Lost... Murder...

and the power of unrivaled technology.

These are the cornerstones in the

foundation of the Roman Empire.

They were driven by a kind of collective

cultural ego. Roman's colossal

building projects:

Stadiums...

Palaces...

Roads...

Aquaducts...

span 3 continents and

unleash the power and promise of the

world's most advanced civilizations.

These structures became symbols of

that idea of Rome.

But while Romans

dominated the landscape with their

massive feats of construction,

they were ultimately powerless to

prevent their own self-destruction.

March 15th, 44 BC.

The most powerful man in the world

lay lifeless on the floor of the Roman

Senate.

As a General he nearly doubled

the size of the Roman Empire. As a

Politician he engineered a stunning

rise to power but now this

battled-scarred warrior had been

slayed in Rome and by Romans.

His name was Gaius Julius Caesar.

Caesar's rise to power was predicated

on him wanting to have the best

standing in the Roman State. He seemed

to want too much power for himself.

He didn't want to share power with others

and this is what led directly to his

assassination.

Decades earlier as an

ambitious young general, Caesar had

recognized that the road to glory in

Rome began on battlefields far from it.

His thirst for military conquest would

spawn construction of one of Rome's most

intimidating feats of engineering.

55 BC

Julius Caesar is leading 8 Roman legions.

A total of 40,000 men north through Gaul.

A Roman Providence encompassing modern

France, Belgium and Switzerland.

He wants to go to Germania, to Germany,

and cross the Rhine

because no Roman Commander has yet done so.

He wants to be as great a conqueror as

Alexander the Great. Go beyond

what is known.

The Rhine River

lies on the edge of what is known.

For centuries

it has been a buffer protecting

Germanic tribes from Roman

expansion. No previous army could cross

it with the might needed for conquest.

But Caesar is unlike any previous warrior.

He could have gone by boat but what is

that for Julius Caesar to go by boat.

A row boat? you know Are you going to put 8

legions on a row boat & go across?

No, man! They need to march across.

They need to be on horseback.

From the engineering point of view, the

difficulties of constructing a bridge

over such a river are enormous in relationship

to the depth of the water and the

forceful current. If you bare in mind

that this had to be done in a short

period of time due to military needs.

The works is actually truly exceptional.

The bridge would need to be four football

fields long and sustain 40,000 soldiers.

Despite the Rhine's width, depth

and strong currents,

Julius Caeser is determined to succeed.

To cross a river that size with a bridge

is something which plays well with an

audience back at home but of course it's something that

plays extremely well with the audience

standing on the other side of (across) the river

who are going to be

awestruck when they see this happening.

With the speed and efficiency of a well

oiled machine, Caesar's soldiers

methodically transformed local timber into an

expanding bridge.

With every hour an

engineering miracle inches closer

to the Rhine's elusive northern bank.

It's almost as if a spaceship, nowadays,

the size, let's say, of half of Manhattan

capable of some magnetic device that

will lift buildings up in the air.

That would be a pretty frightening thing.

Something that we couldn't really grasp

at all.

The foundation of the bridge was

a series of wooden piles driven into

the bedrock of the river.

Each pile was a foot and a half thick.

Towards the middle of the bridge,

they had to be up to 30 feet tall

to reach from the surface to the bottom.

By driven the piles in diagonally,

Caesar's engineers had added

extra stability to the bridge.

When they drove the pilings in at an angle

and connected them, in many ways they are

doing what carpenters do when they are

building a sawhorse. With the legs angled

it utilizes forces to keep from being

pushed over making it a stable work space.

The sloping power offers a lot more

strength against the force of

the river and the flooding of the river

but it's much more difficult to drive

them into the riverbed

than it is to drive a vertical pile.

They would have had to work very carefully

with wooden frames to push them into

the riverbed. On the upstream side, the

piles leaned in the direction of the

current. 40 feet downstream the

corresponding piles leaned against the

current. Each set of piles were joined

by a long connecting beam two feet thick.

Lengths of timber were then laid against the

beams and the surface was finished

with tightly wrapped bundles of sticks.

The design of the bridge was innovative

but what made this engineering feat even

more astounding is the speed in which it

was built. Just 10 days after ordering

it's construction Caesar marched across

his bridge and toward his destiny. If we

tried to do that today, we would never

be able to build something like that in so

few days with that kind of technology.

We could match that feat today if we had

thousands of loyal, sweating soldiers

totally dedicated to Caesar and the

objective of crossing the Rhine River to

terrorize the Germans. Caesar had

estimated the size of the Germanic forces

at 430,000. More than 10 times the size

of his army. When the Germans saw the

Romans legions rolling over the Rhine,

they quickly fled to higher ground.

For the next 18 days, Caesar freely

explored the territory north of the Rhine

encountering no resistance. Then he

crossed back over his bridge & dismantled

it having made an unmistakeable point.

It is symbolic of this that Rome can go

anywhere. And to take it even further

Julius Caesar can go anywhere. Caesar's

bridge was an early indication of his

single-minded ambition

propelled him to unparallel power

but would also prove to be his downfall.

A decade later that ambition would

When he was declared Rome's first

dictator for life at the age of 55

in 44 BC whispers of assassination began

to whisper through the halls of the

Roman senate. He makes certain moves

that suggest that he might want to be

worshiped as a god that his ambition

goes so far beyond the limits of what the