B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (33 page)

Ancient Rome

101 BC (January) - 100: “100 BC”
 [146]

The sixth Doctor and Evelyn, mistakenly thinking they’d gone forward to 100 BC instead of backwards to 101 BC, arrived as the parents of Julius Caesar hailed the birth of a girl, Julia. The travellers wrongly concluded their “previous visit” had altered Julius’ conception, causing him to be born with two X chromosomes. They attempted to “go back” in time, hoping to put history back on course.

101 BC (October) - 100: “100 BC”
 [147]

The sixth Doctor and Evelyn happened to meet Senator Gaius Julius Caesar the elder and his wife Aurelia - the parents of Julius Caesar - and left upon realising that love was in the air.

They returned after an erroneous trip back in time, convinced that their presence had delayed Julius’ conception, causing him to be born a girl. They eventually realised that they’d witnessed the birth of Caesar’s sister, and that Julius hadn’t been born yet. Aurelia, suitably in the mood, lured her husband into bed.

The Doctor met Julius Caesar.
 [148]
The eighth Doctor, Fitz and Trix defeated Thorgan of the Sulumians. He had been planning to prevent the signing of the Treaty of Brundusium.
 [149]
At the height of the Roman Empire, the War Lords lifted a Roman battlefield.
 [150]
The Celestial Toymaker abducted a Roman legionary.
 [151]
The second Doctor, Jamie and Victoria attended a gladiator fight in ancient Rome, and Victoria was appalled by the violence.
 [152]

One of the splinters of Scaroth was a man of influence in Ancient Rome.
 [153]
The Doctor visited Rome, met Hannibal and Cleopatra, and was very impressed by the swordsmanship of Cleopatra’s bodyguard.
 [154]
The captain of Cleopatra’s guard was a “friend of a friend” to Ace, and taught her the art of sword fighting.
 [155]
The tenth Doctor mentioned meeting Cleopatra.
 [156]
and was familiar with the size of Cleopatra’s bedchamber.
 [157]
According to the Doctor, Cleopatra was a pushover.
 [158]
with “the grace of a carpet flea”.
 [159]
Iris Wildthyme’s companion Panda said Cleopatra was an “incorrigible woman”.
 [160]

10 BC - State of Change
 [161]

After watching Cleopatra’s barge on the Nile in 41 BC, the sixth Doctor and Peri had decided to travel a little way into the future to follow the history of Rome. The Rani compelled a Vortex entity, Iam, to copy the Doctor’s TARDIS console, but this also duplicated a section of the Earth around 32 BC, creating a flat disc-shaped world. The TARDIS console was duplicated and came to rest on the copied Earth, where it was regarded as an Oracle.

With information from this Oracle, the Roman Empire made great advancements. The battle of Actium went against Octavian and Agrippa because they faced opponents with steamships. Electric lighting, airships and explosives were developed. The culmination of this technology was Ultimus, the Roman Empire’s atomic bomb programme. Capable of kiloton yields, Ultimus could destroy any known city. Cleopatra’s three children - Cleopatra Selene, Alexander and Ptolemy - ruled as a triumvirate.

The Doctor defeated the Rani’s plans, and convinced Iam to relocate Terra Nova into the real universe. It settled into an unoccupied sector of space.

Anno Domini

The Doctor claimed he was at the original Christmas, and “got the last room” at the inn.
 [162]
The Doctor took Leonardo da Vinci back to the very first Christmas in Bethlehem, so Leo could study the local light and colour for his adoration painting. Leonardo was fearful of visiting Christ’s manager, so he and the Doctor had a slap-up dinner before returning to the fifteenth century.
 [163]

27 AD - TW: Exit Wounds
 [164]

Jack Harkness’ brother, Gray, forced Captain John Hart to bury the immortal Jack beneath the future site of Cardiff. He would remain trapped until 1901.

The Doctor remembered the original Easter.
 [165]
Joseph Liebermann, who would encounter the seventh Doctor in 1888, claimed to be the Wandering Jew of legend.
 [166]

The Doctor visited the court of Caligula.
 [167]
The Meddling Monk and his companion Lucie Miller met Caligula.
 [168]

c 39 AD - Iris: The Two Irises
 [169]

Iris Hilary Wildthyme - a projection of Iris’ bus - and Panda visited Caligula’s Rome for a toga party and some tai chi.

In the spring of 43, the Romans invaded Britain. They were led by Emperor Claudius, who was in Britain for a total of sixteen days.
 [170]

46 AD (winter) - Demon Quest: The Relics of Time
 [171]

The fourth Doctor and Mrs Wibbsey arrived on the trail of the TARDIS’ spatial geometer. A group of Celts considered Mrs Wibbsey a soothsayer, and she went into a trance, displaying knowledge she couldn’t possibly possess. This convinced them to attack a rival tribe, which had a “wizard” and “monster”. The next morning, the Doctor and Wibbsey went to the village and discovered that the monster was an elephant and the wizard was a disguised Emperor Claudius, who had run away from his army for a quiet life. Except... “Claudius” was not the genuine article, but the shapechanging Demon luring the Doctor and Wibbsey through time.
 [172]
As the two British tribes made their peace, “Claudius” entered a dematerialisation chamber in his dwelling and vanished. The Doctor rescued the elephant from the hungry Celts, and the TARDIS headed for its next destination: the Moulin Rouge.

The Iceni, a Celtic tribe led by Boudicca, razed many Roman-occupied British towns to the ground.
 [173]
Roundstone Wood in England always “stayed wild”; in ancient times, it was considered bad luck to collect wood there. The Romans in Britain stayed clear of it.
 [174]

Iris Wildthyme claimed that Salome did the fan dance with the Doctor’s scarf.
 [175]
A great earthquake in Vesuvius in 62 AD released some of the Pyroviles from their ancient slumber. The eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD caused a rift in time that retroactively gave some of the young girls of Pompeii the gift of prophecy. Some of their number formed the Sybiline Cult. The TARDIS’ arrival was foretold in the Thirteenth Book of the Sybiline Oracles.
 [176]
The Pyroviles were unable to return to their homeworld, Pryovillia, because it had been stolen by the Daleks for their reality bomb.
 [177]

Pliny the Elder gave the Doctor some smelling salts.
 [178]
The Celestial Toymaker took some inspiration for his games from the Roman Coliseum.
 [179]

64 AD - The Rescue
 [180]

The TARDIS landed on the side of a hill and toppled from it.

64 AD - Byzantium!
 [181]

The TARDIS had materialised just outside Byzantium. The Romans mistook Ian for a contemporary Briton and granted him some respect as a citizen of the Empire. Ian helped the Roman General Gaius Calaphilus and his political opponent, city praefectus Thalius Maximus, to settle their differences. Calaphilus and Maximus united efforts to purge corruption from the city, instigating a period of reform.

The first Doctor met the scribes Reuben, Rayhab and Amos, and helped them to translate the Gospel of Mark into Greek, producing a version that complemented the writings of Matthew the tax-gatherer.

Returning to the TARDIS, the travellers discovered that the Roman Germanicus Vinicius has found the TARDIS and taken it to his villa near Rome. They followed it there...

64 AD (June to July) - The Romans
 [182]

The first Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Vicki spent nearly a month at a deserted villa just outside Rome. Becoming bored by the lack of adventure, the Doctor and Vicki travelled to the capital. Captured by slave traders, Ian and Barbara were sold at auction. Ian escaped, but ended up as a gladiator in Rome. Barbara became the servant of the Emperor Nero’s wife, Poppea, and the object of the Emperor’s attentions. The Doctor, meanwhile, was posing as the musician Maximus Pettulian (despite a complete lack of musical ability). When the Doctor accidentally set fire to Nero’s plans to rebuild Rome, the Emperor was inspired. As Rome began to burn, the four time travellers returned to the TARDIS.

A Dalek arrived in Roman Britain from the Time War, with orders to imprint the population with the Dalek Factor. Its capsule malfunctioned, and it was only able to release a tiny amount of the Factor before being buried.
 [183]

Volcano Day

79 AD - The Fires of Vulcan
 [184]

The seventh Doctor and Mel arrived in Pompeii, just as Mount Vesuvius became active. The TARDIS was trapped in the rubble of a collapsed building, preventing their escape. The Doctor managed to antagonise the gladiator Murranus by beating him in a dice game. The Doctor and Mel escaped to the TARDIS just as the volcano erupted, destroying Pompeii and the surrounding area.

(=) Temporal distortion resulted in an alternate history where Vesuvius took much longer to erupt, and the city’s populace evacuated in their boats.
 [185]

The tenth Doctor and Martha had some “unlucky business” at Mount Vesuvius.
 [186]
Valnaxi refugees hid themselves and some of their works of art in a warren on Earth, to prevent destruction by their enemy, the Wurms.
 [187]

79 AD (22nd-23rd August) - The Fires of Pompeii
 [188]

The tenth Doctor and Donna arrived in what they thought was Rome, but which turned out to be Pompeii, the day before the great eruption. The Doctor told Donna that Vesuvius erupting was a fixed point in time, and so they couldn’t save the doomed people. They learned that the Pyroviles intended to convert all of humanity into stone creatures, and so used the Pyroviles’ own technology to engineer the historic eruption of Vesuvius, destroying them.

Twenty thousand people died in Pompeii, but Donna persuaded the Doctor to save the family of Lobus Caecilius, a marble trader.

(=) Had the Doctor and Donna not intervened, the Pyroviles would have created a Pompeii-based empire that would have overthrown Rome and encompassed the whole world.
 [189]

Six months after the eruption, Caecilius and his family had set themselves up in Rome, and had an altar dedicated to the Doctor, Donna and their temple: the TARDIS.
 [190]

102 - The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang
 [191]

Projections made by a number of alien races indicated that the Doctor’s TARDIS would explode in such a way that would destroy history. All universes were threatened. A coalition of alien races, brought together using the Cracks in Time for travel, sought to prevent this and laid a trap that the Doctor couldn’t resist. Psychic blueprints were taken from Amy Pond’s house in 2010, and used to construct a vault under Stonehenge - Underhenge - in 102 AD. Within the vault was placed the Pandorica: a fabled prison rumoured to contain “a nameless, terrible thing, soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies”, but which was actually patterned from one of Amy’s childhood storybooks,
The Legend of Pandora’s Box
.

The alliance against the Doctor included the Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans, Terileptils, Nestenes and their Autons, Drahvins, Chelonians, Slitheen, Sycorax and their roboforms, Haemo-goths, Zygons, Atraxi, Draconians, Hoix, Judoon, Uvodni, Blowfish, Weevils and Silurians. Autons posed as Roman soldiers, as patterned from
The Story of Roman Britain
. The conspirators also used Amy’s psychic residue to bring Rory Williams back to life as an Auton - he was unaware that he wasn’t human.

The Underhenge broadcast a signal: “The Pandorica is opening.” Per instructions that Vincent van Gogh left on the painting
The Pandorica Opens
, River Song arrived at Stonehenge and posed as Cleopatra. She summoned the eleventh Doctor and Amy, and they all examined Underhenge and the Pandorica.