Empire Without Limit: Watch Mary Beard’s TV Series on Ancient Rome

As the found­ing myth has it, the city of Rome was estab­lished by a man named Romu­lus, one of two orphaned twin broth­ers raised by a she-wolf on the banks of the Tiber riv­er. The leg­end of Romu­lus and Remus, which involves the for­mer’s frat­ri­ci­dal slay­ing of the lat­ter, lends itself to strik­ing imagery, though it also gives forth more ques­tions than answers. “The Latin for wolf, lupa, also means pros­ti­tute,” for exam­ple, “so was it actu­al­ly a pros­ti­tute who came to the res­cue?” So asks his­to­ri­an Mary Beard in Rome: Empire With­out Lim­it, a four-part series you can watch in its entire­ty above.

In a sense, the sto­ry works either way: the mor­tal clash of broth­er against broth­er makes for a recur­ring metaphor­i­cal theme in the long his­to­ry of Rome, but so does the irre­press­ible pow­er of com­merce. Criss­cross­ing the Euro­pean con­ti­nent, Great Britain, the Mediter­ranean, and Africa by car, boat, bicy­cle, sub­way train, and above all on foot, Beard uses the traces of the might­i­est ancient empire to explain how the whole oper­a­tion actu­al­ly worked, and what its day-to-day expe­ri­ence was like for its sub­jects. When it orig­i­nal­ly aired in 2016, Empire With­out Lim­it fol­lowed up her acclaimed book SPQR: A His­to­ry of Ancient Rome, which cov­ers some of the same themes.

Those who’ve fol­lowed Beard’s work in print, on tele­vi­sion, or in oth­er media know that her ver­sion of Roman his­to­ry is hard­ly anoth­er suc­ces­sion of emper­ors and mil­i­tary cam­paigns. While she does devote time to dis­cussing such sig­nal fig­ures as Julius Cae­sar (who def­i­nite­ly did­n’t say “Et tu, Brute?”), Augus­tus, Hadri­an, and Con­stan­tine, she dis­plays equal or greater inter­est in a four-year-old sil­ver min­er in what’s now Spain, say, or an anony­mous young woman the shape of whose skull sug­gests the extent of migra­tion with­in the empire. And just as wor­thy of con­sid­er­a­tion as any par­tic­u­lar Roman cit­i­zen­ship is the con­cept of Roman cit­i­zen­ship itself, which ulti­mate­ly extend­ed across the vastest empire the world had ever known.

All roads lead to Rome, as the say­ing goes, and in the hey­day of the Roman empire, as Beard points out, it was actu­al­ly true. The ancient Romans were the first to build what she calls “a joined-up world,” where get­ting on a path in Rome and fol­low­ing it could get you all the way to places like Spain or Greece. (And also unprece­dent­ed­ly, you could take a glance at mile mark­ers along that road and imme­di­ate­ly “place your­self in the world.”) Roman dom­i­nance may have end­ed long ago, but the parts of the world have con­tin­ued to join up in much the same way since, and indeed, the broad Roman world­view sur­vives. As Beard puts it, “there’s a lit­tle bit of the Romans in the head of every one of us” — espe­cial­ly those of us who think about their empire every day.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Ancient Rome in 20 Quick Min­utes: A Primer Nar­rat­ed by Bri­an Cox

A Map Show­ing How the Ancient Romans Envi­sioned the World in 40 AD

How Rome Began: The His­to­ry As Told by Ancient His­to­ri­ans

Is Amer­i­ca Declin­ing Like Ancient Rome?

Do You Think About Ancient Rome Every Day? Then Browse a Wealth of Videos, Maps & Pho­tos That Explore the Roman Empire

Rick Steves’ Europe: Binge Watch 11 Sea­sons of America’s Favorite Trav­el­er Free Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.