Original subtitles

The 24th of August, 410AD.

The magnificent city of Rome is under attack.

The ancient capital of the mightiest empire on earth

is at the mercy of a barbarian leader,

thirsting for revenge.

The rich scramble to hide their wealth.

The poor run for their lives.

No-one saw this coming.

The Sack of Rome is one of the iconic events of Western history.

Imagine thousands of men, pouring into your city,

and rushing into your house.

The fear must have been extraordinary.

Rome believed it had

an immortal imperial destiny.

This empire's dominated Europe for 500 years.

How did it come to collapse?

This is the story of three men,

and how their fateful decisions

brought the mighty Roman civilisation to its knees.

A refugee, treated with cruelty and prejudice, driven to violence...

..a weak emperor, blind to the reality beyond his palace walls...

..and a wily general, caught between two worlds,

and trusted by no-one.

They have gambled with Rome's future.

Now the eternal city is running out of time.

Ancient Egypt...

..the Roman Empire...

..the Aztecs of Mexico...

..and the samurai of Japan.

Four great civilisations,

each a pinnacle of human ingenuity and achievement.

Each lasted for centuries.

Their people thought they would endure forever.

Until, suddenly...

CANNON FIRES LOUDLY

..everything changed.

These civilisations faced challenges

that are all too familiar today.

THUNDERCLAP

Climate catastrophe...

..pandemic...

..war.

Challenges for which ancient societies had few solutions.

But what if there was a place that had the answers to what went wrong?

A place full of secrets and stories.

A repository of memory, stretching back through time.

The British Museum,

home to more than eight million artefacts,

is a record of how and why

the greatest civilisations rose to power,

and then spectacularly fell.

Its treasures are the human traces that survived disaster.

But might they also hold lessons for our own future?

Every civilisation throughout history has had an expiry date.

These great societies,

the seeds of their destruction

are sown within the society, they're already there.

No civilisation ever thinks it's going to fall.

But the question is - what can we learn from the past?

Rome is the largest city in the world.

Home to over 700,000 people -

traders and artisans,

senators and slaves.

Arriving to Rome and entering from one of the gates

of its wall in late 4th century,

we would see a city

at the height of its splendour.

Rome is still this monumental city.

It has this history of emperors building things.

You would still have seen things like temples,

the Forum and the Curia, the Senate House,

the Colosseum.

Rome's magnificence is built on the spoils of empire.

800 years earlier,

Roman armies began to carve out a growing territory

that, by the 4th century, stretches across 1.7 million square miles.

From Britain to North Africa

and the Middle East.

The empire is so vast it's now split into two halves -

East and West -

each ruled by its own emperor.

Around 40 million people, a fifth of the world's population,

now live under Roman rule,

in a heady mix of cultures and languages.

It's all held together by a ruthless military might...

..but also by the benefits of a shared peace,

and pioneering advances in technology.

Aqueducts for clean water,

concrete for construction...

..and a complex road network that brings trade and prosperity.

In the western half of the empire,

a handful of aristocratic families have profited more than most

from Rome's imperial success.

They need a strong emperor to keep the status quo.

But their new ruler is a major cause for concern.

Emperor Honorius

is young and inexperienced.

Honorius was not from Rome.

He is not even born in Rome.

He's born in the east.

He really spends most of his youth

living amongst the other courtiers.

He's made a few visits west to see his father,

the previous emperor,

but his first big trip

is the one that ends up being permanent.

He comes over and, shortly thereafter, his father dies.

The accession of a child like Honorius

is extremely odd.

In fact, in previous eras,

Roman politics had never tolerated child emperors.

The personal leadership of the emperor in earlier eras

is just too important. You can't have a child on the throne.

By 395, it is common practice

for Romans to prostrate themselves,

literally crawl on all fours, in front of the emperor.

This was an act of humility and homage.

It was required as part of the imperial ritual.

Imagine how tough that would have been

if you were an extremely wealthy, successful senator

and here you are crawling before a child.

Honorius is remembered

as an indifferent, foolish,

self-absorbed emperor.

Honorius is completely at sea.

Left to his own devices, I think Honorius would have lasted

no more than ten minutes.

It's inevitable that someone else is pulling the strings.

General Stilicho.

Stilicho is this really interesting combination

of loyal servant to the empire,

but also, perhaps a little bit of a conniving opportunist.

Stilicho is commander of Rome's Western armies.

Under the previous emperor, he had become a trusted adviser.

Then he married into the imperial family, consolidating his power.

Now, no-one has greater influence over the young Honorius.

Stilicho is competent militarily, politically astute.

He knew the type of alliances that you had to make

with the key civilian and military leaders,

how to appoint people who were loyal to him.

He absolutely has his eyes on protecting Honorius,

doing what he can to keep Honorius in power.

Of course, if Honorius isn't in power, neither is he.

Honorius needs to persuade Rome's elite

that he can project absolute power across his domains.

He's not the only Roman emperor to face such a challenge.

This is the very first emperor -

Augustus.

Augustus was one of the most brilliant minds.

A real game-changer,

someone who changed forever the path of history.

The head of a bronze statue of Augustus

is a really extraordinary object

that we have from the 1st century BCE.

Partly extraordinary because it still has its eyes.

We're not used to seeing these eyes.

We're used to very vacant sort of eye sockets of our Roman figures.

But it still has its eyes, which make it a really

fascinating object to see, and a really evocative object.

When this statue was cast,

Augustus had just defeated his rivals

in a brutal civil war to lead Rome.

It was the first time one man ruled alone.

And Augustus used this image to cement his reign.

What we see with Augustus is actually a bit of a change

in the way that Roman politicians, Roman statesmen were presented.

Previously, age was seen as a sort of way of communicating wisdom,

so statues and busts of wrinkles

and, you know, signs of age on a face was something

that you would have been used to seeing.

Augustus doesn't do this.

Rather, he wants to put forward the sort of youthfulness, I guess,

of a ruler and the vitality of a ruler.

This is a young, kind of a movie star.

He's going to attract everyone with his magnetic beauty,

and make everybody want to follow him.

So in that sense it's a real shift of gears

from the traditional way of representing authority.

The scale is larger than life,

giving Augustus the appearance of a god.

And yet, this object is also a cautionary tale

for future rulers, like Honorius.

Look closely

and you can see microscopic grains of sand embedded in the bronze.

They tell a story of the dangers of imperial ambition.

The reason why the head is so well-preserved

is because it was purposefully buried.

In 30BC, Augustus's army invaded Egypt...

..and expanded into Kush, to the south.

But the Kushites resisted

and pushed back.

They looted Roman treasures,

pulling the head of Augustus's statue from its body.

They carried their prize back to their capital, Meroe,

where they buried it under the steps of a temple.

Kushites could now literally rub their feet in the face of Augustus.

So, in a very disrespectful and insulting way,

every time someone went on pilgrimage to this temple,

what they did was ultimately walking on the head of the emperor,

the most powerful leader of the world of that time.

It was a sign that aggressive empire-building comes at a cost.

The downside to invading your neighbours is that, often,

you don't just create new frontiers but also new enemies.

In the US military there's a term for this - blowback.

Rome suffered from blowback again and again.

Augustus had been an ambitious young emperor

who presided over a fragile peace.

Now, four centuries later,

the young Honorius needs to persuade the people

that he too can successfully unite his fractious empire.

His adviser, Stilicho, embarks on a campaign

to construct a new image for Honorius.

One of power, stability, and authority.

The start of a new regime was always marked by

a ceremonial pay-out to the military of gold coins.

These coins aren't just sent out as spending money, but as propaganda.

Passed from hand to hand,

they can reach all corners of a sprawling empire.

These early coins, slapped with the head of Honorius,

are part of a meet and greet campaign.

You wouldn't know from the coin that this is somebody

who's underage for being a full-fledged Roman emperor.

It's the way he's shown in profile with a diadem

and this sort of slightly 1980s hairstyle.

But something that I think is particularly interesting

on this coin is if you turn it over and you look at the back...

..you have Honorius standing with

his foot on the neck of a soldier,

and Victory is just up in the corner, holding her crown,

as if she's going to crown him.

And it's a very brazen military image for him to choose,

given that he is not yet battle-tested.

Victory is the crucial characteristic

of a legitimate emperor.

This is the claim that's being made on that coin,

that Honorius is a legitimate emperor.

But Honorius and General Stilicho will soon discover

that success requires more than mere propaganda.

Little does this regime know that in just a few short years,

their world would be turned upside down,

the empire would be shook at its very foundations,

and one of them would end up in his grave.

BIRD OF PREY CRIES

The man destined to become Rome's nemesis

is leading a rebellion in the Balkans,

attacking Roman forces

and taking captives and plunder wherever he can.

His name is Alaric.

Alaric is a legend.

We know he's an experienced soldier, and an admired and feared one.

Unlike a traditional monarchy, or indeed the Roman Empire,

he's not holding power because his father held power.

He is the one they are following because they choose to follow him.

Alaric is charismatic, intelligent and very capable.

He's also a bitter man,

a man who has good reasons to be going rogue.

The root of Alaric's anger stretches back to his childhood.

Soldiers manning Rome's northern border, along the River Danube,

begin to see large crowds of people gathering and asking for help.

If a huge number of people end up on your border,

it means that something has gone really, really wrong.

My experience is that people really don't want to move.

They don't want to leave their countries.

And with the kind of numbers we're talking about, I think it means

that there was conflict raging and they had to come.

These are Alaric's people -

the Goths.

Their homeland lies northeast of Rome,

stretching from present-day Romania to Ukraine.

For generations, they've lived as warriors and farmers,

but now, a rival people, the Huns, attack...

..forcing the Goths to flee south.

Something like 100,000 Gothic men, women and children

come towards the Danube River.

It's a migration on a scale the Romans have not encountered.

Even today, 100,000 people is a lot of people.

And any government would look at 100,000 people and see a problem.

In Roman times, they will have been looking at their own resources

and thinking about, how can they look after

people who need to be fed, who need to be housed,

so they don't become a problem further down the line?

Despite the diverse populations within their empire,

the Romans are uneasy about such a vast influx of people.

And it plays into deep-seated prejudices.

Racial stereotypes are so enduring

because they're ubiquitous in ancient culture,

just like they are in ours.

This mask is meant to evoke somebody from the North -

a barbarian.

The word "barbarian" comes from the Greek "barbaros",

and the Greeks invented it because, to them,

it sounded like the "bar, bar, bar, bar,"

the babbling of peoples whose languages they could not understand.

The Romans, like the Greeks,

conceptualised race as being essentially environmental.

The further you get away from Mediterranean,

the further you get away from that environment

that was so familiar to them,

the more likely you are to be a barbarian.

The Roman stereotype of the barbarian

was always defined by certain traits -

clothing, hairstyle, customs.

They're savage, they're less cultured,

they always have looser hair.

A theatre mask designed to depict a barbarian has to convey that.

A giveaway is the ponytail.

You might notice that the man's hair is pulled back.

It looks like a kind of man bun.

That man bun is the dead giveaway.

Romans don't wear man buns.

These were the kinds of stereotypes that Romans would have absorbed

by going to the theatre,

and really internalised them,

and that can be weaponised in all sorts of ways.

It's a stereotype you can appeal to,

to rally other people to support you.

The 20th, early 21st century

has seen more examples of that than one can easily count.

Reducing people to a stereotype

means you don't have to regard them as full human beings,

usually with tragic results.

Romans may see the Goths as primitive savages,

but they have their uses,

working in the fields, or as conscripts in the army.

Under orders to remove their weapons,

the soldiers at the border begin to let the Goths in

in increasing numbers.

The problem is not migration.

The problem is not displaced peoples.

Moving is fundamental to being human.

It is the reason why we survived through the Ice Age.

The problem is how governments respond to displaced people.

You can choose to take them into your society

or to make them into an enemy.

A number of the local Roman officials see these refugees

and think, "Right, how can I profit from the situation?"

Only give food to those that are willing to pay.

Why actually give them the good food when you can send them

anything else that you might have, like dog meat?

Can you take away some of the Goths,

sell them off into slavery?

If I was giving advice to the Roman government,

I would say be careful. These people are competent soldiers.

You know, the last thing you want to do is create a situation

where people feel that they're being treated cruelly

and that they owe you nothing.

THUNDERCLAP

Enraged by their humiliation at the hands of the Romans,

30,000 Goths stage a fightback.

The battle is a catastrophic defeat for the Roman Empire.

The larger estimates think that 20,000 Roman soldiers are killed

on this battlefield in one afternoon.

It means the Goths are now inside the empire.

There's no way that they can be driven out again.

The crushing defeat forces the Romans to do a deal.

They give the Goths land to settle

in the wilder regions of the Balkans.

In return, the Goths supply warriors for the Roman army.

It's not actually a long-term solution to the problem.

Effectively, it buys time,

another decade or so of relative peace.

And then we come to Alaric.

Alaric has followed the path of many Goth refugees

and served in the Roman army.

He has been a loyal commander for four years,

until the Romans betray him.

At a battle in the Alps, Alaric and his fellow Goths

are sacrificed as cannon fodder for the Roman Empire.

The Goths were put on the front line.

After all, they'll be effective shock troops.

And they are effectively abandoned there.

10,000 Goths were killed.

Alaric was there. He's a survivor.

He cannot possibly have forgotten.

What we have is a two-tier society.

Promises have been broken to them time and time again,

and no respect is given to them, and at the end of the day,

they feel they have to rise up and fight for their rights.

Alaric takes the opportunity to mount a major rebellion

at the head of these Gothic soldiers who'd fought under that campaign,

I think certainly responding to the level of casualties

that they'd suffered on it.

But for the Emperor Honorius and General Stilicho,

an uprising is something they can ill afford.

Because while there is plenty of money swilling around

the Roman Empire,

less and less of it is going into the imperial coffers,

and more into those of Rome's super-rich.

This casket is for a very elite woman.

One of the 1%.

The lid contains a portrait with a man and a woman

standing shoulder to shoulder.

This is a classic marriage scene.

We do know for sure it belonged to a woman named Projecta

because there's an inscription on the edge of it.

The inscription refers to Projecta as well as a man named Secundus.

And we believe that this casket was given to them as a wedding present.

These are two incredibly wealthy people.

This would have been the wedding of the year.

It's elaborately carved

with scenes all over, on almost every side of it.

There is a beautiful image of Venus sort of stepping up out of a bath,

mostly naked.

There's a scene of a procession

of an elite woman to the Roman bathhouse,

which is the place of glamour and luxury in the Roman world.

A lot of objects like the casket are really about showing off

ostentatious wealth, making it very clear

that you are in that very small strata of society

where you can spend most of your time doing very little,

engaged in pleasurable activities.

This celebration of luxury is part of a worrying trend -

the 1% hoovering up the wealth of the wider empire.

There are estimations that 20 families owned

all of Southern France and Italy, for example.

Recent excavations in different areas of Rome have uncovered

absolutely luxurious urban residences

that date precisely to this period.

They were really living la dolce vita.

The wealthy of late antique Rome

are a lot like this super-wealthy billionaire class of today.

They live in these enormous houses that they had created by

cobbling together a bunch of preexisting buildings,

just like we see today in cities like New York and London.

This is a family getting richer by the day.

And yet the emperor is not seeing the benefit of this boom time

for the wealthy elite.

The rich, in principle, are supposed to pay taxes,

but things don't really change in history.

And yesterday, as it happens today,

those who have connections find more or less legal

and more or less conventional way not to pay taxes.

This kind of tax avoidance is squeezing the emperor's finances,

forcing the regime to lean instead on those who can least afford it.

The burden seems to be falling on the lower classes.

The vast majority of Romans are living in tenement blocks,

in crowded, shared spaces,

rat and cockroach infested.

They are living very different lives

to the lives that the wealthy are leading.

Growing wealth inequality is the most common and crucial element

in societal collapse.

It corrodes the social fabric.

Wealth inequality, in short, hollows out societies,

leaving them to be a brittle shell, which can be cracked asunder

by numerous different shocks,

such as disease, climate change and invaders.

THUNDERCLAP

For the last seven years, Alaric and his army

have been plundering what they can in the Balkans.

Now, he marches his massed forces towards Italy.

Alaric is in search of a deal, and that is a more recognised position

within the Roman imperial structure,

payments for his dependants,

and recognition for himself as an imperial general.

Alaric doesn't want to destroy the Roman Empire.

He wants to be a part of it,

if he can overcome Roman prejudice against the Goths.

His great problem, Stilicho, is in the way.

Stilicho and Alaric may be on opposing sides,

but the two men have more in common than Stilicho would like to admit.

Stilicho is actually half-barbarian.

Half-Roman on his mother's side,

and half-Vandal on his father's.

The Vandals were close neighbours of the Goths

beyond the northern frontier.

Stilicho followed his barbarian father into the army,

and rose on merit.

He is an example of how Rome could assimilate outsiders,

when it chose to.

The Roman Empire has controlled a vast region for 400 years.

And one of the secrets is integrating people.

You don't actually treat the peoples you've absorbed as barbarians.

If you learnt the right languages,

if you became part of the Roman system,

you got all the benefits -

Roman law, Roman trade networks.

Stilicho has also committed to a Roman way of life.

But his journey to the top has not been easy.

If you're born in a country where you're a minority,

very often you have to show more resilience,

you have to work harder, you have to prove yourself,

because some of the, you know, the narrative around who you are

and what you're about and what your community are about

is extremely negative.

Stilicho was a Roman by upbringing, by culture.

He didn't identify himself as something separate

from the Roman Empire.

Unfortunately, there is a strong faction within Italy,

within the imperial court, who've never liked the prominence

of a half-Vandal soldier dominating affairs.

THUNDERCLAP

If Alaric hopes Stilicho, a fellow barbarian,

will help him cut a deal,

he's much mistaken.

Stilicho is a top general.

His job is to quell the rebellion.

I don't think that he's busy thinking,

"Oh, I have a little bit of sympathy for this guy."

Rome is a great military power at that stage.

You use your power.

Alaric and Stilicho finally meet at the Battle of Pollentia.

According to our main source,

Stilicho strikes the barbarians like a thunderbolt.

Alaric is defeated, his wife is taken,

plunder is taken, his people are scattered.

But crucially, Stilicho fails to capture Alaric himself.

It will prove a costly mistake.

THUNDER CRACKS

Honorius begins to hear rumours that his most trusted general

has allowed Alaric to slip through his fingers on purpose,

in a barbarian masterplan to overthrow him.

As soon as his regime is looking a bit shaky,

when other people are getting in Honorius's ear,

then the barbarian card is the obvious one to play.

You can use it both to disparage Stilicho, and also to say

that he's secretly in league with Alaric and always has been.

For Honorius, tales of a palace plot would be all too familiar.

As a child, he had been brought up on stories

of emperors being overthrown,

or murdered.

As well as myths of how the powerful punish those who betray them.

He may even have held one such myth in his hands.

The Lycurgus Cup,

perhaps the greatest single surviving example

of magnificent late Roman glassware.

A cup crafted so beautifully

that it does indeed reflect light in different colours.

From green to red,

depending on where the light comes from.

If people are drinking by candlelight

or the wine has been poured in,

and that's changing the colour as well,

so it's making these marvellous effects.

This cup must have belonged to someone with extraordinary wealth,

perhaps a member of the imperial court,

even the emperor himself.

The cup shows the myth of the King Lycurgus,

who offended the God of Wine, Bacchus,

and as punishment was entrapped in a grapevine,

had stones hurled at him by Bacchus's followers.

The god punishes the upstart Lycurgus

by putting him to death.

Probably the message of that cup was don't get too big for your breeches.

For Honorius, the myth offers some stark advice...

..get rid of those who are a threat to you.

He becomes increasingly paranoid.

As society becomes top-heavy, you suddenly have more elites,

generals, wannabe emperors

competing for a small, limited number of high-status positions.

We see this again and again in Rome.

It was always a game of thrones.

And it leads to worse decisions.

The emperor has heard news of multiple barbarian incursions

into Roman territory.

Incursions General Stilicho has failed to repel.

Palace insiders spin these failures as proof of Stilicho's treachery...

.pushing Honorius's paranoia to breaking point.

A figure of the imperial court finally convinced Honorius

that Stilicho, being half-Vandal, was a barbarian after all,

and therefore he would have inevitably conspired

with other barbarians to take over the imperial throne.

Honorius reaches a fateful decision,

and orders Stilicho's arrest.

Honorius is growing up.

Stilicho's been the dominant figure at his court for over 13 years.

It's pretty normal for this kind of child emperor

to start kicking over the traces as they get older.

It certainly was a decision that had really serious consequences.

Stilicho's faced with a choice.

Some of his colleagues are urging him to take the choice

of actually going into rebellion against the ruling regime.

He says, "No, I'm not going to cause mayhem

"at the heart of the Western Empire at a moment of stress."

That's an extraordinary testament to his loyalty

to the basic Roman system.

Stilicho has given Rome his allegiance.

Rome has repaid him with suspicion...

..and a death sentence.

History will judge it a catastrophic error.

Stilicho's execution means disaster for the Western Empire.

It is a chronically misguided, short-sighted action.

Honorius has just removed the one man

who could either do a deal with the barbarians,

or defeat them in battle.

CROWS CAW

He's also unleashed dark forces that will bring carnage to Italy...

..as violence against immigrants erupts.

Stilicho's execution triggers a bloodbath.

The opposition to Stilicho

flows into a major assault

on anybody of barbarian descent

or related to the barbarians in Italy.

There's no question that the level of severity,

the ferocity of this massacre, going after not just the men,

but going after their wives and children,

this went way beyond the kind of political purge

that you would normally expect to see

following the death of somebody who's a major leader.

The extent to this suggests

that there was some layer of prejudice at work here.

But if the massacre is meant to terrify the barbarians

into submission, it does exactly the opposite.

BIRD OF PREY CRIES

You can't appeal to the emperor.

You can't appeal to the local population.

Who might protect you?

There is one very obvious candidate - Alaric.

And so a lot of these soldiers who had been loyal to Stilicho

now flood to join Alaric.

Estimates are, perhaps, 10,000 soldiers

now swell Alaric's forces.

Not only is his greatest opponent dead

and the western military is in chaos,

but Alaric's own following has been greatly strengthened.

Alaric goes for the jugular.

He marches unopposed through Italy to Rome.

His forces surround the city

and cut off the food supply.

Rome is still the single most prestigious city in the empire.

And so Alaric is threatening to sack that city,

as leverage for the things he actually most wants.

So what does he demand?

Gold, silver -

both in thousands of pounds of quantity.

He wants somewhere to settle.

And he wants an official Roman title,

the one Stilicho held -

Commander in Chief of the Western Army.

Our sources about the siege of Rome

are quite unanimous in its severity.

People are starving. Our sources even talk about cannibalism.

The citizens of Rome are suffering,

but their emperor is not suffering with them.

He has retreated to the relative safety of Ravenna,

over 200 miles away, on Italy's Adriatic coast.

Numerous people go up to beg Honorius to help,

to send an army, to make a deal with Alaric.

Our sources report that Honorius declares

that he will never do a deal with one of Alaric's race.

What it's suggesting is an unwillingness on Honorius's part

to wake up and smell the coffee, that the Goths are here

as a permanent structure within the Western Empire,

and you have to find a way of living with them.

You can see why he might resist that.

Honorius has grown up in a world of total Roman dominance.

He doesn't realise that the world has changed.

Alaric gets tired of waiting

and he decides it's time to just sack Rome.

The Romans stereotype Alaric and his people

and, in a way, force him to become the thing that they're fearful of.

Alaric's followers are targeting the noble houses.

They're targeting everything they can basically gather together

and carry off.

SCREAMING AND SHOUTING

Amazingly, some of Rome's treasures from that time survive.

They offer a glimpse of the riches the Goths discovered,

and bear witness to the violence they unleashed.

The Projecta casket is part of a hoard of objects,

almost all silver, nearly 60 of them,

discovered in the ruins of a Roman house in the city of Rome.

What's particularly interesting

is the dating of the objects

align very, very attractively

with the Sack of Rome.

It's pretty likely that this hoard was created

precisely at the moment

when Alaric was at the gates of the city,

and this is one family's attempt to preserve its wealth, its heirlooms.

Why would no-one come back

for such a very expensive luxury collection of treasures?

It's possible that some of the family members fled the city.

It is, of course, entirely possible that these were people

who did indeed fall victim to the Goths.

The Goths are primarily interested

in taking every single thing they can carry,

and bringing it out with them.

But it also, importantly, includes people.

Human trafficking, captive-taking,

was one of the primary forms of booty in the ancient world.

And this was a major goal of the army when they came through.

Honorius, inexperienced, isolated,

is entirely unable to comprehend what has happened.

Honorius was told that Rome had just fallen,

and the reaction of the emperor was

an immediate expression of grief and desperation.

But what he said was,

"But I had fed her with my own hands just a few hours ago."

Because Honorius had a hen house

and one of the hens was called Rome.

Such was the idea that Rome could not fall.

After three long days of violence and plunder,

the Goths finally leave Rome.

As a psychological event, the Sack of Rome sends a shock wave

across the Roman Empire.

It is one of those events where, when you heard about it,

you remember where you were when news reached you,

like 9/11.

Events that trigger a spark across a consciousness.

Nobody could accept the idea

that the most powerful city of all times

had eventually capitulated.

Alaric and the Goths have forged a path that others will follow.

The Gothic migration, the refugee crisis of the 370s,

effectively marks the beginning

of the so-called decline and fall of the Roman Empire.

The Goths will eventually form their own kingdoms on Roman territory.

It becomes the model for other barbarian peoples.

One by one, the territories of the former Western Roman Empire

fall away from imperial control.

Rome lost its grip on western Europe over 1,500 years ago...

..with a weak, inexperienced leader,

blinded by paranoia.

What the Romans got wrong

was refusing to understand

the political moment,

the instability, the fragility of the government.

No leader rising to the top

who could calm the situation and end the stand-off.

This didn't have to happen.

It was a two-tier society that favoured the rich...

..while failing to solve the challenges of mass migration.

This story is a refugee crisis gone wrong.

It is something we are now very familiar with in our modern world.

The fall of Rome, for many people, was a liberation

from a predatory autocracy which over-taxed its citizens,

mistreated immigrants and persisted through conquest.

Do not mourn the empire.

The Romans did not believe their empire was about to collapse.

But it did.

Our world order will change.

That will always be the great lesson of history.

Egypt, a civilisation that has thrived for 3,000 years,

is torn apart by a toxic dynasty,

forcing the great Cleopatra to face civil war,

famine and foreign invasion,

threatening to end the age of the Pharaohs.