Roman Civil War: The Barbarian Invasion (Part 2)

**Dominic Sandbrook** (0:12)
Even citizens found their city confusing. The only way to negotiate it was to memorize notable landmarks, a fig tree perhaps, or a market's colonnade, or best of all, a temple large enough to loom above the maze of narrow streets. Fortunately, Rome was a devout city and temples abounded. The Romans' reverence for the past meant that ancient structures were hardly ever demolished, not even when the open spaces in which they might once have stood had long since vanished under brick. Temples loomed over slums or meat markets, they shentered veiled statues whose very identities might have been forgotten, and yet no one ever thought to demolish them. These fragments of an archaic past preserved in stone, fossils from the earliest days of the city, provided the Romans with a desperately needed sense of bearing. Eternal, like the gods whose spirits pervaded them, they stood like anchors dropped in a storm.
Meanwhile, on all sides, amid a din of hammering, rumbling wagon wheels and crashing rubble, the city was endlessly being rebuilt, torn down and rebuilt again.
Now, that's a description of Rome, the great teeming city, the great metropolis of the Mediterranean world. And listeners may be wondering which great writer, which master of the English language constructed those sentences? Was it Edward Gibbon? Was it Dan Brown? Well, dear listeners, it was our very own Tom Holland in his book Rubicon, the book that catapulted him to greatness.
So Tom, Rome, 105 BC, biggest city in the Mediterranean. It's not yet the mega city that will become under the Emperor Augustus a hundred years later. It's probably about 400, 500,000 people max. But to visitors, as your wonderful prose can read, it is overwhelming, isn't it? Rather like your prose, actually.

**Tom Holland** (2:29)
I think for visitors, it's experienced as a kind of monstrous city. It's crowded, it's confusing, it's completely chaotic. It has this terrible haze of brown smog which hangs over it, and which can be seen many, many miles before you actually see the city itself. Then you arrive in the city, and it's crammed with teetering, jerry-built apartment blocks, insuli they were called islands. They were islands rising above the chaos of the streets below, and which are notorious as death traps. If there's a fire and you are on the top stories, I mean, that's it, you're burnt to a cinder.
Everywhere, there are shanties sprouting up. If there's a fire, the shanties will immediately emerge in the space that's been left, and they're spreading out through the gates along the roads that lead into Rome. There is also an incredible lack of the monumental architecture that most people, I imagine, when they think of ancient Rome, would be in their mind's eye. Rome in this period is not the Rome of gladiator. There are no amphitheaters, there are no palaces, there's very little gleaming marble.
Greek ambassadors who are used to exactly that kind of cityscape, things that are elegant, that are planned, that are spacious, that are centrally organised. When they come to Rome, they think this is an absolute dump. I suppose it's like someone from New York going to a third world city, something like that.
They think it's backward, they think it's ramshackle, they think it's disorganised. But the Roman response to this is to say that the chaos of their city is the index of its liberty. The kings can impose urban plans on cities because they are autocrats. But because Rome is a republic and its great men are much too jealous of one another to allow any of them to build kind of pompous imposing monuments, this means that its chaotic brick-fronted cityscape is an expression of the fact that the Romans are a free people. It's telling that it's only under the rule of Augustus, the first of the Caesars, the first of the autocrats, that it will start its transformation into a city from brick into marble.

**Dominic Sandbrook** (4:47)
He's the Napoleon III of Roman history, so Napoleon III who transforms Paris.

**Tom Holland** (4:53)
Well, I think Napoleon III is surely the would-be Augustus.

**Dominic Sandbrook** (4:58)
Yeah, correct. Because also Napoleon III was an absolutely ludicrous man, whereas Augustus was arguably the greatest politician who ever lived. Anyway, that's by the by. So Rome, 105 BC, one thing obsesses the city more than anything else, and that of course is politics. Because we ended last time with the great political drama of Marius effectively stabbing his patron Metellus in the back. But Marius, you ended last time by saying how worried Marius was about his own Lieutenant Sulla and we will come on to this.
But just give us a sense. So it's a great kind of theater, isn't it? It's a theatre for political show.