined light cavalry

to perform what later came to be known as the "feigned retreat stratagem".

Aurelian's light cavalry pretends to flee,

tricking the palmyrenes into giving chase, leaving the protection of the main lines behind them.

At which point, the Roman cavalry turned back and cut them to pieces.

In any case indeed, the palmyrian heavy cavalry was destroyed, and the road was open to antioch.

General Zabdas orders the surviving palmyrene troops to retreat.

Zenobia and her generals head toward Palmyra.

Aurelian gives chase, determined to catch the queen before she reaches her home city.

But in the Syrian desert, Aurelian faces unexpected obstacles.

You have to remember, this is summer.

It's hot in the desert.

So harassed by both the hot summer and the arabs...

Arab nomads that had remained loyal to Zenobia, Aurelian and his army pursued, or pushed to Palmyra.

But an arrow wound delays Aurelian's pursuit, giving Zenobia time to secure herself in Palmyra.

Cursing his nomad attackers, Aurelian vows to capture their queen.

In 272 a.D., emperor Aurelian defeats Zenobia's army at Antioch,

but in pursuit of the fleeing queen, Arelian is ambushed, allowing her to reach the safety of Palmyra.

Now, ordered to surrender by aurelian, who has besieged the city,

Zenobia writes him a scathing rebuke in the spirit of her model, Cleopatra.

Whatever must be accomplished in matters of war must be done by valor alone.

You demand my surrender?

As though you were not aware that Cleopatra preferred to die a queen

rather than remain alive however high her rank.

Despite her bravado, the proud queen knows she is not safe for long in the city.

She quickly packs for travel.

Palmyra itself is not really ready for a siege anyway.

They built some very hastily erected defenses, and clearly aurelian has some support inside the city.

It does not hold out for very long.

Queen Zenobia and her general Zabdas slip away into the cover of darkness, eluding Aurelian again.

In 272 a.D., Zenobia races toward Persia, making it as far as the Euphrates river in modern-day Iraq.

But aurelian's soldiers are in hot pursuit.

On the banks of the euphrates, the queen offers the boatmen gold to cross the river.

But even her desperate threats are too late to save her.

She was intercepted and captured by the Roman cavalry.

They took Zenobia, her advisors, and generals as prisoners of war and put them on trial.

Bound to prevent escape, Zenobia knows she will soon face Aurelian.

Having won back the throne of Palmyra, Aurelian finally confronts the rebel Zenobia,

a woman whose boldness he can't help but admire.

In his own words...

"What manner of woman she is, how wise in counsels, how steadfast in plans,

how firm toward the soldiers, how generous when necessity calls, and how stern when discipline demands."

But facing likely execution, Zenobia's courage begins to wane.

Zenobia pleaded that she had been led astray by bad advice,

on which account her advisor was put to death, and so was the general Zabdas.

Aurelian has a different fate in mind for the beautiful queen once they reach Rome.

But before leaving Palmyra, Aurelian visits a temple where he will pay tribute to one god alone,

the god of soldiers, Sol invictus, who has ensured his victory on foreign soil.

He clearly had in mind an alliance between him and the sun god

that was responsible for his successes in Palmyra.

He presented himself on his coins in terms of an association of the emperor to the god Sol invictus.

Well, we're moving into this dimension of associating the emperor very closely with one particular divinity

who clearly, given the success that Aurelian had enjoyed, people might believe in.

In the peace of the eastern temple, he sees that this is the one god to unite all of Rome.

He does seem to have been participating in a growing trend toward universalism, both in religion and in Roman political control.

Offering his own blood as sacrifice, Aurelian promises his god a nation of worshippers.

Having taken back the east and restored Rome's ration of free bread,

Aurelian is welcomed back to Rome a hero.

It may have signaled to the romans an end to what had been nearly a half-century of sequence of military catastrophe

followed by recovery, followed by catastrophe, followed by illusory recovery again.

Aurelian has another purpose in Rome-

He will use the riches taken from the east

to establish the soldiers' god, Sol invictus, as the single deity of the empire.

Work soon begins on a new temple.

He actually put the new cult on a par with the official state religion in Rome.

He built a magnificent temple for Sol in Rome, which he furnished with the spoils from Palmyra.

But religion must wait for now.

Aurelian has more battles to fight before the empire is fully restored.

To the north, the Roman territories of Gaul and Britain have fallen

under the unlawful rule of a mutinous Roman army that calls their dominion The gallic empire.

Resembling their barbarian foes more every day,

the gallic soldiers scorn Roman honor, naming the arrogant Roman general Tetricus their emperor.

You have armies popping up all over the place proclaiming their general as emperor,

and then they have to fight, and whoever wins is the one who ends up being the legitimate emperor in the end.

The separation of the gallic empire was, of course, frightening for romans.

It was a major loss.

It was humiliating to have such a significant portion of the traditional Roman empire in another man's hands.

Emperor Aurelian quickly moves to take back the gallic lands and restore the empire to its former glory.

All that stands in his way is Tetricus and the gallic army.

Having defeated queen Zenobia and recovered the east,

Aurelian now vows to take back the lost territory in the west from the usurper Tetricus

and unite all romans under one god, Sol invictus, warrior god of the soldiers.

In 274 A.D., the mutinous gallic empire encompasses both Gaul and Britain.

There the soldier-emperor Tetricus and his army have become indistinguishable from their barbarian enemies.

Undisciplined, they revel in the torment of their prisoners.

The job of soldier-emperor was tremendously dangerous

because they're in power only because they are proclaimed by their troops,

but it's a very difficult thing once in power to maintain that,

because you have to avoid internal conflicts with other potential generals who see themselves as possible emperors.

Tetricus cannot show any weakness to his troops.

But in the privacy of his palace, Tetricus consults his advisors, trying to determine where his next rival will come from.

Tetricus himself had survived over the previous several years a number of internal disputes,

some actually leading to considerable bloodshed among rival leaders in the gauls.

He plans to someday leave his kingdom to his son, establishing a dynasty in his own name.

But reports of a new challenger now threaten to destroy this dream.

It seems to have been clear to him that in the aftermath of his success in the east,

Aurelian was going to and was already marching on Gaul in an attempt to reintegrate Gaul into the Roman empire.

With news of Aurelian's approach, the volatile Tetricus blames his advisors, lashing out at everyone around him.

In 274 a.D., Aurelian marches to chalons, Gaul, in modern-day France

to face Tetricus and win back the western territories for Rome.

Aurelian and his men meet Tetricus in the forests of Chalons, where the fighting is fierce.

Aurelian's army probably contained more cavalry than traditional imperial armies had up until now.

As for Tetricus' army, while there were still important legions along the rhine, guarding these areas,

it would have been a battle between forces, much similar forces with similar equipment at their disposal,

and therefore all the bloodier and more devastating for the armies involved.

It is Tetricus' army that now bears the brunt of Aurelian's vengeance.

Having dared to name another as their emperor, it is they who remain the greatest threat.

Part of the crisis of the third century is the importance that the army plays in choosing an emperor.

This is something that's relatively new in the Roman world, and it's a result of constant warfare.

The army becomes more powerful, it becomes more able to choose emperors,

and it becomes more able to impose its own choice of emperors on Rome itself.

Aurelian cannot allow this affront to his power.

As Tetricus' army falters, Aurelian orders his troops to cut them down, showing no mercy.

Some sources claim that Tetricus realized the game was up even before the battle,

but it looks as though he did fight it out to the end, and it was in the end Aurelian who gained the victory.

It is the culmination of his efforts to reunite the empire.

In the end, he takes the usurper Tetricus prisoner.

And as with queen Zenobia of Palmyra, emperor Aurelian spares Tetricus' life.

And for Tetricus, too, it was surprising that particularly an opponent in civil war-

opponents in civil wars were usually- usually represented a great danger.

They might, after all, turn against you later.

So aurelian displayed remarkable clemency in sparing the lives of both of these opponents.

Tetricus' gallic army is not so lucky.

For it is they who have raised a rival emperor in the west, and now they will pay the ultimate price for their treason.

Aurelian was a great disciplinarian, it seems.

He tolerated no mutinies on the part of soldiers.

He drove them hard but was respected by them.

To maintain his own soldiers' respect, Aurelian knows his punishment of the captured gallic soldiers must be brutal and complete.

Not one is spared.

Aurelian was both a successful military commander and in some respects, as perhaps one had to be, a fairly savage one,

and yet his treatment of Tetricus was remarkably generous.

It is in this generous spirit that Aurelian returns victorious to Rome.

There, after 4 years of nonstop campaigning,

Aurelian celebrates his reunification of the empire

with a spectacular triumph parade displaying high-ranking captives from every far-off conquest.

There's all sorts of other lore that goes with this ceremony,

which mark it out as distinct and in some way both as barbaric and awesome.

The presence of the emperor Aurelian in Rome and the presence of the emperor

in order the celebrate an actual military victory was a novel event for its entire generation.

The defeated usurpers Zenobia and Tetricus are paraded as well,

evidence of Aurelian's successes in the east and west.

It was a humiliating spectacle to be paraded through Rome as a captured enemy leader.

It implied, as it were, that probably you lacked the courage to have died in battle.

Humiliated though they may be, Zenobia and Tetricus and the other captives are allowed to live by the generous emperor Aurelian.

He also shows his generosity to the people of Rome.

Aurelian himself distributed largely the bread, the pork meat,

but also we are told, white tunics of Egyptian and African cloths.

So it was clearly, you know, a very generous display of force there.

Grateful in his triumph, Aurelian consecrates the temple he has built for the god of soldiers, Sol invictus,

whose power and favor he believes have made him invincible.

Many scholars believe simply that this was trying to enforce conformity

among the peoples of the empire for political purposes and also for religious purposes,

and those 2 things are not that easily separated in the mind of a Roman.

Aurelian decrees this day, December 25, will be celebrated each year as the birthday of Sol invictus.

Later emperors, also seeking to unite Rome with religion, will adopt this date for the birth of Jesus Christ.

Even now, over 1,700 years later, this once-pagan holiday is celebrated as Christmas around the world.

Throughout the empire in the third century, there's clearly a movement towards monotheism,

towards different cults that believe in a single god and sometimes in a single redeeming god.

The united Roman empire now stretches from Palmyra to Britain, but in 275 A.D., barbarians again wreak havoc in the east.

Aurelian marches his army to Thrace to prepare for battle.

Aurelian is a fascinating figure.

He was a very energetic and dynamic individual.

If you think of all the places in which he campaigned in his life, he must have had tremendous energy.

It is this drive and energy that earn him the loyalty of his troops.

Aurelian is very successful as a military leader. He knows his troops. He works very effectively with them.

I'm sure he rewards them on a regular basis.

He can, I think, depend on a significant ongoing support from the soldiers.

They...they trust him.

You know, they see him as their leader.

Having brought these soldiers the glory and honor of unimaginable victory,

Aurelian never suspects the betrayal that festers among their ranks.

The assassination of Aurelian is again one of these things that's very difficult to explain,

particularly at a time when he has been so successful militarily,

when the troops should feel satisfied with that success and with their rewards.

Their treacherous act leaves the empire in shock.

As far as we know, the news that the emperor was dead were received with disbelief and a lot of sadness.

He was buried with great pomp in a magnificent tomb at the very spot where he was assassinated.

Rome mourns the loss of a great emperor, one who has saved the empire from certain collapse.

I think Aurelian's importance lies in the fact that it's the beginning of the Roman recovery.

As it were, the central Roman machine coming back to life, and he managed to reunite the empire,

to bring it all under his central control.

But in the end, not even the god of soldiers could protect him from the swords of traitors,

and the empire he had worked so hard to unite fragments again.

Next on "Rome: Rise and fall of an empire..."

Inheriting an empire ravaged by barbarians and torn apart by rival emperors, one man will emerge victorious.

His name is Constantine.

Fighting under the banner of a new god, he brings unity to divided roman empire.