LOST ROMAN HEROES

He defeated Phocas. He was crowned emperor. He married the love of his life on the same extraordinary day. And then, for a decade, everything went wrong.

By 612 AD, Heraclius had lost Syria, lost Jerusalem, lost the True Cross, lost the Senate's dignity and his own. And then he lost the one thing that had nothing to do with Persia.

He lost Fabia.

The girl from Carthage. His anchor. His first love. Dead at the Blachernae Palace, leaving behind two infants who would grow up never knowing her. The funeral procession moved up Constantinople's great boulevard, the emperor walking alongside her open coffin, and something happened that day that no one who witnessed it ever forgot.

But grief was a luxury Heraclius could not afford. Because while he mourned, the Persian war machine kept rolling. Egypt fell in 619. The breadbasket of the empire, gone. Constantinople began to starve. And by that year the Roman Empire consisted of little more than Constantinople, scraps of Thrace and Greece, and a rump of Anatolia.

This was not defeat. This was not crisis. This was an extinction level event.

And so in the winter of 621, Heraclius did something the sources record with a kind of wonder. He withdrew from the affairs of state. He did not cower. He did not pray. He studied. Every breath, every day, feeding his mind on strategy, sketching diagrams, anticipating battles before they took place. And then he loaded what remained of the Roman army onto ships, sailed across the Propontis in secret, and began drilling twenty thousand men in the hills of Bithynia.

Then the Avars set a trap. The Emperor of Rome fled on horseback in mean and miserable clothes, his crown under his arm, seventy thousand civilians massacred behind him. The ransom to make it stop — nearly a billion dollars in today's money. His own son sent as a hostage to barbarians.

And still he did not give up.

He went back inside. And he kept planning.

This is Episode 103. This is what rock bottom looks like.

DEUS ADIUTA ROMANIS.

May God help the Romans.

Because everything else had already been tried.

Heraclius arrived on a warship and without shedding a drop of blood, he rid Rome of evil Phocas. Fair-haired. Young. An icon of the Virgin on the prow. That was Heraclius. October 5th, 610 AD. Crowned emperor, married the love of his life, and stepped out into cheering crowds while Persian watchfires burned on the Asian shore less than a mile away.

He obviously knew he faced a terrible fight. But he had no idea, that evening, how close to the end Rome already was.

What followed was a decade of catastrophe so complete it strains the imagination. Syria gone. Jerusalem fallen. Seven hundred years of Roman rule ended in 21 days. The True Cross carried in triumph to Persia. The Patriarch led away in chains. Nearly a hundred thousand dead. And the army of Rome, once half a million strong, pulverized. Reduced to ten thousand men. Little more.

And then the Senate of Rome, that legendary body, over a thousand years old, did something it had never done in all of that time. It wrote a letter to the Persian King of Kings. Begging for mercy. Calling itself his faithful servants. Calling its own emperor Khosrow's obedient son.

Khosrow read it. And sent back a reply for the ages.

"Khosrow, greatest of gods, and master of the whole earth, to Heraclius, his vile and insensate slave."

Not his son. His slave.

Rome was not struggling. Rome was not in decline. Rome was facing annihilation. The actual, literal end of a civilization that had ruled the world for six centuries.

This is Episode 102.

DARKNESS FALLS...

Rome had survived Nero. Rome had survived Caligula, Commodus, and Caracalla. Rome had survived the Crisis of the Third Century, the Huns, the Vandals, the Goths, and a plague that killed half the Mediterranean world. But in the year 602, Rome met something it had never faced before — and this time, it very nearly did not survive.

His name was Phocas.

In this episode, we begin the greatest story we have ever told on Lost Roman Heroes — a five-part epic on the Emperor Heraclius. But before we can understand how one man pulled Rome back from the edge of total extinction, we have to understand just how close to that edge Rome actually came. And that means we have to talk about the man who dragged it there.

We open where we left Mauricius — murdered with his sons on the shore of the Bosphorus by a junior centurion who had no business wearing the purple. What follows is eight years of horror. Phocas was not merely a bad emperor. Rome had survived plenty of those. He was something new: a cruel and incompetent brute who dismantled the machinery of empire itself, executing every capable general, senator, and administrator who might have threatened him — until there was almost no one left who knew how to run a state or command an army.

And Rome's enemies were watching.

We tell the story of Khosrow II, King of Kings of Persia — the man who owed his throne to Mauricius, who called the murdered emperor his father, and who seized on that murder as the pretext for the greatest Persian invasion since Darius. We meet his four terrifying generals. We watch the Sasanian war machine, at the height of its power, begin methodically dismembering the Roman East — Dara, Armenia, Mesopotamia — until a Persian army stood on the shore at Chalcedon, its watchfires visible from the walls of Constantinople itself.

And then, from the one corner of the Roman world still standing — from Carthage, the ancient city Rome had once burned to the ground — an old soldier named Heraclius the Elder made a decision. He would not stand by while a monster destroyed the empire he had served his whole life. He raised the standard of rebellion, minted coins declaring himself and his son the true consuls of Rome, and sent two young men east to save a dying world.

CARTAGO DELENDA EST had become CARTHAGO ROMA SERVANDA EST. Carthage must save Rome.

This is where the legend begins.

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LRH Episode 100! We travel to Visigothic Spain to meet the two brothers who saved Roman civilization. Leander of Seville, best friend of Pope Gregorius, made Spain Catholic, converting the Visigothic kingdom from Arianism to Catholicism at the Third Council of Toledo and fusing Roman and Gothic culture into one people. Isidore of Seville made certain that Rome would not be forgotten, writing the Etymologiae, a twenty-book encyclopedia that preserved the knowledge of the entire classical world before it disappeared forever. Together, these Hispano-Roman brothers built the cultural foundation that survived the Muslim conquest of 711, fueled the Reconquista, and became modern Spain itself.

Join LRH as we interview historian and podcaster Emma Southon, author of the recently published "Not Built in a Day: How Slavery Made the Roman Empire." For 98 episodes we've covered Roman heroes. But we've never told the story of the millions of enslaved people who built everything our favorite heroes stood on. It always appeared as backdrop. As color. As afterthought. Roman slavery started in earnest in 146 BCE. The year Rome destroyed Carthage and erased Corinth in the same breath. The year something snapped. Enemies stopped being adversaries and started being examples. A New Rome. A Darker Rome. And inseparable from that darkness, an explosion of slavery on a scale the ancient world had never seen. Emma Southon has spent her career recovering the people Rome tried to erase, the enslaved, and the women, both written out of a record created entirely by the rich men who owned and overlooked them. In this episode we talk about what that record can and can't tell us, why no Roman ever tried to abolish the institution, how America's experience with slavery might inform our understanding of Roman slavery, and why Spartacus matters more than Hollywood understands.