Mary Beard: The Origins Of The Ancient Roman Empire

The story of the Roman Empire opens with a fairy tale. Once upon a time, not far from here, a princess gave birth to twin sons. The king, her wicked uncle, fearing that the boys would one day become his rivals, ordered his faithful servants to throw them into the river. But as it was in flood, they just left them in a basket at the water's edge, from where they floated downstream. Rescued on the bank by a mother wolf who suckled them, they were later found by a local shepherd who reared them as his own. Their names were Romulus and Remus. And they went on to found Rome. This small, ordinary town in the middle of Italy became the centre of an empire, stretching from the fringes of the Sahara... ..to the damp moorlands of northern Britain, from Spain to Israel, the Nile to the Rhine. It has framed the geography of modern Europe and defined the way we think of empire now, transforming the Western world through revolutions in trade. This is one of the first examples of globalisation. Agriculture, just olives, olives and more damn olives. Art, law and architecture. This is where even I get a bit gobsmacked by Roman engineering. There are plenty of conquests and defeats too, battles and butchery. But there are also bigger questions. How did it work? And what difference did it make? Why did the empire eventually fall? And how did it all come about in the first place? Was it ambition? Was it just luck? If we really want to answer that question, we have to go back to what the Romans themselves said about it, to their doubts, their debates and their conversations. Because they wondered just as much as we do about what set them apart. It's on the Appian Way, one of the main roads out of Rome, going south deep into Italy, that we first get a clear glimpse into the lives of the early Romans. Buon sera. Buon sera. A period long before the marble columns and the Colosseum and one that's often overlooked. This tomb was built 500 years after the city was founded. It's a very long way from Romulus. But what's written here tells us for the first time what some Romans felt and thought, what their mindset was. In a way, what we really know about the Romans starts here. This isn't Rome as we now imagine it, but it is the grandest thing they could do at the time. Back then, it was new. This is the tombstone of the first man to be buried here. Scipio Barbatus. That means Beardy Scipio. And it tells us a bit about his excellent qualities. He is fortis, weir and sapiens. He's a strong, brave man, but he's clever, he's wise. This is quite strange. It says his appearance was equal to his virtus. So his appearance was as good as his virtue. He really looked the part. He cut a dash. And it ends with his conquests. He suegit omne Lucanum. He suppressed the whole of Lucania, which is a region in South Italy. Obsides que abducit. And he took hostages. So it's very easy to see what these people's priorities were. But it's kind of more than that, because in some ways this is just a few lines of an epitaph. But in another way, this is the first short, surviving historical narrative from any Roman that we have. I mean, this is the beginning of Roman history writing. It might be 500 years after the age of the founders, but this is actually the first place where we can really see the Romans. We get a very vivid picture of a people committed to conquest and to the glory that came with military victory. But that's actually like everyone else around them. So what set the Romans apart? With so little direct evidence, the best place to look for the answer is in the stories that they told and their own elaborate speculations on the city's origins. And in particular, in the mythical story of Romulus and Remus, the brothers suckled by a wolf. It was continually told and retold, and it contained a message about Rome's conquests and internal wars. There's actually a little more Roman history in the myth. It would be easy to dismiss the story of Romulus and Remus as if it was just a fairy tale, just a myth. And it certainly isn't history in our terms. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't have a lot to tell us about how the Romans thought about themselves, what their cultural priorities and anxieties were. Why a wolf? The story wouldn't have been the same if it had been a cow or a sheep. It was the fact that they were rescued by a ferocious predator that revealed the destiny of the twins. Some Romans questioned the detail. The Latin for wolf, lupa, also means prostitute. So was it actually a prostitute who came to the rescue? But in broad terms, they believed that the tale was true. In fact, when later they came to inscribe in the forum a list of the names of all those generals who had scored the biggest, or bloodiest, victories for Rome, people like the Scipios, who did they start the list with? Romulus. One person who's not on the list is Romulus's twin brother, Remus. Because, it's said, they had a massive row over where exactly to establish the new town. It ended up with Romulus murdering his twin, an act which reflected the bloody civil wars that would later blight the politics of Rome. It must be one of the oddest foundation stories in the whole history of the world. Not only does it involve a pair of twins, not a single founder, but then one of the twins goes and kills the other. That's to say, fratricide lay at the very beginning of the Roman story. Brother killing brother was hardwired into Rome. Establishing his new settlement on the Palatine Hill, Romulus became its sole ruler. Romulus's first problem was that he had hardly any citizens for his new city. So he declared it an asylum and he welcomed criminals, runaway slaves, the dispossessed and the down-and-out from the whole of Italy. It's another strange aspect to the tale. Whereas the average ancient city liked to imagine that its original inhabitants had sprung miraculously from the soil of the homeland, the Romans imagined that their city had originally been a city of asylum seekers. It was an attempt to give a mythic dimension to one of Rome's later most distinctive characteristics, that it not only welcomed outsiders, but that eventually it spread Roman citizenship throughout the empire. Romulus's next problem was that he had no women and therefore his city had no future. But none of the people in the neighbouring towns were prepared to give their daughters to be Roman wives. They were actually nastily insulting and made no secret of the fact that they didn't think a band of runaways was great husband material. So Romulus had to resort to a trick. So the story goes, Romulus invited his neighbours, the Sabines, to a religious festival. In the middle of the proceedings, he gave a signal for his men to abduct all the young women among the visitors and to carry them off as their wives. This is the famous Rape of the Sabine Women and it's an almost uncomfortably frank image. This woman here has been captured and she's trying to get away, but she's not going to make it. This one has already collapsed. And another is trying to flee, but it's hopeless. The rape might have been a response to a terrible Roman humiliation, but it was still a violent assault. These women are not willing, they're victims. It's an incident that the Romans discussed and debated and displayed ever after. Some of Rome's enemies said that this was absolutely typical Roman behaviour. If they wanted something, they just went out and grabbed it. In the story, the families of the Sabine Women, as you'd expect, hit back at the Romans in what would be Rome's first war and first victory, which was commemorated in a rather strange monument at the heart of the city. Most people walk straight past here, but it's where the Romans were convinced that the heart of that battle took place, in what became the Forum, but what was then not much more than a swamp. And they marked the spot where one of Rome's first enemies fell to his death. This was just one of a series of monuments that imprinted the origins of Rome onto the face of the later city. If you wanted, you could go up into the Palatine Hill and see what was supposed to be the Hut of Romulus himself, still a tourist attraction in the 4th century AD. The myths of Rome were there for all to see, and with them, the problems of being Roman. Fratricide, rape, violence and constant conflict. Rome, at the beginning, was ruled by kings, Romulus and six others to follow. But the citizens eventually rejected what they'd come to see as a tyranny and established a kind of democracy in which every year the people elected officials to govern the city and fight its wars. And soon after that, there were signs that Rome was beginning to grow. Why is it that an ordinary little town by the Tiber became something much, much bigger than that? The honest truth is we don't know why it happened, but we do know when. We can almost touch it, almost. Because in the early 4th century BC, the Romans built this massive city wall around their town. Now, there's more to this than just defence. This is a big statement that Rome has arrived. And even more interesting, a lot of the stone they used to build it came from the territory of a little town a few miles up the road that they'd just taken over. This is one of the first hints of Roman expansion. Rome's growth didn't stop at its walls. It expanded beyond them deep into the Italian peninsula. We shouldn't imagine Romans crowding around maps plotting world domination. For a start, they didn't have maps. And in any case, they weren't any more militaristic than their neighbours. Early Italy was a violent place. So the question isn't why they went to war, but why they went on winning. On the traditional pattern of warfare, to put it a bit crudely, every year the lads of one place would go out and do over a neighbouring town and if they hit lucky, they'd come back with slaves and cattle. It wasn't really organised warfare. It was glorified raiding. What the Romans did was establish permanent relationships with the people they beat. Of course, they came back with slaves and cattle. But they demanded for the future that the defeated towns should provide troops for the Roman army. And that cumulatively gave them a huge advantage. Because in the ancient world, it wasn't high-tech military hardware that counted, it was how many boots you could get on the ground. As a city on its own, Rome could never have dominated the whole of Italy. What's crucial is the relationship they formed with other people. Rome not only conquered, but it incorporated its enemies. And that's what's unique. By the 3rd century BC, Rome could call upon more than 700,000 soldiers. And how they secured that manpower can be seen on the city's first gold coins. Jonathan Williams is the Deputy Director of the British Museum. What is going on here? And I can read Roma, Rome, underneath. It's a very complicated scene above, but I can't quite work out. So what we've got here is, we've got a couple of men here, standing either side of another man, who seems to be kneeling down, holding something in his arms. And what he's holding is a pig, an upturned pig. Now, this is a pretty strange scene to us, but any Roman would have known what this was meant to represent. It's a scene of oath-taking, promises being given and accepted between two sides. And this is how the Romans did it. Strange to us, but it's clearly a kind of meaningful ceremony for your Romans. Some people think that this might be a mythological scene. The oath being taken by Romulus, the first king of the Romans, together with the Sabines, one of the earliest alliances the Romans made with one of their allies. But it could more generally just be a reference to that whole system of alliances between the Romans and all the other peoples of Italy that were so important and lay at the foundation of the ways in which the Romans came to dominate and rule the whole of the Italian peninsula. And so what this coin is doing, in a sense, is kind of...it's broadcasting, or sort of creating an image of Rome as the centre of these alliances with other peoples. Absolutely, yes. It's broadcasting messages to the Allies, but also to the Romans themselves, about how faithful we are, we're good, solid, loyal allies, but you'd better stick with us, because you don't want to know what happens if you split on us. Rome's expansion was more improvised than planned. From the small walled town, through a patchwork of alliances with friends and conquered foes, Rome controlled most of Italy. And from that, the Romans soon came into conflict with the other great superpower of the day, the city of Carthage. Because there was actually another empire out there to rival Rome. The Romans' network of alliances put pressure on them to intervene in support of friends and allies further and further afield. It's a bit like what happens to modern superpowers. One particular request for help had defining consequences. During a dispute between two Sicilian towns, different groups appealed to Rome and to Carthage. After intense debate in Rome between those spoiling for a fight and those who thought Rome was far better off out of it, the Romans decided to go in. And that was how Rome and Carthage first came face-to-face in conflict. Across a narrow strip of water, the island of Sicily, more Greek than Italian, became the setting of Rome's first overseas war, a naval war against the Western Mediterranean's most powerful seafaring state. The Romans hadn't had or needed fighting ships before. The story goes that what they did is find a Carthaginian ship and copy it over and over again. It was a big turning point, and in 241 BC, these waters were crowded with the dreadnoughts of the ancient world, fighting it out in a final, messy battle. Hey, George, we actually found it. All right. Another M for him. It's the wreckage from this battle that marine archaeologist Geoff Royal and his team have been discovering and raising from the seabed. It's really quite difficult to make sense of this. I've been looking ever so hard, and I keep thinking of every little rock on the bed of the sea as some bit of Roman or Carthaginian military equipment. But when you actually come across one of these amphorae just lying there, you know, detritus of the battle, it really hits you in the face. You're seeing it literally as it fell, as it were, with your own eyes. It's quite extraordinary. What's the most memorable thing you've come across like this? The Rams are always very memorable, because it's a really big deal to have found them. It was one of the objectives of the survey. And, of course, yeah, when we see them, it's always exciting. Built into the ship's bows, these Rams did exactly that, rammed the enemy vessels. But what we've seen from the evidence is, obviously, there was a lot of destruction at sea level, or at sea surface level. So all of that is spread out, the helmets, the Rams. The Rams themselves all have frontal damage. Now you've got 11 Rams, 10 from this side. So they're actually going head to head. Or hitting something. Basically, you just run into each other. It's just, you know, it's like kind of the dodgems without the dodge. Yeah. Your sight lines at sea, and the speeds that they would have been going, you had hour and a half, hour and 45, nearly two hours, to see that this is going to happen. You've got time to change your mind. Yeah. And if you don't change your mind, and you lose, everyone on the ship's dead. Yeah. And it's thanks to Geoff's work that I can get my hands on some of the actual remains of this battle. This extraordinary object is one of the bronze Rams that would have been fitted to the front of the ships underneath the waterline. This one clearly did pierce an enemy ship because part of a Carthaginian plank is still fixed to it. It's quite nicely decorated. There's a helmet here, kind of helmet logo with feather plumes. And all down here is a wonderful trace of Roman officialdom. It says, Lucius Quinctius, the cuistor, that's the quality control agent, approved this Ram, sort of marvellous Roman administrative efficiency. Actually, a wonderful contrast with the one Carthaginian Ram that's been discovered, which has on it, instead, may the god Baal, you know, strike your ships and make a hole in them. In some ways, the most interesting and most moving object to have been discovered is this helmet, a Roman helmet, and it came complete with its cheek pieces, which would have protected the fighter's face. And it brings you about as close as you can ever get to the individuals who fought, and, in this case, I imagine, died in that great battle. I suspect I might be the first person to put this helmet on since 241 BC. Whoever wore it must have had a bigger head than me, or else there was a lot of padding in it. The end result of all this was that the Carthaginians were pushed out of Sicily altogether and the island became the first overseas territory under Roman control. In a way, you might say that the Roman Empire began here. Rome defeated Carthage twice more. First was the famous occasion when Hannibal pulled off the stunt of crossing the Alps with his elephants, only to lose out eventually on all fronts. The Romans finished the job years later in 146 BC. Whether they were really anxious about Carthaginian recovery or simply wanted to show their muscle, they launched an expedition to North Africa under one of the Scipios and they razed the city to the ground. As one hardline senator had repeatedly insisted, Carthago delenda est. Carthage must be destroyed. We don't know what actually drove Rome to annihilate the city of Carthage. They'd taken over most of the Carthaginian Empire when they defeated Hannibal, so maybe it was a devastating display of imperial self-confidence. But 146 would also be remembered for another city's destruction. This was the year that Rome sacked Corinth, the wealthiest city in Greece. 146 would become ingrained in the minds of every Roman, the year when Rome became so powerful that it no longer had any serious challenges left. The destruction of two of the most famous cities in the Mediterranean changed the rules of the game forever. There was still no sign of a Roman master plan, or that they really wanted actually to govern anywhere, but they now had more power than anyone else, even if they didn't really know how to use it. Basically, the Roman priority was to get their own way. But 146 was also an ambivalent year. Some people certainly celebrated, but others already saw it as the beginning of the end. But there's a logic in the history of empires. When you get to the top, you can only come down. Carthage was wiped from the earth, but Greece was very different, and it gave Rome something more precious than economic profit. It's culture. Conquest didn't just change the people that Rome conquered, it changed Rome too. And it was thanks to Greece that Rome started to become full of marble columns, elegant statues and objets d'art. This was the very beginning of the Rome we know, and also the beginning of a flourishing art market. This was once a great piece of art. It's a statue of Hercules. He was part of the cargo of a shipwreck that's been recovered from the seabed. Not just him, there were more than 30 other marble statues, some bronze ones, some exquisite jewellery, glassware, scientific instruments. They say they found the pips of the very last olives, the cruet, before the disaster. But from our point of view, what's important is that this was a cargo of stuff, one out of many thousands, that was making its way from the Greek world on a one-way ticket to Rome. HE SPEAKS GREEK The Greek world that Rome conquered had a long history of art, theatre and literature. And many Romans felt the cultural traditions of Greece outclassed their own. But Rome not only bought, plundered and emulated Greek culture, Romans wrote themselves into the Greek story, tracing their own origins back to the mythical war between Greeks and Trojans and to the most famous work of Greek literature of all, the Iliad. One crucial character for the Romans was Aeneas, who played a rather minor part on the losing Trojan side in Homer's Iliad. The Romans took the story of Aeneas and ran with it, making him flee from Troy and come to Italy to found the Roman race as a kind of ancestor of Romulus and Remus. It's almost as if they're saying that they didn't just belong in the Greek world, but they actually came from here. The story of Aeneas gave the Romans a stake in the traditions of Greece. But exactly how Greek to be was the topic of the day, with some conservative hardliners arguing that soft Greek culture was destroying old Roman values. There's more to conquest than conquest by sword. There's conquest by book, by word and by culture. One Roman poet later claimed that it wasn't actually the Romans who conquered Greece, but the Greeks who conquered Rome. What he meant by that was the Greeks were really the winners because Rome owed them such a vast cultural debt that went back centuries before the conquest of Corinth. But at the same time, it was Rome's interest in Greek culture, their study, their preservation and their replication of it that's played a big part in keeping that culture alive for us. In a way, I like to think Rome has kind of given us Greece. The Romans had now gained effective control over the entire Mediterranean, the only people ever to have done that. Not always by annexing territory, but simply by being able to get their own way. We think of this empire as the land around the sea. But actually, at the heart of it, there's the Mediterranean itself. It's crucial to understand what's going on across this huge, liquid territory. We aren't talking just about some nice little boats transporting sculptures. The problems of controlling this sea were as important as the ones of controlling Carthage or Corinth. The Mediterranean was the empire's internal sea and main highway. Mare Nostrum, they called it, our sea. It was far cheaper and quicker to travel on the water than by land, but it was dangerous too. That's not just because all you'd need was one storm and you'd have lost everything. There were also bandits and hijackers wanting to get their hands on anything that was sailing. Not just goods, but people too. It was a bit like a motorway swarming with people. A motorway swarming with human traffickers. Rome's overseas conquests had turned thousands and thousands of prisoners into slaves. And that created a demand for more. There were big profits to be made out of the slave trade. Delos was a huge mercantile community and people made loads of money here. One Roman writer called it the biggest market in the whole planet. All sorts of goods must have passed through. Perfumes and spices, sculpture and furniture. But Delos was most famous for being the world capital of the slave trade. And one of the main suppliers of that trade were those bandits and hijackers that the Romans called pirates. For the Romans, a pirate was anyone you didn't like in a ship from small-time chancers to big-time criminals, more like the mafia. It was not an easy relationship and those tough guys in ships proved pretty difficult to control. One day, they were stalking your market. The next day, they turned on you. And that's exactly what we see here. This is a wonderful pair of very distinctively Roman faces. Sunken cheeks and wrinkly, both of them looking a bit sinister. It's kind of tempting to imagine that they were involved in a rather nasty form of business. They're also in a pretty ropey state. They've been smashed and they look a bit burnt. The reason for that actually stems from a key moment in the history of this place. In 69 BC, pirates came here, they torched the place. There was a vast fire and Delos was destroyed. Pirates had their impact at Rome itself too. Fear of pirates provided a reason or excuse for the Romans to take a decision that would set the scene for big political changes that would undermine their democracy and herald one-man rule. Pirates were certainly a nuisance and sometimes dangerous, but the threat could always be manipulated to justify military action. The War on Pirates was a bit like the War on Terror. And in 67 BC, the Roman people voted almost on limited powers to one man to clear the sea of pirates. And that man was Pompey. Pompey the Great, as he was known, got rid of the pirates in just three months and then turned his firepower onto some fabulously wealthy eastern kings, returning to Rome with a bang, a spectacular two-day parade and a massive carnival. The Victory Parade was one of the biggest street parties the Romans ever celebrated. There was the general processing through the streets in his chariot. There was all the booty and spoils and riches he'd brought back home out in front of him and his prisoners walking there too. The idea was that the people in the city should be able to see what the generals and armies had been getting up to abroad and what they brought back. Some people thought the display was terribly vulgar and on occasions people cried in the audience as they watched the poor prisoners go past. But for most Romans, this was a chance to let their hair down... The Getone Queen. Pfft! Not bad! ..and to indulge in the riches that had been won for them. With the party long gone, not much trace of Pompey's triumph is left behind, but tucked away in a corner of a museum, we can see one member of that spectacle's supporting cast. It's not often that you can actually track down an individual object that was trundled through the streets of Rome in a triumphal procession. In fact, this is probably the only one. Its great bronze urn was probably used for mixing up wine and water and honey, and it's actually got the name of one of the kings who Pompey defeated scratched into its rim. This makes me pretty certain that this was one of the treasures, one of thousands upon thousands, that the people of Rome watched go by in Pompey's parade in 61. The empire had been traditionally funded, formed and governed by democratic officials serving for one year, sharing power. The idea had always been to stop anyone becoming a king again, but with Pompey, the Romans began to shelve their rejection of individual power. If you needed to defend or extend the empire, perhaps you had to hand over control to just one man. Yet for a man who revolutionised Rome, he's left very few visible traces. This is a wonderful bit of Roman street archaeology. You might miss it to start with, but the layout of these buildings, this sweeping curved façade, actually matches ancient Roman foundations underneath. And those foundations belonged to a huge, semi-circular auditorium of a theatre. These are the traces of the theatre that Pompey put up with the profits of his eastern campaigns. And they're the first time ever that Roman buildings begin to match the Rome of our imaginations. Huge, monumental, magnificent, designed to impress. Pompey set the benchmark for what an imperial building should look like, and one that later emperors would follow. But he's never become a household name. He's always been overshadowed in the quest for glory and the competition for personal power. The one person that forever after stole the limelight was his great rival, Julius Caesar. Blimey! Off we go! Never done this before! Going in the opposite direction to Pompey, Caesar headed west. When Pompey had been so stunningly and bloodily successful out east, and had come back with such a load of cash and spoils, Caesar, if he wanted to rival him, had only one option, which was to have a great conquest himself. But in one important way, Caesar really outdoes Pompey. Pompey has big victories. Caesar has big victories and writes about them. And the reason why we can go to Alesia, the site of one of Caesar's last victories there, is because we actually have Caesar's own account of it. At Alesia, the army of Gauls had set up camp on a hill. In Caesar's own description, he seems in complete control. Camps were constructed at strategic points, he writes. Pickets were stationed day and night. There was hard fighting on both sides. I had two trenches dug. I erected a rampart and a palisade. When you see the scale of it all, it's that despite what he claims when he writes the story up, Caesar couldn't possibly have had his eye on all the areas of this battlefield. In the end, winning an ancient battle comes down to strength of numbers, starving the enemy out, surprising them from behind, and perhaps most of all, the truth is, it comes down to luck. Luck or not, I'm sure that Caesar himself will be delighted to know we still read his own version of these campaigns. However he won the battle, the real point is that his story has lasted for centuries. And in terms of imperial propaganda, it's a nice proof that the pen really can be mightier, or at least more enduring, than the sword. The leader of the Gauls in their doomed last stand was Vercingetorix. Since then, he's become a hero of modern France, a freedom fighter standing up for the French nation. The irony is that everything we know about Vercingetorix goes back to what Caesar wrote about him. In a way, our Vercingetorix is a Roman creation. Whatever he was really like, the point was that Caesar needed to show that he had defeated a dangerous, brave and ultimately worthy opponent. The Romans would never have thought that there was any kudos to be gained in beating a sissy. Caesar also boasted about the number of Gauls that his army had killed during his campaign. Modern estimates come to around a million. His figures may have been sexed up to impress back home, but there's little doubt that Caesar's ambition to surpass Pompey's glories had been achieved through nothing short of genocide. Excavations of the battlefield have unearthed some of the weapons that won Caesar his victory, including the ancient version of landmines. These things aren't exactly high-tech, but they're very, very nasty. This one in particular, you have to imagine standing on it in your leather sandal. The point goes right through and into your foot and you can't pull it out because of that little barb there. Your foot's bleeding, you can't get your sandal off, you're in agony, you can't move. It makes my toes curl just to think about it. There were people in Rome who got anxious about what was going on in Gaul and at the level of the killing. And some of Caesar's enemies even went so far as to suggest that he should be put on trial for war crimes and that the judge and jury should be all Gauls. The Roman Empire was a pretty brutal thing, but there were some levels of brutality that even the Romans couldn't stand. Julius Caesar would never have made it without the loyal support of his troops. They were far from the cattle raiders of the early city. The soldiers were now professionals, bound to their general as he was to them, even more than to the state. And unlike Pompey, Caesar was prepared to use that army to seize control of Rome. For his part, Caesar was well aware that his enemies in Rome were conspiring against him, that they were trying to back him into a corner, and, as he put it, to undermine his dignitas, that distinctive Roman combination of prestige and clout. So he took a chance. And with one of his legions, he set out to march on Rome. When he got to the River Rubicon, which marked the border between Gaul and Italy, he said, ''Let's throw the dice in the air, then. ''In other words, God only knows what'll happen next.'' Some Romans saw this as the legacy of Romulus and Remus, the twins whose quarrels resulted in the death of one. Now, a Roman fought Roman for ultimate power. Caesar's return to Rome triggered a chaotic civil war that engulfed not just Italy, but most of the empire. Pompey himself ended up dead on the coast of Egypt, his decapitated head presented to Caesar, who, so we're told, burst into tears at the sight of it. Caesar won the war and was made officially dictator, sole ruler of Rome. But he didn't last much longer. If there's just one Roman that everyone knows, it's Julius Caesar. Not because of what he did, but because he died. His assassination has been blown up into a heroic scene that we all know, or think we know, from films, paintings and plays, and from those famous last words, ''Et tu, Brute?'', which he definitely didn't say. What we know for sure is that he was ambushed by a group of his friends in a meeting in a Senate house that, ironically, had been built by his great rival, Pompey. It all happened just over there, where that tree now is. It was another echo back to Rome's foundation story. Now it was Caesar who took the part of the murdered Remus. It's the most famous political assassination ever, carried out in the name of liberty, just a few weeks after Caesar had been made dictator for life. Too soon to know whether he'd succeeded or failed. But the fact was that the assassins may have got rid of a man they thought of as a tyrant, but they didn't get rid of tyranny. It was all too little, too late. By now, it was inevitable that the Empire would be ruled by one man. The question was, what shape would that one-man rule take? That was defined by the man who established autocratic power long-term, and who we call First Emperor of Rome, Gaius Julius Octavius, or, as he later called himself, Augustus. That name actually doesn't mean very much. The closest you can get is revered one. But he worked out the do's and don'ts of being a one-man ruler. In the early 3rd century BC, Scipio Barbatus, on his tomb, could have his career summed up in just a few lines. 300 years later, the Emperor Augustus wrote his own epitaph to be displayed outside his tomb, in hundreds of lines. It's an extraordinary, overblown account of what I did. But it also offers a blueprint for how to be an emperor in the future. And there are three things he stresses. First of all, you have to be massively generous to the Roman people. You have to give them handouts and entertainments and services. And that's what he lists here, all the cash he spent on that. Then you've got to build, build, build. And that's really the model of Pompey. And Augustus tells us about the temples that he constructed, and the theatres. But most important of all, and this is what the biggest part of the document is about, you have to invest in conquest. And Augustus explains how he extended the boundaries of the Roman Empire, how he pacified the provinces of Gaul and Spain, how he pacified the Alps. The message he's hammering home is clear. If you want to be a Roman emperor, you have to look like a conqueror. However much the Romans tried to avoid the Pompeys and the Caesars of this world, the problems of governing, policing and ever-expanding empire proved that decisions taken by committee didn't work. It wasn't the emperor that created the Roman Empire, it was the empire that created Roman emperors. Augustus's account of what he did is a practical toolkit for how to be a Roman emperor. But the ideology behind it all is best represented on another monument he put up, celebrating Pax, peace. So this is an altar of peace. It's celebrating the security and the prosperity that the Roman Empire can bring. But it isn't really peace in our sense of the word. This isn't about the absence of fighting, it's about peace that is the result of fighting. This is peace that has been won by victory. Really, this is an altar of pacification. It's also more than that. Built out of marble by the best artists in town, you couldn't miss the messages here. The walls around it are covered with friezes, some depicting Augustus with his family, carving the imperial dynasty into stone. And some of the images spread the idea of his divine birthright, projecting his lineage all the way back to the mythical founders of Rome. On either side of the main steps, there are two different versions of Rome's ancestry. On one side, the wolf with Romulus and Remus, and on the other side, Aeneas, who's just arrived initially from Troy. There's a special resonance for the emperor here, because Augustus claimed to be directly descended from Aeneas. But there's an even bigger point if you take these two scenes together. On the one side, there's Romulus, who welcomed into his new city outcasts and runaways. On the other side, Aeneas, who really did come from abroad. The message about Rome's origins is clear. Rome was always foreign. This made perfect Roman sense. The stories they told of their own origins reflected the growing diversity, expansion and openness of their world. And there was one corner of the empire that had a particular resonance. I'm in the place that many Romans thought the whole story of their city began. It's more than 1,000 miles away from Rome. It's the city of Troy, the city of the Trojan War, that most famous, most defining war in the whole history and myth of the classical world. The War of Helen, Achilles, Hector and the Trojan Horse. It was also the birthplace of Aeneas. And for the new Augustan age, the Roman poet Virgil elaborately reimagined and rewrote Aeneas' journey from Troy to Italy in his epic poem, The Aeneid. He was using myth to explore the complexities of the rise of Rome and of its empire. There are all kinds of things in this poem. Love, honour, heroism and empire. Virgil also points to some of the much more disconcerting sides of imperial power. At the end of the story, and it's really the last thing we see Aeneas doing, our hero cruelly and gratuitously slaughters an enemy soldier who has surrendered to him. It's as if, in Virgil's hands, the story of Aeneas both celebrates Rome's empire and exposes its potential brutality. And yet Virgil could also present the Roman Empire as a gift from the gods themselves. At the very beginning, Jupiter, the king of the gods, prophesised Rome's future power. I have given, he says, I have given the Romans imperium sine fine. I have given them empire without limit. It hadn't really started that way. A completely unremarkable city had expanded far beyond its walls, becoming the power centre of a vast empire. And from the twins to the emperors, from cattle raiders to organised armies, from the early victories of Scipio Barbatus to the crushing destruction of Corinth in the east or the bloody killing fields of Gaul in the west, through a combination of improvisation, good luck, greed and ambition, Rome has imprinted on our minds what it means to be an empire. The idea of empire without limit is something that Scipio Barbatus could never have understood. He knew all about conquest and military glory and the profits that came with them. But Rome, having territorial control over swathes of the outside world, thought of as limitless, would have been absolutely incomprehensible to him. Two-and-a-half centuries later, Virgil Zined claims that Jupiter himself had planned it that way. It's as if Virgil, looking back, is reinterpreting the messy, the improvised history of Roman conquest into some grand design of manifest destiny.