Sometimes you just don’t want any fannying about. Sometimes you want big chunky facts marking a wide, boldly slashed path through the thickets of your ignorance and to worry about the details later. And if you can find a cheerful guide to accompany you, so much the better.
So it was with the opener to Channel 5’s new three-part series Rome: the World’s First Superpower. It hacked and slashed its way through the first three-and-a-half centuries of the Eternal City’s history, gladly accompanied by actor Larry Lamb, whose undisguised enthusiasm and joy at the prospect of a journey through Italian time and space was – well, just smashing, really.
SO! To begin! Twins Romulus and Remus finished sucking at their lupine stepmother’s teat and promptly fought to death for the right to found the place. Romulus won and set about amassing, by fair means and – if you were a Sabine woman – very foul, a populace and got busy developing civilisation so that they could all move from stinky mud huts on the seven hills to unstinky great villas everywhere asap.
BUT! Not everyone got villas. Plebby plebs lived in plebby places. Resentment bred. Tyrant Tarquin the Proud comes to power after a bloody coup. Unhappiness. Boo! Rape of Lucretia. Boo-er! Everyone furious. Rome convulses and emerges a republic. Hurrah! One of the new twin consuls executes his own sons for plotting against the new Rome to prove the profundity of his commitment to the new world order. Yikes! But also hurrah! Sort of.
BUT, AGAIN! Somehow there was still a wealthy elite controlling Rome and picking on the poor folk. The plebs who fought – as the city fathers required - in the army kept coming home to find everything taken over by the patricians. Terrific boo! So the plebs downed tools and arms until the patricians had worked out some laws to stop them pissing on everyone’s chips all the time.
THUS! Rome was united and able to devote itself to empire-building. Bad news for the Etruscans and assorted others, good news for lovers of viaducts and stuffed dormice, for they are coming soon to an annexed region near you! See you, Larry, for definitus certainus, next week.
