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00:00Our British history is rich with tales of wealth and power and all that political nonsense.
00:10The glamour of our kings and queens, the jewels and furs and charisma.
00:16And all those heads being chopped off.
00:21But what about the real people who made everything happen?
00:24Greg Boer.
00:29I'll discover what they ate.
00:31It's a bit stuchy.
00:33The challenges they faced.
00:35Stuff this for a game of soldiers.
00:37And how they built Britain.
00:39That's straight as a die.
00:41I'm going to uncover the extraordinary lives of some of history's ordinary people.
00:49Romans.
00:50Quite a weight on my head, I have to say.
00:54Edwardians.
00:55Breathe in, madam, breathe in.
00:571950s.
00:58Put the needle on the record.
01:01Ooh, really soft breaks, takes ages to stop it.
01:04And the middle ages.
01:06There's the executive model inside the house.
01:10Whatever.
01:11History from the bottom up.
01:14This time, I'm going back nearly 2,000 years to the great Roman Empire.
01:27An empire that's stretched all the way from Egypt to Hadrian's Wall.
01:33And brought people from Europe, Asia and Africa to live here.
01:37In gloomy old Britain.
01:40A couple of thousand years ago, there was no better way of seeing the world than by joining the Roman army.
01:59Although it could be a bit of a lottery.
02:02For one young man, let's call him Marcus, this would have meant travelling thousands of miles just so he could do guard duty at a forlorn outpost of the empire in a distant and uncivilised place called Britannia.
02:20This is going to be our Marcus.
02:26He came from the other end of the empire, in Africa.
02:33In search of adventure, he would have taken a boat from his homeland along the Nile sometime around the year 200 AD.
02:41Adventurer Marcus, you want to join the Roman army, OK?
02:45Change at Cairo and take a chariot west across the desert, till you see a lot of blokes with spears.
02:51Great!
02:52What a mug!
02:54The Romans had been in North Africa for centuries.
02:58And Africans travelled around the empire as soldiers, traders and emperors.
03:04Hail Caesar!
03:05But the army didn't take just anybody.
03:08To qualify, Marcus had to be solid and strong, alert, straight-necked and broad-chested.
03:15But it didn't matter how many fingers he had.
03:18Some lads had tried to avoid conscription by chopping a couple off.
03:23But the army wasn't having that.
03:25So having proved he was a sturdy country lad with eight to ten fingers, Marcus had to swear to obey the emperor and never run away from the army or the enemy.
03:38Then he was in.
03:40Every morning after a hearty breakfast of a pound of bacon, Marcus worked out with a wooden sword.
03:46Which sounds rubbish, but it was heavier than a real sword, to make him even more big and strong.
03:53Then he was dispatched over 3,000 miles from his homeland to Blighty.
04:05Rome's most northerly colony for over 150 years.
04:10Now you might think that being a Roman soldier simply meant getting into well-formed units and then smashing the daylights out of the barbarians.
04:20But there was actually far more to it than that, as Marcus and his mates would soon discover.
04:27For a start, there was the marching.
04:31You had to march for up to 24 miles a day.
04:37Which is certainly a lot more than the 4,587 steps I've taken so far.
04:43And if there wasn't a road where they wanted to go, Marcus and his comrades would just have to build one.
04:50So how did that work?
04:56This is historian Dr Simon Elliott.
04:58Is it true that there were virtually no roads in England prior to the Romans coming, and then they banged in a whole lot of roads, many of which are today's A roads?
05:09Absolutely, yeah. If you look at the landscape of Britain today, you look at all the A roads, they're all the lines of Roman roads.
05:15You think of Watling Street, which is the line of the A2 and the A5.
05:18You think of the A1, which is Ehrman Street, and its extension from York going into Scotland, which is Deer Street.
05:24These are all Roman roads built by Roman legionaries.
05:28They were serious roads with drainage and layered with rocks, gravel and sand.
05:34The luxury version even had cobbles.
05:37So how did they make them so straight?
05:40Well, Marcus may have had to be handy with one of these strange contraptions, a gromer.
05:47All you have to do is sight yourself on that plumb line, go through the central plumb line, and lock onto that plumb line.
05:54Oh, yeah, and then you stick your stick in over there somewhere.
05:57You just tell me where to go, Tony.
05:58OK, let's have a go.
06:01So if I stop here, Tony, for the first stick, you tell me left or right?
06:06Uh, right. Just slightly that way. Yep, bang on.
06:11There's the first one. Yeah.
06:13Then I go a little bit further. Yeah.
06:16Well, a gnat's knee that way. Oh, too far. That was an elephant's knee.
06:23Just a tiny bit right...
06:26Well, that's straight as a die.
06:30There we are, a Roman road.
06:32Yeah.
06:33How long do you reckon it would take to build a bit of Roman road from here to those trees over there?
06:39That's about 100 metres, I would think.
06:41To build 100 metres, probably 40 man-hours.
06:44So if you had 40 men, 40 legionaries, then it would take one hour.
06:48That's staggering, isn't it? I know.
06:50Is it fair to say the soldiers in the Roman army were half fighting men and half builders?
06:55Absolutely spot on.
06:56So if you look at the typical Roman legion of 5,500 men, you would have maybe 4,500 as the full fat legionaries,
07:03with his shield, his helmet, his javelins, his gladius, his spaniants, his sword.
07:07But this legionary was also a fully trained engineer.
07:11So he didn't just carry that kit, he always carried his engineering kit as well.
07:15And then within the legion, the other 1,000 were also specialists.
07:19So you had stonemasons, you had carpenters, you had surveyor.
07:24I joined the army for the killing, not the building.
07:29Yeah, stop this for a good of soldiers.
07:31Marcus's unit was on its way to Hadrian's Wall,
07:36which had been built over 50 years before to protect Roman Britain
07:41from the tribes of Caledonians and Picts.
07:46His destination? Some drafty fort facing sleet and snow.
07:52We've got a remarkably vivid idea of what life would have been like for someone like Marcus
07:59from some fantastic archaeological finds
08:02that were found at a place called Vindolanda on Hadrian's Wall.
08:07These are copies, they're letters, and they're written on wood rather than parchment
08:13because parchment would have been very hard to come by.
08:16And they've got in them some lovely details, like there's a request for more beer.
08:21And there's another request for warmer underpants, which I can quite understand.
08:29And there's one which describes the local people as Little Britons,
08:33which I suppose is meant to be derogatory.
08:36Although, quite honestly, I'm quite proud of being a Little Briton.
08:40Marcus also had a reputation for being a bit of a buffoon,
08:44which probably kept his mates entertained in the long winter nights.
08:48But one day in 208 AD, there was a surprising sight.
08:54The Roman Emperor turned up.
09:00This is him, Septimius Severus, the 21st to rule since the Empire was first founded in 27 BC,
09:08and who also happened to be the first African Roman Emperor.
09:13Severus was a hard man who turned the Empire into a military monarchy.
09:18When Marcus met him, the Emperor's mind was on the war in the north.
09:23Severus wanted to sort out the problem of the troublesome Scots once and for all.
09:28But he needed to boost his defences first.
09:31And that meant that Marcus and his comrades would need to rebuild the forts all the way along the wall.
09:38Another massive, back-breaking job.
09:41It was all go in the Roman army.
09:46Despite their practical approach to life, Romans were extremely superstitious.
09:50Before launching an attack, Emperor Severus wanted to know what the future held.
09:57This could be done by reading patterns in nature, like the way birds flocked,
10:03or in lightning,
10:06or even in the entrails of sacrificed chickens.
10:09One day the Emperor was inspecting Marcus's fort, and being a Roman, he was really superstitious,
10:18so he was looking round for some kind of sign or omen which would guide him to victory.
10:24And it was at that point that Marcus stepped into the history books.
10:30This history book, to be precise, Roman historian Augusta described an incident involving the Emperor and an African soldier.
10:38And he had got this wreath of cypress leaves, and he said,
10:45Emperor, you are a god.
10:48Mind you, for a human being to be a god, you have to die first.
10:55So, er, sorry about that.
10:58And as you can imagine, there was absolute silence.
11:01And the Emperor was not amused and sent the man out of his sight.
11:09We don't know what happened to Marcus after his ill-timed joke.
11:13He would have been lucky to get away with his life.
11:17As for Severus, he died in York in 211 AD.
11:25At which point the Romans suddenly lost interest in Scotland.
11:28But Severus had left one legacy which Marcus may just have benefited from.
11:37Before Severus died, he changed the law so that soldiers could marry local girls.
11:44And when they retired, they either got a little pension or a piece of land.
11:48So, I like to think that provided Marcus wasn't executed for impertinence or killed fighting the Scots,
11:57he would have married the local girl and settled down.
12:01And maybe, to this very day, his descendants are still living somewhere just outside Carlisle.
12:11At the other end of Roman Britain, it started as a small trading post on the Thames, London.
12:18London.
12:20Londonium was its original name.
12:23That was a Roman town.
12:26These were the original Londoners.
12:29Nice couple, Rosie Lee.
12:31Roman London grew fast and soon became a vital trading hub for the Empire.
12:36Around about the year AD 90, a young girl called Fortunata made this journey up the Thames.
12:44But she wasn't selling anything.
12:47It was herself that was on sale.
12:50Fortunata was a slave.
12:53This could be her.
12:56Fortunata means lucky, which sounds like a cruel joke.
13:00She may have been either captured by the Romans or sold to them by her parents.
13:04She was from Gaul, modern-day France, which, to her, must now have seemed very far away.
13:15Roman London was crammed, with a population of around 60,000.
13:21The riverside would have been bustling and noisy,
13:25with languages being spoken from all over the Roman Empire.
13:29A pound of your finest Sistine chapels, please.
13:31But there wouldn't have been any time for sightseeing for Fortunata.
13:38She'd have been shoved down the streets, probably stumbling from the weight of the manacles on her hands and her feet.
13:45And she must have feared the worst.
13:48Fortunata was on her way to be sold.
13:51Today we might associate slavery with the trade in African people, taken by force to work in the Americas.
14:01But humans have been enslaving each other for thousands of years, and the Roman Empire was no different.
14:07It depended on slaves, who made up about 20% of the population.
14:14Romans were happy to make anyone a slave, whether they came from Africa, Asia or Europe.
14:21Slaves didn't only do tough physical jobs either.
14:28They could be accountants, actors, scribes, or financiers dealing with huge amounts of money.
14:34But their individual lives are shrouded in mystery.
14:38So how did we find out about Fortunata? Did we just make her up? No, we didn't.
14:46It was a great piece of archaeological detective work.
14:51During modern excavations near the Thames, one sharp-eyed archaeologist spotted this.
14:56A wax writing tablet.
15:00Except, unfortunately, the wax had disappeared.
15:04Originally, it would have looked something like this.
15:07This is a tablet that a scribe would have used in Roman times to write on.
15:14You see it's made of wood, and this black inside is black wax.
15:18And the scribe would write for Fortunata into the wax, and that was the message.
15:31If the wax didn't survive, neither would the message.
15:35Except, fortunately for us, there was one particular scribe who was very heavy-handed.
15:42How do we know?
15:43Well, examination of the wooden frame revealed the imprint of his stylus, enhanced in this replica.
15:50He pushed so hard that he gouged into the wood all the words that he was writing.
15:57So, you can actually read them today.
16:01And they reveal that this is the bill of sale of the slave girl Fortunata to a chap called Vegitus,
16:09who was a slave of another slave.
16:11It says, Vegitus, assistant slave of Montanus, who's also the slave of the august emperor,
16:19has bought and received the girl Fortunata for 600 denari, which is quite a lot of money at that time.
16:27And she's in good health, and she won't wander or run away.
16:31The sale would have been a humiliating process, which probably involved Fortunata being stripped for inspection by Vegitus.
16:42Her price was equivalent to two years' salary for a Roman legionary, suggesting a highly attractive young woman, one who probably offered special skills, such as cookery.
16:54Fortunata's owner, Vegitus, had been given this money by his owner in a sort of trust.
17:01He could use it to buy whatever he wanted, even a slave for himself, so that one day, if Vegitus earned his freedom, he could set up home and, if he chose, marry his slave girl.
17:13For now, though, Fortunata belonged to whoever owned Vegitus.
17:20So she probably went to work in some kind of high-status official residence, maybe not unlike this one.
17:27As a top-end slave, Fortunata might have been given duties looking after the lady of the house.
17:37Oh, cheer up, girl, for goodness sake.
17:42She'd have had her own quarters with the other slaves.
17:46But she wouldn't have had all the luxury of underfloor heating and tiled floors and all the things we normally associate with Roman villas.
17:53She would have lived round the back or in the next field in quarters, which were pretty cramped and basic.
18:03She and the other slaves would be expected to run the place so that it was self-sufficient, including growing all of their food.
18:12And, doubtless, she'd have brought some of her fancy French cooking skills with her.
18:16Caroline Nicolet is French and an expert in Roman cookery.
18:22Oh, Caroline, I can smell this from the other side of the room.
18:27Oh, it's really lovely, isn't it?
18:29Oh, thank you.
18:30Shall I have a toast?
18:31Yes, please, absolutely.
18:33Erm, so this is called a Minutal egg spray coquis, which is a pork and apricots stew, if you like.
18:40Oh, it's very nice.
18:42As soon as we talk in my mouth, it's a bit hot.
18:45But it really is that combination of the sweetness of the apricots and the meatiness of the pork, gorgeous.
18:52It's very much like a Moroccan tagine, if you like.
18:55But what is it about this Roman stew that makes it so irresistible?
19:00It's the fish sauce that we call garum.
19:04Garum is a sauce made by fermenting fish.
19:06It's old, dead fish that you lay out on the beach for days and the cats come and wee on it.
19:13It is a smelly affair.
19:15It's mainly the guts or the heads animal that are thrown in, left to ferment with a lot of salt in the sun, in the heat, etc.
19:23For about at least three months.
19:27So Fortunata herself wouldn't get any of it.
19:30Except if she cooks it and working in the kitchen, you might have leftovers.
19:33But you won't be served that as part of your daily meal.
19:37If Fortunata was brought here as a cook, what products would she be able to cook with?
19:43There's apricots. We can't have them fresh in Britain, so they will have to be dried, preserved in honey.
19:49What about these cucumbers?
19:50We don't have cucumbers, as far as we know in Britain, before the Roman conquest.
19:54Say the first century BC, that's where things and fashions really begin to change.
19:59Onions here, they would have been originally English, wouldn't they?
20:02No. They are imported. That's really odd for us now to think about a cuisine without onions.
20:07Yeah.
20:08But as far as we know, before the Roman conquest, all types of allium are very Mediterranean.
20:14Before the Romans arrived, the Brits relied on a simple diet of meat, barley, beans and root vegetables.
20:20Fortunata, I've always thought of her as a victim, but actually, at least for some of the time, she would have been doing quite well, being surrounded by exotic food, probably having a little bit herself maybe getting a bit of respect from the fact that she cooks so well.
20:37Yeah, absolutely. Just the fact that she is so expensive. She's a very respected slave, because you are an asset to an estate.
20:53It's horrible, isn't it, to think about the lack of freedom and the gross exploitation that Fortunata and slaves like her would have suffered from.
21:03But I like to think that Fortunata might actually have lived up to her name and been lucky.
21:09After all, she was alive. It seems as though she was living in quite a comfortable place.
21:16Maybe she ended up marrying Vegitus and they had a couple of kids and they became free and were happy ever after.
21:25I hope so.
21:32When the Romans invaded Britain, they brought with them all sorts of radical new ideas, some of them even more exciting than either roads or the Mediterranean diet.
21:45Like, for instance, showbiz.
21:51Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
21:53And welcome to the show tonight.
21:55The Romans worked hard and they played hard.
21:58Among the impressive buildings that they built, or got their slaves to build, were amphitheatres, circuses, stadiums and theatres.
22:07Roman theatre was inspired by classical Greek plays and mainly consisted of dramas that were either tragedies or comedies.
22:21They were performed by actors wearing costumes and masks to convey character.
22:27And although we don't exactly know which plays were performed in Britain, we do at least know one place where they were performed.
22:33This is the best preserved theatre in Roman Britain at Verulamium in Hertfordshire.
22:40Back in Roman times, it would have been an entertainment hotspot.
22:44With something for all the family.
22:46APPLAUSE
22:51But who were the stars of Roman Britain?
22:54Well, we've got one fantastic clue which contains two intriguing names.
23:01The clue is this gorgeous terracotta piece of pottery and the names are Veracunda Ludia and Lucius Gladiator.
23:11Veracunda the actress and Lucius the gladiator.
23:17This is a replica of the original which was discovered in Leicester.
23:21The small hole allowed it to be hung as a pendant, surely a love token.
23:26What we're looking at is a showbiz couple from Roman Britain.
23:32And first, I'm going in search of Veracunda's story.
23:36Much as they enjoyed their entertainment, respectable Romans looked down on actresses like Veracunda, who almost certainly would have been a slave anyway.
23:47She would have had to be a great actor, dancer and mime artist.
23:53And if these mosaics are anything to go by, pander to the bawdy expectations of the audience.
24:00She would have been part of a troupe of travelling entertainers, performing at venues up and down Rome and Britain.
24:09For them, Verulamium would have been a big tour date.
24:13This area here, where all the grass is now, rectangular space, would have been the stage.
24:21And they wouldn't just have had this one pillar, there would have been one, two, three, maybe even four.
24:27And behind them would have been some kind of cloth or curtain to access the scenery.
24:35And over here, that's where the musicians would have played.
24:39Behind them, you've got this curve all the way around, that's where the audience sat.
24:44And they'd have had tickets, they'd have been lead tokens, which would have been stamped on the way in.
24:50And what about Veracunda? Well, when she was waiting for the show to start, she would have been up in the preparation room, what we call the green room nowadays.
25:02This is where she would have been getting a bit worked up, wondering how tonight was going to go, hanging up her frocks and dusting off her dresses.
25:11I'm hoping that Reading University's Roman expert, Dr Matthew Nichols, can reveal a bit more of Veracunda's world.
25:21What do you think of that name, Veracunda?
25:24It does have a meaning in Latin, which is, we could say something like modesty.
25:29And her name is first, it's before Lucius the gladiator.
25:32So they seem to me to be probably a couple, I would have thought.
25:35It looks to me like something these two people cared about and thought about.
25:38If you and I were here for an evening's entertainment and Veracunda was up on stage, what would we be likely to see?
25:47I suspect if it's a troupe that's got a ludia in it, an actress, that we're looking at mime, which might be a series of farcical performances, caricature situations from daily life.
25:58There might be song numbers and dance numbers and so on. It could be something a bit more raunchy.
26:02It could be something a bit more highbrow.
26:09Who would be watching it? Just the people who lived in the villas or the ordinary people and the goat herds?
26:20If you look around at the building, it's a pretty large structure. It could hold a lot of people. Looking around, I would say several thousand people.
26:28So that's probably most of the population of a town like St Albans and we might imagine people coming in from the neighbourhood as well, from the surrounding villas and farms.
26:35So I suspect you'd want to appeal to the villa crowd and to the goat herd crowd.
26:39Whatever their demographic, Romans liked an exciting end to the evening.
26:44And if the playwrights struggled to deliver a suitable climax, they could always resort to one time honoured, if not terribly subtle, device.
26:52Sometimes a magic figure would just come in and wave a magic wand. Everyone would die. End of play.
27:02This sort of ending was known in Latin as a deus ex machina, or god from the machine.
27:09But no-one was really harmed, of course. It was just pretend.
27:15Veracunda could just go back to her tent and do exactly the same thing the next day.
27:20For her boyfriend, though, the action was all too real.
27:26Ruthless bloodlust was a cherished Roman value.
27:30And one they exported around the empire to colonies such as Britain.
27:35This was the world of Veracunda's boyfriend, Lucius.
27:42Lucius was a gladiator.
27:45Britain may have been a far-flung province, but the Romans here had to have their games.
27:50They were very serious about their entertainment.
27:53You could say deadly serious.
27:58Britain had its own modest versions of Rome's theatre of death.
28:01Today, they've either been turned into shady glades or attractive traffic islands.
28:10But don't be fooled. The games were just as nasty.
28:15They were put on for free by wealthy politicians or businessmen,
28:21wanting to carry favour with the locals.
28:22Men, and even women, would often fight to the death in front of the baying crowds.
28:30I love you, lad.
28:32Come on if you think you're hard enough.
28:35During Lucius's time in the second century, defeated gladiators weren't always executed,
28:42but very few lasted more than ten fights.
28:44It's hard to imagine anything more awful, isn't it?
28:49But the games were extremely popular, both with the Romans and with the Romano-British.
28:54So how did Lucius end up with a career as a gladiator?
28:58Well, we can be fairly certain that this wasn't his preferred career choice.
29:02Lucius was most likely an enemy combatant, captured from one of the British tribes,
29:10and then offered a choice.
29:12To either A, be executed...
29:15Erm...
29:17I don't really like that one.
29:19Or B, be enslaved and fight as a gladiator.
29:25Lucius's life was all about survival, and fighting for a living,
29:30and being prepared to kill.
29:33And the centre of his world would have been his training,
29:37into which I'm about to get a crash course.
29:41First, I suppose I best get myself kitted out.
29:44This is quite bizarre, this. It's like a Roman car boot sale, isn't it?
29:48Very much so. A gladiator car boot sale, maybe.
29:52John Conyard is a professional re-enactor.
29:55It looks like all this stuff is designed to make it difficult to fight in.
29:59There's a whole variety of different kinds of headgear here.
30:03All the helmets are made of a copper alloy, sometimes covered in tin.
30:07It's quite a weight on my head, I have to say.
30:09The fight certainly won't last very long.
30:11Certainly, in some of the helmets, they've deliberately got small eye holes,
30:14so it's going to be hard to breathe.
30:20I like this wonky sword. What would the function of that have done?
30:21So, with a sword like this, I can slide it over the shield,
30:25inside the collarbone, to the heart.
30:27I can place it on your breastbone, turn it around,
30:31and then slide it upwards through the bottom of your chin,
30:34up into your brain pan.
30:36Look at this, you wouldn't want one of these up your bits and pieces, would you?
30:40The fore-skewered dagger was devastating,
30:44against knee or elbow joints.
30:46On the days when Lucius wasn't fighting, what would he have been doing?
30:51If he was a young gladiator, I suspect he might have been kept to barracks,
30:56almost chained up in his room or in the gladiator school.
30:59After he's had some experience, and he becomes a higher status gladiator,
31:03he might be allowed into town where he could meet actresses.
31:06How often would they fight?
31:08Certainly once to maybe eight times a year.
31:10I thought it would have been more like football,
31:12and you would have turned out once a week.
31:14They were paid very large sums of money for about anything
31:17from maybe £75,000 to a quarter of a million in our terms.
31:23So, fighting one or two bouts a year would be an excellent way
31:26of having a very good living in the Roman Empire.
31:31For Lucius, the secret to a good performance
31:34was not only to be handy in a scrap, but also to get into character.
31:39Each gladiator played a different role, and had his own arch-enemy.
31:43What with his glamorous girlfriend Veracunda,
31:47I reckon Lucius was a pretty boy gladiator, like this chap.
31:52Known as a retiarius or a net man, he had no helmet,
31:57so he could show off his good looks.
31:59His arch-enemy was the Secutor, well-armed but slow.
32:04So, what's Tom doing here?
32:07Tom's playing a gladiator for us.
32:10John's son Tom is dressed as a Secutor.
32:14So, the retiarius would be practically unarmoured.
32:17Yeah.
32:18They're using the trident, the fishing spear.
32:20It's a very powerful weapon, I can use it two-handed.
32:23Oh, hang on, it's a demonstration!
32:25You're right.
32:26Not too bad.
32:27The net would be weighted, lead weights all the way around the outside.
32:31And, of course, we could try to throw the net in such a way to bring him down.
32:37So, you are the fisherman who has caught the fish.
32:40Yes.
32:42With a high-energy diet and a programme of rigorous training every day,
32:46Lucius prepared for his next big fight.
32:51When it came to the day of the games,
32:54the whole thing would unfold a bit like a circus in a series of acts.
32:59And if it was a really classy show, then it would be accompanied by a soundtrack
33:05played by musical instruments, just like a sort of horror movie.
33:12And Lucius would watch from the wings as the old warm-up acts came on
33:17and got the audience in the mood.
33:20But I'm not really talking about a cheeky chappy in the Spangly Jackets.
33:26First on were the bestiarius fighters.
33:30Criminals given spears to have a sporting chance against very hungry big cats.
33:36After the ferocious hungry animals, there'd probably be a few executions,
33:45just to get the audience's bloodlust up.
33:50Then it's Lucius' call.
33:53He's had a few fights before, so by now he's well-known, well-seasoned and popular.
33:58And here comes the star of the show, Lucius the Retiarius.
34:07And a great reaction from the crowd.
34:11The Secutor is straight in at Lucius with a shot to the head.
34:15But Lucius easily dodges out of the way, quick, elegant movements.
34:19Lucius makes the lumbering Rex look a bit ridiculous.
34:22Ooh, another swipe from Rex. That was closer.
34:27Now, Lucius has come in on his blind side and it's back of the net.
34:32The crowd is going wild. Oh, my word.
34:37Was it really this bloody? Or is that just something we see in the movies?
34:42Well, not far from the prim tea rooms of York,
34:46archaeologists recently discovered evidence for a huge English gladiator's graveyard.
34:5280 bodies, nearly all men, mostly killed in horrible ways.
34:58Including one whose bones showed he'd been savaged by a big cat,
35:04presumably brought to Britannia for the games.
35:08The end for Lucius II was most probably brutal and grim.
35:14We all know something about gladiators, don't we?
35:17The strange helmets and the weird weapons and the nets.
35:20In fact, they're so bizarre, they're almost reduced to oddities, aren't they,
35:25rather than human beings.
35:27And it's only when we learn the name of one of them,
35:31or see their butchered skeletons,
35:33that we realise that they were people just like us,
35:37with lives like ours, but with terrible, brutal deaths.
35:41In Roman Britain, locals who became part of Roman society often did so as slaves,
35:52whether they were cooks, actresses, or gladiators.
35:56But how about the Brits who didn't get taken into slavery?
36:01What were their lives like?
36:03And are there even any records of them?
36:06Well, we do have a name, and it comes from the village of Prick Willow,
36:12on the island of Eels, which is now Ely in Cambridgeshire.
36:16That name is Boderoginus, which roughly translates as Born of Victory.
36:23But whose victory?
36:25Well, it could well be Queen Boudicca,
36:28who was the tribe chief who smashed the Romans on a number of occasions.
36:33So calling your child Born of Victory
36:36could well be two fingers up to the Roman Empire.
36:39Tricky little Britain.
36:42So did Boderoginus live up to his name?
36:46Well, not exactly.
36:48However, he did find a way of dealing with the Romans on his own terms.
36:52You see, Boderoginus had a job which gave him special value.
36:58It was one which would have made the other members of the tribe
37:02look at him with a bit of awe, a bit of wonder.
37:05He was someone who seemed to have something to do with magic
37:10because he could conjure beautiful things out of the earth.
37:17He was a metal worker.
37:21This might be Boderoginus hard at work.
37:25After training under a mentor,
37:28he'd have become a travelling artisan or had a shop in the village.
37:30But Boderoginus soon became an artist of the highest calibre.
37:35We know about him because one of his products,
37:40made in the second century AD,
37:42was unearthed in a bog near the village of Prickwillow.
37:48And it's kept in pride of place at the British Museum.
37:52This is stunning.
37:57This strange-looking thing looks like a little saucepan to me.
38:03What's so lovely about it is these exquisite patterns on it.
38:08Dolphins playing.
38:11Sea beasts with scaly tails.
38:16And what looks like a cupid popping up in the middle of it all.
38:23It's just beautiful.
38:25Richard, help me out.
38:26What am I looking at?
38:28Dr Richard Hobbs is Western curator of Roman Britain.
38:31In some ways the most important bit is the inscription that you can just see here.
38:38Is that a B there?
38:40Boderoginus.
38:41And then a dot and then the letter F.
38:43Oh, F, yeah. I know what that is.
38:45It's like fabricated, made.
38:48We know the name of the craftsman who made this extraordinary thing.
38:51Can I feel it?
38:52Yeah, you can.
38:53It's got a bit of heft to it.
38:55What is it actually made out of?
38:57It's made out of copper alloys, so it's made of copper alloys with other things.
39:03Now we certainly know there's tin here, that's why it's got this greyish look to the inner part of the bowl.
39:10And there are some tiny traces of enamel, which is like a type of glass.
39:14The metal alloys would first have been cast in clay moulds,
39:19then the detail refined by delicate filing and engraving with tiny tools.
39:25Boderoginus is clearly a very skilled and experienced man, isn't he?
39:31Yeah, he's really working at the top of his profession.
39:34He also knows a lot about Roman classical imagery,
39:38so he's clearly learnt the kind of artistic side of it, as well as the skills needed to make this.
39:42And Boderoginus used his knowledge to create something Romans would have used in sacred religious rites.
39:51So this would have been commissioned by a priest who would have paid a lot,
39:55something like a month's salary for the average Roman legionary.
39:59Do we know anything about the kind of ceremony that this would have been involved in?
40:04The decoration is all about Bacchus. Bacchus is the god of wine.
40:08He's also associated with rebirth, you know, the coming of the seasons, the good things in life.
40:14Bacchus was a very important god to the Romans, and they held frequent festivals in his honour.
40:21In a sacred ceremony, Boderoginus's skillet would have been used to offer wine as a sort of sacrifice to the god Bacchus.
40:30We can imagine that this is being used as part of one of those festivals, the Bacchanalia,
40:38which is all about the merrymaking of surrounding Bacchus, the drinking of the wine, maybe the great harvest itself.
40:45Once those ceremonies have been gone through, then you can all partake freely in the Bacchanalian festivals themselves.
40:54So although this wine is sacramental and it's been blessed,
40:57you'd be able to nick it as part of the party.
41:00Absolutely. You paid your due to the god, so you can then be satisfied that you're in harmony with the gods.
41:09Bacchanalia was basically an excuse to have a good time.
41:13And for some reason, this Roman god became very popular with many Brits.
41:17That's a bit Shelly, are you sure you should be going topless?
41:22What about you?
41:24Oh yeah, I got a bit carried away, didn't I?
41:27Do you think he would have been a respected member of his society?
41:33Well, the funny thing is, a lot of metal workers were not viewed in that way.
41:39They were kind of viewed with suspicion, because of this amazing ability to, you know,
41:44bring together something from the earth with water and fire and make these extraordinary objects.
41:50So they were a bit magic?
41:52They were sort of seen as alchemists.
41:53Great at last to find evidence for how Brits could exploit the Romans.
42:02All brought together into one magnificent little saucepan
42:07by a craftsman called Bodrogenus nearly 2,000 years ago.
42:14The Romans provoked such a mixture of emotions.
42:16Whatever the benefits of the Roman Empire, I can imagine many little Britons breathing a sigh of relief
42:26when the whole thing finally went down the toilet.
42:33Coming up, the new landmark series investigating how to get on top of Australia's domestic violence problem
42:39and how to keep women and children safer in See What You Made Me Do.
42:42And over on SBS Food, Hemsley & Hemsley, healthy and delicious.
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