LIFE AND DEATH IN ROME: Chaos

This is a story about death. It’s about decadence and it’s about betrayal. During the Third Century AD, Rome endured the greatest crisis in its history.

A combination of plague, warfare and imperial debauchery meant that the Roman Empire almost collapsed. It was saved by an Emperor you have never heard of called Gallienus, and the reason you have never heard of this is because he was given a very bad press by the tabloid historians of his day.

In this film, we show how tabloid history is created by the historical hacks of the Roman age who bent history to fit their own agendas. In the process, we learn about the great Plague of Galen, which killed a third of the population of the Roman Empire – at its height 2,000 people a day were dying in Rome.

We delve behind the image of Commodus, the gladiator-emperor, who was strangled to death by his homosexual lover in a palace plot organised by his wife. We tell the remarkable story of the so-called transsexual Emperor Elagabalus, who lived for sex and whose murdered body was dumped down a sewer.

Fianlly, we tell the tragic tale of Gallienus, who desperately held the Roman Empire together after his father was captured and used as a footstool by the Persian king, but who was ultimately murdered by the men he most trusted.