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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.
00:34The rulers of this tough little state saw themselves as new standard-bearers of civilisation.
00:44But now the walls of their ordered world were under siege.
00:51Savages. Barbarians were at the gate.
00:59How 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?
01:17How dare they go?
01:17How dare they go?
01:33What are they?
01:35How dare they go?
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.
01:57But simply being non-Roman doesn't begin to describe their reputation.
02:05Barbarian is still a byword for the unsivilised, the savage,
02:10just as it was in Rome's days.
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.
02:37The 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,
03:32who 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.
04:03The 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!
04:31It was a stain on the honour of Rome that would never be forgotten.
04:37Actually, what really seemed to get to the Romans
04:39was the fact that the Celts had been bought off so cheap.
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
04:56to ensure that Rome was never again at the mercy of 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.
05:37It was sited over on that hill over there.
05:47They called it Elysium.
05:50And that was where the great chief Vercingetorix
05:53led his people in an heroic but doomed last stand against Julius Caesar.
06:10It's 52 BC, 300 years after the Celtic siege of Rome.
06:14And inside Elysium, Vercingetorix has hurriedly assembled an army.
06:19It's an alliance of some 28 Celtic tribes.
06:22Outside 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.
06:4423 miles of them, spirits may not release us.
06:45They were already full of thousands.
06:4525 miles away from me.
06:4523 miles away from me that
07:12Even 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
07:24it was the Celts who were at the sharp end, and he spared no expense or effort
07:30on the part of his soldiers to do just that.
07:36In the Roman army, they didn't just teach you how to fight,
07:39but they 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,
08:12quick 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?
08:44There must have been much more to the Celts than Rome ever let on.
08:50And archaeologists are trying to find out what.
08:57Recently, this ancient Celtic centre, the site of the Gauls' last stand,
09:02has 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.
09:19For 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.
09:34Came here looking for the Celts, and there isn't much Celtic here.
09:57Versing Gethryx, 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,
10:19Versing Gethryx 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.
10:33And 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.
11:57The story started back in 1897, in a field near the French village of Coligny.
12:07That'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.
12:41Obviously 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,
12:56the 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.
13:13Okay, 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 you develop computers.
13:26So it'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 probably with some sort of strings we could attach from one to another and kind of...
13:49It's a calculator. This thing is actually just simply a calculator because by working out the calendar to fit in
13:56with 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. And then we drop down
14:14exactly six days and the pattern repeats itself again. We 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. So I started at that
14:30point, I said, that's got to be where we're going to figure out what the system 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. The marks were the key to a system for solving that.
14:46Professor Olmsted tried to make it clearer.
14:48Look, 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. They're saying this is actually a day
15:01in 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.
15:22I 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 in the Romans.
15:43Even 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
15:59years or 200 years or whatever you want to go, 450 years, and be accurate.
16:04Something like that.
16:05Garrett 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.
17:03Inside these massive walls, archaeologists are revealing further evidence of a highly developed civilisation.
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.
17:48And for years, that was all we knew about Biebract.
17:52The 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.
18:11Just like Elysium, it's a Celtic town buried beneath Roman remains.
18:16And Vincent Guishard is leading the search to reveal this hidden Celtic world.
18:22Yeah, of the Celtic town that was here before.
18:26Yes, what's a pre-Roman, pre-conquest occupation.
18:29And 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, that latest phase of occupation, late 1st century BC.
18:42An earlier layer of Roman construction with this wall, which is mid 1st century BC.
18:47So just the time of Caesar, or just after the time of Caesar.
18:51And underneath, you can see there are greyish layers.
18:54At the time when the site of Biebract was covered only with timber buildings.
18:58So that's the Celtic layer, that's the bit where the girls are working there.
19:04In fact, what we're looking at now is the story, really.
19:08Because there at the bottom there, you've got the Celtic site.
19:12And then suddenly, Rome stamps 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 tower.
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 storage place, somebody who was a trader, for example.
19:53Wine, textiles, food, metalwork and everything.
19:57It's related to quite a large building, with two storeys on the top of the ground floor.
20:02Yes, it's a very high building.
20:04It may have been the first floor, which had been a shop, for example,
20:09just facing one of the major streets 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
20:33between 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,
20:56with a big cork in the top.
20:58The Gauls were importing Italian wine on such a vast scale
21:02that the Romans had to expand their wine production to cope with the demand.
21:07And we know that this international trade in wine had been going on for centuries.
21:14But the Romans got one thing right about the Celts.
21:17They liked a drink.
21:18Why they didn't make their own wine, I've no idea.
21:22It must have cost them a fortune to import it all.
21:24Some 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.
22:05It was protecting the real wealth of a substantial town.
22:10And, according to Vincent Guishard,
22:13there 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?
22:35Yeah, so with this four to five meters high wall with the same ditch.
22:38You have to imagine that just 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.
22:58Well, 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 a 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.
24:14First of all, it would have been much bigger.
24:15It would have been probably twice as wide as this.
24:17Twice as wide?
24:18Probably, yeah.
24:20And why did they build it here?
24:23What's it all on here?
24:25Well, we're on a bog.
24:27We'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,
24:37people 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 are just pissed and...
24:47Oh, impossible, yeah.
24:48Wander the wrong way home.
24:50Exactly.
24:50Absolutely.
24:52And do these roads, do roads like this appear anywhere else in Europe?
24:56Or are they just restricted to Ireland?
24:57No.
24:58Trackways are known elsewhere, but trackways on this scale, this size, this complexity,
25:03are only found here, in 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 one.
25:18Now, we're going to go inside and see the real thing now.
25:21And, yes, this is it.
25:24Oh, my goodness.
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.
25:41It 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.
26:04Nothing. Absolutely out of the question.
26:06Totally 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.
26:12This 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
26:35when 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, these roads linked a network of societies
27:03that 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 Bibracte
27:46of pretty well equal size and importance.
27:49That was how the Celtic world worked.
27:53For the Romans, all roads led to Rome.
27:56That'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 because there was no single centre.
28:21The Celts weren't so obsessed with centralised power and with dominating others.
28:27But they had a society that was linked and traded over 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,
29:14which they traded with people as far away as Africa and 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 because a dreadful army of barbarians called the Helvetii had overrun the
30:01territory of another tribe who were friendly to Rome.
30:03So Caesar marched north and nobly slaughtered the invaders.
30:07It was a glorious victory and gave Caesar no end of brownie bones.
30:16However, there's something fishy about Caesar's story.
30:26Most of the Helvetii were children, women and the elderly, 258,000 of them unarmed civilians.
30:34They were carefully listed on documents found in their camp after the battle.
30:38It doesn't sound like an invading army, and it wasn't.
30:42The Helvetii were a Celtic tribe who were trying to migrate, as Celtic tribes did in those days.
30:48The whole thing was highly organised and controlled.
30:52And the list of names was a census they'd carried out in order to make sure everybody got fed and
30:58housed.
31:02The Helvetii had planned to cross territory under the protection of Caesar.
31:07They asked his permission, and when he refused, they 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, he turned his highly trained army loose on the migrants, who were also Celts
31:28by 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, he would have killed or enslaved two million.
31:48Why?
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, something strikes us immediately.
32:01There aren't any.
32:03Not when this was minted in the first century BC.
32:06Not when Caesar invaded Gaul.
32:09Soon after the conquest of Gaul, the Romans started minting gold coins again.
32:14What a coincidence.
32:21You see, Caesar knew something that historians have only just found out.
32:28It's not true.
32:34Although it's long been known that the Celts used gold for coins and jewellery,
32:38it was believed that they only acquired the precious metal in trade.
32:43Serious mining, it was thought, took off only under the supervision of Roman engineers.
32:48But Beatrice Cowie has spent the last ten years proving otherwise.
32:56Don't we know 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, yeah.
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.
33:23It's all pre-Roman.
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
34:12in the European economy, in fact.
34:16How many gold mines, for example, were there?
34:18Well, 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, and we get up to the possible prediction of 70
34:51tons 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, yeah, 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.
35:18Caesar desperately needed cash to pay off his debts, and he needed a military adventure to boost his career.
35:25The Celts could provide him with both.
35:29The truth is, Caesar was a politician on the make.
35:34The conquest of Gaul gave him gold to pay his army and victor's status in Rome.
35:38He 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%,
35:53and he was so glorious, he became dictator of Rome.
35:59However sophisticated Celtic society may have been,
36:03to the Romans, they were, and always would be, barbarians.
36:07And indeed, there were some features of the Celtic way of life
36:12that were truly abhorrent to a good Roman like 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,
36:35but he hadn't found anything of historical significance.
36:38But before he left for his Christmas holidays,
36:41he gave permission to a local farm worker to dig in a field
36:46where the worker said he'd found some odd stones.
36:48The archaeologist said, well, there were no historical significance,
36:51and 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
37:01that was to change our understanding of the Celts.
37:05What he'd found, right in this field here, was an ancient bronze head.
37:11So he took it home and put it on his kitchen table.
37:14When Monsieur Geoffroy returned from his Christmas holiday,
37:17he immediately recognised it was the handle of a wine vessel.
37:22The biggest and the most extraordinary wine vessel ever discovered.
37:30And from other scattered remains in the area,
37:33Monsieur Geoffroy suspected that what they had discovered
37:36was a collapsed burial chamber.
37:43And that's exactly what it was.
37:46It 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
38:08about those perverse Celtic ways that would have so horrified the Romans.
38:15Miranda, I don't think I've ever seen such a big one.
38:18It is rather large, isn't it? Yes.
38:20And this was actually buried with this woman?
38:24It was buried with the woman.
38:25It's the biggest of its kind we've ever seen from any tomb anywhere in Europe.
38:30And it just shows what an incredibly important person she must have been.
38:34So this is a Celtic vase?
38:37No, no, it comes from over the Alps.
38:38It'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.
38:46Yes, I mean, what an incredible thing to do.
38:49Do you think she actually wanted it just specifically for...
38:51to be buried with her?
38:52I think so.
38:53She may have commissioned this long before she died.
38:55And I see, like a tomb.
38:57Absolutely, yes.
38:58And it's not the only object in the grave, is it?
39:00I mean, there's a whole lot of other things.
39:02The grave was very richly furnished.
39:04There'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,
39:11placed around the sides of the grave,
39:13and then the actual wagon itself, the platform,
39:16becomes the kind of, you know, the tablet on which she's laid out.
39:22The funeral would have been accompanied by massive numbers of people
39:25who would have gathered from far and wide
39:27to watch her being carried on that hearse.
39:37I mean, do you get any Roman women buried in this kind of style?
39:41Absolutely not.
39:42No, you've got a statement of power here
39:44which is unequalled in the Roman world.
39:46Because for Roman women, I mean, they couldn't...
39:48They weren't even real citizens.
39:49They couldn't own businesses.
39:51They were very unfree, in fact, very sequestered,
39:54and under the power of brothers or husbands or fathers,
39:57until death.
40:02Are we saying there's more equality in the Celtic world
40:04between men and women?
40:05We're saying there's more social fluidity,
40:07which means that it's possible for women to rise to the top,
40:10either by achieved status, by something they did,
40:12or inherited status.
40:14That could never happen in the classical world,
40:15either in Greece or in Rome,
40:17but it could happen in the Celtic world where we are now.
40:21And I'm not...
40:22I don't want to say that, you know,
40:23every woman was equal to every man.
40:25I'm sure that wasn't the case.
40:26But at least some women were very, very powerful
40:28and more powerful than the men that surrounded them.
40:31This woman represented something truly abhorrent to the Romans.
40:36A woman with power.
40:40The Romans left behind hundreds of books
40:43documenting their lives, their laws and their history.
40:45But the Celts didn't believe in writing things down,
40:49and their laws and literature were all memorised
40:52to be passed on by word of mouth.
40:54It was not until nearly a thousand years after the woman of Vicks died
40:59that they started to make books.
41:05The oldest of them are kept here in the library of Trinity College Dublin.
41:11And Professor Donohar O'Quran explains that the attitudes to women expressed
41:16within the poems and stories preserved here
41:18are consistent with what we learn from the Vicks burial.
41:21In the Roman Republic, women had very little position.
41:25But the women in the barbarian society seem to have had a 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
41:39and look back further and say, well, maybe...
41:42Yes, we can extrapolate.
41:45What we can figure out from the narratives and tales of the early Middle Ages,
41:51they have echoes and resonances inherited from the past.
41:56The earliest Irish laws were written down in the 7th century
42:00and again tell a consistent story.
42:03The Irish laws give women a status in society
42:08that 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,
42:22if he prefers to sleep with boys instead,
42:27if he beats her, she may divorce you.
42:29And if she divorces you, she takes back all the property
42:32she brought into the marriage
42:33and she is free from 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
42:54and those who are senile, who are mentally non-conference
42:58or physically decrepit, these have to be maintained.
43:03In fact, if a child does not carry out these obligations,
43:06the parents may nominate another person
43:09who is a member of the family or not a member of the family
43:12to carry out that obligation
43:13and will be rewarded in that account with an inheritance.
43:18At the other end of the scale, children, young children,
43:22are treated as having the same protection as clerics
43:26because of their innocence.
43:28This is quite a contrast to the Roman world
43:31in which you could put an unwanted child
43:33on the local rubbish dump.
43:35I think it may be.
43:36The Roman idea of dumping kids
43:38at well-known dumping sites in the city
43:40I think is repugnant to these people.
43:45Celtic law is all about everyone's rights and duties
43:49within the community.
43:50Quite different from Roman law
43:52where the only person who counts is the paterfamilias,
43:56big daddy.
43:57I must say, I'm genuinely surprised
44:00by the basic decency of my barbarian ancestors
44:03compared with the authoritarian Romans.
44:11And many Celts resisted Roman ways
44:14and Roman laws determinately.
44:17To the death.
44:19The Celtic world had no Rome,
44:21no capital to destroy.
44:39The extinction of the Celts had begun
44:42with Vercingetorix and his Gauls bottled up here at Elysia.
44:46The destruction of their memory also began here.
44:51when Caesar started writing his history.
44:56We're only just beginning to rescue the memory of the Celts
45:00from that oblivion.
45:03The Celts formed a sophisticated society.
45:07In many ways, it was a society that was preferable
45:09to what the Romans had on offer.
45:11I mean, the Celts didn't throw their unwanted babies
45:13onto rubbish dumps like the Romans.
45:15In fact, they imposed a legal obligation on families
45:19to look after the very young and the very old
45:21and the mentally handicapped.
45:23They also had a complex tariff of compensation for wrongful injury.
45:29And I'm damn certain if I were a woman,
45:32I'd rather have been a Celtic woman than a Roman woman.
45:41Their society wasn't inferior to Rome's,
45:44but it was very different.
45:46And in the end, its composition as a loose federation
45:51made it vulnerable to the ruthless might
45:54of Rome's professional army,
45:56as Caesar proved here at Elysia.
46:10As the towns starved,
46:12Vercingetorix ordered the old women and the children to leave
46:16so they could get to safety.
46:18But Caesar wouldn't let them through.
46:20He was hoping the Celts would open the gates again
46:23to let them back in, and then he could attack.
46:26Vercingetorix knew that if that happened, it was all over.
46:29So they were left in no man's land
46:33to die of starvation and dehydration
46:36in front of their sons and fathers and husbands.
46:4270,000 people died in Elysia,
46:45and that was just the beginning.
46:48By the time Caesar finished,
46:50he reckoned that out of 10 million Gauls,
46:53he'd killed a million and another million had been enslaved.
47:03When Caesar accepted Vercingetorix's surrender,
47:07he'd won more than a military battle.
47:09He had won the battle for history too.
47:14Celtic history died with the Druids,
47:16and 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
47:30to honour Julius Caesar and strangled.
47:33Woe to the vanquished!
47:59Woe to the vanquished!
48:02By a 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.
48:18If you want to rule the whole world,
48:21does it follow that everyone else welcomes enslavement?
48:25To robbery, slaughter, plunder,
48:28they give the lying name of freedom.
48:32They make a wilderness, call it peace.
48:36Well, thank you very much.
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