Mary Beard traces Rome's rise back to the myths of its founding, a story that begins with fratricide and rape, to argue that violence sits at the root of the city's identity. She shows how Rome also functioned as an asylum for exiles and outcasts, a mixed origin that shaped its unusually open policy toward conquered peoples and neighbors. The story moves through Rome's wars in Italy and Sicily against Carthage, then to Greece, where conquest came wrapped in cultural imitation, and to France, where Beard finds evidence of campaigns closer to extermination than warfare. She makes the case, against the popular image, that Rome's greatest territorial expansion happened while the city itself was still a rough settlement of mud and brick, and that the marble city came after empire, not before it. The film closes on the political cost of that empire: the destruction of the centuries-old Republic and the emergence of one-man rule. Beard narrates on location throughout, using ruins and inscriptions to back each claim.