Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit.

With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabatans, and enjoy a new release every week.

Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. The Roman Empire, the beating heart of the ancient world, a dazzling expanse of marble and

martial valour, of togas and trade routes that spanned three continents. It was constructed

over the course of a thousand years and rose from a city that was once an overlooked backwater.

Rome's sweeping Imperium came to define the very concept of civilization, but then the cracks started to emerge.

Rome, once a dominion of glory and gold, in just two centuries, would become synonymous with decay

and collapse. And over the next two weeks, the question we're asking on the ancients is how.

How was the most illustrious empire the world had yet seen brought to doom and destitution. You're listening to the

ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and this is the story of the fall of Rome.

Today, in the first of four special episodes, we're starting at the beginning, casting the net

wide to trace the origins of the Western Roman Empire's collapse. From civil wars that pitted

Emperor versus Emperor to the contested rise of Christianity, we'll explore the swirling

maelstrom of internal pressures and tensions that pushed Rome to breaking point. Next, we'll explore the swirling maelstrom of internal pressures and tensions that pushed Rome to

breaking point. Next, we'll journey north to the unruly borderlands along the rivers Rhine and Danube

to mingle among the so-called barbarians, who flooded across the empire's boundaries and

carved out their own barbarian kingdoms from the husk of this fallen superpower.

Then we'll travel east, past the lands of the Goths and the Huns, to the fertile crescent of

Mesopotamia and the faraway lands of East Africa, tracing the origins of a series of

indiscriminate deadly plagues that ripped through the empire's population.

We'll ask was disease the main factor that brought Rome to its knees.

And finally, to bring things to a head, we'll tell the tale of Rome's last emperors,

...