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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