- 5/18/2025
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00The Roman Empire was the most successful the world had ever known.
00:09At its peak in the 2nd century AD,
00:13it covered 5 million square kilometres.
00:19From Hadrian's Wall in the north
00:22to ancient Mesopotamia in the east.
00:26All of it run by a system of remarkable efficiency and stability.
00:32They called it Pax Romana, the Roman Peace,
00:37and its benefits were enjoyed by 60 million people.
00:46The Romans were proudly boast of having come up with the final word on civilisation.
00:52Peace, security and prosperity,
00:55all underwritten by an imperial power with a civilising mission.
00:59As long as you got with the programme, paid your taxes,
01:03committed to the empire and, of course, kept the peace,
01:06the benefits of civilisation would come to you.
01:09What more could anyone want?
01:13The answer was more than the Pax Romana could supply.
01:18This mighty empire would endure some mad, bad and dangerous emperors,
01:24but in the end, it would be subverted by an obscure religious cult from the east.
01:32Its followers would reject not just Rome,
01:35but all that Rome would come to mean.
01:38The city of man would be eclipsed by the city of God.
02:09SCREAMING
02:31Here's a rare thing in our story of the ancient world,
02:34a massive, expensive public monument,
02:38dedicated not to some blood-soaked triumph over a cringing enemy,
02:43but to that elusive, precious thing called peace.
02:48Surely the greatest good that human civilisation can aspire to.
02:57It was created at the behest of the man who established the Pax Romana.
03:05Augustus, Rome's first emperor.
03:11This is the Ara Parkes, the Altar of Peace, built by Augustus in 13 BC.
03:18On this frieze here, it shows Augustus coming back from campaign,
03:23the guarantor and author of peace.
03:28Quite a transformation from the teenage warlord
03:31who reputedly ripped out the eyes of one of his enemies.
03:3918 years earlier, plain old Octavian Caesar, as he was then,
03:44was last man standing in the brutal civil wars
03:47that had torn the Roman Republic apart.
03:53As victor, he'd faced a simple choice.
03:58Resuscitate the Republic, ruled by the Senate and the people,
04:02or put it out of its misery.
04:05But the canny Octavian rebranded Augustus, found a third way.
04:11He killed the Republic's soul, but kept its body alive.
04:18On the frieze, you can see Augustus with three main constituencies.
04:23The first of these is the Senate,
04:26because Augustus was going to claim that he was going to restore the Roman Republic.
04:30And to do that, he needed to restore the dignity and authority of the Senate.
04:35The second group are the priesthood,
04:38because Augustus is going to claim that he's going to restore traditional Roman religion.
04:44But the third group is a real novelty.
04:47We can see them up here.
04:49Women and children.
04:51These are members of Augustus's immediate family.
04:54Augustus wanted to get the people of Rome used to a new concept,
04:58an imperial dynasty.
05:02As Augustus knew, Romans had a visceral hatred of kings.
05:09To plant his dynasty firmly in this hostile soil,
05:13Augustus had to master a tricky political manoeuvre.
05:17A Roman writer would later define it as getting higher by stepping down.
05:25You can see what that meant in practice in another public monument,
05:30erected 30 years after the Altar of Peace.
05:34The Res Gestae, literally, The Things Done, by Augustus,
05:39is the carefully doctored CV of the man who brought the principles of monarchy
05:44back to Rome after 500 years.
05:55That's a public testament.
05:57The Res Gestae is a very odd document indeed.
06:01Most Roman aristocrats, on their epitaphs,
06:04would be boasting about the honours and offices that they had accrued.
06:08But the Res Gestae does the diametric opposite.
06:11On it, Augustus boasts about the offices that he's turned down.
06:16So up here, we've got the dictatorship,
06:19which was offered to me in my absence and presence
06:22by the people and Senate of Rome.
06:24I didn't take it.
06:26The consulship, offered to me annually and eternally,
06:30I didn't take it.
06:32The coronation crown that was offered to me, I didn't accept it.
06:41One title that the self-denying Augustus did accept
06:45was pater patriae, father of the country.
06:53And he garnished it with a disingenuous little phrase
06:57that added more smoke and mirrors to this monarchy in disguise.
07:05Primus inter pares, or first amongst equals,
07:08would remain the modus operandi for all emperors after Augustus.
07:13Augustus would maintain the charade of visiting the Senate House
07:17and seeking advice from its leaders.
07:21And even half the provinces would remain in senatorial control,
07:25but they tended to be the ones that didn't have large standing armies,
07:29just in case.
07:36The dead hand of the father of the country
07:39weighed heavily here in the Senate.
07:44Woe betide the senator who failed to do Augustus' bidding.
07:50And so the habits of debate and dissent shriveled and died.
08:06Augustus lived long enough to see his imperial system take firm root.
08:11But its resilience was tested by what came next.
08:21A succession of rulers that gives the term Roman Emperor
08:25its lurid associations with vanity...
08:31..debauchery...
08:33..and insanity.
08:38This hall is literally full of emperors.
08:41And, as you can see, they come in various shapes.
08:44This is the Roman emperor,
08:46and this is the hall of emperors.
08:48And, as you can see, they come in various shapes and sizes.
08:52But one of the interesting things about the empire
08:55is it often didn't seem to matter what the man at the top was like.
08:59He could be mad, bad and dangerous,
09:02but the empire just carried on regardless.
09:07The machinery of empire, trade, tax collecting and public works,
09:12rarely missed a beat.
09:14But the imperial system distorted the values and ideals of Rome.
09:21For Rome's elite, life under an emperor was a form of exquisite torture.
09:27The closer you got to the centre of power,
09:30the greater your chances of an untimely death.
09:35Such unspoken inequalities often created embarrassing
09:39and even dangerous situations.
09:42The emperor Claudius, who often got things wrong,
09:45used to turn up at senators' houses for dinner, uninvited,
09:49leaving his hosts to sit there quaking in their boots over dinner
09:53as his bodyguards served up the food.
09:56And one obsequious senator threw himself at the feet
10:00of the aged emperor Tiberius, knocking him over,
10:03and he almost ended up with a guardsman's sword in his guts.
10:08Many senators embraced stoicism, the cultivation of indifference
10:14in the face of life's trials and tribulations,
10:18as a psychological defence mechanism
10:20against these arbitrary and dangerous times.
10:29Many of them decided to exercise the ultimate freedom
10:33that they still had left under a tyrant,
10:36and that was choosing the manner and the time of their own deaths.
10:42So there was a whole series of senatorial suicides,
10:46including men who invited all of their friends to dinner,
10:49where they read poetry, ate something,
10:52and then they went off to the baths where the guy
10:55who was going to commit suicide slashed his wrists.
10:58But then, in another twist,
11:01one of these guys had his hands bandaged up again,
11:04and he went out again, spent some more time discussing things
11:07with his friends before going back in and having the bandages removed,
11:11where he bled to death.
11:17While Rome's imperial system drove its elite to suicide,
11:21the masses were encouraged to behave like spoiled brats.
11:26The million-strong population of Rome was always one grievance away
11:31from becoming a million-strong mob.
11:35And so smart emperors kept it sweet with panem ecocenses,
11:41bread and circuses.
11:47The bread came first.
11:49Augustus handed out a free monthly dole of grain,
11:53Augustus handed out a free monthly dole of grain to 200,000 Romans,
11:59one-fifth of the city's population.
12:02He could afford to be generous,
12:04because Rome had acquired the ancient world's great bread basket
12:07of North Africa.
12:13The abundant fruits of empire helped fill the bellies of the Romans
12:17and kept them quiet.
12:23There was a trading boom in the Mediterranean,
12:25unprecedented in the ancient world,
12:28as ships headed to Rome laden with grain, building materials
12:32and amphora full of olive oil.
12:38So much for the bread, but the plebs also demanded stronger meat.
12:47The circuses.
12:50The Roman games had gladiators, chariots and wild beasts.
12:58These Las Vegas-scale spectaculars were paid for by the emperor
13:03or his representatives.
13:06And death was always top of the bill.
13:10In this murky, subterranean world, animals and men would wait
13:14before they were taken up to the arena above
13:17to die for the entertainment of the crowds there.
13:20The Roman Empire, built on bread and circuses,
13:23cheap food and cheap thrills.
13:30The grim theatre of death was the place where death was played.
13:35The grim theatre of death that played out on the sandy floor
13:39of the amphitheatre was accompanied by cut and thrust
13:43of a more subtle kind.
13:47The political interaction that took place between the crowd
13:51and their emperor.
13:54There were ways of doing it and ways of not doing it.
13:57So Tiberius got it completely wrong and came across as being very aloof
14:01because he didn't turn up at all.
14:03Then there were others like Claudius who just enjoyed it a bit too much.
14:07He used to like looking at the expressions on the faces of the dying gladiators.
14:13Others also didn't get involved enough.
14:16So Domitian liked to sit in his box,
14:18but he spent most of his time chatting to a dwarf in a red cloak.
14:23And then there was Nero, who went too far
14:27and actually became the star of the show himself
14:30and performed as a musician.
14:34So for emperors, the games were a time when you had to get the balance right
14:39between participation and maintaining your dignity.
14:46But keeping the Romans in Rome happy and docile
14:49was only one part of the challenge of running the empire.
14:56What about the 59 million other citizens and subjects of Rome
15:00scattered over its vast territories?
15:05To keep them in their place as compliant tax-paying units,
15:09emperors depended upon the loyalty and commitment of local elites.
15:16It was they in thousands of towns, large and small,
15:20who really ran the Roman Empire,
15:23extracting revenues, building public works
15:27and keeping order by imitating the bread and circuses programme
15:31developed in the capital.
15:35The system was remarkably efficient and streamlined.
15:38The whole of the empire was administered
15:41by just 10,000 of these bureaucrats.
15:44Modern Britain has half a million.
15:51To cultivate and maintain their loyalty,
15:54they were granted full citizen rights and generous tax concessions.
16:01And perhaps most importantly, there was the imperial cult,
16:05which turned emperors and their families into gods.
16:12Here, the Emperor Antoninus Pius
16:14is being elevated to the heavens on the wings of an eagle.
16:19In Ephesus in Turkey, the divine Hadrian had his own temple.
16:26The members of Augustus' dynasty were worshipped here,
16:30in Nimes, in France.
16:38This bronze statue behind me is of the Emperor Claudius,
16:41and it comes from the temple of Augustus,
16:44a Herculaneum in southern Italy.
16:46Now, the imperial cult wasn't just about religion,
16:49it was also about political control.
16:51The problem that an emperor had was how to connect
16:54with his millions of subjects over a huge empire,
16:58people who he was never going to meet personally.
17:01And the imperial cult acted as a kind of hologram,
17:05beaming the emperor right across his vast empire
17:08and allowing him to create some kind of personal connection
17:12with his subjects.
17:17But when it came to religion, the Romans were not fundamentalists.
17:24Here at the temple of Luxor in Egypt,
17:26it was perfectly acceptable to worship the ancient Egyptian gods
17:31alongside the deified emperors of the imperial cult.
17:41And elsewhere in the empire,
17:43there was plenty of other evidence for Rome's religious tolerance.
17:50We're here in the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon,
17:53in what was once Heliopolis, the City of the Sun.
17:57A little bit of Rome from Rome.
18:00Before it was called Heliopolis,
18:02this was known as the Phoenician city of Baalbek,
18:05dedicated to the god Baal.
18:09Alexander Greekified the name.
18:12But the Romans, when they took control,
18:15preferred to keep things as they were.
18:17Imperial Rome was just not interested in name changes,
18:21preferring instead to add new labels rather than erasing the old.
18:29In spiritual matters, the empire was a sponge,
18:33absorbing foreign gods as readily as it had gobbled up foreign territory.
18:43This was the temple of Jupiter.
18:45But the Jupiter worshipped here was also understood to be Baal Hadad,
18:50a local storm deity who'd been honoured here for centuries
18:54before the first togas arrived.
18:56The temple of Venus over there was also the temple of Astarte,
19:00the Phoenician goddess of love.
19:02And at the temple of Bacchus, the wine god,
19:05it was also possible to pray to Dionysius,
19:08an ancient eastern fertility deity.
19:11The Romans were big tent polytheists.
19:14All were welcome to their local and traditional gods,
19:17just as long as they were willing to offer up a pinch of incense
19:21to the imperial cult.
19:25Rome tolerated everything,
19:27except for rebellion, political disorder and the non-payment of taxes.
19:33For a region like this, which had known the scourge of war in the past,
19:38that must have sounded like a pretty good deal.
19:49But the ironic truth about the Roman Empire was this.
19:53The further you were from the toxic centre that Rome was becoming,
19:58the more the stability and security created by the Pax Romana
20:02could be enjoyed and exploited.
20:09In the second century AD, where I'm standing now
20:12would have been on the very edge of the Roman Empire.
20:15This way lies Rome,
20:181,500 miles as the imperial eagle flies.
20:22And this way lies Mesopotamia,
20:25Persia,
20:27India,
20:28China,
20:30and the very edges of the known world.
20:33When we talk about the edge of empire,
20:36we think of Hadrian's famous wall,
20:38clambering over the rain-soaked hills of Cumbria and Northumberland,
20:42manned by homesick squaddies grumbling about their chillblains.
20:47Well, here, there was no wall or chillblains.
20:51This was Palmyra, the Queen of the Desert.
20:55And it tells a very different story
20:58of what life could be like under the Pax Romana.
21:02Rome had acquired this desert territory
21:05during the last decades of the Republic.
21:09And Palmyra was first garrisoned during the reign of Augustus.
21:16Even then, it was a vital link in the east-west trade route,
21:21providing an essential stopover point
21:24between the upper waters of the Euphrates and the Mediterranean coast.
21:32For the Palmyrans, the arrival of the Romans
21:35simply meant that a whole new market opportunity had opened up.
21:39From the workshops and factories of Rome,
21:42supplies of manufactured goods.
21:44From India and the east, spices and silk.
21:49Of course, we've met these people before.
21:51The Bronze Age merchants travelling with their mule trains
21:55from Assur to Anatolia.
21:57The Iron Age Phoenicians,
21:59criss-crossing the Mediterranean in their sturdy ships.
22:03Well, they're here too, in Palmyra.
22:05The essential middlemen,
22:07stitching together the political map of the ancient world
22:10with the thread of trade.
22:12And as the Assyrians had their mules
22:15and the Phoenicians had their ships,
22:17so the Palmyrans had their favoured mode of transport.
22:21The camel.
22:28By mastering the art of crossing the desert with their camel trains,
22:33the Palmyrans were able to join together what nature had put asunder.
22:48But like all traders, what the Palmyrans needed most
22:52was peace and stability,
22:54reliable supplies of stock and stable markets,
22:57so that they could pursue their ultimate objective
23:00of getting rich quick.
23:11This wasn't always easy.
23:13To the immediate east of them lay the kingdom of Parthia,
23:17a thorn in the side of Rome for centuries.
23:21Like others before him,
23:23the Emperor Trajan decided to solve Rome's eastern problems
23:27once and for all.
23:29He led his legions into Parthia
23:31and then beyond to the ancient cities of Mesopotamia,
23:35following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great.
23:38But whereas Alexander's victories had fuelled an appetite for further glory,
23:43Trajan came to a rather different,
23:45if not the most important, victory.
23:48Trajan came to a rather different conclusion.
23:52This country is so measurably vast,
23:55and separated from Rome by such incalculable distance,
23:58we cannot possibly administer it.
24:01He then turned round and went back west.
24:05That was AD 117.
24:08And if you wanted to date the high watermark of the Roman Empire,
24:12then Trajan's rather world-weary conclusion would arguably be it.
24:19Under Trajan's successor, Hadrian,
24:23Rome reverted to a policy of peace with its eastern neighbours.
24:28After 500 years of expansion,
24:31Rome finally decided enough was enough.
24:36Fuzzy borders became lines in the sand,
24:40and Palmyra, on the critical interface between the Roman
24:44and the non-Roman world, became a free city.
24:49And that was when the good times really began to roll.
24:55Sometime in the 2nd century AD, of around 150 years afterwards,
25:00the Palmyrans achieved the perfect formula
25:03for their relationship with Rome.
25:06First of all, they're important because they provided Rome
25:10with something it wanted, silks and spices.
25:13And second, there was no conflict of interest here,
25:17because the Palmyrans were only interested in profits,
25:20whereas Rome, like all empires, was obsessed with its own destiny.
25:31Finally, and best of all, the Palmyrans were far enough away from Rome
25:36to be left alone to get on with it.
25:40And today we can see the virtues of being left alone
25:43in the elaborate mausoleums.
25:47Put up by some of the leading families of Palmyra,
25:50both above ground and underground.
25:55Memorials to their wealth and status,
25:58but also the benefits of being in the empire,
26:02rather than of the empire.
26:05But it wasn't just merchant princes who enjoyed the benefits of empire.
26:13The ancient Greeks always used to say
26:16that the basis for any successful society
26:19was eunomia, good order.
26:26And that's what you can sense,
26:28and that's what you can feel.
26:32And that's what you can sense
26:34in a set of remarkable archaeological finds
26:37from some of Rome's Egyptian cities.
26:40The banal blessings of good order, writ large.
26:50As any private eye worth his salt will tell you,
26:53what people throw away is often more revealing
26:56than what they keep and cherish.
26:59And it was certainly the case here,
27:01in the Roman city of Antonopolis,
27:03where amongst the tonnes of broken pottery,
27:06archaeologists struck gold.
27:08Papyri, thousands and thousands of them.
27:11So many that it's going to take generations of scholars
27:14to decipher and publish them all.
27:28The wealth of written material
27:30allows us to reconstruct in minute detail
27:33what life was like here in the heyday of the empire.
27:39Most of it is the ancient equivalent of those mountains of paper
27:43that clog up our lives today.
27:46Bills, tax returns, personal letters,
27:50invitations, certificates,
27:53contracts, to-do lists.
27:56The kind of stuff that's either too important to throw away
28:00or too trivial to be bothered with.
28:03From the nearby city of Oxyrhynchus comes more of the same.
28:10And this one addresses the serious problem
28:13of donkeys being driven too quickly
28:15through the busy streets of the city.
28:20And this little note was written by two friends, Appium and Epimus,
28:25to a schoolmate of theirs, Ephraditos.
28:29And it contains the most extraordinary suggestion.
28:32If you let us bugger you and it's OK with you,
28:35we shall stop thrashing you.
28:37And there's even a helpful little illustration here,
28:40so Ephradidis knew exactly what was expected of him.
28:45And then there's this.
28:47This is a letter by Diogenes to one of his employees.
28:52A thousand times I've written to you to cut down the vines of Pahaea,
28:57but today again I get a letter from you asking what should be done,
29:01to which I reply,
29:03cut them down, cut them down, cut them down,
29:07cut them down and cut them down.
29:09There, I say it again and again.
29:14Go on, Diogenes, why don't you say exactly what you mean?
29:18But there's a twist to this tale of hot-rod donkey riders,
29:22smutty teenagers and slow-witted servants.
29:26And it suggests that the people of Antinopolis and Oxyrhynchus
29:30had other things on their minds.
29:34And you could say that these concerns
29:37besieged the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.
29:49Amongst the charming trivia,
29:51archaeologists also found this rather different text.
29:55This is a text from the Roman Empire.
29:58Amongst the charming trivia,
30:00archaeologists also found this rather different text.
30:06The kingdom is inside of you and it is outside of you.
30:09When you come to know yourselves, when you will become known,
30:13and you will realise that it is you who are the sons of the living father.
30:18But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty,
30:22and it is you who are that poverty.
30:29These words are from the apocryphal Gospel of St Thomas,
30:33from which three extracts have been found
30:36amongst the bills and the junk mail.
30:39And what it shows is that alongside the everyday concerns
30:43about vines and donkeys, that there were people here,
30:47grappling with profound and unsettling questions
30:50about the meaning of life and the fate of their immortal souls.
30:55Questions which the Roman Empire, despite its material wealth,
30:59were simply unable to answer.
31:08In many ways, the Roman Empire represents
31:11the zenith of ancient civilisation.
31:14Its values had taken root throughout its far-flung territories,
31:18but its inability to address the spiritual anxieties
31:22of its subjects would prove to be a fatal flaw.
31:37This weakness would be exposed and exploited by an obscure Jewish sect
31:42that had begun in the Roman province of Judea
31:45with the execution of an unorthodox religious leader
31:49called Yeshua ben Yosef.
31:57Christianity would go on to become the official religion of Rome
32:02and a major contributor to its downfall.
32:13The cult's extraordinary growth began after the Jewish people
32:17revolt of 66 AD and the destruction of the High Temple in Jerusalem
32:22by Titus, the son of the Roman Emperor Vespasian.
32:37This triumphal arch was built to commemorate
32:39Titus' suppression of the Jews.
32:42And inside it, there are two figures.
32:45And inside it, there are two friezes.
32:48On one side, we have the Emperor,
32:50flanked by the winged goddess Victory in his chariot
32:53and surrounded by his troops.
32:55And on the other, we have the spoils of Victory.
32:59The most sacred objects from the Temple on the Mount,
33:03the menorah and the silver trumpets amongst them.
33:08So this arch was as much about issuing a severe warning
33:11of the dangers of resisting the Pax Romana
33:14as it was about tasting the sweetness of victory.
33:21But what the Romans actually did
33:23was sow the seeds for their later problems.
33:29After the failed revolt,
33:31Jews dispersed throughout the Mediterranean world,
33:34carrying with them the beliefs of Christianity.
33:38These beliefs would put Christians on a collision course with Rome.
33:44They were fiercely monotheistic and balked at the imperial cult.
33:49They made a sharp distinction between the sacred and the secular,
33:53and they looked forward to a glorious life after death,
33:58making a mockery of the Empire's worldly devotion to the here and now.
34:04Christianity initially took root away from the imperial centre
34:09in places like Carthage in North Africa.
34:16For the authorities here,
34:18to be a Christian was to be a revolutionary
34:21and a target for persecution.
34:25A new word would emerge,
34:27martyr.
34:32The problem for the Romans was that for the Christians,
34:35martyrdom was a privilege, not a punishment.
34:39After all, it offered a guaranteed pass into the kingdom of heaven.
34:49The Romans were not the only ones to be persecuted.
34:53In Carthage, in 203 AD,
34:57the amphitheatre here was the site of a notorious killing of Christians.
35:06Worryingly for the authorities,
35:08one of the female victims, Perpetua,
35:11came from one of the city's elite families.
35:18Perpetua had been arrested by the Romans
35:21with a group of other Christians,
35:23including her pregnant servant, Felicitas.
35:29Both women refused to renounce their faith
35:32and both were sentenced to die in the amphitheatre,
35:35even though just two days before the execution,
35:38Felicitas gave birth to a baby daughter.
35:46Felicitas and Perpetua were brought up naked into the arena
35:50and the crowd immediately started shouting for them
35:53to be sent down below again.
35:55Not because they wanted to show them mercy,
35:57but because they felt squeamish about Felicitas' lactating breasts,
36:02which were dripping milk all over the arena floor.
36:06When they were sent up again, they were fully clothed,
36:09they were whipped,
36:11and then a wild cow was sent into the arena to trample them.
36:14But even after that, they were still alive,
36:17and swordsmen were sent into the arena to finish them off.
36:21The swordsman who was sent in to kill Perpetua,
36:24his hands were shaking so much that she had to hold them
36:28so he could cut her throat.
36:34Perpetua had got what she wanted, a martyr's death.
36:40And this bloody ritual would be repeated sporadically in amphitheatres
36:44across the Roman Empire over the next century.
36:57But persecution was never a coherent policy,
37:01and when the Roman authorities abandoned it,
37:04frustrated martyrs had to find other ways
37:07to express their rejection of the Roman world.
37:14If it couldn't be achieved quickly through the executioner's blade,
37:18salvation would have to be earned the hard way,
37:21through extreme asceticism.
37:27This is the world's oldest Christian monastery,
37:30St Anthony's in Egypt.
37:34Anthony was born into a wealthy Egyptian family around 250 AD.
37:41At the age of 34, he decided to renounce his material possessions
37:46and dedicate his life to God.
37:48So he headed into the desert to live the life of a hermit in a cave.
37:57Father Damien, how many steps are there up to the cave of St Anthony?
38:01I think maybe 1,300.
38:05You know, it's like the way to heaven.
38:08It's a very narrow way and a very tough way,
38:10but when you reach there, you will get the prize.
38:23So now we arrived.
38:25Here is our treasure, actually. This is a real monastery, I believe.
38:28This is the cave of St Anthony, where he used to live here.
38:33And I believe that his blessing is still present inside the cave.
38:37Let's go and have a visit.
38:39Thank you very much, Father Damien.
38:41OK.
39:00Christianity was particularly attractive to those who wanted to opt out
39:04from the comfortable certainties of the imperial system.
39:07They wanted spiritual rather than material enrichment.
39:11For these young men and women, asceticism offered an escape
39:15from the straitjacket of public service,
39:18private enterprise and family commitment,
39:21whilst at the same time offering a blueprint for a new life,
39:25one of poverty, abstinence, charity and penance.
39:35CHANTING
39:47For them, all the achievements of the Pax Romana,
39:51the laws, the aqueducts, the peace and the prosperity,
39:55were essentially meaningless.
39:58But it's hard to see how a small, isolated group of gentle ascetics,
40:03with their eyes fervently focused on the promise of a world to come,
40:07could be a problem to the mighty Roman Empire.
40:18Well, for a start, Perpetua in Carthage, Anthony in Egypt
40:23and the thousands who followed their example
40:26were precisely the kind of wealthy, educated people
40:30who would have been expected to take up active roles
40:33in the running and administration of the empire.
40:37By dropping out, they sapped the energies of a system
40:41that ultimately depended on the active commitment of its elites
40:45to keep the machinery of empire ticking over.
41:00But it would take something far more radical
41:03to turn this revolutionary movement into a force to be reckoned with.
41:10The spiritual restlessness that drove some to martyrdom
41:14and others to the desert
41:16went to the very top of the imperial system.
41:22This is Constantine,
41:25the man who would turn a pagan empire into a Christian one.
41:31He was a man of action rather than a man of faith,
41:35but even he seems to have been looking for answers
41:38that his civilisation couldn't supply.
41:43Constantine was actually quite promiscuous
41:45when it came to one-to-one relationships with individual gods.
41:49By the time he got to Christianity,
41:51he'd already been through Apollo and the sun god Sol Invictus.
41:56The relationship that Christianity would endure,
41:59it was possibly because of Christianity's monotheistic tendencies
42:04fitted very well with the man who had ultimately been responsible
42:08for the collapse of the Tetrarchy.
42:10One emperor, one god.
42:17The Tetrarchy had involved the carving up of the empire
42:20between four different emperors.
42:23They'd been created by the emperor Diocletian
42:26at the end of the third century AD,
42:28whose empire had become too large and unwieldy for one man to rule.
42:39But after Diocletian's death,
42:41the rival emperors inevitably went to war.
42:46This climaxed in 312 AD
42:49at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge on the outskirts of Rome,
42:53where Constantine defeated his rival Maxentius...
43:02..who drowned in the Tiber.
43:07Christians travelling with Constantine's army
43:10were quick to attribute the victory commemorated on this arch
43:14to the divine favour of their god.
43:17Constantine, always ready to give a god the benefit of the doubt,
43:21showed his gratitude a year later by passing an edict of toleration,
43:26granting Christians freedom of worship throughout the empire.
43:32A decade later, when Constantine emerged as sole emperor,
43:36the obscure Messianic cult from Judea really came in from the cold.
43:42Constantine demonstrated his commitment to Christianity with hard cash.
43:47He endowed a series of magnificent churches,
43:50including St Peter's Basilica in Rome
43:53and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem,
43:56which was built on the surplus land of the Holy See.
44:02Constantine was a man of many talents,
44:04but he was also a man of few words.
44:07The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem,
44:10which was built on the supposed site of the Son of God's tomb,
44:14on the orders of Constantine's pious mother, Helena.
44:18These would become new centres of political
44:22as well as spiritual power in Constantine's empire.
44:28In return for political support and generous patronage,
44:32Constantine expected one thing above all from his church,
44:37a consistent message on Christianity's core beliefs.
44:42The Council of Nicaea, held in 325 AD in present-day Turkey,
44:48was the first and most famous attempt by the Christian establishment
44:52to get its story straight.
44:56As you can see, there's not much left of the place
44:59where the Council of Nicaea was held.
45:02However, although the bricks and mortar are long gone,
45:05the legacy of the meeting of bishops that took place here
45:08in 325 AD is endured,
45:11because it was here that the Rome of Romulus and the Republic
45:15and Augustus Caesar and the Empire
45:17began to make way for a new Rome,
45:20a Rome of priests, popes
45:22and the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.
45:30Constantine presented the Council with what seemed like a reasonable request,
45:36a firm date for Easter,
45:38an agreement on the precise nature of the relationship
45:41that stood at the heart of Christian faith,
45:44that between the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.
45:49Easier asked than answered.
45:53These seats were used for a much later Council of Nicaea,
45:57which was held here in the Church of Hagia Sophia
46:00centuries after the first one.
46:03But I don't suppose the seating technology had changed very much.
46:07And the point of this is that these seats are incredibly cramped
46:11and uncomfortable.
46:13And every time you sat down, they must have served as an invitation
46:16to come up with a quick compromise.
46:19And that's exactly what Constantine wanted,
46:22a quick political fix to what he said
46:25were nothing more than small and trifling matters.
46:29But what he didn't appreciate was that this was a new type of politics,
46:33the politics of faith.
46:35And in this new political landscape, nothing was small or trifling.
46:45The bishops ended up compromising on a form of words
46:49familiar to all Christians today.
46:52We believe in one God, the Father Almighty,
46:55and in one Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God
46:59and begotten of the Father and in the Holy Ghost.
47:14Constantine was not finished yet.
47:17He made a decision that effectively brought to an end
47:21500 years of Roman history.
47:25On the 11th of May, 330,
47:28Rome was finally eclipsed as the capital of the Roman Empire.
47:32Of course, there had been contenders before,
47:35but this time it was for real.
47:37500 miles east of Rome, on the Straits of the Bosporus,
47:41Constantine founded the city of Constantinople,
47:44and he planned it to be nothing less than the new Rome.
47:56Constantine based himself in Constantinople, present-day Istanbul,
48:01until he died in 337 AD,
48:05when he was finally baptised on his deathbed.
48:22With just one exception,
48:24Constantine's successors would follow his example and be Christians.
48:29Their support made the church a real power in the land,
48:33and towards the end of the 4th century AD,
48:36it began to assert its independence from its imperial patrons.
48:43The main driving force on the Christian side
48:46was Ambrose, Bishop of Milan.
48:48A clever and energetic man
48:50who was clearly unfazed with dealing with emperors.
48:53Before he joined the church,
48:55Ambrose had had a successful career as a senator and governor.
48:59Now, Ambrose was firmly of the belief that it was a Christian church,
49:03not the Roman emperor, who was God's main representative on Earth.
49:07And this position was bound to set him on a collision course
49:11with emperors who were used, by this time,
49:13in intervening in religious affairs whenever they felt like it.
49:17So the scene was now set for a dramatic and very public showdown
49:22here in imperial Milan.
49:26It pitted Ambrose against the emperor Theodosius,
49:30a battle-hardened campaigner, but also a pious Christian.
49:35The spark was the massacre of 7,000 rebellious subjects
49:40under the orders of Theodosius in Thessaloniki in Greece.
49:47Many of the victims were Christians,
49:49and Ambrose felt compelled to respond.
49:52He banned Theodosius from the congregation in his cathedral
49:56and threatened him with excommunication if he didn't repent.
50:05Theodosius took the hint,
50:07and for the next couple of months, the citizens of Milan
50:10were treated to the extraordinary spectacle of their emperor,
50:13the most powerful and feared man in the Roman world,
50:16doing acts of public penance, stripped of his imperial insignia.
50:20And when, eventually, the chastened emperor
50:23was readmitted back into the Catholic fold,
50:26Ambrose insisted that he stood with the congregation
50:29rather than joining the priests in the sacred sanctuary.
50:32Ambrose had emphatically and literally put Theodosius in his place.
50:38Ambrose's spectacular humiliation of the emperor
50:41impressed ambitious men about where real power now lay.
50:52One of these men was a brilliant scholar called Augustine.
51:00Baptised here in Milan by Ambrose,
51:04Augustine had been born into a relatively prosperous family in North Africa
51:09and, after a good education in Carthage,
51:12had landed a professorship here in Milan.
51:15But after being baptised,
51:17he decided to return home and devote himself to God.
51:21This was a decision that would not only affect his family,
51:24but also the people of Milan.
51:27He decided to return home and devote himself to God.
51:31This was a decision that would not only change his life,
51:34but also the whole course of Western Christianity.
51:47Augustine returned to Africa,
51:49intending to follow the example of St Anthony,
51:52leading a simple monastic life.
51:58But his plans were changed for him when he visited Hipporegius,
52:02a port city on the North African coast.
52:09When he worshipped at the church here, he soon got noticed.
52:13With his classical education and oratorical skills,
52:17the congregation urged him to stay on, which he did,
52:21and eventually he would become their bishop.
52:27Augustine was soon playing an active part
52:30in the religious battles that raged,
52:33using pulpit and pen to attack pagans and heretics alike.
52:42He'd been bishop for 15 years,
52:44when history gave him a controversy
52:47that he could really get his teeth into.
52:51In the late summer of 410, shocking news reached Hipporegius.
52:56Rome, the founding capital of the greatest empire
52:59that history had ever known,
53:01had fallen to Alaric and his Visigothic army.
53:10Three days of looting followed,
53:13and many of Rome's finest buildings were destroyed.
53:18The mausoleum of the great Augustus was ransacked.
53:22Burial urns were overturned,
53:24and the ashes of Roman emperors were scattered on the streets.
53:33Rome may have been stripped of its pre-eminence by Constantine,
53:37but it still retained a symbolic importance,
53:41and its fall to German barbarians
53:44sent reverberations throughout the empire.
54:00In the weeks and months that followed,
54:02Hippo filled with traumatised refugees from Rome.
54:06They wanted to know why the mother city had fallen.
54:11Augustine took up his pen and gave them an answer.
54:19He wrote a blistering attack on the myth and mystique of Rome,
54:23writing a Christian counter-history of the city,
54:26a no-holds-barred decline and fall from the city's virtuous founders
54:31to the decadent, selfish, materialistic citizens of his own day.
54:36If Rome fell, Augustine argued, it was because it deserved to.
54:44In his Coup de Grace, Augustine attacked the very ideals that Rome,
54:48and indeed all the great civilisations of the ancient world, aspired to.
54:56These earthly cities were doomed to fail
54:59because they were the work of corrupt mankind.
55:07It took Augustine 13 years to finish his masterpiece, The City of God.
55:15And for me, there are few bleaker assessments
55:18of the futility of civilisation-building.
55:21For Augustine, no purpose or meaning could be found in the earthly city.
55:26Only the city of God offered these,
55:28and that could only be reached beyond the grave.
55:31Until that glorious release,
55:33the righteous man should act like a pilgrim in the fallen world of mankind,
55:38taking advantage of the peace and security the civilisation offered,
55:43but without ever mistaking it for anything substantial or enduring.
55:48The good man was just passing through,
55:51and the great technological, political and cultural issues
55:55of the time were not to be overlooked.
55:58And the great technological, political and cultural achievements
56:02of civilisation were mere stepping stones
56:05to the eternal glory of the city of God.
56:28CHANTING
56:46It's been 1,500 years now since the city of God took on the city of man,
56:51and in that time, other prophets from other religions
56:55have added their voices of criticism.
56:57But despite its manifold and serial failures, the city of man has endured.
57:05Elaborate schemes for political reform, social justice or national greatness
57:11have been tried and tested, often to destruction.
57:20And in the darkest days, many of which have fallen in our own times,
57:25the very idea of civilisation has been called into question.
57:30But despite all the calamities, crises and dead ends,
57:34we've returned again and again to the possibilities offered by the city of man.
57:42Hoping to get it right next time.
57:46MUSIC PLAYS
57:51There's no going back to the comfortable securities
57:54of family, kin and tribe.
57:56Civilisation has transformed us into a species
57:59which, for better or worse, chooses to live with strangers.
58:03And we need to keep on trying to find ways of making that unlikely choice work.
58:08Personally, I'm optimistic.
58:11So Esapiens, they say, has been around for at least 160,000 years.
58:16The city, for less than 6,000.
58:19So it's early days yet.
58:21We must keep the faith and try and make it work.
58:25MUSIC PLAYS
58:37Catch up with The Apprentice here on BBC HD
58:40with the interviews at 10.30.
58:42But first, we're heading to Normandy for Dig 1940. Next.
58:54MUSIC PLAYS
Recommended
59:01
|
Up next
58:21
58:22
58:53
26:13
45:12