- 2 days ago
Category
😹
FunTranscript
00:15It's 389 years before the birth of Christ, and the young Roman Republic is under attack.
00:26All the grandeur of Rome still lay in the future, but the Romans were already dreaming of greatness.
00:35The rulers of this tough little state saw themselves as new standard-bearers of civilisation.
00:43But now the walls of their ordered world were under siege.
00:52Savages. Barbarians were at the gate.
01:00How dare these primitive savages invade the heart of civilisation with its paved streets, its wealth, its laws, its ordered
01:10way of life.
01:11Just who did these barbarians think they were? Come to that. Who do we think they were?
01:17No.
01:44The End
01:47Well, according to the Romans, pretty much anybody who wasn't Roman,
01:52which includes most of the ancestors of modern Europe and the Middle East.
01:58But simply being non-Roman doesn't begin to describe their reputation.
02:05Barbarian is still a byword for the uncivilised, the savage,
02:10just as it was in Rome's day.
02:12You see, the Romans despised and feared the unwashed dregs of humanity
02:20that lived beyond their civilised borders.
02:23This series is about the peoples the Romans so despised.
02:31But of them all, there was one race that really got under the Romans' skin.
02:38The Celts were the Romans' bête noire,
02:41the bogeymen who stalked the dark corners of the Roman psyche.
02:47And the siege of 389 BC was the reason why.
02:53It was a horror story of humiliation.
02:58A warning from history that every Roman child learned at their mother's knee.
03:10They never forgot what happened when the siege ended
03:13and the Celts came into the very heart of the sacred city.
03:23Roman historians told how the wild men were struck dumb by the lavish buildings
03:29and the calm dignity of the city fathers who sat stoically awaiting their fate.
03:37Awe struck the Celts may have been.
03:42But it didn't stop them trashing the place.
03:50Well, the story goes on that the Celts, under the leadership of a man named Brennus,
03:55swarmed through the city, looting and pillaging, burning and raping,
03:59while the Romans sought refuge up there on the Capitoline Hill.
04:04The Celts forced the city to hand over a thousand pounds of gold.
04:08And to rub their noses in it, they weighed the gold on dodgy scales.
04:14When the Romans protested, Brennus contemptuously tossed his sword onto the counterweights
04:20and declared,
04:22Woe to the vanquished!
04:32It was a stain on the honour of Rome that would never be forgotten.
04:37Actually, what really seemed to get to the Romans was the fact that the Celts had been bought off so
04:42cheap.
04:42I mean, surely the whole of Rome was worth more than a thousand pounds of gold.
04:49The trauma would last for generations.
04:52From that day forward, the Empire would devote every effort to ensure that Rome was never again at the mercy
04:59of the barbarians.
05:24Bennis and his chums were Celts from France, or Gaul, as they called it in those days.
05:30And that's where I am now. I'm in the Burgundy region.
05:33And I'm standing opposite one of the great Celtic towns.
05:38It was sited over on that hill over there.
05:47They called it Elysium.
05:50And that was where the great chief Vercingetorix led his people in an heroic but doomed last stand against Julius
05:58Caesar.
06:10It's 52 BC, 300 years after the Celtic siege of Rome.
06:15And inside Elysium, Vercingetorix has hurriedly assembled an army.
06:19It's an alliance of some 28 Celtic tribes.
06:23Outside Elysium, Caesar has constructed an extraordinary series of earthworms.
06:2925 miles of them, in two concentric circles around the besieged city.
06:37One to keep the Celts penned into Elysium, and the other to keep any relief force at bay.
07:13Even after 300 years, the humiliation at the hands of the Celts still rankled.
07:20Now Caesar had them at his mercy, he intended to make sure that this time it was the Celts who
07:26were at the sharp end.
07:27And he spared no expense or effort from the part of his soldiers to do just that.
07:36In the Roman army, they didn't just teach you how to fight.
07:40They also taught you how to build things on a vast scale and quickly.
07:45It took Caesar's army just five weeks to throw up these ramparts.
07:50And don't forget there was 25 miles of them.
07:54But then, that's what you'd expect.
07:56It's a Roman efficiency and organisation against Celtic chaos and barbarism.
08:04Caesar should have had an easy enough task here.
08:07Some classical writers describe the Celts as an illiterate rabble, quick to fight but lacking in strategy.
08:17But Caesar knew better.
08:20These siege works tell us that he took them extremely seriously.
08:30If the Celts were just poor, simple, unwashed illiterates, what exactly was his problem?
08:36And why waste so much effort on them?
08:39Could it be that they had something that Rome really wanted?
08:43There must have been much more to the Celts than Rome ever let on.
08:51And archaeologists are trying to find out what.
08:57Recently, this ancient Celtic centre, the site of the Gauls' last stand, has been the subject of a major investigation.
09:06So, after ten years of digging, what have the archaeologists found?
09:14Some Roman columns.
09:17This is the Basilica. For the Romans, that's like a town hall or courts of justice.
09:23Roman coffins.
09:26This must be the Roman theatre.
09:29And this is the Temple to Jupiter.
09:32That's Roman too.
09:35Came here looking for the Celts and there isn't much Celtic here.
09:57Versing Getrix, the great Celtic hero who defied Rome.
10:01The warrior who fought to preserve the Celtic way of life.
10:05stands here proudly looking out over a Roman ruin.
10:11Everything he fought for has been obliterated.
10:17According to Caesar,
10:19Vercingetorix and his fellow Celts weren't great ones for writing things down.
10:24Certainly, no version of their side of the story has survived.
10:28So, Roman history has become our history.
10:34And we all know what happens when history is written by the victors.
10:38So, what got Caesar so interested in the Celts?
10:46I'm looking for what the Romans didn't tell us.
10:57It isn't an easy job, because almost everywhere we look,
11:02the Celtic world has been effaced by the Roman.
11:08Before the Romans came,
11:10the Celtic world stretched from the Balkans to Scotland,
11:14from Turkey to Spain.
11:15It was the blueprint from which much of modern Europe was created.
11:25And yet, from the Roman perspective,
11:27it was a world filled with warring peasants of no historical significance.
11:31Apart from the fact they were our ancestors, of course.
11:34And for the best part of 2,000 years, that's how we viewed them.
11:38Primitive people who just couldn't keep up with the intellectual pace set by the Romans.
11:43Until a recent piece of research changed our view of the Celts.
11:57These stories started back in 1897, in a field near the French village of Coligny.
12:07the French village.
12:08That's when a certain Monsieur Roux unearthed a whole load of mysterious metal pieces.
12:16They were covered in lines of holes, like the peg holes in a cribbage board.
12:23There were numbers and Greek and Roman letters that made no sense in either of those languages.
12:31It was assumed that they must refer to days of the month and phases of the moon.
12:39It was some sort of calendar.
12:41Well, obviously far too sophisticated to have been Celtic.
12:45I mean, what did they know?
12:49Scholars wrestled with the puzzle for over a century.
12:52But as the Celtic words and numbers seemed to make no sense,
12:57the colony calendar, as it became known, remained little more than an intriguing Celtic novelty.
13:04Until in 1989, an American scholar by the name of Garrett Olmsted cracked the Coligny Enigma.
13:14OK, so here it is then. And what are we looking at now?
13:18We're looking at this most fantastic lunar-solar calculator really ever devised before we develop computers.
13:26It's a lunar calendar that's adjusted to the solar calendar as well.
13:30It's a lunar calendar which is adjusted to the fact that the lunar and solar cycles don't really quite exactly
13:36interact.
13:37And what are the little holes for?
13:39The little holes are to put day markers so that you can put a marker in there and advance it
13:43for each day.
13:44And also I think you probably, with some sort of strings, we could attach from one to another and kind
13:49of...
13:49It's a calculator. This thing is actually just simply a calculator because by working out the calendar
13:54to fit in with the actual cycles of the sun and the moon, we end up with a repetitive system...
14:00Garrett explained that at the heart of the colony mystery was a series of mysterious repeating marks.
14:07You notice how these marks are always in groups of three. TII, ITI and IIT.
14:13And then we drop down exactly six days and the pattern repeats itself again.
14:17We then advance one day with that whole system...
14:20No one could work out what they were for. So they just gave up trying to make sense of them.
14:25There are like 50 people over the past hundred years that have played with this.
14:28So I started at that point, I said, that's got to be where we're going to figure out what the
14:33system this was.
14:35Everyone knew a month started at the new moon, but that meant that the year was nearly 11 days too
14:41short.
14:41The marks were the key to a system for solving that.
14:46Professor Olmsted tried to make it clearer.
14:49Look, the calendar has lucky months that are complete and un-month months which are unlucky with only 29 days
14:55in it.
14:55So you transfer a day from a lucky month to an unlucky month.
15:00They're saying, this is actually a day in which the sun is now rising in its strength.
15:03And then I began to realize they all were months that were shifted internally from an earlier counting scheme.
15:11And so that is how the first mark is determined for the first eight days.
15:16And in order to make the system work out, I had to go through and figure out, okay, let's transfer
15:21them back.
15:21I think what Professor Olmsted was telling me was that calendars are terribly complicated things.
15:28The Roman calendar had drifted so badly that they were celebrating the start of spring in the middle of August.
15:35And yet the simple barbarian Celts had developed a calendar of astonishing accuracy.
15:41This is way ahead of anything the Romans were.
15:44Way ahead of anything. Even today, you have to go and generate tables with a computer.
15:49But here, they've reduced it down to a simple mathematical scheme whereby you can predict within, say, a day and
15:55a half where the sun is going to be on any given month, any day into the future for 100
16:00years or 200 years or whatever you want to go, 450 years, and be accurate.
16:05Garret Olmsted's work proves that when the Roman historian Polybius wrote that the Celts had no knowledge whatsoever of science,
16:13he either didn't know what he was talking about or he was lying.
16:19Perhaps the most precious thing about the calendar is that it allows the Celts to talk to us directly, without
16:27Roman interpreters.
16:29And the story they tell us couldn't be more different from the Roman one.
16:34So, is it possible to get behind the Roman propaganda and unearth the real Celts?
16:54The next stop on my search was a few miles down the road from Elysium.
17:00Here, another Celtic town is being investigated.
17:04Inside these massive walls, archaeologists are revealing further evidence of a highly developed civilization.
17:22This hilltop was the site of the Celtic town of Biebract.
17:27Now, Biebract was the place where Vercingetorix was proclaimed war leader of the Gauls before his fatal encounter with Julius
17:35Caesar.
17:36It was an important place, and we know that because Caesar tells us it was.
17:42In fact, after his conquest of Gaul, Caesar chose to stay here to write up his account of it.
17:49And for years, that was all we knew about Biebract.
17:51The town just simply disappeared. It became farmland and forest.
17:58Recently, however, archaeologists have been uncovering facts about Biebract that didn't fit in to Caesar's story.
18:10Just like Elysium, it's a Celtic town buried beneath Roman remains, and Vincent Guishard is leading the search to reveal
18:20this hidden Celtic world.
18:22Early occupation.
18:23Yeah, of the Celtic, of the Celtic towns here before.
18:26Yes, let's say pre-Roman, pre-conquest occupation.
18:29And we've, we've reached that eventually.
18:32Wow. It was much deeper than what we were expecting.
18:35So here you see, at the bottom, a Roman wall, so that's the latest phase of occupation, late 1st century
18:41BC.
18:42An earlier layer of Roman construction with this wall, which is mid 1st century BC, so just the time of
18:48Caesar, or just after the time of Caesar.
18:51And underneath, you can see there are greyish layers, at the time when the site of Biebract was covered only
18:57with timber buildings.
18:58So that's, that's the Celtic layer, that's the, the bit where the, where the, where the girls are working there.
19:04In fact, what we're looking at, what we're looking at now is kind of, is, is, is the story, really,
19:08because there at the bottom there, you've got the, the, the Celtic site, and then suddenly Rome,
19:14stamps on them, and then builds on top of that.
19:21Vincent took me next to a reconstruction of a Celtic building.
19:25It shows that before the Romans arrived, there was much more to Gaul than Asterix's tribal village.
19:32This was an Iron Age industrial town.
19:38Well, it was certainly a big cellar, I mean, any idea what it was used for?
19:42That's a question.
19:43Every single house in Biebract had its own cellar, but usually they're much smaller than this one.
19:48So we would like to see it as a, as a, as a storage place, somebody who was a trader,
19:53for example.
19:54Wine, textiles, food, metal work, and everything.
19:57It's related to quite a large building.
19:59Yeah.
20:00With two storeys on, on the top of the ground floor.
20:02Yes, it's, it's, it's very, very high building.
20:04It may have been the first floor, which had been a, a, a, a shop, for example.
20:09Just facing one of the major streets of the, uh, of, of, of the town.
20:21The Celts of Biebract were metalsmiths and tradesmen.
20:25But who were they doing business with?
20:28Well, there's ample archaeological evidence that there was a thriving trade in jewels and weapons between the Celts themselves.
20:35But they were also doing business with Rome.
20:42Hundreds and thousands of jars like this have been discovered here at Biebract.
20:48This one would have probably come from central Italy.
20:51But the thing is, it would have been transported here full of wine, with a big cork in the top.
20:58The Gauls were importing Italian wine on such a vast scale that the Romans had to expand their wine production
21:06to cope with the demand.
21:07And we know that this international trade in wine had been going on for centuries.
21:14And the Romans got one thing right about the Celts.
21:17They liked a drink.
21:19Why they didn't make their own wine, I've no idea.
21:22It must have cost them a fortune to import it all.
21:25Some Celts must have been loaded.
21:36The Celts celebrated their wealth by wearing it.
21:39And the Romans knew about that all right.
21:45These barbarians weren't just brawling drunkards.
21:48Well, they might have been, but they were also rich.
21:51But where was the money coming from?
21:54That the Romans don't say.
22:00The substantial wall around Biebract wasn't built to defend a simple farming community.
22:06It was protecting the real wealth of a substantial town.
22:09And, according to Vincent Guisha, there were many towns like this, right across the Celtic Empire.
22:16And is this peculiar to Biebract?
22:18It's very typical for all these later Iron Age fortifications in the Celtic world.
22:25This rampart is three miles long.
22:29Three miles long?
22:30Yeah, so it takes a good two hours just to walk along it.
22:33Three miles exactly like this?
22:35Yes, with this four to five meters high wall with the same ditch.
22:38You have to imagine that it's the work of several thousands of people just to build that, yes.
22:46So it's really just a massive construction.
22:52I mean, this is a substantial city. Is this a one-off, this town?
22:58No.
22:59Well, it's clear that Biebract is one of the biggest.
23:02But there are at least ten or twelve of them of the same size around the Celtic world.
23:07So it's not a unique case.
23:12Although Biebract was one of the big twelve, there were hundreds of other towns right across the Celtic world.
23:19And they didn't operate in isolation.
23:21They were trading with each other, with Rome and even beyond the Mediterranean.
23:27It's all pretty surprising, but not nearly as surprising as the next thing I discover.
23:36As soon as they knew it was pre-Roman, the archaeologists moved quickly.
23:46Corlea team leader Professor Barry Raftery soon realized they had stumbled on an ingenious piece of Celtic engineering.
24:01This is sort of reconstruction, is it?
24:03This is a reconstruction of the original roadway, which is right under our feet.
24:07It's about four feet below us, the original roadway.
24:10And would it have looked like this?
24:12Vaguely, but not precisely. First of all, it would have been much bigger.
24:15It would have been probably twice as wide as this.
24:17Twice as wide?
24:19Probably, yeah.
24:19And why did they build it here? I mean, what's it all on here?
24:25Well, we're on a bog, we're on a bog in the middle of Ireland,
24:29and obviously they built it because they wanted to get from one side of the bog to the other.
24:33There were pools and hollows, and people who didn't know the way,
24:38people who might have had a few drinks on them, if they walked on the wet spot,
24:41they could have gone in and drowned.
24:42We have found bodies dating to the medieval period.
24:45People who were just pissed and wondered the wrong way home.
24:50Exactly, absolutely.
24:52And do these roads, do roads like this appear anywhere else in Europe?
24:56Or are they just restricted to Ireland?
24:57No, trackways are known elsewhere.
25:00But trackways on this scale, this size, this complexity, are only found here,
25:05in one case only, and in north-west Germany.
25:08Incredibly close in detail to the Irish trackway that we're standing on.
25:11Built at the same time?
25:12That's another very interesting point.
25:14We're being built and used exactly at the same time as those in Ireland this morning.
25:19Now we're going to go inside and see the real thing now.
25:21Yes, this is it.
25:24Oh, my God.
25:26It is massive, that is impressive, I have to say.
25:29It's the biggest trackway that has ever been found in Ireland,
25:32the biggest prehistoric trackway.
25:33But, I mean, getting these, I mean, they're huge bits of timber,
25:36I mean, it must have taken an awful lot of work to get these in place.
25:40It wasn't just big, it was a remarkable feat of engineering,
25:45a permanent way across a treacherous bog.
25:48The fact that identical roads exist in Germany
25:51shows that Celtic road engineering was on an international scale
25:55and designed to carry seriously heavy traffic.
25:59This would have been, you wouldn't have built this for, you know,
26:02flocks of sheep or things like that, would you?
26:04Absolutely out of the question, totally out of the question.
26:07This was for wheel transport, I'll stake my life on it.
26:10This is a biggie, this had a purpose, this was used for wheel transport, no question.
26:29If the Celts beat the Romans at building the first roads,
26:32it shouldn't be too surprising if they were also werehead when it came to using them.
26:45The Celts were the first great road builders of Europe,
26:49and they didn't just build them in Ireland.
26:53They built them all over the whole continent.
26:57And together with rivers and the sea,
27:00these roads linked a network of societies that had been trading for centuries.
27:10Rome saw the Mediterranean as the centre of the world.
27:14Their roads were built to carry troops out and food in to Rome.
27:21The Celtic world occupied a different space,
27:25and that meant the Celts saw things slightly different.
27:36The Celts' economic model was different from the Romans.
27:40Their transportation and communication network linked lots of cities like Bibract,
27:46of pretty well equal size and importance.
27:48That was how the Celtic world worked.
27:53For the Romans, all roads led to Rome.
27:57That's because their society was highly centralised.
28:00It was tightly controlled and designed to service one place, Rome,
28:04and the tiny number of people who ran that city.
28:08But Celtic York wasn't like that at all.
28:11The roads didn't all run to a single centre,
28:13because there was no single centre.
28:21The Celts weren't so obsessed with centralised power,
28:25and with dominating others.
28:27But they had a society that was linked and traded
28:31over a much bigger area than Rome.
28:34And we know about it not from what the Romans told us,
28:37but from what they did with this stuff.
28:51The Celts had forged themselves into a sophisticated society.
28:56In some ways, more sophisticated than Rome.
29:00What's more, their lands were rich in tin, lead, iron and silver.
29:06And they had these smiths and metal workers to transform these into valuable products.
29:12Weapons and exquisite jewellery, which they traded with people as far away as Africa,
29:18and perhaps even China.
29:19The main trade, however, was with Rome.
29:30And yet, in 58 AD, Julius Caesar invaded and crushed the Gauls.
29:37Now, why on earth would he do that?
29:52Caesar says he was forced to invade Gaul,
29:56because a dreadful army of barbarians called the Helvetii
30:00had overrun the territory of another tribe who were friendly to Rome.
30:04So Caesar marched north and nobly slaughtered the invaders.
30:08It was a glorious victory,
30:11and gave Caesar no end of brownie policy.
30:16However, there's something fishy about Caesar's story.
30:26Most of the Helvetii were children, women and the elderly.
30:31258,000 of them are unarmed civilians.
30:34They were carefully listed on documents found in their camp after the battle.
30:38Doesn't sound like an invading army, and it wasn't.
30:42The Helvetii were a Celtic tribe who were trying to migrate,
30:46as Celtic tribes did in those days.
30:49The whole thing was highly organised and controlled,
30:52and the list of names was a census they'd carried out,
30:56in order to make sure everybody got fed and housed.
31:02The Helvetii had planned to cross territory under the protection of Caesar.
31:07They asked his permission, and when he refused,
31:11they took a less troublesome route through Celtic territory.
31:15Caesar declared that Rome had to protect the Celts.
31:19Lucky Celts.
31:21So, 16 miles south of Bibract,
31:24he turned his highly trained army loose on the migrants,
31:27who were also Celts, by the way,
31:29and butchered or captured over a quarter of a million of them.
31:33And then he protected loads of other Celts all over Gaul.
31:37That was his job.
31:38He'd been appointed protector of the Gauls.
31:41By the time he'd finished protecting them,
31:43he would have killed or enslaved two million.
31:47Why?
31:51This is a Celtic gold coin bearing the image of Vercingetorix.
31:55But the thing is, if we compare it to Roman gold coins of the period,
31:59something strikes us immediately.
32:02There aren't any.
32:04Not when this was minted in the first century BC,
32:06not when Caesar invaded Gaul.
32:09Soon after the conquest of Gaul,
32:11the Romans started minting gold coins again.
32:14What a coincidence.
32:21You see, Caesar knew something that historians have only just found out.
32:33Although it's long been known that the Celts used gold for coins and chips
32:38are not the same.
32:39It was believed that they only acquired the precious metal in trade.
32:43Serious mining, it was thought,
32:45took off only under the supervision of Roman engineers.
32:49But Beatrice Cauway has spent the last ten years proving otherwise.
32:56Tell me what we're looking at here.
32:58We're looking at an old mine, which is actually filled,
33:01but in the beginning, the men start to cut in open cast.
33:06People say, oh, that should be Roman, because it's such a huge work.
33:11I mean, it cannot be Celts.
33:12It must be Roman.
33:14It must be more recent and Roman.
33:16Then we start to excavate the site the way we do here,
33:20and we discover that all the site was from Celtic time.
33:24It's all pre-Ramen.
33:27Not only were the Celts responsible for mines previously believed to be Roman,
33:32they were extracting gold in substantial quantities.
33:38How's all this work you've been doing on the mines?
33:41Has it changed people's view of the wealth of the Celts?
33:44Yeah, for instance, the historian before said all the gold the Celts use,
33:49let's say in gold, it's because they sell themselves as mercenaries in the world,
33:55in the Mediterranean world, and they were paid in gold money,
33:58and that's how they bring gold back to home.
34:01And what was very new is to discover that those Celts had all those gold
34:08and knew how to extract it, and that will introduce a lot of metals in the European economy, in fact.
34:16How many gold mines, for example, were there?
34:19Well, for Limousin, we have made a large survey, over 250 sites.
34:24We have about more than 30 sites in Brittany, the same in the Pyrenees,
34:30maybe 50 sites in the Arverne area, which maybe we can reach to 400 sites altogether.
34:38So just in Gaul, you've got 400 gold mines?
34:42Possibly, yeah.
34:43We estimate the prediction of this gold in Limousin only,
34:47and we get up to the possible prediction of 70 tons of gold, which is not bad.
34:5470 tons of gold?
34:55Yeah.
34:55So the Celts were really... They were sitting on a gold mine.
34:59Yeah, you know, they had a lot of gold.
35:02In fact, they were sitting on over 400 gold mines.
35:06The Celts wouldn't have needed the Romans' gold, even if the Romans had any.
35:11It was the Romans, and in particular Caesar, who needed the Celts' gold.
35:19Caesar desperately needed cash to pay off his debts,
35:22and he needed a military adventure to boost his career.
35:26The Celts could provide him with both.
35:29The truth is, Caesar was a politician on the make.
35:33The conquest of Gaul gave him gold to pay his army and victor's status in Rome.
35:39He then wrote his own version of history to make sure everyone saw it the way he wanted them to,
35:43and that has become our history.
35:46By the end of the conquest, he'd plundered so much gold, its price fell by 25%, and he was so
35:54glorious, he became dictator of Rome.
35:59However sophisticated Celtic society may have been, to the Romans, they were, and always would be, barbarians.
36:07And indeed, there were some features of the Celtic way of life that were truly abhorrent to a good Roman
36:15like Caesar.
36:20And this hillside has yielded remarkable evidence of the perverse and twisted practices of the Celts.
36:29In 1952, an archaeologist was excavating a Celtic site on this hill here, but he hadn't found anything of historical
36:37significance.
36:38But before he left for his Christmas holidays, he gave permission to a local farm worker to dig in a
36:45field where the worker said he'd found some odd stones.
36:48The archaeologist said, well, there were no historical significance and he could dig where he liked.
36:53So, Monsieur Moisson, the farm worker, dug a trench in that field over there.
36:58And suddenly, something surged out of the ground that was to change our understanding of the Celts.
37:06What he found, right in this field here, was an ancient bronze head.
37:11So he took it home and put it on his kitchen table.
37:13When Monsieur Joffroy returned from his Christmas holiday, he immediately recognised it was the handle of a wine vessel.
37:21The biggest and the most extraordinary wine vessel ever discovered.
37:30And from other scattered remains in the area, Monsieur Joffroy suspected that what they had discovered was a collapsed burial
37:38chamber.
37:43And that's exactly what it was. It was the grave of someone who was not only rich, but powerful.
37:50But there was something even more interesting.
37:55She was a woman.
38:04Miranda Oldhouse Green knows as much as anyone alive about those perverse Celtic ways that would have so horrified the
38:12Romans.
38:15Miranda, I don't think I've ever seen such a big one.
38:19This is rather large, isn't it? Yes.
38:21And this was actually buried with this woman?
38:24It was buried with the woman. It's the biggest of its kind we've ever seen from any tomb anywhere in
38:29Europe.
38:30And it just shows what an incredibly important person she must have been.
38:33So is this a Celtic vase?
38:37No, no, it comes from over the Alps. It's either built in Corinth or Etruria as well.
38:41Somebody carried this over the Alps all the way to...
38:44We hope not full of liquid, but yes, I mean, what an incredible thing to do.
38:49Do you think she actually wanted it just specifically for, to be buried with her?
38:52I think so. She may have commissioned this long before she died.
38:55And I see like a tomb. Absolutely, yes.
38:58And it's not the only object in the grave, is it? I mean, there's a whole lot of other things.
39:03The grave was very richly furnished. There's a whole sort of drinking, feasting equipment here.
39:07And the wagon's buried with her as well.
39:09The wagon is buried with her. The wheels are taken off, placed around the sides of the grave.
39:13And then the actual wagon itself, the platform, becomes the kind of, you know, the tablet on which she's laid
39:19out.
39:22The funeral would have been accompanied by massive numbers of people who would have gathered from far and wide to
39:27watch her being carried on that hearse.
39:37I mean, do you get any Roman women buried in this kind of style?
39:41Absolutely not. No, you've got a statement of power here which is unequalled in the Roman world.
39:46Because for Roman women, I mean, they couldn't, they weren't even real citizens.
39:49They couldn't own businesses. They were very unfree, in fact, very sequestered.
39:54And under the power of brothers or husbands or fathers, until death.
40:02Are we saying there's more equality in the Celtic world between men and women?
40:05We're saying there's more social fluidity, which means that it's possible for women to rise to the top, either by
40:11achieved status, by something they did, or inherited status.
40:14That could never happen in the classical world, either in Greece or in Rome, but it could happen in the
40:18Celtic world where we are now.
40:21And I'm not, I don't want to say that, you know, every woman was equal to every man, I'm sure
40:25that wasn't the case, but at least some women were very, very powerful and more powerful than the men that
40:30surrounded them.
40:31This woman represented something truly abhorrent to the Romans.
40:36A woman with power.
40:40The Romans left behind hundreds of books documenting their lives, their laws and their history.
40:46But the Celts didn't believe in writing things down, and their laws and literature were all memorised to be passed
40:53on by word of mouth.
40:54It was not until nearly a thousand years after the woman of Vic's died that they started to make books.
41:05The oldest of them are kept here in the library of Trinity College Dublin.
41:11Professor Donohar O'Quran explains that the attitudes to women expressed within the poems and stories preserved here are consistent
41:19with what we learn from the Vic's burial.
41:22In the Roman Republic, women had very little position, but the women in the barbarian societies seem to have had
41:29a stronger role in society.
41:32And the early stratum of Irish literature is full of very, very powerful women.
41:36Can we extrapolate from what was written down in the Middle Ages and look back further and say, well, maybe
41:42some idea?
41:43We can extrapolate, we can figure out from the narratives and tales of the early Middle Ages, they have echoes
41:52and resonances inherited from the past.
41:56The earliest Irish laws were written down in the 7th century and again tell a consistent story.
42:03The Irish laws give women a status in society that does not occur in the neighbouring societies.
42:11For example, a woman may divorce her husband, she may initiate divorce.
42:18If he is impotent, if he is infertile, if he prefers to sleep with boys instead, if he beats her,
42:28she may divorce you.
42:29And if she divorces you, she takes back all the property she brought into the marriage and she is free
42:34from that time to marry again.
42:42And it wasn't just women who had protection under Celtic law.
42:51You can see, for example, that elderly people and those who are, those who are senile, who are mentally non
42:57-compass or physically decrepit, they, these have to be maintained.
43:03In fact, if a child does not carry out these obligations, the parents may nominate another person, who is a
43:10member of the family or not a member of the family, to carry out that obligation and will be rewarded
43:15in that account with an inheritance.
43:18At the other end of the scale, children, who are young children, are treated as having the same protection as
43:25clerics because of their innocence.
43:29This is quite a contrast to the Roman world in which you could put an unwanted child on the local
43:34rubbish dump.
43:35I think it may be. The Roman idea of dumping kids at well-known dumping sites in the city, I
43:41think is repugnant to these people.
43:45Celtic law is all about everyone's rights and duties within the community.
43:50Quite different from Roman law, where the only person who counts is the paterfamilias, big daddy.
43:58I must say, I'm genuinely surprised by the basic decency of my barbarian ancestors compared with the authoritarian Romans.
44:11And many Celts resisted Roman ways and Roman laws determinately, to the death.
44:19The Celtic world had no Rome, no capital to destroy.
44:39The extinction of the Celts had begun with Vercingetorix and his Gauls bottled up here at Elysia.
44:46The destruction of their memory also began here, when Caesar started writing his history.
44:56We're only just beginning to rescue the memory of the Celts from that oblivion.
45:02The Celts formed a sophisticated society.
45:07In many ways, it was a society that was preferable to what the Romans had on offer.
45:11I mean, the Celts didn't throw their unwanted babies onto rubbish dumps like the Romans.
45:15In fact, they imposed a legal obligation on families to look after the very young and the very old, and
45:22the mentally handicapped.
45:24They also had a complex tariff of compensation for wrongful injury.
45:29And I'm damn certain, if I were a woman, I'd rather have been a Celtic woman than a Roman woman.
45:41Their society wasn't inferior to Rome's, but it was very different.
45:47And in the end, its composition as a loose federation made it vulnerable to the ruthless might of Rome's professional
45:56army.
45:57As Caesar proved here at Elysia.
46:10As the town starved, Vercingetorix ordered the old, the women and the children to leave, so they could get to
46:17safety.
46:18But Caesar wouldn't let them through.
46:20He was hoping the Celts would open the gates again to let them back in, and then he could attack.
46:26But Vercingetorix knew that if that happened, it was all over.
46:30So they were left in no man's land to die of starvation and dehydration in front of their sons and
46:38fathers and husbands.
46:4270,000 people died in Elysia, and that was just the beginning.
46:48By the time Caesar finished, he reckoned that out of 10 million Gauls, he'd killed a million, and another million
46:56had been enslaved.
47:03When Caesar accepted Vercingetorix's surrender, he'd won more than a military battle.
47:09He had won the battle for history too.
47:14Celtic history died with the Druids, and for 2,000 years, Caesar's version of history prevailed.
47:23Vercingetorix was taken back to Rome and kept in a pit for five years.
47:27Then he was put on display at a public spectacle to honour Julius Caesar and strangled.
47:34Woe to the vanquished!
47:55It seems to me the Celtic world isn't so much a world that's been lost as a world that was
48:01deliberately obliterated by ruthless empire.
48:07So, who were the barbarians?
48:10Well, there are even Romans who wondered about this.
48:13Tacitus put these words into the mouth of one conquered Britain.
48:17For me, they say it all.
48:19If you want to rule the whole world, does it follow that everyone else welcomes enslavement?
48:25To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of freedom.
48:31They make a wilderness.
48:35Call it peace.
48:49CHOIR ORGAN PLAYS
Comments