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Meet the Roman Emperor with Mary Beard (2024) is a fascinating documentary that brings history to life with the expertise of renowned historian Mary Beard. The film explores the world of ancient Rome through the lives of its emperors, offering fresh perspectives, engaging stories, and cultural insights. Blending scholarship with accessible storytelling, this documentary makes the past vivid and relatable for today’s audiences.
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Meet the Roman Emperor with Mary Beard, Meet the Roman Emperor 2024, Mary Beard documentary, Roman Emperor documentary, ancient Rome film, Roman history documentary, educational documentary 2024, history with Mary Beard, cultural history documentary, engaging history film, Roman Empire documentary, classical history storytelling, historical exploration film, Mary Beard history series, Meet the Roman Emperor movie, ancient world documentary, Roman culture and society film, informative history documentary, history and culture 2024, inspiring historical documentary
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Art et designTranscription
00:00Sous-titrage Société Radio-Canada
00:30Sous-titrage Société Radio-Canada
01:00Nothing but death.
01:04Was this a warning that you were about to be bumped off?
01:07A grim joke?
01:08Or a fancy dress party gone horribly wrong?
01:12Welcome to the world of the Emperor of Rome.
01:16It's far stranger than the Hollywood version.
01:19At Rome's Capitoline Museum, in a single room, is a unique collection of portraits of the men who ruled the Roman world for centuries.
01:35And yes, it was always men.
01:38Some emperors are now just footnotes in history.
01:41Others we might recognise.
01:43Nero, fiddling while Rome burned.
01:46Hadrian, building his wall across Britain.
01:48All made laws, raised taxes, commanded armies, poured money into buildings and entertainments and swamped the Roman world with their image.
02:01This is how they wanted to be seen.
02:05But what was it really like to be a Roman emperor?
02:09I want to look beyond these formal masks, beyond the propaganda and the parades, to explore how emperors operated behind the scenes, in the places they lived and worked.
02:23What was Roman power like when the PR machine was turned off?
02:30What's amazing is we can still uncover the private world of the emperor.
02:35The very rooms where he hosted dinners, wrote letters and dodged assassination attempts.
02:42Don't worry, you don't know all the emperor's names and dates.
02:46I promise you, most Romans didn't either.
02:49I'm interested in the bigger things that apply to them all.
02:53Their home, their court, entourage and slaves, and what they actually did all day.
03:00I'm trying to get closer to the men who wore the crown.
03:04Sometimes, I'm sure, terrified of the moment, it would be snatched away.
03:10We tend to fantasise about the absolute power of the Roman emperor.
03:15We imagine that he could do what he liked, didn't have to lift a finger.
03:19And we're drawn to the grandeur and the luxury.
03:22We might even envy it.
03:25But should we be careful what we wish for?
03:28Should the emperor actually inspire as much pity as envy?
03:33If you've got an emperor, where does he live?
03:44The emperor's main residence was here on one of Rome's seven hills.
04:00The Palatine, in the heart of the city.
04:02The Palatine gives us our word palace.
04:17Sounds grand, but if you come here today, do manage your expectations.
04:22First impressions are, quite frankly, a bit of a mess.
04:29You get little sense now of the original splendour from these ruins.
04:38It's also a maze.
04:40I'm with the tourists who look bewildered, but I think, in a way, that's the key to understanding what we see here.
04:50The Palatine, just like the Kremlin, Versailles or Buckingham Palace, wasn't built to help outsiders make sense of it.
04:57What's striking is the sheer scale of the place, all the twists and turns, and the labyrinthine plan that's almost impossible to work out.
05:07But that's often the point with palaces, and palace is a symbol of power.
05:14It's almost designed to make the visitor feel small, overawed, and, if possible, a bit confused.
05:23The Roman palace emerged over time, a modest development under the first emperor Augustus, grander experiments under Nero,
05:32but most of what we see was completed in the late 1st century CE by the emperor Domitian.
05:45Domitian is one of those emperors who've gone down in history as a baddie.
05:49He was the host of that macabre black dinner party.
05:52Rumour had it, he poisoned his brother Titus to become emperor,
05:56and it's said he was touchy about his baldness, which he must have covered up with a wig.
06:02Stories told about him are colourful at the very least, a bit chilling, and always intriguing.
06:11But are they true?
06:13Some of them may well have been exaggerated or invented to tarnish his reputation,
06:20and so justify killing him in a palace coup.
06:23I mean, it suited the regime that followed him to turn him into a monster.
06:29But what we know for sure, because we've got the hard material evidence and contemporary accounts,
06:38is that right here, he built a palace of gobsmacking opulence.
06:45I mean, think away this bare brick factory style.
06:49It was all once covered in shimmering marble.
06:54The usual image of the imperial palace, given to us by Hollywood, is too austere.
07:01All symmetry, minimalism and white marble.
07:03In reality, the palace would have contained a clutter of curiosities, pets and antiques from across the empire.
07:16And it would have been a riot of colour, with the emperor's huge wealth on gaudy display.
07:23Richly coloured marble, mosaics, frescoes.
07:26And then, on top of that, gold and precious gems, like these, everywhere.
07:35It must have been stuck on the palace walls or on the furniture.
07:41You know, it's pure palace bling.
07:45It's a bit Trump Towers, to be honest.
07:47But, actually, the most revealing little detail is what's in these glass dishes hidden away at the back.
07:56Because now you've got loads of ordinary nails.
07:59But they too have got coated with gold.
08:07Ordinary Romans, here in the old city centre, the Forum,
08:11must have wondered about the power and impossible wealth behind the palace walls.
08:17If you were going to see it, and meet the emperor,
08:21this is one way you'd go, up a twisting and slightly scary ramp.
08:27It was meant to be intimidating, I'm sure.
08:31The whole idea was, you couldn't see who or what was coming round the corner.
08:36It was the guards who were in charge here, standing on each bend,
08:42controlling who was coming up and who was going down.
08:47You've got past the guards.
08:50Now, what was it like to actually come face to face with the emperor?
08:57Some ordinary people did.
09:00Receiving people's begging letters was part of the imperial job.
09:03So what were the do's and don'ts of greeting the big man?
09:16There was a strong myth that the emperor was accessible to anyone and everyone.
09:22But I bet that in practice, that access was pretty carefully policed.
09:30We read in ancient writers of people being frisked on their way into his presence and the crowd of bouncers.
09:37In our terms, though, some of it was surprisingly intimate.
09:42We don't generally think about Romans as being big kissers.
09:48But an awful lot of kissing went on in the Roman imperial court.
09:52So much so, that on one occasion, it had to be completely banned to curb an outbreak of infectious herpes.
10:04The kissing was carefully graded, though.
10:07So, if you were one of the emperor's close friends, almost his equals, you got to kiss him on the cheek or even the lips.
10:18If he held out his hand for you to kiss that, that was a mark of your inferiority.
10:26If you were expected to kiss his feet, that was a mark of total subservience.
10:32If we showed up now at a gathering of the powerful, the G7, the G20, would we find similar protocols?
10:59Of course, yes. Of course, there are very strict protocols.
11:02Of course, depending on the institution, on the occasion, but definitely protocols are still there.
11:09When people shake hands in the political world, they are very mindful about giving their hand like this.
11:16So, perpendicular to the floor, because this is a relationship between equals.
11:21But if I do like this, it's like I'm overpowering you in some ways.
11:26Of course, if I'm doing this, it's like I'm begging.
11:30So, it's something that is very important.
11:34And, like, Mr. Putin, I mean, you could see it coming.
11:37Because for many years, I have observed his handshakes.
11:41And when he has to shake hands, he, like, comes like this.
11:45Hello!
11:45And I've been put in my place.
11:49I think it was the same in ancient Rome.
11:52Some rituals that are normal for the people in the circle, then they were designed just to make people feel a little bit awkward and to remind you that you don't really belong.
12:05OK, Lisa, we're in the presence of the Emperor Domitian.
12:09How are you going to introduce yourself?
12:11How are you going to say hi?
12:12Oh, don't ask me.
12:13I'm going to get thrown to the lions.
12:15Well, I'm going to do what I think is the right thing.
12:18Give him a kiss.
12:18The Emperor's lifestyle wasn't all about glad-handing and enjoying palace luxuries.
12:29If you did get to trade a kiss with him, you might soon find the Emperor was rather preoccupied by work.
12:37In our terms, the Roman Empire was pretty inefficient.
12:41We're centuries before email, obviously, and it could take months to get a letter by ship and horse to a distant province,
12:48and months for news to come back again.
12:51It was hard for emperors to keep tabs on things.
12:56Even so, ancient writers tell us that they were buried in paperwork.
13:01This workaholic here, Vespasian, used to get up before dawn to deal with his letters and official reports.
13:11And this young lad, the Emperor Alexander Severus, he was so wedded to the job
13:17that he kept a set of military records in his private apartments
13:21so he could go through budgets and troop deployments late into the night.
13:27Marcus Aurelius, when he was a young man, tried to catch up on his correspondence while he was at the races.
13:34It wasn't a good look.
13:36It was a bit like a member of our own royal family being caught on their mobile at the cup final.
13:41I've called it paperwork, but this was about dictating to slave scribes
13:49or writing replies and orders on papyrus or wax tablets.
13:55I'm practising my handwriting on a mock-up Roman wax tablet.
14:00The system's ever so simple, just two bits of wood smeared with wax on the inside,
14:05and you use your stylus to scratch the letters in the wax.
14:11And it's great if you make a mistake, because you've used this hand of the stylus
14:15just to smear out what you've done and start again.
14:22I'm going to write a thank you letter to the Emperor.
14:27In some ways, this little piece of bronze lies behind imperial power almost as much as the sword does.
14:57Because this is an actual stylus surviving from the period.
15:03It's the emblem of the Emperor as writer, though it could be turned into a weapon itself.
15:11When he was assassinated, Julius Caesar used his stylus to defend himself against his attackers.
15:19And the Emperor Hadrian is supposed to have used his to gouge out the eye of one of his slaves.
15:28And according to Suetonius, who wrote biographies of the emperors,
15:33but had been a palace administrator himself,
15:37the Emperor Domitian, instead of getting on with his paperwork,
15:41used his stylus to indulge his nasty, sadistic hobby.
15:47What Suetonius says is that Domitian used to lock himself away for hours on end each day.
15:56What he'd do is he'd be catching flies and then stabbing them with his stylus.
16:03Nowadays, we think of the Roman Empire as one-man rule.
16:12But that phrase couldn't be more misleading.
16:15No one ever rules alone.
16:17You can't understand one-man rule without looking at the imperial entourage
16:22who actually made it possible.
16:24The palace was not just a home for the emperor,
16:36but a workplace for a lot of people lower down the Peking order.
16:41It was almost a mini-city of administrators, accountants, doctors, fortune-tellers,
16:48dwarfs, jesters, bodyguards, cooks, cleaners,
16:51and foreign royalty held hostage.
16:55If you want an idea of the sheer number of staff,
16:58go to the Palatine Lavatrice.
17:02One of the biggest multi-seaters in the whole of the Roman world is this.
17:07You can get more than 40 people here, all on the left, together.
17:11It was the bog-standard Roman system.
17:14You've got a channel of water here.
17:17And when you want to wipe your bum, you dip your sponge in the water,
17:23shove it through the hole, give a good wipe, and off you go.
17:29Even to find many of the posh people of the palace in these lavs, though,
17:34they'd have had one or two seaters.
17:37This was slave territory.
17:39And it's a bit hard to know what the atmosphere was like.
17:42Were they rushing down here for a quick slash,
17:44afraid to take too much time off work?
17:46Or, as I'd like to think,
17:49was this where the best palace gossip happened?
17:59Rome was dependent on this slave labour.
18:04And the palace machine depended on an underground world of slaves.
18:09Sometimes it was literally underground.
18:15Many slaves would have come and gone unseen in service tunnels like this one,
18:22under another imperial property.
18:23It's actually pretty big.
18:35You could drive a horse and cart down here,
18:38which is exactly what they did,
18:41as you can see from the ruts in the paving.
18:44This is where the slaves would come and go out of sight and out of mind of the emperor.
18:53It's a subterranean network which exists solely to serve those people living literally upstairs.
19:03It would have been populated by men, women, children,
19:09who the Romans would have thought of as human machines.
19:13They had very few rights and they could be used, beaten, raped by their owners,
19:21pretty much at whim.
19:25Yet Roman slavery was layered.
19:28Yes, many slaves were mere drudges,
19:31but a few worked nearer the centre of power,
19:35serving in roles that brought them up close and personal
19:37with the emperor and his family.
19:40We can glimpse some of the jobs they did from their tombstones,
19:49the very briefest of epitaphs,
19:52which once marked out an individual's ashes in a big communal tomb.
19:56Many displayed on the walls here are from the household of Livia,
20:00the emperor Augustus' wife.
20:03They're also, for me, pretty poignant.
20:05They kind of reduce a human life to just a name and a job.
20:13Here's a great example.
20:14It's a woman called Kalene and she is the Oktrix.
20:21She's the masseuse of the Empress Livia.
20:25So she must have pressed quite a lot of the imperial flesh.
20:30Just next to her, there's a woman called Aukta
20:36and she was an Oktrix.
20:39That could be a make-up artist.
20:42But it could also be a hairdresser.
20:44And we know that imperial ladies could be quite touchy
20:47about their grey hairs.
20:49So my guess is that Aukta would have pulled out quite a few.
20:53And this one has to be my all-time favourite.
20:59It's to a man called Eutactus.
21:02And he was, and you can just see the beginning of the word here,
21:06he was capsarius to Livia.
21:10In our terms, he was her handbag carrier.
21:14The public image of Livia was one of low-key modesty.
21:19But all these give the lie to that.
21:23It was obviously quite an operation
21:25to keep the Livia show on the road.
21:31Those memorials were put up by slaves' friends and families
21:34after their death.
21:36But there's a place on the edge of the Palatine
21:38where some imperial slaves left their mark while they were alive.
21:43I'm exploring it with Silvia Orlandi
21:46from the Sapienza University of Rome.
21:49Most of them were just one name,
21:52and according to the Roman law, they were slaves.
21:55Three Roman citizens have three names.
21:58Exactly.
21:58And so one name is a total giveaway for being a slave.
22:03This was probably a slave training school.
22:07Slaves scratched graffiti on the walls as they passed through,
22:10some of it classic Roman smut.
22:13This is a very interesting wall.
22:17Just covered?
22:18Covered with graffiti in different size and different languages.
22:24We have Latin, we have Greek.
22:26Oh, they are actually, I have to say, Silvia, they're very hard to read.
22:33I mean, Latin handwriting is gross.
22:35But I can read this one.
22:36Oh, yeah.
22:36OK, it says Felix Petticoe.
22:41What that means is, my name's Felix, and I'm a bugger.
22:45Or...
22:46You could translate it differently, couldn't you?
22:48It could mean, because Felix means happy as well as being someone's name, Felix.
22:53I'm glad to do it.
22:54I'm glad to be a bugger, yes.
22:57I'm sorry, but, you know, that's what Romans were like.
23:02But the graffiti also reveal how diverse the slaves working close to the emperor were.
23:08Some were palace-born and bred, others recorded their distant origins.
23:13Right.
23:15There's quite a lot of scratching, but hey, look down here.
23:20Here's some good ones.
23:21We have some names of slaves saying where they come from.
23:27We have Bassus saying that he's a Kerronesita, so coming from Khersonesos.
23:35He's Bassus from what we call Ukraine.
23:38Exactly.
23:39And then we have another man saying that he was Hadrimetimus.
23:45And that's in Tunisia.
23:47Finally, a concessus saying that he's Berna.
23:54And that means he's a home-bred slave.
23:56So we've got a trio doing a little graffiti together.
24:01One's from Kherson, one's from Tunisia, and the other is bred in the palace.
24:05Exactly.
24:06Gosh.
24:09Most surprising is a graffito, probably from the second century, that reveals slaves with Christian faith were working inside the palace, even as emperors fed their fellow believers to the lions.
24:21It's one of the earliest surviving images of the crucifixion, a joke by one slave at the expense of another parodying Jesus on the cross by giving him a donkey's head.
24:34Underneath, it says in Greek, Alexxamenos is worshipping his god.
24:38You just get that window onto a social world.
24:44And the everyday life, knowing each other, enough to make jokes on the religion of other slaves.
24:52Nice bit of satire amongst the downstairs community.
24:56I think it's very funny that the emperors, it took them another hundred years to discover Christianity, but the slave community is there already.
25:07Just one thing which makes me slightly uneasy about it, though, is that we now associate crucifixion with the Christian story, but in the ancient world...
25:19It was a punishment reserved to slaves.
25:23Slaves.
25:23There's a kind of another level to this, I think.
25:29Beyond his slaves, the administrators and soldiers, the other power behind one-man rule was the emperor's court.
25:37Roman aristocrats took big jobs in governing the empire, and the emperor's relationship with them was always a delicate balancing act.
25:50He needed to make generous gestures, cement alliances, play off enemies and broker deals.
25:56And in Roman court culture, that was done at dinner.
25:59Eating is never just about eating in Rome, and it never was.
26:17Who sits where?
26:19Who gets the best food?
26:21Dining was an exercise in power in the imperial court.
26:25It could show, just by where you were placed, how close you were to the man at the top.
26:34I'm going to see a room where we know one of Rome's emperors hosted power dinners.
26:42Nero, like Domitian, has gone down as one of Rome's monster emperors, fiddling while Rome burned and worse.
26:49He was also a great patron of art, and you get a sense of that in this dining room.
26:58For me, it's a kind of Nero was here moment.
27:02Now, it does take a bit of imagination to bring it back to life.
27:08That's largely because this great foundation wall from Domitian's palace above has cut it in two, and you have to try to think that away.
27:19But the plan is pretty clear and simple.
27:23It's half underground.
27:24It would have been open to the sky, but it would have been quite shady and cool.
27:30And you'd get into it down one of two flights of stairs.
27:38When you got to the bottom here, you'd have found a stage.
27:43This really was dining as theatre, quite literally.
27:47There would have been a platform along there, supported on those marble columns.
27:51And that's where performers, stand-up comedians, musicians, celebrity philosophers would have entertained the guests.
28:02But it's not just that.
28:04Because from that opening up there, there was a torrent of water splashing down into these pools below.
28:15But what about the guests?
28:18Where was Nero?
28:18Well, what you have to do is you have to line up that water opening there and see that the water ends up in this pool here.
28:30And it is around there, underneath a rather elegant canopy, supported on red marble columns, that the emperor and his main guests would have reclined.
28:42My guess is, pretty certainly, that Nero's couch would have been here, directly in front of the water opening.
28:54And that he would have been able to look in the pool and see himself reflected.
29:01So, this is not just dining as theatre.
29:06This is really the emperor on show.
29:09And eyes were not just on the emperor.
29:22In fact, at dinner, everyone was being watched.
29:26Guests were carefully observed for any faux pas.
29:30There are stories, for example, that some of them were humiliated when they were caught nicking a palace plate as a memento.
29:37But the emperor was being judged, too.
29:41As host, he could be criticised for ridiculous over-extravagance or penny-pinching meanness, like when Tiberius was caught serving up leftovers.
29:53And the microaggressions went far beyond macabre fancy dress.
29:58Domitian is supposed to have enjoyed belching in the face of his upmarket guests and throwing food at them if he didn't fancy it himself.
30:05Dinner also put the emperor at risk.
30:14A dinner party was where rivals could get close.
30:17Poisoning was always a threat.
30:19Wary emperors would have been protected not just by their guards, but by their tasters, who were not tasting food for its quality.
30:28A tombstone discovered in Germany commemorates one of Emperor Domitian's tasters.
30:34You can see the man's name very clearly on the tombstone.
30:38He's Tiberius Claudius Zosimus.
30:42The stone was actually found in Mainz, where it seems he was travelling with Domitian, and he died there.
30:48They're not so far as we know from poisoning.
30:51But for me, what's interesting is how very specific they are, whoever put this stone up, about Zosimus' rank.
30:59Because he's not just a praegustator, he's not just a commoner garden taster, he is the procurator.
31:08He's the manager of the tasters of the emperor Domitian.
31:15Tasting was a labour-intensive business, and our Zosimus was a big cheese on the front line of protecting the emperor.
31:23The emperors didn't just entertain at the Palatine.
31:34They hosted dinners on boats, in the Colosseum, even up trees,
31:39and they designed extravagant dining experiences at their out-of-town country estates.
31:45Some of these places have become mysterious lost worlds.
32:06Now lying five metres below the water at Baiai, on the Bay of Naples,
32:11archaeologists have uncovered the stunning remains of what were once Roman pleasure palaces.
32:26You have to snorkel now to see the site of the emperor Claudius' coastal villa.
32:33There's an extraordinary dining room here,
32:36where guests would eat among sculptures of figures from ancient myth.
32:41They may look innocuous now, but these sculptures contain a coded message.
32:50It's hard to interpret underwater,
32:52so I'm heading north along the coast to another imperial villa at Spurlonga.
33:02Here, the theme of the Baiai sculptures is repeated in a now very slightly drier dining room.
33:11Host and guests would be taken by boat to recline on dining couches
33:25on an artificial island that had been built to face this spectacular cave.
33:32and, in what was a common Roman trick, their food would have been floated across to them.
33:41This must have been one of the most magical places to eat anywhere in the Roman world.
33:47But actually, it was a setting that was also tinged with menace.
33:52The cave was once filled with sculptures found in thousands of tiny pieces during roadworks in the 1950s.
34:09They've been elaborately stuck together again, revealing a centrepiece,
34:13a scene from ancient myth and a dark in-joke about murder on the menu.
34:18This huge, sprawling figure is the one-eyed giant Polyphemus,
34:25who entertained Odysseus and his crew when they fetched up on his remote island
34:31on their way back from the Trojan War.
34:34The problem was, Polyphemus was a cannibal.
34:38And his dinner menu featured a couple of Odysseus' crew.
34:44They had to fight back.
34:47So they got the giant drunk and skewered out his single eye, leaving him blind.
34:55This really is the mythical dinner party from hell.
35:02The host eats the guests, and the guests maim the host.
35:08Sculptures on this theme have been found in at least four surviving imperial dining rooms,
35:14including Baiai.
35:16The Romans were a knowing lot.
35:18Someone's having a joke here that eating with the emperor
35:22was as dangerous as eating with Polyphemus.
35:29This takes us back to the emperor Domitian at the Imperial Palace
35:32and his infamous black dinner party.
35:35In a way, he was playing with the same joke, stoking fear in his guests,
35:41their names carved on gravestones and everything painted black.
35:47And that particular dinner had a disturbing final twist.
35:53At the end of the evening, the emperor said goodbye and the guests went home.
35:58Then came a knock at their door.
36:00And at that point, they really were convinced that their time was up.
36:05But instead of a hit squad outside, they found some palace porters,
36:11who'd come to deliver their silver gravestones, the black dishes they'd eaten off,
36:17and the slaves who had served them, all as a present from the emperor.
36:22And finally came the particular slave who had been assigned to each one,
36:33now cleaned up and nicely dressed.
36:37So, having spent the whole night in terror, the guests took in the gifts.
36:43For Cassius Dio, the Roman historian who tells us this story,
36:51it's all about the emperor's humiliation of his guests.
36:55It's a lesson in how terror doesn't necessarily depend on bloodshed.
37:00You can be menacing by being generous.
37:04What probably strikes us more today is the dehumanisation of the young slaves.
37:11Wrapped up, sent off like a kind of party bag,
37:15transferred from one owner to another to do with just as they wanted.
37:25Dinner is over.
37:27The guests have gone home.
37:29Can we get closer to the emperor at night?
37:33Can we see his intimate life through the people who shared the imperial bed,
37:39or were forced to share it?
37:53There are all kinds of stories about the emperor's sex lives,
37:57about Livia grooming young virgins for Augustus,
38:01or Tiberius having his private parts nibbled by little boys in the swimming pool.
38:08There are also stories with almost modern resonance
38:11about gender difference and gender fluidity.
38:14The emperor Elagabalus is said to have asked for a surgical transition.
38:19One thing held against Nero was that after the death of his wife,
38:23he was supposed to have had castrated and then married Sporus,
38:27a slave who resembled her.
38:30and then married Sporus.
38:31He was supposed to have had castrated.
38:32I don't want to pour cold water on all these stories.
38:42True or not, they're helping us see Roman debates and anxieties
38:49projected onto the emperor.
38:51Even the macho Romans are using the figure of their ruler
38:55to wonder where the boundaries were between male and female.
39:00Sometimes there's a dash of fantasy thrown in too.
39:04Who would I sleep with and how if I ruled the world?
39:08But sometimes the stories aren't really about gender or sex
39:14or what happened in bed at all.
39:17And that's what we see very clearly with the emperor Hadrian
39:20and his sprawling estate here at Tivoli.
39:2420 miles northeast of Rome, Tivoli is less villa and more a private town,
39:34twice the size of Pompeii.
39:39A massive imperial complex of colonnades and gardens,
39:43including replicas of famous buildings from across the empire.
39:48Hadrian had grand ambition for grand projects.
39:55It was claimed he personally took a big role in designing Tivoli.
40:00And it's hard to look at Tivoli's excesses
40:03without thinking about the emperor's obsession with a young Greek slave.
40:12Antinous was Hadrian's boyfriend,
40:14but the relationship ended tragically
40:16when, on an imperial sightseeing trip in Egypt,
40:19Antinous mysteriously drowned in the Nile.
40:25In grief, Hadrian flooded the Roman world
40:28with images of his dead lover.
40:31So many that more statues of Antinous survive
40:35than of any other member of the imperial family
40:38apart from Augustus and Hadrian himself.
40:41He founded cities named after him.
40:47He even made Antinous a god.
40:54Most Romans wouldn't have found it remotely remarkable
40:57that Hadrian was having a relationship with a younger man.
41:00What was controversial was his uncontrollable grief
41:06and the fact that he imposed that on the rest of the Roman world.
41:11This wasn't about sex.
41:13It was about power.
41:15Megalomania, even.
41:17Hadrian was a man who didn't know when or how to stop.
41:22There's an anxiety here about the lack of control
41:28on the part of the absolute ruler.
41:30But even day to day,
41:32the mind and body of an emperor
41:34was always carefully observed by his entourage and even by himself.
41:39We're never closer to a body of an emperor than that of Marcus Aurelius.
41:56A world away from this idealised, sculpted image,
42:00Marcus's medical history reveals something of the fragility
42:03of imperial power concentrated in the body of one man.
42:08I'm cycling on the old Appian Way,
42:12heading south to a place where I'll be able to think more
42:15about the emperor in the flesh.
42:20Marcus's rather obsessive interest in bodily ailments,
42:23even as a young man,
42:25is revealed in a sequence of letters
42:27between him and his tutor Marcus Fronto.
42:32I really want to know how you are, my lord.
42:34I have been wracked by a pain in my neck.
42:37I seem to have got through the night without a fever
42:41and I've taken my food well.
42:43You can imagine how I felt when I learnt of your neck pain.
42:47If your neck pain gets better, it will help my own recovery.
42:51I think I've got a chill.
42:53This is the third night I've been kept awake with diarrhoea and awful stomach cramps.
43:00The doctors recommend a bath.
43:05It really is quite hard to know what to make of all that bodily fixation.
43:09Were they a pair of dreadful hypochondriacs?
43:11Or is it just a case of a little too much oversharing for our taste?
43:18Or is it that Romans had a more down-to-earth attitude than we do today
43:23when it came to bodily health?
43:25A clue can be found at the Villa of the Quintili,
43:31once a sprawling country pile during Marcus Aurelius' reign
43:36and later owned by his son Commodus.
43:41Prominent at the centre of the estate is a large bathing complex
43:45where guests could take a cleansing icy plunge in the cold pools,
43:50get themselves scrubbed and massaged or sweat by the hot pool.
43:56We never see our royal family starkers,
43:59but for Romans, a naked emperor wouldn't have been such a big deal.
44:04His body was almost public property
44:06and that's partly thanks to baths like these.
44:10This really is an absolute top-of-the-range bathing establishment.
44:14Kind of all mod cons.
44:17We're in the hot part of the baths
44:20and this is the swimming pool.
44:23You've got to completely reclad it in marble.
44:26But you've also got to put the people back in.
44:29And we have to imagine men.
44:31Men only, I think.
44:33All of them stark naked.
44:35All of them, as some Roman writers tell us,
44:39kind of eyeing each other up a bit.
44:42In a way, I think this sort of bathing was probably a bit of a social leveller.
44:47You've got the slightly untrim, flabby emperor
44:51here upstaged by the glorious hunk
44:55who's several notches down in the social hierarchy.
44:59I mean, this is a place where bodies are on display.
45:03It wasn't just the emperor's body being watched, but his health, his treatment and his drug regimes.
45:14There was a whole industry around him to fuss over any illness.
45:18Roman doctors' case notes take us down the throats and even up the bums of an imperial patient like Marcus Aurelius.
45:30None more so than Galen, who originally came to Rome from the Greek world.
45:35Galen is certainly not now a household name.
45:38But in the second century CE, he was a celebrity royal physician and a hugely prolific medical writer.
45:47In fact, one tenth of all the literature that survives, written in ancient Greek, was actually written by Galen.
45:55And when Marcus Aurelius was suffering with a very nasty stomach upset, from which some doctors thought he might die,
46:05Galen treated him with a pad, smeared with very expensive ointment and applied to what he called the mouth of his bowel.
46:17I think that means his rectum.
46:19And if so, then that must count as one of the very earliest references we have to an anal suppository.
46:36I'm off to see an amazing treasure trove just outside Rome of 300 ancient medical instruments seized by police from an art dealer.
46:47Oh, wow.
46:52These are the kind of things that Galen might once have used to probe around in the mouths of Roman bowels.
47:04What doctors have used to prod, poke and peer inside their patients hasn't changed much over the centuries.
47:13This looks to me for all the world like a tongue depressor, open wide Roman style.
47:20But what all these spoons and measures remind us of is that ancient doctors were also ancient chemists.
47:30And they were busy making their own medicines.
47:33Now, one of the most valued medicines in the Roman world was something called theriac, which was the drug of choice of several Roman emperors, because it was believed to cure most things and also to guard against the effects of poisoning.
47:51It had dozens of different ingredients from, you know, a dose of cinnamon to some ground up snake skin.
48:02Marcus Aurelius was one of those who took it.
48:05He can blame that it made him drowsy.
48:08That might be because it also contained opium.
48:12And it does make you wonder whether some of these emperors went round part of the time feeling quite high.
48:22Poor digestion and drowsiness were only part of Marcus Aurelius's troubles.
48:26His reign faced plague and rebellions in the empire.
48:31And in the middle of all this, Marcus wrote one of the few first person journals to have survived from Roman times.
48:39Sometimes reflecting his frustration with life at the imperial court.
48:43Say to yourself first thing in the morning, today I shall meet the busybody, the ungrateful, the insolent, the treacherous, the malicious and the antisocial.
49:01They like that because they don't know what is good or evil.
49:04Marcus's Meditations, as it's called, is a compilation of his daily jottings based on Stoic philosophy.
49:17It's now a best-selling self-help book and a favourite bedside read of world leaders.
49:23But I want to ask philosopher Angie Hobbs what we see of Marcus in these reflections.
49:29He's following the Stoic advice of keeping a daily journal in which you write down inspiring quotes or exhortations to yourself.
49:39And also includes his reflections on life. He feels he's getting older.
49:44He's feeling a bit overwhelmed by events in the empire. He's a bit lonely.
49:49We might think, well, he's an emperor. He's in charge of the biggest empire the world has ever known.
49:54Why would he be feeling that he's not in control? But he didn't.
49:57It's very clear from his meditations he didn't. He has troubles with the German tribes.
50:03Britain is being a headache. He's got all sorts of problems.
50:06He really wants something to guide him through life.
50:10And again and again he talks of Stoic philosophy as medicine, as therapy, a therapy of the soul.
50:16I think it's interesting. I think that some of the observations he makes, you know,
50:19do not become Caesarified. Don't become like a pompous old emperor.
50:25You know, all that, um, appeals to me, but I don't see it. I'm getting close to him.
50:32I respond really differently.
50:34Because for me, he does draw me in. I feel great affection for this man.
50:37He says, you know, human beings are just tiny, infinitesimally small specks in the vast, limitless sweeps of time and space.
50:47So there's that melancholy side, which is, I find, really touching, really appealing.
50:51Well, I kind of think about it differently, don't I? All this stuff about just imagine you're just a speck in the, you know, in the mists of time and, you know, one day you'll all be dead, right?
51:03And I think, what's he doing while he's writing this? He's thrashing the barbarians.
51:08You know, there are certainly tensions between what we would maybe now think is a good man living a good life and how he sees it.
51:15He hates all the hypocrisy and the flattery and the luxury and the triviality. He would much rather be a philosopher.
51:20Can I say that you're a better spokesman for Marcus Aurelius, for me, than he is for himself?
51:29Unlike Angie, I still feel Marcus keeps us at arm's length, trading on abstract ideas, even as he wages war in the real world.
51:39But perhaps the meditations do reveal something important, that emperors could feel powerless.
51:50When their time was up, emperors often faced a horrible end.
52:00Many, more than those who died a natural death, were said to have been murdered, whether by poisoned mushrooms, suffocation or even being stabbed mid-pea.
52:11This isn't just because the Romans were an especially vicious lot.
52:17It comes down to how imperial power was handed on.
52:22The problem of succession.
52:23Unlike in many later monarchies, the eldest son of a Roman emperor didn't automatically inherit the throne.
52:33The advantage of that was that you didn't find someone totally unsuitable succeeding, just because they happened to be the firstborn.
52:43The disadvantage was that it meant a rule-free zone, especially when the old emperor was fading.
52:52People were jostling for power.
52:54There was intrigue amongst those closest to him.
52:58And plenty of backstabbing. Quite a lot of it. Literal.
53:02The point about the Roman system of one-man rule was that, as a system, it was extraordinarily resilient.
53:12It lasted for centuries.
53:15But individual rulers were dispensable.
53:18There wasn't a single one of the first twelve emperors, who were not rumoured, maybe implausibly, to have been murdered.
53:28The only way to get rid of an emperor was to kill him.
53:36The Roman writer Suetonius describes the atmosphere of suspicion in the dog days of Domitian's reign.
53:43The paranoid emperor always looking over his shoulder.
53:48As he grew more anxious every day, he had the walls of the colonnades where he used to walk, lined with moonstone.
53:56So that reflected in its shiny surface, he could see whatever was going on behind him.
54:03Domitian used to say that emperors were very unlucky.
54:07Because when they discovered a conspiracy, no-one believed them until they'd actually been murdered.
54:14And he was right to be fearful.
54:17Because despite his best efforts to thwart an attack, he fell foul to a plot here, at home, in the palace.
54:26Which is where emperors were always most at risk.
54:29It was, in a way, their prison.
54:32They, too, couldn't see who was coming round the corner.
54:36Absolute power was never very far from absolute paranoia.
54:45It's at the end, when he's cornered and alone, that the emperor perhaps comes most clearly into view.
54:50In their hour of death, emperors could be all too human, crying out famous last words, from the profound to the pathetic.
55:03After eating the poisoned mushrooms served up to him by his wife, Claudius' final utterance can only be translated as,
55:12Blimey, I think I've shat myself.
55:15For Nero, the end was very different.
55:20Several armies had rebelled, and he made a run for it.
55:23But he couldn't get further than the villa of one of his former slaves, Faun, now on the outskirts of modern Rome.
55:30A place with end-of-regime vibes, reminiscent of the fall of Mussolini or Gaddafi.
55:38Nero knew the game was up.
55:39He'd lost all the trappings of power, he was barefoot, dressed in a cheap tunic and a rough cloak,
55:46and he was camped out just round here in the villa of one of his ex-slaves.
55:50He felt that his only option was suicide.
55:54All the same, he kept hesitating.
55:57He was a performer to the end, mind you.
56:00Among his last words were,
56:02what an artist is dying here.
56:11It's now we see the Emperor as he really was.
56:15An ordinary, pitiful human being, who in death depended on the same slaves who had looked after him in life.
56:22Nero's blooded body was bundled up and, Suetonius tells us, buried by his wet nurse, Eclogay, who had cared for him when he was a baby.
56:35In the end, the person who looked out for the Emperor wasn't a member of his family, wasn't a political ally.
56:45It was his old slave.
56:47And this is her tombstone.
56:49It's got her name here, Claudia Eclogay.
56:54And underneath, very faintly, it says,
56:59which means most devoted, most loyal.
57:03She certainly was that.
57:05The stone was found quite near the villa of Fion,
57:09which means, I guess, that she was eventually buried near where her master had fallen.
57:15Now, it'd be easy just to walk past this,
57:19not to give it a second glance.
57:21But that would be a real pity,
57:24because this is the tombstone of the woman who buried the Emperor Nero.
57:37Absolute rule is always, in part, about deceiving people,
57:42projecting a brave public face while hiding a fearful private reality.
57:47The Emperors of Rome, for all their apparent power and wealth,
57:50were no different.
57:52We can't now meet a Roman Emperor, but we can strip away the spin
57:57and see more than we might have imagined of the Emperor's life behind the facade of power,
58:03from his anal suppositories to his uneasy dinner table,
58:08maybe even to his loneliness.
58:11More than anything else, though, we get a sense of his vulnerability.
58:17Now, I'm not for a minute trying to defend this series of absolute rulers and what they got up to,
58:23but I confess that every now and then I feel just a little bit sorry for the very ordinary, flawed human beings who had to play the part of rulers of Rome.
58:37Rulers of Rome.
58:38Rulers of Rome.
58:39Rulers of Rome.
58:40Rulers of Rome.
58:41The.
58:42Theansa Man.
58:43The.
58:45The.
58:50The.
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