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00:00.
00:05Rome, 23rd of August in the year 410 A.D.
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
00:48as 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 lifted 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, the ruins of what was lost.
02:15Aqueducts, great temples, a vast coliseum.
02:21Rome was topped off and didn't mind who knew it.
02:29And anyone who wasn't part of their world,
02:32as 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
02:56of a trauma she'd suffered at their hands many 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
03:16between 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
03:32in their place on the other side,
03:34at 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,
03:56and the Gauls even spoke Latin.
03:59It was all very sophisticated.
04:01But 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.
04:14Not subject to Rome.
04:16Not speaking Latin.
04:17Who 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
04:37into a Roman province.
04:41But 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.
06:09They'd nailed Roman heads to trees.
06:13Officers 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,
06:27the 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.
06:47What 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.
07:10Herman the German.
07:18High on the Poiterburg Ridge, about 100 miles east of the River Rhine,
07:22Herman still stands guard.
07:25Whatever the Romans thought of this savage,
07:28clearly 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 some of the other.
07:40Herman 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 schoolboy, 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
08:00against 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
08:17in the Napoleonic Wars and afterwards.
08:19This was built in the 19th century.
08:21And against the common oppressor,
08:24you need a symbol of unity for the resistance.
08:28And this is the symbol of struggle for liberation.
08:34But wait a minute.
08:36For a great national icon,
08:38who abolished the German struggle against Rome,
08:40there seems to be some confusion over what he was called.
08:46The inscription at the base of the monument says Arminius.
08:49I thought he was Herman.
08:51Arminius, the liberator without doubt of Germany,
08:55who battled the Romans at the prime of the empire.
09:03But Arminius, that's a Latin name.
09:07How come this great German hero has got a name given to him by the 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.
09:29But definitely he went from his own tribe to Rome and was educated in Roman ways.
09:39And he even joined the Roman army on a campaign in Hungary.
09:43That was a typical Roman policy.
09:45You take noble hostages and by that you ensure not just that their families and their tribes behave,
09:54but you also educate these hostages in Roman ways.
09:58You Romanize them.
09:59And 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.
10:07And the split between Romanized and non-Romanized and a bit more Romanized and less Romanized went right through families
10:15and through tribes.
10:16The border between empires and barbarians was not black and white.
10:22It was not a line. It was a gray zone. 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.
10:37A 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.
11:20They were also barbarians, many of them Germans like himself.
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,
11:40of the Romans using everything to hand.
11:43They'll take advantage of the local cultures.
11:45The Romans had always used what was available.
11:47And why the Roman Empire worked so fantastically well, and lasts so long,
11:51is they can con the local elites, the 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.
12:03Skills 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.
12:15And 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,
12:29not just on the frontier when they're campaigning against the Germans here,
12:34but 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,
12:49you know, behind the emperor whilst he's dining,
12:51escorting him in and out of the theatre.
12:53And when, on the odd occasion, a Roman emperor gets assassinated,
12:57the German guards go berserk.
13:00They want to kill everybody in sight.
13:02The Italian citizen praetorians loot the palace.
13:06But the Germans are looking for blood.
13:11The Romans admired the fighting prowess of the Germans,
13:15and 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,
13:27and 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,
13:39the strategy of Romanising the Germans backfired disastrously.
13:44In fact, the Germans seem to have played somebody for a sucker.
13:49Meet that somebody.
13:52General P. Quictilius Varus, Rome's top man in Germany.
13:57He was not a very nice man.
14:04Varus 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,
14:19the 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,
14:39but left it a rich man and the province poor.
14:44Tish.
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.
15:38They 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.
16:14They didn't like self-appointed authorities from the outside,
16:19coming 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.
18:06All 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
18:29pull 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.
18:48After 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?
19:33There 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,
19:52it's even got its own bus stop.
19:56Terry, very 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.
20:37Where 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
21:27as 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.
21:38No, 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?
22:11Yeah, absolutely.
22:12And 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 which totally wiped out three Roman legions,
22:44a tenth of the Roman army.
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.
23:21Arminius!
23:22Arminius!
23:25Arminius!
23:26Arminius!
23:28Arminius!
23:31Arminius!
23:32Arminius!
23:37Arminius!
23:38Arminius!
23:40The 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 by the despised barbarians.
23:56This was a defeat that Rome would never forget and 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 would 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, now no cruelty would be too great for them.
24:33Six years later, the Emperor's grandson crossed 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.
25:12The bloodbath was hailed as a great victory back in Rome and as part of the celebrations, Arminius' wife and
25:19son were paraded through the streets in chains.
25:22And as for Arminius, well, he outstayed his welcome.
25:28He tried to set himself up as a permanent king of the Germans and was duly eliminated.
25:41But Arminius did leave a legacy.
25:44The barbarians had traumatised the Empire and the next time Rome decided to expand her frontiers in the east,
25:51she would do it so thoroughly and so brutally that she would wipe an entire nation off the map.
25:59There can't be many monuments in the world that celebrate an act of genocide.
26:05But this one does.
26:10Trajan's column was put up here in the heart of Rome a hundred years after Arminius' time.
26:15It depicts a fight against an enemy of savage headhunters who cut off their victims' heads and stuck them on
26:22poles.
26:23No wonder the Romans were haunted by 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.
26:34And 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 over the barbarian people of Dacia,
26:54in a land known today, funnily enough, as Romania, the land of the Romans.
27:05Now, unless you happen to be Romanian, you may never even have heard of Dacia.
27:11That's because it was here that the Romans applied the lessons they had learnt in Germany a hundred years before.
27:17They decided not to simply conquer, but to exterminate an entire barbarian civilisation.
27:24And Trajan's men did such a good job that experts are only just beginning to piece together who the Dacians
27:31were.
27:35The centre of Dacian civilisation was here, in the remote Carpathian mountains of Transylvania.
27:46Yes, it's Dracula country, where garlic is banned and the only treatment for bites is a steak 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, just beyond the limits of the Roman Empire.
28:06And although our evidence for Dacian culture is still sketchy, a 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 at the top of this mountain.
28:25It was called Sami Zegutuza.
28:29But like most things Dacian, there'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 has been excavating sites in Romania for 15 years,
28:53trying to assemble a picture of Dacian culture in the first century AD.
29:00Chris, I mean, looking around at these stones, I don't get much impression of what these people were like or
29:05what their lives were like.
29:06I mean, what do they tell us? What do they tell you?
29:09Well, the amazing thing about these walls is that these stones have been bought from about 20 kilometres away from
29:15here.
29:15So you must have had a society that had the organisation to bring these blocks that far.
29:21And the actual design of the walls is not like anything else apart from a small number of sites in
29:26this area.
29:27There are buildings all over this mountain top, but they also had ceramic water pipes.
29:33Ceramic water pipes? So they had plumbing?
29:34Yep, they had plumbing of a sort, perhaps either to catch rainwater to funnel into a cistern
29:38or maybe just to stop the rainwater on the mountain washing the buildings away.
29:42Hot and cold water in every room, was it?
29:44I don't think they had hot, but 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, it looks pretty much like a Roman road.
29:56Yeah, well, I do wonder whether they were deliberately trying to mimic or ape the Romans with roads like this,
30:03but only in some very special sorts of places.
30:05But why would they do that?
30:06They had contacts with Rome, they had imports from Rome, they knew about Rome.
30:11And they may have been trying to show that they were as good as the Romans by building things like
30:16this.
30:20The fortified town of Sarizeketusa was constructed sometime around the first century BC.
30:28Some 30,000 people are thought to have lived here in a society that looked very much like classical Greece,
30:34with added comforts.
30:35Apart from their stonework and plumbing, there's evidence that Dacia imported wine and other luxuries from Greece and Rome.
30:44The Romans may have called them barbarians, but as Chris wanted to show me, the archaeological record is starting to
30:51reveal the sophistication of the Dacians.
30:55I bought a few things here for us to look at. I'll just carefully show you what we've got here.
31:02It's a little heart, it's a sweet little heart. Was this for Valentine? Oh, God, I don't know how heavy
31:06it is, really.
31:07Yeah, no, that's made of lead. And it's a plumb bob.
31:10Plumb bob, what's that?
31:11Well, it's for hanging a string on to get a vertical line for putting in buildings or something like that.
31:16And you've got a ring at the top for the string and then a little point at the bottom to
31:20get the vertical line.
31:21You also have a pair of compasses for drawing circles, and that sort of thing may have been used for
31:28metal work or something like that.
31:30It's quite a sophisticated thing, because it's kind of a little adjusting thing.
31:33Yeah, yeah. So this tells us that they had architects and designers designing all these buildings.
31:39Yes, yeah, they would have had a plan to make these structures and not something you could do randomly.
31:44So they were working mathematics and that sort of thing.
31:47This is some sort of cart or chariot fitting. It would have been bolted onto wood through these two holes.
31:55And then this would have been for guiding leather straps, part of the reins or the horse gear.
32:01I mean, it looks brand new. I mean, it looks like a Victorian thing or something like that.
32:06And we have this lovely little silver bracelet. You 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, they had chariots and they had girls.
32:21Yes.
32:24So 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 to a Dacian chief.
32:50So where did it all go wrong? Why would the Romans wipe them out?
32:55Well, 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.
33:11To do it quite honestly, this isn't my idea of fun, leaving the lovely sunshine and coming down a dark
33:16hole in the ground.
33:17And I don't suppose it was much fun 2,000 years ago either.
33:21And yet people did it. They must have had a good reason, I suppose.
33:30Carol, my guide, keeps saying the word our.
33:33Our, our, our, our perspective.
33:36Our.
33:39Our. This is our.
33:42It's a seam of gold.
33:50The Dacians were cursed with gold.
33:54Lots of it.
33:55Deep within the Carpathians lay some of the world's finest white gold.
33:59Also quartz, opals, iron and copper.
34:02Some of these Dacian artefacts date from as early as the 4th century BC.
34:08Gold had made Dacia rich.
34:11Or at least its rulers.
34:17We know the great Dacian king, Dicabalus, had 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.
34:33They 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.
34:53At the end of the 1st century AD, the dispute turned nasty.
34:58Up till then, the Dacian king, Dicabalus, 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.
35:13And Trajan had a problem.
35:15He needed cash.
35:16Fast.
35:18Trajan's empire was in economic meltdown.
35:22Meanwhile, the Dacians were sitting on a gold mine.
35:24Literally, it was all far too tempting.
35:28And in 101 AD, Trajan bit the apple.
35:32Hard.
35:34In Germany a hundred 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, a hundred thousand 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 Dicabalus finally realised the game was up, he committed suicide rather than surrender.
36:28As for his legendary treasure, he'd found a pretty foolproof place to hide it.
36:33Or so he thought.
36:36Well, he buried it under this river.
36:40He had the river diverted, and 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 so they couldn't spill the beans.
36:53However, the Romans caught one of the king's companions, and soon the beans were all over the place.
36:59And Dicabalus's treasure became Trajan's.
37:12But most of Dacia's wealth was still locked in the metal mountains.
37:16The Romans started hooking it out of the ground as fast as they possibly could.
37:36Looks like they're still at it.
38:06The Romans
38:07But according 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.
38:35Dacia was stripped bare.
38:38It's said that 1,600 tonnes of gold
38:41and 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.
38:59CHEERING
39:09Back in Rome, the emperor threw the mother of all parties.
39:14He financed the games for a record 123 days.
39:19The 10,000 gladiators fought
39:21and 11,000 wild beasts were slaughtered to the roar of the crowd.
39:27The Romans' idea of fun usually involved killing things
39:30on 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?
40:09Make it a big one!
40:14When we look around at ancient Rome today,
40:17we are looking at the prophets plundered from the barbarian kingdom of Dacia in 106 AD.
40:26And to be fair, Trajan wasn't shy about it.
40:29He wanted everyone to know, hence his common.
40:34Rome was rich and it was time to protect the winnings.
40:38Up 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, abandoned 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 were no longer seen as a danger to be conquered,
41:07but as burglars to be kept out.
41:19For 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 gods.
41:42Ah, yes, the gods.
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 at 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. Hold the front page.
42:31There are other accounts of the sack that tell an entirely different story.
42:37What, no boiling oil?
42:39No 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.
43:52Farmers. They'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.
44:15In Latin it says, Dio quae deliberans, thinking about it for a long time.
44:20It's not something you do just on the sort of off day.
44:25You decide, well, move inside the Roman Empire.
44:27That will be pretty and, you know, it 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, the Huns.
44:59But letting them in wasn't an act of Roman kindness.
45:02The Empire wanted cheap soldiers for its own defence.
45:06And instead of the new promised land, the Goths ended up in refugee camps.
45:11After all, they hardly qualified as real human beings.
45:15By January, when the Goths have been there for five months with no sanitation,
45:21food running out, cold, down below freezing, then things are getting very desperate.
45:28And other Romans exploiting them in any way as well?
45:29Absolutely.
45:30You know, Roman merchants, like merchants everywhere, have an eye for their main chance.
45:35And the sources record plenty of stories.
45:37The most famous one is Goths having to sell off children and getting dog meat in return.
45:45The Goths were not going to suffer whatever the Romans inflicted upon them.
45:50In 378 AD, these half-starved and desperate people confronted 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 inside 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 with 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, but without success.
47:10Finally, he marched his army to Rome and blockaded the city.
47:17On an August day in the year 410, 40,000 Goths poured through the gates of Rome.
47:32What did they start doing? Smashing statues? Burning churches? Uh-uh.
47:37You 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. He 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, the sack of Rome was a mark of failure.
48:53It got him nowhere.
48:55The emperor still refused to negotiate.
48:58So, after three days, he left.
49:03Alaric took his wandering Goths south, perhaps heading for North Africa.
49:07We'll never know, because in one of the great anti-climaxes of history,
49:12he suddenly died.
49:15The great barbarian threat to civilisation receded.
49:35And in Rome, well, things soon got back to normal.
49:42Slaves became slaves again, women became the property of men again,
49:46and unwanted children could be dumped onto the town rubbish heap again,
49:50which 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.
50:08It was show business as usual.
50:10After the barbarian nightmare,
50:12the world could return to civilised Roman values.
50:22So, who are the real barbarians here?
50:25For centuries, Rome had dominated and brutalised 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 isn't really a very civilised thing to do.
50:46In fact, it's downright barbaric.
50:50It's not just the king.
50:51It's not the king's horrors.
50:54It's not just the king's horrors,
50:55but in fact it's a king's horse to put itself into a reconstruction.
51:00It's a king's horse.
51:00And, it's not and the king's horse to kill ourarı.
51:17And the king's horse were still dead.
51:18And the sea of humans could leave the danger and be the king's horse.
51:18It's the king's horse that hasn't been slaughtered.
51:43Transcription by CastingWords
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