Wunderry Plus subscribers can listen to Tides of History early and ad free right now.

Join Wunderry Plus in the Wundery app or on Apple Podcasts. The wheels of the ox cart groaned and creaked as they rolled along the muddy track.

The sudden downpour had soaked the trackway leading down to the forward across the river Tyber.

It was lucky that the rain had stopped, the cart driver thought.

The Tyber had a tendency to spill its banks at the slightest provocation.

The Romans had built up the low-lying land on their side of the river to raise it above the floods,

but this side of the crossing wasn't as fortunate.

His cart was packed full of fine black polished

pottery from the Etruscan city of Tarquinia. Losing it and a swollen ford would ruin it.

His oxen bellowed as they struggled through the churned mud leading down to the river itself.

The driver hopped down from the cart and led them across, carefully testing the depth with his wooden staff

to be sure they weren't wandering into the depths of the riverbed.

The water was cold and dirtier than he would have preferred, clogged with the flotsam and jetsam of the

thousands of people living on and among the hills on the far bank.

He kept his attention down where it belonged until they were nearly across

and only then looked up, catching sight of the swelling high ground beyond.

Curls of smoke rose from a hundred fires.

The burbling of the river's current couldn't drown out the buzzing chatter of voices,

clattering carts, hammers and saws, boatmen shouting at one another as they navigated

toward the riverbanks, and the thousand other sounds that spilled outward from the city of Rome.

He could smell it too, the stink of cattle from the drovers market down the Tybert,

the smoke from the kilns and smithies, and unwashed bodies all mingling together

...