Mary Beard’s Ultimate Rome: Empire Without Limit

This is the main gate of a great Roman city,

on the empire's northern frontier in Germany.

It advertises the presence and the impact of Rome.

And it's still here, 2,000 years later.

Rome was built to last.

But it didn't.

One of the biggest puzzles about the Roman Empire has always been

what caused its decline and fall?

Historians have been debating that one since the fifth century AD

and we still haven't agreed an answer.

There are all kinds of theories, from the sensible to the silly.

Was it the invasion of barbarian hordes?

Or was it galloping inflation?

Was it corruption, public and private?

Too much sex?

Or maybe too little sex?

Or was it the lead in the water pipes,

gradually sending them all mad?

Happily, this isn't a multiple-choice test,

and one thing's for sure, it's all intriguingly complicated,

so bear with me.

From its mythical origins

to the reality of empire...

...stretching from Britain in the north,

to the fringes of the Sahara in the south...

...Spain to Israel, the Nile to the Rhine.

The Roman world was more culturally diverse,

productive and connected than anything that had gone before.

We tend to joke when we say, "All roads lead to Rome."

But actually, they did.

It seemed like Rome had discovered the art of imperial longevity,

thriving not only by exploitation, but by creating citizens

and at the very top of the pile, the Emperor.

You probably have to kiss his feet.

But the Roman Empire was more vulnerable than it looked.

There was conflict and there was resistance,

both from the outside and within.

This was Romans attacking Romans.

So why DID the Roman Empire come to an end?

Or did it?

No-one's ever going to know for sure what caused Rome's decline.

It's not the kind of question that you can ever answer once and for all.

But I'm going unpick a story that makes sense to me.

And I'm starting at one of the most recognisable

and puzzling monuments in the Roman world.

The 115km-long Hadrian's Wall, that spans northern Britain.

Built in the second century AD when the empire was at its widest,

what its construction hints to me, is a shift in the way the Romans

saw the empire and what happened at its boundaries.

In some ways, Britain was Rome's Afghanistan.

The Romans always found it terribly hard to get

the upper hand, particularly in the north of the country.

It wasn't that there were loads of pitched battles

between Romans and barbarians,

but there were decades of terrorism and guerrilla warfare.

The wall must have been something to do with controlling that.

But it was never a straightforward defence against the enemy,

it was more a Roman statement.

This really is an aggressive structure,

ploughing through the country, from one side of it to the other.

It seems to me there's two things going on here.

First of all, it is a major symbol of Roman power

and it's speaking to both people out there to the north

and at those down there to the south.

But there's also a new idea of what an empire is that's at stake here.

They're starting to say, the empire has an edge, it has a boundary.

And they're doing that here and in other places in the empire.

This is the start of the empire being mapped.

And that made a big difference.

As we know now, the moment there's a physical barrier,

whether it's a wall, a fence or a river,

it doesn't just keep people out, it also entices them in.

And there was an extra urgency to that. When almost everyone inside

the empire was a full Roman citizen, almost everyone outside not.

It wasn't a simple stand-off between insiders and outsiders,

Romans and barbarians.

The frontiers of the empire were always pretty porous,

in our terms, and you even find so-called barbarians

serving in the Roman army.

All the same, it was a whole series of flash points that put

the empire on the defensive against invaders, against waves of refugees

and against economic migrants, and to be honest,

it was quite difficult to tell the difference between those three.

The effect of all that was somehow to turn the empire inside out.

The centre of things was now on the margins.

That's where more and more Roman cash was spent, it's where more

and more Roman resources were eaten up

and it's where the decisions that really mattered were taken.

In a way, the Romans on the frontiers, the soldiers

and the generals, became the key power brokers.

The change was dramatic.

In the third century AD,

emperors were usually raised to power by the legions,

with little or no reference to the authorities in Rome itself,

and they didn't last long, either.

Most of them barely had time to issue some coins

and put up some statues before they were gone,

often assassinated by the supporters of the next guy on the throne.

One of this lot was Elagabalus,

parachuted onto the throne by his granny

and an army legion.

If you believe the stories, he was a nasty piece of work,

making Nero or Caligula look like pussycats.

Bellissima!

He was particularly well-known for his flamboyant banquets.

A meal with him was an experience to die for.

And sometimes, literally.

The food was about as far-out as you could get.

Nightingales' tongues and ostrich brains, particular favourites.

But he was artful, too.

He was particularly keen on colour-coded banquets.

All the food in blue or in green.

But there were risks.

If you were at the bottom of the pecking order,

you didn't get real food at all.

You just got model food, in wood or plaster.

All you could do was look at it.

And on one occasion, he showered so many rose petals on his lucky

guests that they smothered and didn't get out alive.

The Emperor was a complete fashion freak.

He never wore the same pair of shoes twice.

He had his mum in the Senate

and he loved being pulled along in a wheelbarrow by naked ladies.

He even went so far as to change sex

and he had a vagina surgically constructed.

Now, this isn't all literally true.

For a start, Elagabalus was only 14 when he came to the throne.

At best, it's a fantasy about what it might be like having

a very difficult teenager as Emperor.

At worst, it's black propaganda, invented after he'd been deposed.

But there's a logic to it. It's a fantasy about a system under threat.

The idea that the man on the throne was completely bonkers

was saying more about the way the system was imploding

than about the man or boy himself.

But the Romans didn't just sit and watch it all happen.

'And the best way to explain how they tried to restore order...'

Prego, senora. Ah, grazie Mille! Buon appetito!

'..Is with another meal.'

This is called a Pizza Romana.

And one thing's for sure, no Roman ate it, because for a start,

they didn't have tomatoes.

But if you suspend disbelief for a bit, it's quite a good

way of visualising the problems the Roman Empire's facing.

The pizza is the empire.

Rome is the tomato in the middle.

Problem number one?

The empire's very big.

Communications across it, very slow.

Rome's here.

It's really

weeks away from getting its commands out to the frontiers.

So what do they do about it?

Well, as usual, the Romans improvised.

They decided to cut the empire in two.

It's quite difficult, cutting an empire in two.

And you can even go further.

You can say

divide the empire into three, with three joint emperors.

You can even divide it...

If you can cut it!

You can even divide it into four, with four joint emperors.

The advantages of this are obvious.

You get manageable chunks to administer.

One emperor for that, one for that, one for that, one for that.

The disadvantages are obvious, too.

This guy decides he wants to have this person's share

and so you get conflict.

And what looked as if it was kind of devolution

turns out to be a disintegration.

The other problem they deal with is what to do about Rome

and here we get another kind of devolution.

You get a series of mini capitals... These are the olives.

...for different parts of the empire.

That one, let's say, is in the east, that's Nicaea.

This is Trier, in Germany.

Ravenna or Milan, in Italy.

And those cities can be administrative centres

for the different bits, and that makes all of the kind

of problems of communication and so forth much easier.

What to do about Rome in the middle?

When all the decisions, really, are being made in these other capitals.

Well, the answer is that Rome stays looking lovely,

it stays being a grand symbolic centre,

but it's not really doing anything.

In a way, this poor tomato has become a bit of a white elephant.

The city of Romulus no longer controls the Roman world.

Of course, it remained hugely symbolic, but some emperors

ruled their slice of territory without ever even going to Rome.

One-man rule, established by the first Emperor Augustus, was,

for a time, devolved to multiple emperors in a divided empire.

And this is the grand imperial throne room

of the mini-capital at Trier in Germany.

It's a building with some powerful messages.

It's telling us, for one thing, that Rome was no longer

the centre of Roman power.

But in its modern reincarnation, there's a clue to an even

But in its modern reincarnation, there's a clue to an even

bigger revolution that was taking place within the empire.

It was later converted into a church,

and as we'll see, that was no accident.