Rome: The World's First SuperpowerEpisodes Guide

Larry begins this week in the heart of Rome, surrounded by the festivities as the city celebrates its 2,767th birthday! Amid the carnival atmosphere, he sets out to examine the earliest beginnings of this extraordinary people, revealing how a settlement of mud huts became a kingdom, and then a republic.In the Circus Maximus, Larry explores the earliest accounts of the city's foundation, discovers the ancient and bloody legend of Romulus and Remus, and searches for the archaeology to back up these myths. Descending into the city's ancient sewers, he finds out how Rome's first leaders turned their village of mud huts into a city of stone – and how thousands laboured to their deaths to build the new city. The enormous foundations of the Temple of Jupiter in the Capitoline Museum reveal the scale of early Rome's ambition.The republic was born when the greed and corruption of Tarquin the Proud, Rome's seventh king, led to a revolution which brought down the monarchy. The letters SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus) can still be found all over the city and date from the time of the republic, but although it was governed in the name of the Senate and People of Rome, when it came to major decisions, Romans still turned to the gods.At one of ancient Rome's holy sites, Larry finds out how signs from the gods were interpreted. He also visits a huge archaeological dig in the hill country outside the city to uncover how divine blessing finally drove Rome to conquer its nearest neighbour. This monumental victory left Rome poised on the path to Empire.

In 400 BC, Rome is 300 years old and has conquered its nearest neighbours, the Etruscans. The Republic is now a seemingly invincible city state, until a sudden and cataclysmic event turns everything on its head. Searching for evidence of this dramatic story, Larry Lamb begins his quest at the Termini Train Station in central Rome.Larry discovers how Rome was attacked by the Gauls in the Battle of Allia during a war that was to last three years. The city survived, but only just, and the leaders resolved to never come so close to destruction again. Deciding that the best form of defence is attack, the Republic began a century of aggressive expansion. Soon, Roman control of Italy stretched all the way to the tip of its southern toe.To find out what happened next, Larry heads to Erice, an ancient citadel on the beautiful island of Sicily. He discovers how Rome's expansion brought it into conflict with another great Mediterranean power – the Carthaginians.Larry's journey continues to Tunisia, where the ancient ruins of Kerkouane reveal that the Carthaginians were every bit as formidable and sophisticated as the Romans. Larry learns how these two civilisations came to despise each other and how their rivalry soon spiralled into a bitter, brutal and protracted war, fought across the Mediterranean. He reveals how the Romans built a navy from scratch and took on the Carthaginians at sea and how the great Carthaginian general Hannibal responded by taking his army across the Alps and laying siege to Rome itself.Finally, amongst the ancient ruins of Carthage in Tunisia, Larry sees for himself the chilling evidence of the Republic's act of genocide that finally ended one hundred years of conflict, and left Rome master of the Mediterranean.

During the mid-second century BC, Rome was enjoying the spoils of war, with slaves, treasure and art pouring into the republic. However, not everyone was reaping the benefit and as the gap widened between the poor and the privileged, resentment was mounting.Larry traces the journey of Tiberius Gracchus, a man from Rome's elite ruling classes who eventually came to champion the cause of the common citizen farmer. Along the way, Larry literally dives into the world of the rich by snorkelling through the submerged ruins at Baiae. On the seabed he sees for himself how farmed oysters led to the development of the hypocaust, Rome's famous central heating system.Amid the ruins of a villa at Settefinestra, Larry explains how unbridled greed and the massive slave-run vineyards of the rich threatened the livelihood of smaller citizen farmers, who found themselves landless and forced into a life of poverty and hopelessness in the city. He also visits Rome's only surviving insula – cheap, multi-storey tenement housing where hundreds of poor and dispossessed citizens faced poverty and disease.Tiberius Gracchus took a remarkable political path to right these wrongs. Pitting himself against the all-powerful Senate, he used his impressive skills as an orator to become Tribune of the People and force through a controversial land reform bill. This triggered a chain of events that led to a violent climax when Rome's senators resorted to murder. It was the first time that Rome's political arena had been stained with blood and, for the Roman Republic, this marked the beginning of the end.

Using Caesar's own memoirs as his guide, Larry follows the great man's extraordinary transformation from a bankrupt junior public official to the invincible general who conquered Gaul, through to his infamous assassination.Along the way, he discovers that money was at the heart of every decision Caesar ever made. Larry is amazed to learn of Julius's humble beginning as a penniless civil servant. He then visits the Channel Island of Jersey, which once stood at the northern edge of the Roman world. In a field overlooking the sea, he meets Reg Mead and Richard Miles, who made a record discovery there of 70,000 coins dating back to the time of Caesar. At Jersey Museum, the man responsible for conserving the Grouville hoard tells him how it was hidden around the time of 50-60BC to protect it from Julius Caesar as he marauded across mainland Europe.To understand Caesar's military genius, Larry visits the site of the siege of Alesia, Caesar's most decisive military victory, in central France. Taking to the air, he uses infra-red imagery to reveal the scale of Caesar's campaign. Back on land, he visits the reconstructed giant ramparts of Alesia and consults Caesar's memoirs to discover how his military cunning finally defeated Rome's ancient enemy.However, Caesar's most deadly adversaries were not on the battlefields of Europe. They were waiting for him in the very heart of Rome. On the banks of the river Rubicon in northern Italy, Larry relates the moment that Caesar took a decision that shaped Roman history for centuries. By crossing the Rubicon, he declared civil war – and unleashed three years of chaos on the republic.Caesar's enemies and even some of his supporters were determined to save the republic from his dictatorial rule and famously plotted to assassinate him. Larry retraces Caesar's final hours as their plans unfolded, climaxing in the brutal, fatal attack in a Senate debating chamber.Larry reflects that while the plot was intended to save the republic, it actually opened the way for a new age of emperors, known as the Caesars. He concludes that it was their individual ambition that drove Rome onwards, until their empire covered two million square miles and controlled the lives of a quarter of the world's population. Rome's greatest heights were yet to come.