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00:00.
00:05Rome, 23rd of August in the year 410 AD.
00:14Tomorrow, this world ends.
00:18What would it mean to live through one of the most terrible moments
00:23in human history, the destruction of the very heart of civilisation?
00:31For over 800 years, Rome had stood secure against all invaders.
00:37But now, the barbarians really were at the gates.
00:44Their leader is a man whose name will go down in history as Alaric the Goth.
01:00Tomorrow, Alaric will sack Rome.
01:03It will be one of the most traumatic moments in history.
01:07The whole of the Western world will be shaken to its core.
01:11Blood and violence.
01:16Rape and slaughter.
01:20Death and destruction.
01:24The cradle of civilisation burnt to the ground and lived in ruins.
01:30Well, not really.
01:32It was all much more extraordinary than that.
01:53We still see Rome as one of the great triumphs of civilisation.
01:58Back in classical times when the Roman Empire was at its height,
02:02we're told Rome was a beacon of hope in the dark world of barbarism.
02:07Well, that's certainly how the Romans liked to see themselves.
02:10And it's what we see now.
02:12The ruins of what was lost.
02:15Aqueducts.
02:16Great temples.
02:18A vast Colosseum.
02:21Rome was topped off and didn't mind who knew it.
02:29And anyone who wasn't part of their world, as far as the Romans were concerned,
02:34were barbarians, to be kept as far from these treasures as possible.
02:39But in 410 AD, the dam burst.
02:45Of all the peoples beyond Rome's borders,
02:48the barbarians of the north held a special dread.
02:53Rome still carried the deep mental scars of a trauma she'd suffered at their hands
02:58many years earlier.
03:00A dark and foggy land far, far away.
03:06Cologne in modern industrialised Germany.
03:122,000 years ago, the river Rhine marked the frontier between the civilised Roman world
03:19and the barbarian wilds of Germania, Germany.
03:28Here on the Rhine, the Romans were trying to keep the barbarians in their place
03:33on the other side, at a nice, safe distance from Rome.
03:38Mind you, the Germans didn't take much notice of it.
03:42They came and went across the river all the time,
03:45raiding the wealthy Roman province of Gaul.
03:49You see, Gaul had been thoroughly Romanised.
03:53They had towns, and towns meant you could raise taxes,
03:57and the Gauls even spoke Latin.
03:59It was all very sophisticated.
04:00But over on the other side, things were rather different.
04:06Here was the dark forest of the Germans.
04:09Tribes without towns.
04:11Not paying taxes.
04:13Not subject to Rome.
04:16Not speaking Latin.
04:18Who knows what they were plotting?
04:24At the beginning of the first century AD,
04:27the Emperor Augustus decided to teach these unprincipled savages
04:31some civilised values,
04:33and to turn the barbarian wilderness of Germania into a Roman province.
04:40But the Germans had some surprises in store.
04:45Nasty surprises.
04:51In the year 9 AD, three of Rome's crack legions, over 20,000 men,
04:58marched into the Teutoburg forest, deep inside barbarian Germany.
05:03They never came out.
05:08Six years later, a search party came looking for their dead.
05:12They were appalled to find the bleached bones of the legions
05:16heaped into piles around a battlefield.
05:24One in ten of all Rome's soldiers lay dead.
05:27This is the sort of thing the Romans did to discipline their own troops.
05:30They called it decimation.
05:32No-one else was supposed to do it.
05:35Something had gone horribly wrong.
05:39Around 20,000 Romans were slaughtered.
05:42These are just some of their bones.
05:44You can see where this skull has been sliced through.
05:49And this whole chap's face has been sliced away by a sword.
05:54And you see the sword marks on these bones here.
06:03The Germans had behaved just as you'd expect uncivilised savages to behave.
06:10They'd nailed Roman heads to trees.
06:13The officers were dragged off to altars and had their throats cut.
06:18They cut out one man's tongue and sewed his mouth up.
06:25As for the Roman commander Varus, the barbarians cut off his head and sent it to the emperor in Rome.
06:36The Romans hadn't just been defeated, they'd been defiled.
06:47You want barbarians?
06:49These were barbarians.
06:58Who could have led such ferocious creatures?
07:01I mean, do we know anything of the wild savage who must have been their leader?
07:06Well, yes, as a matter of fact, we do.
07:08His name was Herman.
07:11Herman the German.
07:18High on the Teuterberg ridge, about 100 miles east of the River Rhine, Herman still stands guard.
07:25Whatever the Romans thought of this savage, clearly the Germans held a different view.
07:31Ah, Heinrich.
07:32Ah, Terry. Good to see you.
07:34Well, here he is. He's pretty big, isn't he?
07:37He must have been pretty important to somebody or other.
07:40Hermann was important to me when I came here as a boy.
07:43He was, to me, the big German hero, the first German hero.
07:48And to a school boy, of course, this guy looks even bigger.
07:53Why is he such a hero?
07:55Because he is thought of as the first unifier of the German tribes against the common enemy from the west.
08:02Looking out over France, I believe.
08:04Towards the Rhine, where the Romans came from.
08:07Oh, yes.
08:08And he also looks straight in the direction of France.
08:13France having become the new Rome that threatened Germany in the Napoleonic Wars and afterwards.
08:19This was built in the 19th century.
08:22And against the common oppressor, you need a symbol of unity for the resistance.
08:27And this is the symbol of struggle for liberation.
08:34Oh, wait a minute.
08:36For a great national icon, who embolished the German struggle against Rome, there seems to be some confusion over what
08:43he was called.
08:45The inscription at the base of the monument says Arminius. I thought he was Herman.
08:51Arminius, the liberator without doubt of Germany, who battled the Romans at the prime of the empire.
09:04But Arminius, that's a Latin name. How come this great German hero has got a name given to him by
09:11the enemy?
09:11First of all, it was the Romans who wrote, and the Germani did not.
09:15And second, he actually served in the Roman army.
09:19This great German hero served in the Roman army.
09:23Yes. He was taken, people believe, as a hostage, but definitely he went from his own tribe to Rome and
09:36was educated in Roman ways.
09:39And he even joined the Roman army on a campaign in Hungary.
09:43That was a typical Roman policy. You take noble hostages, and by that you ensure not just that their families
09:53and their tribes behave,
09:55but you also educate these hostages in Roman ways. You Romanize them.
10:00And then you've got this great German hero who's actually thoroughly Romanized.
10:04I mean, he was part of the Roman Empire in a way.
10:07Absolutely. And the split between Romanized and non-Romanized and a bit more Romanized and less Romanized went right through
10:14families and through tribes.
10:16The border between empires and barbarians was not black and white. It was not a line. It was a gray
10:23zone. It was a blurred interface.
10:28So, Herman the German, or Arminius, as the Romans called him, was anything but a wild savage.
10:34He was actually a bit of a toff. A chieftain's son who'd become a thoroughly Romanized barbarian.
10:41And it was all part of a cunning Roman strategy.
10:45They offered Roman education to a barbarian, got him used to civilized Roman ways, and bingo!
10:51He'd be eating out of their hands and getting his fellow barbarians to toe the line.
10:56At least, that was the theory.
11:06By the year 9 AD, Arminius was back in Germania, helping the Romans enforce imperial rule over the barbarians of
11:15Germany.
11:15But the odd thing is that the many commanded weren't Romans. They were also barbarians. Many of them Germans like
11:24himself.
11:24Come again? It's time I talk to another historian. This time, John Coulson.
11:31Just tell me, what were barbarians doing in the Roman army?
11:36Well, there's a great tradition going back centuries, right back through Roman history, of the Romans using everything to hand.
11:43They'll take advantage of the local cultures. The Romans had always used what was available.
11:47And why the Roman Empire worked so fantastically well, and lasts so long, is they can con the local elites,
11:53the local aristocracies, into joining the club.
11:56The Romans seemed to have regarded the Germans as warriors pretty highly.
12:00The Germans had skills the Romans really valued. Skills in warfare, horse breeding. The Germans made tremendous mercenaries.
12:08And one real feature of the Germans, which the Romans valued, was their loyalty.
12:12Loyalty to a leader?
12:14Loyalty to a leader, yes. And the Romans found they could transfer this loyalty from tribal chieftains to Roman leaders.
12:24And the emperors of the first century AD, Augustus onwards, have these Germans, not just on the frontier when they're
12:31campaigning against the Germans here,
12:33but in Rome itself, as an ultra-reliable, hard military force in the capital.
12:40They were so loyal, they were even made bodyguards of the emperors in Rome.
12:44And by that I mean standing in doorways in the palace in Rome, you know, behind the emperor whilst he's
12:51dining, escorting him in and out of the theatre.
12:53And when, on the odd occasion, a Roman emperor gets assassinated, the German guards go berserk.
13:00They want to kill everybody in sight. The Italian citizen praetorians loot the palace.
13:06But the Germans are looking for blood.
13:11The Romans admired the fighting prowess of the Germans and knew they could trust their sense of loyalty.
13:19And Arminius, it seemed, was the most loyal of the loyal.
13:24He'd fought for Rome against the barbarians of Eastern Europe and been awarded Roman citizenship,
13:29and even given the title of equites, the equivalent of Sir Arminius.
13:36And yet, somewhere in the Teutoburg forest, the strategy of Romanising the Germans backfired disastrously.
13:43In fact, the Germans seem to have played somebody for a sucker.
13:50Meet that somebody.
13:52General P. Quictilius Varus, Rome's top man in Germany.
13:57He was not a very nice man.
14:03Varus had previously been a governor of the troubled Roman province of Syria,
14:08where he put down a revolt of Jews by crucifying 2,000 of them.
14:15When it came to meeting out torture and death on an industrial scale,
14:20the Romans could teach the barbarians a thing or two.
14:26But I would hate you to think of Varus as merely a brutal administrator.
14:31He was also a profiteer.
14:35It's said that he entered the rich province of Syria a poor man,
14:40but left it a rich man and the province poor.
14:44Tish.
14:50Now, Varus may have lined his pockets at the expense of the Syrians,
14:54but if he thought he could do the same thing in Germania,
14:57he had another thing coming.
15:07People like the Syrians and the Celts in Gaul had towns,
15:11and towns meant they could be monitored and controlled,
15:13and, most importantly, taxed.
15:18But Germania wasn't like that.
15:21It was made up of thousands of tiny farming settlements,
15:24like this one in the Teutoburg forest.
15:28It's not that they were more primitive exactly,
15:31it's just that they were too busy doing the things they liked doing,
15:34like fighting each other, hunting, growing crops and raising animals.
15:39They were proud, stubborn people who valued their own independence.
15:44Fair enough, really.
15:53The Romans assumed that once the Germans saw the advantages of Romanisation,
15:59they'd accept Roman rule just like the Celts had done.
16:03But they didn't know the Germans.
16:06You see, the Germans just didn't like permanent rulers.
16:09They'd elect war leaders, but if they outstayed their welcome,
16:13they'd eliminate them.
16:15They didn't like self-appointed authorities from the outside,
16:18coming in and bossing them around,
16:21which is what Rome had on offer.
16:28Vara started to act as if Germany were already a Roman province.
16:33Of course, there were some Germans who cosied up to the Romans
16:36and who did very well out of their patronage,
16:38but there were many more who had no intention of allowing Rome
16:41to take over their country.
16:43They liked it as it was.
16:45Loyalty wasn't to be taken for granted,
16:48even from Sir Arminius.
16:52According to the ancient historian Dio Cassius,
16:56Varus not only gave orders to the Germans
16:59as if they were actually slaves of the Romans,
17:01but he also exacted money from them,
17:04as if they were subject nations.
17:06And these were demands they would not tolerate.
17:13But they decided not to explain this to Varus
17:17and let him believe he was running a regular Roman province.
17:24Arminius pretended to be a dutiful subject,
17:26keeping supplies coming and encouraging a steady stream
17:29of phony lawsuits for Varus to settle by his wisdom.
17:33Arminius' people said they were grateful
17:36that quarrels that were usually settled by arms
17:38were now being ended by law.
17:42Oh yes, sure they were.
17:49Arminius continued to swear allegiance to the Roman eagle,
17:53but secretly he decided to throw off his toga
17:57and go back to his roots.
18:07All summer, the resistance was being mobilised.
18:11Word spread through the scattered homesteads and hamlets
18:14as Arminius secretly assembled an invisible army
18:18to strike back at the Empire.
18:26How did these bitterly divided subsistence farmers
18:30pull off their shock victory over the most professional army in the world?
18:34Well, as I said, Arminius played Varus for a sucker.
18:41Arminius had totally conned Varus into a false sense of security.
18:46He trusted Arminius.
18:49After all, the man spoke Latin, he was an equidaze,
18:52he was practically a Roman.
18:55In the autumn of 9 AD,
18:58Arminius used his position of trust
19:00to lure the Romans into a death trap.
19:03He invented reports of an uprising
19:06in a remote northern region of Germania.
19:09He went ahead, so he said, to investigate.
19:13Meanwhile, Varus gathered his legions
19:16and followed Arminius into unexplored territory.
19:22What happened next would remain a mystery for nearly 2,000 years.
19:28All that was known was that the legions were slaughtered.
19:32But how?
19:34There must be clues left behind on the battlefield.
19:37But where was the battlefield?
19:39Until recently, historians and archaeologists
19:42had been unable to pin down its location.
19:48But now, thanks to an ex-British army officer
19:51with a passion for Roman history,
19:53it's even got its own bus stop.
19:56Terry, a great pleasure to meet you.
19:57Good to meet you too.
19:58So, this is where Varus came to Greece?
20:02Well, this particular area was well known
20:04that during the 1700s and 1800s
20:06many of the farmers had been picking up loose Roman coins.
20:09We'd had no specific real idea
20:12and then I felt that this crossroads
20:15perhaps was the best starter for ten, if you like.
20:17What exactly did you find?
20:19In this particular field, my first find,
20:21if you like to call it that,
20:22was a very large accumulation of Roman silver coins.
20:26103 in total over two weekends.
20:29And the first weekend, when I found three coins,
20:32I was overjoyed, terribly excited.
20:35One of them was certainly from the period of Augustus.
20:38Where did you find them?
20:38And that was smack bang in the centre of this particular field here.
20:42And then I had no concept of the potential of the whole of the area,
20:48but safe to say that I came back the following weekend
20:50and then it was just staggering.
20:53It was absolutely amazing.
20:54Slowly but surely, when you thought you'd found the last one,
20:57there was more and more and more
20:59and everyone had to be plotted coming out of the ground.
21:03And after a while, it was just, it was just the enormity.
21:06It was just too much to take in at once.
21:08It was a treasure find.
21:10Tony Clunn had discovered the only major battle site
21:14from the ancient world ever to be unearthed in Europe.
21:17Coins dropped by fleeing Romans.
21:20Weapons.
21:21A Roman cavalry mask.
21:24Even a donkey bell stuffed with straw to muffle the sound
21:28as the terrified Roman units tried to make good their escape.
21:31But the most surprising thing of all was the location of the battlefield.
21:36So close to a bus stop.
21:38Nah, just joking.
21:40For generations, people had assumed the battle must have been fought in a forest.
21:44But as an ex-soldier, Tony Clunn realised that the Germans were using Roman military tactics
21:49against the Romans in a planned battle out in the open.
21:53Barbarian didn't mean wild and simple.
21:57Why had Arminius chosen this spot?
22:00It chose itself.
22:01It was the only way through the whole of this area
22:03where you can actually get a trap set up between the hills and the moor.
22:09This would have been moorland then?
22:11Yep, absolutely.
22:11And that means bog and...?
22:12Bog and wet and dry areas.
22:15But obviously every time they hit the wet areas, your worst nightmares are realised.
22:19and all of a sudden you're running slower and slower.
22:22So Arminius knew what he was doing.
22:25Arminius was one of the greatest, as far as I'm concerned,
22:27one of the greatest perhaps unrecognised commanders that have ever been
22:32and ranks one of the top ten commanders in the world, as far as I'm concerned.
22:37He actually turned round and put into effect a plan
22:40which totally wiped out three Roman legions, a tenth of the Roman army.
22:45was the only way.
22:54Arminius had achieved every battle commander's dream.
22:58He'd lured his enemy onto a battlefield of his own choosing.
23:02And now he had the Romans exactly where he wanted them,
23:06the invisible army suddenly showed itself.
23:14The legions were trapped as Arminius unleashed the full fury of his warriors.
23:39The Germans were as merciless to the Romans as the Romans would have been to them.
23:45Varus and his legions were completely outwitted and outfought
23:48by the despised barbarians.
23:57This was a defeat that Rome would never forget
24:00and that would leave a deep psychological scar on the empire.
24:04It would also throw Rome's policy towards the barbarians of the north into reverse.
24:11Germania would not, after all, be absorbed into Rome.
24:14From now on, the natural frontiers of the Rhine
24:17would form the boundary of the empire in northern Europe.
24:23But Rome wasn't quite finished with Germania yet.
24:27The barbarians had rejected the empire.
24:30Now no cruelty would be too great for them.
24:34Six years later, the emperor's grandson
24:36crossed this river again on a devastating revenge mission.
24:51German villages were put to the torch.
24:54Men, women and children were slaughtered in a spree of violence.
25:13The bloodbath was hailed as a great victory back in Rome.
25:16And as part of the celebrations, Arminius' wife and son
25:20were paraded through the streets in chains.
25:23And as for Arminius...
25:26Well, he outstayed his welcome.
25:28He tried to set himself up as a permanent king of the Germans
25:31and was duly eliminated.
25:41But Arminius did leave a legacy.
25:44The barbarians had traumatised the empire.
25:47And the next time Rome decided to expand her frontiers in the east,
25:51she would do it so thoroughly and so brutally
25:54that she would wipe an entire nation off the map.
25:59There can't be many monuments in the world
26:02that celebrate an act of genocide.
26:05But this one does.
26:10Trajan's column was put up here in the heart of Rome
26:13a hundred years after Arminius' time.
26:15It depicts a fight against an enemy of savage headhunters
26:19who cut off their victims' heads and stuck them on poles.
26:23No wonder the Romans were haunted
26:25by the spectre of savage barbarians beyond the city walls.
26:29Except that it wasn't the barbarians doing the headhunting.
26:33It was the Romans themselves.
26:35And this column doesn't commemorate barbarian atrocities at all.
26:41It's a public celebration of Roman ruthlessness on a grand scale.
26:47It records the victory of the Emperor Trajan
26:51over the barbarian people of Dacia
26:53in a land known today, funnily enough, as Romania,
26:58the land of the Romans.
27:05Now, unless you happen to be Romanian,
27:08you may never even have heard of Dacia.
27:11That's because it was here that the Romans
27:13applied the lessons they had learnt in Germany a hundred years before.
27:17They decided not to simply conquer,
27:20but to exterminate an entire barbarian civilisation.
27:25And Trajan's men did such a good job
27:27that experts are only just beginning to piece together
27:30who the Dacians were.
27:35The centre of Dacian civilisation was here,
27:38in the remote Carpathian mountains of Transylvania.
27:46Yes, it's Dracula country,
27:48where garlic is banned
27:50and the only treatment for bites is a stake through the heart.
27:54But that didn't scare off the Romans.
28:00The kingdom of Dacia stretched from the Black Sea to the Balkans,
28:04just beyond the limits of the Roman Empire.
28:06And although our evidence for Dacian culture is still sketchy,
28:10a cluster of fortified towns and hillforts here in Transylvania
28:14have given us a tantalising glimpse of this lost civilisation.
28:20The Dacian capital was supposed to be somewhere
28:23at the top of this mountain.
28:25It was called Sámi Zegutuza.
28:29But like most things Dacian,
28:31there's nothing much left to see.
28:33Unless, wait a minute...
28:36Found it!
28:44But I'd already been beaten to it.
28:48Archaeologist Chris Lockyer
28:50has been excavating sites in Romania for 15 years,
28:53trying to assemble a picture of Dacian culture
28:56in the 1st century AD.
29:01Chris, I mean, looking around at these stones,
29:02I don't get much impression of what these people were like
29:05or what their lives were like.
29:07I mean, what did they tell us?
29:08What did they tell you?
29:09Well, the amazing thing about these walls
29:11is that these stones have been bought
29:13from about 20 kilometres away from here.
29:1520 kilometres away?
29:16So you must have had a society
29:17that had the organisation to bring these blocks that far.
29:21And the actual design of the walls
29:23is not like anything else
29:25apart from a small number of sites in this area.
29:27There are buildings all over this mountaintop,
29:30but they also had ceramic water pipes.
29:32Ceramic water pipes?
29:33So they had plumbing?
29:34Yep, they had plumbing of a sort,
29:36perhaps either to catch rainwater
29:37to funnel into a cistern
29:39or maybe just to stop the rainwater on the mountain
29:41washing the buildings away.
29:43Hot and cold water in every room, was it?
29:44I don't think they had hot,
29:46but they certainly had water.
29:48And they had roads.
29:50And they had some roads, yes.
29:51I mean, considering this was built by barbarians,
29:54it looks pretty much like a Roman road.
29:56Yeah, well, I do wonder
29:57whether they were deliberately trying to mimic
30:01or ape the Romans with roads like this,
30:03but only in some very special sorts of places.
30:05But why would they do that?
30:07They had contacts with Rome,
30:08they had imports from Rome,
30:09they knew about Rome,
30:10and they may have been trying to show
30:12that they were as good as the Romans
30:14by building things like this.
30:20The fortified town of Sarmis-Egatusa
30:23was constructed sometime around the 1st century BC.
30:28Some 30,000 people are thought to have lived here
30:31in a society that looked very much like classical Greece
30:34with added comforts.
30:36Apart from their stonework and plumbing,
30:38there's evidence that Dacia imported wine
30:41and other luxuries from Greece and Rome.
30:44The Romans may have called them barbarians,
30:47but as Chris wanted to show me,
30:49the archaeological record is starting to reveal
30:52the sophistication of the Dacians.
30:55I brought a few things here for us to look at.
30:58If I can just carefully show you what we've got here.
31:02It's a little heart.
31:03It's a sweet little heart.
31:04Was this for Valentine?
31:05Oh, God, no, it's heavy.
31:07No, that's made of lead, and it's a plumb bob.
31:10A plumb bob, what's that?
31:11Well, it's for hanging a string on to get a vertical line
31:14for putting in buildings or something like that.
31:17And you've got a ring at the top for the string
31:18and then a little point at the bottom
31:20to get the vertical line.
31:21You also have a pair of compasses for drawing circles
31:25and that sort of thing may have been used for metalwork
31:29or something like that or design things.
31:30It's quite an investigated thing.
31:31Because it's got a little adjusting thing here.
31:33Yeah, yeah.
31:34So this tells us that they had architects and designers
31:37designing all these buildings.
31:39Yes, yeah, they would have had a plan to make these structures.
31:43They're not something you could do randomly.
31:44So they were working mathematics and all that sort of thing.
31:48This is some sort of cart or chariot fitting.
31:52It would have been bolted onto wood through these two holes.
31:56And then this would have been for guiding leather straps,
31:59part of the reins or the horse gear.
32:01I mean, it looks quite new.
32:03I mean, it looks like a Victorian thing or something like that.
32:06And we have this lovely little silver bracelet.
32:10You can see it's actually two horses' hooves.
32:13Oh, yeah, yeah, that's it, yeah.
32:15From these artefacts, we know that the Dacians had buildings,
32:19they had chariots and they had girls.
32:22Yes.
32:25So what exactly was Rome's problem with Dacian?
32:28The Dacians had a healthy trading relationship with the Romans
32:31and the emperor Augustus was even said to have betrothed his daughter
32:35to a Dacian chief.
32:50So where did it all go wrong?
32:52Why would the Romans wipe them out?
32:56Well, here's a clue.
32:57The locals have another name for the mountains in this part of the Carpathians.
33:02They call them the Metal Mountains.
33:11This isn't my idea of fun,
33:13leaving the lovely sunshine and coming down a dark hole in the ground.
33:17And I don't suppose it was much fun 2,000 years ago either.
33:21And yet people did it.
33:22They must have had a good reason, I suppose.
33:25But I was so excited.
33:26Very, very excited to go here.
33:29Aure, Aure, Aure.
33:30Carol, my guide, keeps saying the word Aure.
33:33Aure, Aure, Aure, Aure, Aure.
33:36Of course, and Romans...
33:37Aure.
33:39What? Aure?
33:40This is Aure.
33:41It's a seam of gold.
33:50The Dacians were cursed with gold, lots of it.
33:55Deep within the Carpathians lay some of the world's finest white gold,
34:00also quartz, opals, iron and copper.
34:03Some of these Dacian artefacts date from as early as the 4th century BC.
34:08Gold had made Dacia rich, or at least its rulers.
34:17We know the great Dacian king, Decebalus,
34:20had a prodigious hoard of treasure stashed in his mountain hideaway at Samizeketusa.
34:27It was vastly more wealth than he knew what to do with.
34:31But that was where the Romans could help.
34:34They had plenty of ideas.
34:35If only they could get their hands on it.
34:40All they needed was an excuse.
34:43As usual, it involved borders.
34:46Where exactly did Rome end and Dacia begin?
34:50Certainly not where the Dacians thought.
34:54At the end of the 1st century AD, the dispute turned nasty.
34:58Up till then, the Dacian king, Decebalus, had managed to run diplomatic rings around the Roman Emperor.
35:08All that would change when a new man took over the top job in Rome.
35:12His name was Trajan, and Trajan had a problem.
35:15He needed cash, fast.
35:18Trajan's empire was in economic meltdown.
35:22Meanwhile, the Dacians were sitting on a gold mine.
35:25Literally.
35:25It was all far too tempting.
35:28And in 101 AD, Trajan bit the apple.
35:32Hard.
35:34In Germany, 100 years earlier, Rome had sent three legions to conquer the northern barbarians.
35:41That had proved to be a mistake.
35:44Trajan led 13 legions, 100,000 men, to make quite sure about Dacia.
35:55This wasn't a war of conquest.
35:58This was a war of extermination.
36:06Dacian resistance was crushed.
36:10Its cities put to the torch.
36:19When King Decebalus finally realised the game was up,
36:23he committed suicide rather than surrender.
36:28As for his legendary treasure,
36:30he'd found a pretty foolproof place to hide it,
36:33or so he thought.
36:37Well, he buried it under this river.
36:40He had the river diverted,
36:42and then he dug a pit for the treasure in the riverbed,
36:45and then he set it back on its course again.
36:47He even had the captives who did it put to death
36:51so they couldn't spill the beans.
36:52However, the Romans caught one of the king's companions,
36:57and soon the beans were all over the place,
37:00and Decebalus' treasure became Trajan's.
37:12But most of Dacia's wealth was still locked in the metal mountains.
37:17The Romans started hooking it out of the ground as fast as they possibly could.
37:36It looks like they're still at it.
37:39The Romans
37:39The Romans
37:39The Romans
38:07According to Trajan's doctor,
38:09the entire Dacian population was reduced to 40.
38:13Modern historians tend to think he was exaggerating
38:16and that it was probably just the social elite who were eliminated.
38:20One thing's for sure.
38:22There wasn't much left of Dacian culture
38:25by the time Trajan had ripped its wealth from the rocks.
38:36Dacia was stripped bare.
38:38It's said that 1,600 tonnes of gold
38:42and 3,000 tonnes of silver were carted away.
38:46Temples of Zalmoxis were burned
38:48and the Dacian hillforts demolished.
38:51Even the memory of Dacian civilisation was wiped out.
39:10Back in Rome, the emperor threw the mother of all parties.
39:14He financed the games for a record 123 days.
39:20The 10,000 gladiators fought and 11,000 wild beasts
39:24were slaughtered to the roar of the crowd.
39:28The Romans' idea of fun usually involved killing things
39:31on an industrial scale.
39:37But Trajan didn't just fritter the money away.
39:40He embarked on a huge building spree
39:43that created the Rome that we so admire today.
39:47The heart of Rome, with its baths, basilicas, temples and forums.
39:53What do you mean there's no water?
39:55Build an aqueduct!
39:59Want to join the Mediterranean and the Red Sea?
40:02Build a canal!
40:04Need another legion?
40:06Make that too!
40:08You want a shopping mall?
40:10Make it a big one!
40:14When we look around at ancient Rome today,
40:17we are looking at the prophets plundered
40:20from the barbarian kingdom of Dacia in 106 AD.
40:26And to be fair, Trajan wasn't shy about it.
40:30He wanted everyone to know, hence his column.
40:34Rome was rich and it was time to protect the winnings.
40:37Up until now, the empire had been seen as infinitely expandable,
40:42but now there was no-one left worth walking over.
40:48Trajan's successor, the Emperor Hadrian,
40:51abandoned the idea of further expansion and created a frontier.
40:56Hadrian drew a line around the entire empire.
41:01The great mass of barbarians beyond
41:04were no longer seen as a danger to be conquered,
41:07but as burglars to be kept out.
41:20For nearly 200 years, it sort of worked.
41:25But pressure on the frontiers steadily built and built.
41:29Eventually, Rome gave up on Dacia.
41:35A Germanic people from the north were moving into Dacia.
41:39They were the Goths.
41:43Ah, yes, the Goths.
41:45Which brings us back to where we started.
41:48Alaric the Goth and his wild men clambering outside the gates of Rome.
41:53In the year 410 AD, Alaric surrounded the city.
41:57And on the 24th of August, 40,000 Gothic warriors entered Rome.
42:03Rome's historians recorded the event.
42:09Rome, the mistress of the world, shivered, crushed with fear,
42:14at the blaring trumpets and the howling of the Goths.
42:19The city is swallowed up in fire.
42:22Buildings once held sacred are now but heaps of dust and ashes.
42:28But wait a minute.
42:30Hold the front page.
42:31There are other accounts of the sack that tell an entirely different story.
42:37What? No boiling oil? No diseased bodies hurled over the gates?
42:43Apparently not.
42:45In fact, it turns out these barbarians were Roman citizens.
42:50And their leader, Alaric, had once been the supreme commander of the Eastern Empire's army.
42:56What on earth was going on?
43:02Well, it had all started about 30 years earlier.
43:06In the year 376 AD, a tidal wave of barbarians from the north had flooded over the Roman frontier.
43:15But they weren't an invading army.
43:18They were an entire nation, driven from their homelands beyond the frontier.
43:26It's said the Goths had originally come from Gotland and Sweden in the 2nd century BC.
43:32They'd migrated southwards through modern-day Germany, Poland and Russia in search of land,
43:38finally reaching the borders of the Roman Empire itself.
43:45So, Peter, you're trying to get some sort of concept of what Gothic society was like,
43:50what kind of people these were.
43:52They're farmers.
43:53They're sort of small, very small family estates.
43:57But the thing to get about it, to understand about it that's really important,
44:02is that they're not aimless refugees who just run anywhere.
44:07They've thought about this decision to come inside the Roman Empire extremely carefully.
44:12In fact, there's a lovely phrase in our main source for this.
44:16In Latin it says,
44:16Dio quae deliberans, thinking about it for a long time.
44:20It's not something you do.
44:23Just on the sort of off day you decide,
44:25well, move inside the Roman Empire, that will be pretty and, you know,
44:29it will all benefit, it will be wonderful.
44:30They knew that there were potential dangers of being turned into slaves and or killed.
44:49These people were running for their lives.
44:52They were fleeing from aggressive bands of nomadic horsemen from the east,
44:56the Huns.
44:59But letting them in wasn't an act of Roman kindness.
45:02The Empire wanted cheap soldiers for its own defence,
45:05and instead of the new promised land,
45:08the Goths ended up in refugee camps.
45:11After all, they hardly qualified as real human beings.
45:15By January, when the Goths had been there for five months
45:19with no sanitation, food running out, cold, down below freezing,
45:25then things are getting very desperate.
45:28And other Romans exploiting them in any way?
45:29Absolutely.
45:30Roman merchants, like merchants everywhere,
45:33have an eye for their main chance,
45:34and the sources record plenty of stories.
45:37The most famous one is Goths having to sell off children
45:41and getting dog meat in return.
45:46The Goths were not going to suffer
45:48whatever the Romans inflicted upon them.
45:50In 378 AD, these half-starved and desperate people
45:54confronted the whole army of Emperor Valens
45:58and simply wiped it out.
46:01The Goths would not be slaves.
46:08The burglars from beyond had moved into the neighbourhood,
46:13and now the very idea of a frontier had lost its meaning.
46:18The New Deal was that the Goths would have their own territory
46:21inside the Empire,
46:23in return for replacing the army they destroyed.
46:27700 years of Roman military tradition were over.
46:30Rome now had a barbarian army.
46:35As a boy, Alaric the Goth had crossed the Danube
46:38with his family in the great refugee immigration.
46:41They'd lost their land, and the land Rome had given them was useless.
46:46Alaric grew up to become the military leader of the Goths,
46:49and he set out to do something about that.
46:52He strove to become a major player in Roman affairs,
46:56not for himself, but to achieve a proper homeland for his people.
47:04For years, Alaric tried to force the Emperor to provide one,
47:09but without success.
47:10Finally, he marched his army to Rome and blockaded the city.
47:18On an August day in the year 410,
47:2140,000 Goths poured through the gates of Rome.
47:32And what did they start doing?
47:34Smashing statues? Burning churches?
47:37Uh-uh.
47:38You see, that's another curious thing about these barbarians.
47:41The Goths had seen the light.
47:44They were Christians.
47:54And the city they seized was the city of St. Peter.
47:58The Goths came as Christians, not destroyers from the wild.
48:03They didn't rape or murder.
48:05St. Augustine claimed that it was the piety of the Goths
48:09that transformed this sack into a pilgrimage.
48:16The Goths didn't want to destroy Rome.
48:19They wanted to become a part of it.
48:22Alaric loved Rome.
48:24He admired it.
48:25He needed it.
48:27The last thing he wanted to do was mess it up.
48:35Of course, he wasn't much of a Roman, really.
48:38I mean, a Trajan or a general Varus would have seized the city,
48:42held onto it, stripped it bare, and killed thousands.
48:47In fact, for Alaric the Christian,
48:49the sack of Rome was a mark of failure.
48:53It got him nowhere.
48:55The emperor still refused to negotiate.
48:59So, after three days, he left.
49:03Alaric took his wandering Goths south,
49:06perhaps heading for North Africa.
49:08We'll never know,
49:09because in one of the great anticlimaxes of history,
49:12he suddenly died.
49:15The great barbarian threat to civilization receded.
49:35And in Rome, well, things soon got back to normal.
49:42Slaves became slaves again,
49:44women became the property of men again,
49:46and unwanted children could be dumped onto the town rubbish heap again,
49:51which was the tradition in ancient Rome.
49:56In the arena, wild animals were once again slaughtered
50:00for the delight of the crowd.
50:02And prisoners were once again torn to pieces by the wild animals,
50:06also for public amusement.
50:07It was show business as usual.
50:10After the barbarian nightmare,
50:12the world could return to civilized Roman values.
50:22So, who are the real barbarians here?
50:25For centuries, Rome had dominated and brutalized people around its borders,
50:30sometimes destroying whole cultures in the process.
50:33The Romans feared and despised the barbarians for their otherness.
50:38But human beings are just human beings,
50:41and thinking in terms of us and them
50:43isn't really a very civilized thing to do.
50:46In fact, it's downright barbaric.
50:50It's pretty cool.
50:51It's over.
50:54You're looking for us and us.
50:56It's kind of a very sexual realidad.
50:59You're gonna take me!
51:01You were gonna take you!
51:02We walked away!
51:02You got to hell!
51:18You knew what you were going to do.
51:18We had to try!
51:18I got to tell you what I'm gonna do.
51:45Transcription by CastingWords
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