I'm Peter Frankopen. And in our podcast, Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history.

This season we're revisiting the life of Cecil Rhodes.

From Sickly Child to Diamond Tycoon, leading colonialist in South Africa, he was a bastion of British imperialism.

Over the past few years, campuses around the world have been met by students, chanting Rhodes must fall. His legacy has been completely transformed.

It's unbelievable how relevant roads still feels and how often his name is invoked by people

contesting really polarizing parts of our contemporary life.

But one of the questions about Rhodes is that he takes all the flag and therefore hides

away all the other people who were responsible for doing things that maybe not quite so bad.

That's why I think it's important to think not just about Rhodes and his own life, but about what that period

of British and colonial history meant.

And one of the things people often say is you have to judge these figures by the standards of their time

that's exactly what we're gonna do Peter isn't it so follow legacy now from

wherever you get your podcasts or binge entire seasons early and ad-free on

Wondery Plus. It's early September just over 2,000 years ago in 9 a.D.

Amidst the wet and boggy ground of a dense German forest, scarred Roman soldiers huddle around fires in the cold dark night. the their enemy merciless

merciless.

These men awaited dawn and almost certain death.

Victims in one of the greatest defeats in Roman history.

It's a story of betrayal, of one man's vehement desire to liberate his people from Roman rule

and the brutal bloody lengths he would go to achieve it.

A barbarian who has taken on the might of the Roman Empire has worked out the way that a Roman army

operates in the field and has found a way to nullify Roman

...