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About 1 hr0 learners Rev. 2026-10-28 0
When Hannibal wiped out a Roman army at Cannae, killing tens of thousands in an afternoon, Rome refused to negotiate and won the war anyway. A little over a century later the same Republic came apart with no foreign enemy at the gates, undone by its own citizens, generals and broken rules. That puzzle sits at the heart of Roman history, and it is why the American founders signed their arguments with Roman names and why people worried about democracy today still argue about the Gracchi.
You will watch a cluster of farming villages on the Tiber become master of the Mediterranean, meet a gladiator who held off legions and a provincial governor unsure what to do with Christians, and climb the stairs of a crowded apartment block before checking the accounts of an aqueduct inspector. By the end, you will catch what imperial propaganda leaves out, weigh the rival stories about why the West fell, and recognize Roman ideas about citizenship, law and limited power in the institutions you live under now.
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