Rome, 24 August, AD410. The empire that’s dominated Europe for five centuries is on the brink of collapse, its capital at the mercy of a barbarian leader. What do the people do? They do as they’ve always done. The rich scramble to hide their wealth. The poor run for their lives. The fateful decisions of a tiny number of power-obsessed men bring the mightiest civilisation on Earth to its knees. Sounds familiar? And yet. No one saw it coming … OK, apart from us, the hollow-eyed cynics of the future, watching the BBC’s latest iteration of a landmark series from the discomfort of our own civilisation’s real-time plummet.
The first, less-close-to-the-bone Civilisation aired in AD1969. An equally un-self-aware era when it was totally fine for a Tory politician in trilby and tie (Kenneth Clark) to chart western culture’s triumph ove
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