Larry begins this week in the heart of Rome, surrounded by the festivities as the city celebrates its 2,767th birthday! Amid the carnival atmosphere, he sets out to examine the earliest beginnings of this extraordinary people, revealing how a settlement of mud huts became a kingdom, and then a republic.
In the Circus Maximus, Larry explores the earliest accounts of the city's foundation, discovers the ancient and bloody legend of Romulus and Remus, and searches for the archaeology to back up these myths. Descending into the city's ancient sewers, he finds out how Rome's first leaders turned their village of mud huts into a city of stone – and how thousands laboured to their deaths to build the new city. The enormous foundations of the Temple of Jupiter in the Capitoline Museum reveal the scale of early Rome's ambition.
The republic was born when the greed and corruption of Tarquin the Proud, Rome's seventh king, led to a revolution which brought down the monarchy. The letters SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus) can still be found all over the city and date from the time of the republic, but although it was governed in the name of the Senate and People of Rome, when it came to major decisions, Romans still turned to the gods.
At one of ancient Rome's holy sites, Larry finds out how signs from the gods were interpreted. He also visits a huge archaeological dig in the hill country outside the city to uncover how divine blessing finally drove Rome to conquer its nearest neighbour. This monumental victory left Rome poised on the path to Empire.

During the mid-second century BC, Rome was enjoying the spoils of war, with slaves, treasure and art pouring into the republic. However, not everyone was reaping the benefit and as the gap widened between the poor and the privileged, resentment was mounting.
Larry traces the journey of Tiberius Gracchus, a man from Rome's elite ruling classes who eventually came to champion the cause of the common citizen farmer. Along the way, Larry literally dives into the world of the rich by snorkelling through the submerged ruins at Baiae. On the seabed he sees for himself how farmed oysters led to the development of the hypocaust, Rome's famous central heating system.
Amid the ruins of a villa at Settefinestra, Larry explains how unbridled greed and the massive slave-run vineyards of the rich threatened the livelihood of smaller citizen farmers, who found themselves landless and forced into a life of poverty and hopelessness in the city. He also visits Rome's only surviving insula – cheap, multi-storey tenement housing where hundreds of poor and dispossessed citizens faced poverty and disease.
Tiberius Gracchus took a remarkable political path to right these wrongs. Pitting himself against the all-powerful Senate, he used his impressive skills as an orator to become Tribune of the People and force through a controversial land reform bill. This triggered a chain of events that led to a violent climax when Rome's senators resorted to murder. It was the first time that Rome's political arena had been stained with blood and, for the Roman Republic, this marked the beginning of the end.