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00:00The 24th of August 410 AD. The magnificent city of Rome is under attack.
00:16The ancient capital of the mightiest empire on earth is at the mercy of a barbarian leader,
00:27thirsting for revenge. The rich scramble to hide their wealth. The poor run for their lives.
00:39No one saw this coming. The sack of Rome is one of the iconic events of Western history.
00:47Imagine thousands of men pouring into your city and rushing into your house. The fear must have been
00:58extraordinary. Rome believes it had an immortal imperial destiny.
01:07This empire dominated Europe for 500 years. How did it come to collapse?
01:15This is the story of three men and how their fateful decisions brought the mighty Roman
01:22civilization to its knees. A refugee, treated with cruelty and prejudice, driven to violence.
01:32A weak emperor, blind to the reality beyond his palace walls.
01:36And a wily general, caught between two worlds and trusted by no one.
01:46They have gambled with Rome's future.
01:50Now the eternal city is running out of time.
02:07Ancient Egypt.
02:08Ancient Egypt.
02:10The Roman Empire.
02:15The Aztecs of Mexico.
02:20And the Samurai of Japan.
02:21Four great civilizations. Each a pinnacle of human ingenuity and achievement. Each lasted for centuries.
02:37Their people thought they would endure forever.
02:40Until suddenly, everything changed.
02:51These civilizations faced challenges that are all too familiar today.
03:01Climate catastrophe.
03:02Pandemic.
03:12Wars.
03:15Challenges for which ancient societies had few solutions.
03:19But what if there was a place that had the answers to what went wrong?
03:32A place full of secrets and stories.
03:36A repository of memory stretching back through time.
03:40The British Museum, home to more than eight million artifacts, is a record of how and why
03:53the greatest civilizations rose to power and then spectacularly fell.
03:59It's treasures are the human traces that survived disaster.
04:07But might they also hold lessons for our own future?
04:14Every civilization throughout history has had an expiry date.
04:19With great societies, the seeds of their destruction are sown within the society.
04:26They're already there.
04:29No civilization ever thinks it's going to fall.
04:34But the question is, what can we learn from the past?
04:59Rome is the largest city in the world.
05:15Home to over 700,000 people.
05:18Traders and artisans.
05:21Senators and slaves.
05:23Arriving to Rome and entering from one of the gates of its wall in the late fourth century,
05:32we would see a city at the height of its splendor.
05:37Rome is still this monumental city.
05:46It has this history of emperors building things.
05:49You would still have seen things like temples, the forum and the curia, the senate house, the colosseum.
05:56Rome's magnificence is built on the spoils of empire.
06:07800 years earlier, Roman armies began to carve out a growing territory.
06:13That by the fourth century stretches across 1.7 million square miles.
06:19From Britain to North Africa and the Middle East.
06:23The empire is so vast, it's now split into two halves.
06:28East and west, each ruled by its own emperor.
06:41Around 40 million people, a fifth of the world's population, now live under Roman rule,
06:48in a heady mix of cultures and languages.
06:53It's all held together by a ruthless military might.
06:58But also by the benefits of a shared peace and pioneering advances in technology.
07:07Aqueducts for clean water.
07:11Concrete for construction.
07:13And a complex road network that brings trade and prosperity.
07:18In the western half of the empire, a handful of aristocratic families have profited more than most
07:32from Rome's imperial success.
07:33In the western half of the empire, they need a strong emperor to keep the status quo.
07:42But their new ruler is a major cause for concern.
07:45apply the battle of the empire Empire Hierarchus to a protector of the empire.
08:00Como canchiero be a father of the empire of the empire.
08:01Honorius was not from Rome.
08:04He is not even born in Rome.
08:06He's born in the east.
08:08He really spends most of his youth living amongst the other courtiers.
08:14He's made a few visits west to see his father, the previous emperor.
08:20But his first big trip is the one that ends up being permanent.
08:26He comes over, and shortly thereafter, his father dies.
08:34The accession of a child like Honorius is extremely odd.
08:40In fact, in previous eras, Roman politics had never tolerated child emperors.
08:47The personal leadership of the emperor in earlier eras is just too important.
08:52You can't have a child on the throne.
08:56By 395, it is common practice for Romans to prostrate themselves,
09:05literally crawl on all fours in front of the emperor.
09:15This was an act of humility and homage.
09:18It was required as part of the imperial ritual.
09:24Imagine how tough that would have been if you were an extremely wealthy, successful senator,
09:32and here you are crawling before a child.
09:37Honourius is remembered as an indifferent, foolish, self-absorbed emperor.
09:49Honourius is completely at sea.
09:54Left to his own devices, I think Honourius would have lasted no more than ten minutes.
09:59It's inevitable that someone else is pulling the strings.
10:08General Stilicho.
10:11Stilicho is this really interesting combination of loyal servant to the empire, but also perhaps a little bit of a conniving opportunist.
10:24Stilicho is commander of Rome's western armies.
10:33Under the previous emperor, he had become a trusted advisor.
10:37Then he married into the imperial family, consolidating his power.
10:43Now, no one has greater influence over the young Honourius.
10:49Stilicho is competent militarily, politically astute.
10:54He knew the type of alliances that you had to make with the key civilian and military leaders,
11:02how to appoint people who were loyal to him.
11:05He absolutely has his eyes on protecting Honourius, doing what he can to keep Honourius in power.
11:16Of course, if Honourius isn't in power, neither is he.
11:21Honourius needs to persuade Rome's elite that he can project absolute power across his domains.
11:42He's not the only Roman emperor to face such a challenge.
11:46This is the very first emperor, Augustus.
12:01Augustus was one of the most brilliant minds, a real game-changer, someone who changed forever the path of history.
12:16The head of a bronze statue of Augustus is a really extraordinary object that we have from the first century BCE.
12:33Partly extraordinary because it still has its eyes.
12:36We're not used to seeing these eyes.
12:39We're used to very vacant sort of eye sockets of our Roman figures, but it still has its eyes,
12:43which make it a really fascinating object to see and a really evocative object.
12:52When this statue was cast, Augustus had just defeated his rivals in a brutal civil war to lead Rome.
12:59It was the first time one man ruled alone.
13:04And Augustus used this image to cement his reign.
13:09What we see with Augustus is actually a bit of a change in the way that Roman politicians, Roman statesmen were presented.
13:13Previously, age was seen as a sort of way of communicating wisdom, so statues and busts of wrinkles and signs of age on a face was something that you would have been used to seeing.
13:31Augustus doesn't do this.
13:37Rather, he wants to put forward the sort of youthfulness, I guess, of a ruler and the vitality of a ruler.
13:45This is a young, kind of a movie star.
13:54He's gonna attract everyone with his magnetic beauty and make everybody want to follow him.
14:01So in that sense, it's a real shift of gears from the traditional way of representing authority.
14:07The scale is larger than life, giving Augustus the appearance of a god.
14:18And yet, this object is also a cautionary tale for future rulers like Honorius.
14:28Look closely, and you can see microscopic grains of sand embedded in the bronze.
14:35They tell a story of the dangers of imperial ambition.
14:41The reason why the head is so well preserved is because it was purposely buried.
14:50In 30 BC, Augustus' army invaded Egypt and expanded into Kush to the south.
14:59But the Kushites resisted and pushed back.
15:10They looted Roman treasures, pulling the head of Augustus' statue from its body.
15:17They carried their prize back to their capital, Meroe, where they buried it under the steps of a temple.
15:29Kushites could now literally rub their feet in the face of Augustus.
15:34So 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.
15:54It was a sign that aggressive empire building comes at a cost.
16:06The downside to invading your neighbours is that often you don't just create new frontiers, but also new enemies.
16:12In the US military there's a term for this, blowback.
16:18Rome suffered from blowback again and again.
16:21Augustus had been an ambitious young emperor who presided over a fragile peace.
16:31Now, four centuries later, the young Honorius needs to persuade the people that he too can successfully unite his fractious empire.
16:41His advisor, Stilicho, embarks on a campaign to construct a new image for Honorius.
16:52One of power, stability and authority.
16:58The start of a new regime was always marked by a ceremonial payout to the military of gold coins.
17:05These coins aren't just sent out as spending money, but as propaganda.
17:25Passed from hand to hand, they can reach all corners of a sprawling empire.
17:46These early coins slapped with the head of Honorius, a part of a meet and greet campaign.
17:52You wouldn't know from the coin that this is somebody who's underage for being a full-fledged Roman emperor.
18:03It's the way he's shown in profile with a diadem and this sort of slightly 1980s hairstyle.
18:11But something that I think is particularly interesting on this coin is if you turn it over and you look at the back.
18:22You have Honorius standing with his foot on the neck of a soldier.
18:27And Victory is just up in the corner holding her crown as if she's going to crown him.
18:38And it's a very brazen military image for him to choose, given that he is not yet battle-tested.
18:46Victory is the crucial characteristic of a legitimate emperor.
18:57This is the claim that's being made on that coin, that Honorius is a legitimate emperor.
19:02But Honorius and General Stilicho will soon discover that success requires more than mere propaganda.
19:13Little does this regime know that in just a few short years their world would be turned upside down.
19:23The empire would be shook at its very foundations and one of them would end up in his grave.
19:44The man destined to become Rome's nemesis is leading a rebellion in the Balkans.
19:49Attacking Roman forces and taking captives and plunder wherever he can.
19:58His name is Alaric.
20:02Alaric is a legend.
20:04We know he's an experienced soldier and an admired and feared one.
20:09Unlike a traditional monarchy or indeed the Roman Empire,
20:14he's not holding power because his father held power.
20:17He is the one they are following because they choose to follow him.
20:21Alaric is charismatic, intelligent and very capable.
20:26He's also a bitter man.
20:29A man who has good reasons to be going rogue.
20:31The root of Alaric's anger stretches back to his childhood.
20:38Soldiers manning Rome's northern border along the river Danube begin to see large crowds of people gathering and asking for help.
20:53If a huge number of people end up on your border, it means that something has gone really, really wrong.
21:11My experience is that people really don't want to move, they don't want to leave their countries, and with the kinds of numbers we're talking about, I think it means that there was conflict raging and they had to come.
21:29These are Alaric's people, the Goths.
21:40Their homeland lies north-east of Rome, stretching from present-day Romania to Ukraine.
21:46For generations, they've lived as warriors and farmers, but now a rival people, the Huns, attack, forcing the Goths to flee south.
21:59Something like 100,000 Gothic men, women and children come towards the Danube River.
22:08It's a migration on a scale the Romans have not encountered.
22:16Even today, 100,000 people is a lot of people.
22:22And any government would look at 100,000 people and see problem.
22:29In 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.
22:45Despite the diverse populations within their empire, the Romans are uneasy about such a vast influx of people.
23:02And it plays into deep-seated prejudices.
23:05Racial stereotypes are so enduring because they're ubiquitous in ancient culture, just like they are in ours.
23:18This mask is meant to evoke somebody from the north, a barbarian.
23:38The word barbarian comes from a Greek barbaros, and the Greeks invented it because, to them, it sounded like the bar-bar-bar-bar-bar-bar, the babbling of peoples whose languages they could not understand.
23:57The Romans, like the Greeks, conceptualized race as being essentially environmental.
24:09The further you get away from the Mediterranean, the further you get away from that environment that was so familiar to them, the more likely you are to be a barbarian.
24:20The Roman stereotype of the barbarian was always defined by certain traits.
24:31Clothing, hairstyle, customs.
24:35They're savage, they're less cultured.
24:39They always have looser hair.
24:42A theatre mask designed to depict a barbarian has to convey that.
24:46A giveaway is the ponytail.
24:52You might notice that the man's hair is pulled back.
24:55It looks like a kind of man bun.
24:58That man bun is the dead giveaway.
25:00Romans don't wear man buns.
25:03These were the kinds of stereotypes that Romans would have absorbed by going to the theatre and really internalized them.
25:12And that can be weaponized in all sorts of ways.
25:17It's a stereotype you can appeal to, to rally other people to support you.
25:22The 20th, early 21st century has seen more examples of that than one can easily count.
25:29Reducing people to a stereotype means you don't have to regard them as full human beings, usually with tragic results.
25:39Romans may see the Goths as primitive savages, but they have their uses.
25:49Working in the fields or as conscripts in the army.
25:54Under orders to remove their weapons, the soldiers at the border begin to let the Goths in, in increasing numbers.
26:04The problem is not migration.
26:07The problem is not displaced peoples.
26:10Moving is fundamental to being human.
26:13It is the reason why we survived through the ice age.
26:17The problem is how governments respond to displaced people.
26:20You can choose to take them into your society or to make them into an enemy.
26:25A number of the local Roman officials see these refugees and think, right, how can I profit from the situation?
26:44Only give food to those that are willing to pay?
26:49Why actually give them the good food when you could send them anything else that you might have, like dog meat?
26:56Can you take away some of the Goths?
26:59Sell them off into slavery?
27:01If I was giving advice to the Roman government, I would say be careful.
27:08These people are competent soldiers.
27:11You 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.
27:22The battle is a catastrophic defeat for the Roman Empire.
27:40The larger estimates think that 20,000 Roman soldiers are killed on this battlefield in one afternoon.
27:47It means the Goths are now inside the Empire.
27:52There's no way that they can be driven out again.
27:57The crushing defeat forces the Romans to do a deal.
28:02They give the Goths land to settle in the wilder regions of the Balkans.
28:08In return, the Goths supply warriors for the Roman army.
28:13It's not actually a long-term solution to the problem.
28:18Effectively, it buys time.
28:21Another decade or so of relative peace.
28:24And then we come to Alaric.
28:26Alaric has followed the path of many Goth refugees and served in the Roman army.
28:48He has been a loyal commander for four years until the Romans betray him.
28:58At a battle in the Alps, Alaric and his fellow Goths are sacrificed as cannon fodder for the Roman Empire.
29:07The Goths were put in the front line.
29:11After all, there'll be effective shock troops and they are effectively abandoned there.
29:1610,000 Goths were killed.
29:18Alaric was there.
29:20He's a survivor.
29:21He cannot possibly have forgotten.
29:24What we have is a two-tier society. Promises have been broken to them time and time again.
29:34No respect is given to them.
29:37And at the end of the day, they feel they have to rise up and fight for their rights.
29:43Alaric takes the opportunity to mount a major rebellion at the head of these Gothic soldiers who'd fought on that campaign.
29:59I think certainly responding to the level of casualties that they'd suffered on it.
30:05But for the Emperor Honorius and General Stilicho, an uprising is something they can ill afford.
30:25Because while there is plenty of money swilling around the Roman Empire, less and less of it is going into the imperial coffers.
30:34And more into those of Rome's super rich.
30:54This casket is for a very elite woman.
30:59One of the 1%.
31:01The lid contains a portrait with a man and a woman standing shoulder to shoulder. This is a classic marriage scene.
31:26We do know for sure it belonged to a woman named Praiecta because there's an inscription on the edge of it.
31:35The inscription refers to Praiecta as well as a man named Secundus.
31:41And we believe that this casket was given to them as a wedding present.
31:51These are two incredibly wealthy people.
31:56This would have been the wedding of the year.
31:59It's elaborately carved with scenes all over on almost every side of it.
32:11There is a beautiful image of Venus sort of stepping up out of a bath, mostly naked.
32:20There is 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.
32:36A 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.
32:59This celebration of luxury is part of a worrying trend.
33:06The 1% hoovering up the wealth of the wider empire.
33:11There are estimations that 20 families owned all of southern France and Italy, for example.
33:22Recent excavations in different areas of Rome have uncovered absolutely luxurious urban residences that date precisely to this period.
33:37They were really leaving La Dolce Vita.
33:41The wealthy of late antique Rome are a lot like the super wealthy billionaire class of today.
33:52They live in these enormous houses that they had created by cobbling together a bunch of pre-existent buildings just like we see today in cities like New York and London.
34:05This is a family getting richer by the day.
34:18And yet the emperor is not seeing the benefit of this boom time for the wealthy elite.
34:28The rich, in principle, are supposed to pay taxes, but things don't really change in history.
34:38And yesterday, as it happens today, those who have connections find more or less legal and more or less conventional way not to pay taxes.
34:53This kind of tax avoidance is squeezing the emperor's finances, forcing the regime to lean instead on those who can least afford it.
35:06The burden seems to be falling on the lower classes.
35:10The vast majority of Romans are living in tenement blocks, crowded, shared spaces, rat and cockroach infested.
35:23They are living very different lives to the lives that the wealthy are leading.
35:32Growing wealth inequality is the most common and crucial element in societal collapse.
35:38It corrodes the social fabric.
35:41Wealth 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.
35:57For the last seven years, Alaric and his army have been plundering what they can in the Balkans.
36:21Now he marches his massed forces towards Italy.
36:28Alaric is in search of a deal, and that is a more recognised position within the Roman imperial structure.
36:36Payments for his dependents and recognition for himself as an imperial general.
36:43Alaric 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.
36:58Great problem, Stilicho is in the way.
37:03Stilicho and Alaric may be on opposing sides, but the two men have more in common than Stilicho would like to admit.
37:12Stilicho is actually half barbarian, half Roman on his mother's side, and half Vandal on his father's.
37:21The Vandals were close neighbours of the Goths beyond the northern frontier.
37:29Stilicho followed his barbarian father into the army and rose on merit.
37:36He is an example of how Rome could assimilate outsiders when it chose to.
37:44The Roman Empire has controlled a vast region for 400 years.
37:50And one of the secrets is integrating people.
37:53You don't actually treat the peoples you've absorbed as barbarians if you learnt the right languages.
38:00If you became part of the Roman system, you got all the benefits.
38:05Roman law, Roman trade networks.
38:08Stilicho has also committed to a Roman way of life.
38:17But his journey to the top has not been easy.
38:24If you're born in a country where you're a minority, very often you have to show more resilience,
38:31you have to work harder, you have to prove yourself.
38:34Because some of the, you know, the narrative around who you are and what you're about
38:39and what your community about is extremely negative.
38:48Stilicho was a Roman by upbringing, by culture.
38:51He didn't identify himself as something separate from the Roman Empire.
38:57Unfortunately, there is a strong faction within Italy, within the imperial court,
39:02who've never liked the prominence of a half-vandal soldier dominating affairs.
39:15If Alaric hopes Stilicho, a fellow barbarian, will help him cut a deal, he's much mistaken.
39:22Stilicho is the top general. His job is to quell the rebellion.
39:29I don't think that he's busy thinking, oh, I have a little bit of sympathy for this guy.
39:35Rome is a great military power at that stage.
39:39You use your power.
39:41Alaric and Stilicho finally meet at the Battle of Palentia.
39:53According to our main source, Stilicho strikes the barbarians like a thunderbolt.
40:00Alaric is defeated, his wife is taken, plunder is taken, his people are scattered.
40:05But crucially, Stilicho fails to capture Alaric himself.
40:17It will prove a costly mistake.
40:19Honorius begins to hear rumors that his most trusted general has allowed Alaric to slip through his fingers on purpose,
40:39in a barbarian master plan to overthrow him.
40:42As soon as his regime is looking a bit shaky, when other people are getting in Honorius' ear,
40:52then the barbarian card is the obvious one to play.
40:56You can use it both to disparage Stilicho and also to say that he's secretly in league with Alaric and always has been.
41:07For Honorius, tales of a palace plot would be all too familiar.
41:12As a child, he had been brought up on stories of emperors being overthrown or murdered.
41:20As well as myths of how the powerful punish those who betray them.
41:35He may even have held one such myth in his hands.
41:39The Lycurgus cup.
41:40Perhaps the greatest single surviving example of magnificent late Roman glassware.
41:42A cup crafted so beautifully that it doesn't have to be seen in the world.
41:43The Lycurgus cup.
41:44Perhaps the greatest single surviving example of magnificent late Roman glassware.
41:49The Lycurgus cup, perhaps the greatest single surviving example of magnificent late Roman
42:07glassware, a cup crafted so beautifully that it does indeed reflect light in different
42:14colours, from green to red, depending on where the light comes from.
42:23If people are drinking by candlelight or the wine is being poured in and that's changing
42:28the colour as well, so it's making these marvellous effects.
42:34This cup must have belonged to someone with extraordinary wealth, perhaps a member of the
42:39imperial court, even the emperor himself.
42:55The cup shows the myth of the king Lycurgus who offended the god of wine Bacchus and as
43:02punishment was entrapped in the grapevine, had stones held at him by Bacchus' followers.
43:11The god punishes the upstart Lycurgus by putting him to death.
43:19Probably the message of that cup was don't get too big for your britches.
43:24For Honorius, the myth offers some stark advice.
43:41Get rid of those who are a threat to you.
43:44He becomes increasingly paranoid.
43:47As society becomes top heavy, you suddenly have more elites, generals, wannabe emperors,
43:55competing for a small limited number of high status positions.
44:00We see this again and again in Rome.
44:02It was always a game of thrones, and it leads to worse decisions.
44:17The emperor has heard news of multiple barbarian incursions into Roman territory.
44:32Incursions General Stilicho has failed to repel.
44:41Palace insiders spin these failures as proof of Stilicho's treachery, pushing Honorius' paranoia
44:50to breaking point.
44:53A figure of the imperial court finally convinced Honorius that Stilicho, being half-vandal, was
45:02a barbarian after all.
45:03And therefore, he would have inevitably conspired with other barbarian to take over the imperial
45:10throne.
45:12Honorius reaches a fateful decision and orders Stilicho's arrest.
45:24Stilicho has been the dominant figure at his court for over 13 years.
45:38It's pretty normal for this kind of child emperor to start kicking over the traces as
45:45they get older.
45:50It certainly was a decision that had really serious consequences.
45:58Stilicho is faced with a choice.
46:00Some of his colleagues are urging him to take the choice of actually going into rebellion
46:06against the ruling regime.
46:09He says, no, I'm not going to cause mayhem at the heart of the Western Empire at a moment
46:16of stress.
46:19It's an extraordinary testament to his loyalty to the basic Roman system.
46:27Stilicho has given Rome his allegiance.
46:31Rome has repaid him with suspicion and a death sentence.
46:42You will judge it a catastrophic error.
46:51Stilicho's execution means disaster for the Western Empire.
46:56It is a chronically misguided, short-sighted action.
47:02Honorius has just removed the one man who could either do a deal with the barbarians or defeat
47:08or defeat them in battle.
47:19He's also unleashed dark forces that will bring carnage to Italy as violence against immigrants erupts.
47:27Stilicho's execution triggers a bloodbath.
47:38The opposition to Stilicho flows into a major assault on anybody of barbarian descent or related
47:47to the barbarians in Italy.
47:49There's no question that the level of severity, the ferocity of this massacre, going after not just the men,
48:00but going after their wives and children, this went way beyond the kind of political purge that you would normally
48:08expect to see following the death of somebody who's a major leader.
48:12The extent to this suggests that there was some layer of prejudice at work here.
48:21But if the massacre is meant to terrify the barbarians into submission, it does exactly the opposite.
48:28You can't appeal to the emperor.
48:41You can't appeal to the local population.
48:44Who might protect you?
48:46There is one very obvious candidate, Alaric.
48:50And so a lot of these soldiers who had been loyal to Stilicho now flood to join Alaric.
48:58The soldiers are perhaps 10,000 soldiers now swell Alaric's forces.
49:04Not only is his greatest opponent dead and the Western military is in chaos,
49:09but Alaric's own following has been greatly strengthened.
49:15Alaric goes for the jugular.
49:19He marches unopposed through Italy to Rome.
49:25His forces surround the city and cut off the food supply.
49:31Rome is still the single most prestigious city in the empire.
49:36And so Alaric is threatening to sack that city as leverage for the things he actually most wants.
49:45So what does he demand?
49:47Gold, silver, both in thousands of pounds of quantity.
49:55He wants somewhere to settle.
49:58And he wants an official Roman title, the one Stilicho held, commander-in-chief of the Western Army.
50:07Our sources about the siege of Rome are quite unanimous in its severity.
50:19People are starving.
50:20Our sources even talk about cannibalism.
50:26The citizens of Rome are suffering, but their emperor is not suffering with them.
50:33He has retreated to the relative safety of Ravenna, over 200 miles away, on Italy's Adriatic coast.
50:42Numerous people go up to beg Honorius to help, to send an army, to make a deal with Alaric.
50:52Our sources report that Honorius declares that he will never do a deal with one of Alaric's race.
51:01What it's suggesting is an unwillingness on Honorius' part to wake up and smell the coffee.
51:08The goths are here as a permanent structure within the Western Empire, and you have to find a way of living with them.
51:16You can see why he might resist that.
51:19Honorius has grown up in a world of total Roman dominance.
51:24He doesn't realize that the world has changed.
51:27Alaric gets tired of waiting, and he decides it's time to just...
51:49...zack Rome.
51:54The Romans stereotype Alaric and his people and, in a way, force him to become the thing that they're fearful of.
52:05Alaric's followers are targeting the noble houses.
52:09They're targeting everything they can basically gather together and carry off.
52:15Amazingly, some of Rome's treasures from that time survive.
52:29They offer a glimpse of the riches the goths discovered, and bear witness to the violence they unleashed.
52:36The Proacta casket is part of a horde of objects, almost all silver, nearly 60 of them, discovered in the ruins of a Roman house in the city of Rome.
52:55What's particularly interesting is the dating of the objects align very, very attractively with the sack of Rome.
53:05It's pretty likely that this horde was created precisely at the moment when Alaric was at the gates of the city.
53:15And this is one family's attempt to preserve its wealth, its heirlooms.
53:24Why would no one come back for such a very expensive, luxury collection of treasures?
53:29It's possible that some of the family members fled the city.
53:40It is, of course, entirely possible that these were people who did indeed fall victim to the goths.
53:46The goths are primarily interested in taking every single thing they can carry and bringing it out with them.
54:04But it also, importantly, includes people.
54:07Human trafficking, captive taking, was one of the primary forms of booty in the ancient world.
54:20And this was a major goal of the army when they came through.
54:25Honorius, inexperienced, isolated, is entirely unable to comprehend what has happened.
54:40Honorius was told that Rome had just fallen,
54:44and the reaction of the emperor was an immediate expression of grief and desperation.
54:52But what he said was,
54:55but I had fed her with my own hands just a few hours ago.
55:01Because Honorius had a hen house and one of the hens was called Rome.
55:09Such was the idea that Rome could not fall.
55:16After three long days of violence and plunder,
55:19the goths finally leave Rome.
55:24As a psychological event,
55:26the sack of Rome sends a shockwave across the Roman Empire.
55:30It is one of those events where, when you heard about it,
55:34you remember where you were when news reached you.
55:38Like 9-11.
55:40Events that trigger a spark across a consciousness.
55:44Nobody could accept the idea that the most powerful city of all times had eventually capitulated.
55:57Alaric and the Goths have forged a path that others will follow.
56:10The Gothic migration, the refugee crisis of the 370s,
56:15effectively marks the beginning of the so-called decline and fall of the Roman Empire.
56:22The Goths will eventually form their own kingdoms on Roman territory.
56:28It becomes the model for other barbarian peoples.
56:42One by one, the territories of the former Western Roman Empire fall away from imperial control.
56:49Rome lost its grip on Western Europe over 1500 years ago.
57:00With a weak, inexperienced leader blinded by paranoia.
57:07What the Romans got wrong was refusing to understand the political moment.
57:18The instability, the fragility of the government.
57:22No leader rising to the top who could calm the situation and end the standoff.
57:30This didn't have to happen.
57:31It was a two-tier society that favoured the rich, while failing to solve the challenges of mass migration.
57:46This story is a refugee crisis gone wrong.
57:50It is something we are now very familiar with in our modern world.
57:54The fall of Rome, for many people, was a liberation from a predatory autocracy,
58:04which overtaxed citizens, mistreated immigrants and persisted through conquest.
58:09Do not mourn the Empire.
58:11The Romans did not believe their empire was about to collapse.
58:18But it did.
58:19Indeed, our world order will change.
58:23That will always be the great lesson of history.
58:32Egypt, a civilisation that has thrived for 3,000 years, is torn apart by a toxic dynasty,
58:40forcing the great Cleopatra to face civil war, famine and foreign invasion, threatening to end the age of the pharaohs.
58:52The Romans.
58:53The Romans.
58:54The Romans.
58:55The Romans.
59:00Watch the next episode of Civilisations on Egypt right now on BBC iPlayer Press Red.
59:07Tonight's Radio 3 classical mixtape features a Rome-inspired sequence of reflective music.
59:13Listen on sounds.
59:14Explore Rome's invisible city, a lost subterranean world, with Alexander Armstrong on BBC Four now.
59:21Part 2 from the Ministry ofرا
59:38Part 2
59:43Part 2
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