- 2 days ago
Mary Beard delves even deeper into ordinary Roman life by going behind the closed doors of their homes. She meets an extraordinary cast of characters, drunken housewives, teenage brides, bullied children and runaway slaves, and paints a more dynamic, lusty picture of Roman family life.....
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00:05today when we think of ancient Rome this is what we see a city of marble ruins colossal
00:13amphitheatres and imperial power a world of emperors and armies and lavish spectacle all
00:21those gladiators fighting to their death but what happens if we turn that upside down we
00:28take a look at Rome from the bottom up hidden away all over the modern city you can still
00:36find evidence for a very different ancient Rome the forgotten voices of its bakers and butchers
00:43its slaves and children gosh this is a sad one he lived for just one year fix it and the
00:50death of
00:51a baby you've got a young slave girl 817 Africana she came from Africa this wasn't just a mugging this
01:01was mass murder in this series I've been exploring the lives of these ordinary Romans through the
01:07extraordinary stories they tell us on their tombstones we've already seen how the Empire
01:15turned Rome into the world's first global city a place where a million people from three continents
01:21lived together where life was full of luxury and laughter but also disease and danger in this final
01:29film I want to delve even deeper and go behind the closed doors of the Roman home to lift the
01:35lid on
01:35their personal lives and prized possessions it's a really really precious piece because it's only cradle
01:42to survive from the Roman world and take you to meet some extraordinary ordinary Romans who reveal
01:50an intimate a times dark but very surprising picture of the Roman family step through the front door
01:57into a Roman home and you'll find a place brimming with stories from the shocking to the sweet loving
02:05couples that's for sure but also teenage pregnancies abandoned babies drunken housewives runaway slaves
02:14main-nage-a-trois and a very nasty case of domestic violence welcome to my room
02:51this house in Pompeii is the perfect example of a conventional Roman home you come through the
02:58front door into a grand formal hall with several rooms off it pool for collecting water
03:04opposite the front door a reception room comes study called in Latin the tablino the standard
03:12view is that this is where the master of the house presided dressed in his toga receiving his guests while
03:19at the back of the house in the private quarters is where we find the wife and kids and the
03:24cook
03:24slaving away over a hot oven probably that is there's a touch of the Frankie Howard Mr. and Mrs. Pompeii
03:33about it or to put it another way it's a temptation for us to take a rather idealizing image of
03:43our own
03:43families dress them up in togas add a couple of slaves and say hey presto that's the Roman family
03:50and it's not actually entirely wrong and there's some quite strikingly familiar things about a Roman
03:58house right down to some of them having a beware of the dog sign at the front door but if
04:06you look a
04:06bit harder you find it isn't quite so simple
04:13so how do we start to bring back to life what really went on within the walls of a Roman
04:18home
04:19and how do we get close to a real Roman family
04:35well the best way is to look at what the Romans themselves tell us from beyond
04:40the grave when you come into a place like this what first hits you in the eye are the statues
04:46of
04:46the rich stern emperors and ladies with expensive hairdos but if you look behind them you'll find
04:52thousands of ordinary Roman voices compelling us to read their stories some are forked out on portraits
05:01others on just a few lines of text but they all give you clues about who they lived with and
05:07who they
05:08loved he has a cute little boy with his pet dog he's a dad he's commemorating his daughter Julia there
05:16she is really natty hairdo she must have been quite fashion conscious I think but one of the most
05:22striking things about all these tombstones is how Roman husbands and wives portray themselves in death
05:28and if you want to know why we've inherited such a traditional view of the Roman family then the
05:35best place to start is with Roman marriage so this is one end of a big Roman marble coffin we
05:44don't know
05:44who was originally inside it but this end at least talks to us about marriage husband wife and they're
05:53holding hands that's the absolutely classic image of the Roman married couple it's really such a cliched logo
06:04of Roman marriage that stone carvers would have churned these things out by the dozen this will all be
06:12prepared and the stonemason just put your faces onto the heads whatever it looks like it isn't an equal
06:22relationship though in the stereotype the husband has all the control the wife's job is to serve him
06:30every which way you even get some Roman epitaphs that sum up a woman's life just by listing her service
06:38she talked nicely she walked nicely she had kids she kept house she made wool enough said
06:47and it goes right to the top of Roman society too there's a lovely story about the empress livia the
06:55scheming poisoning wife of the emperor augustus she's supposed to have taken great care that people saw
07:01her in the imperial palace itself spinning and weaving the wool for her husband's togas that was what
07:09Roman women were supposed to do on the surface then these tombstones show us a rather poised cool even
07:21cold view of Roman marriage but tombstones tend to give that impression even today they trade in
07:28cliches but there's plenty of other evidence that helps us get behind these stereotyped impressions at the
07:35British Museum in London is a wonderful collection of Roman rings covered in the same imagery
07:48they look pretty familiar to us we know actually that what we call the wedding finger was the favorite
07:56place to put a ring some Roman doctors thought it was a direct link between that finger and the heart
08:03but it's hard to get through these sort of standardized images of the clasped hands just occasionally you can
08:11and this ring here it's a pretty plain ring but in the center it's got written on it in Latin
08:22te amo parum which means literally I love you not enough I don't love you enough
08:33it's kind of slightly odd at first sight it's particularly odd to imagine that you would give
08:38a rather expensive gold ring to somebody to say here you are have this lovely ring but I don't care
08:43for you that much I think it's probably a bit cleverer than that and I think what the message must
08:49mean is I can't love you possibly as much as you deserve to be loved you are so fantastic and
08:59gorgeous and lovable but nobody could love you as much as you ought to be loved it's a wonderfully rare
09:05really rare glimpse of somebody's kind of personal voice shouting through these are the cliched images
09:21of marriage that ring hints at some of the passion you can find in Roman relationships but it's also there
09:28if
09:28you look beyond the man's voice and think about it from the woman's side scattered across Rome is an
09:35amazing trio of tombstones which although still written by men give us a much more intimate a more honest
09:41portrait of their partners you have to be a bit careful about what husbands and wives say about each
09:48other on their epitaphs they do tell such terrible whoppers about their marriage we lived together for 30
09:57years without a crossword I don't imagine that could have been any more true in ancient Rome than it is
10:04now
10:04but just occasionally you find someone who comes a bit off-center breaks through those cliches and really
10:12conjures up the character this is a great example the tombstone of a woman called glyconis put up by her
10:20husband now glyconis is a Greek name and it means sweet so she's sweetie and he says that in fact
10:28he says she's
10:30sweet by name but even sweeter by nature she didn't like to be all proper and austere he says she
10:41much
10:41preferred to be a bit wild lasky both rather sexy so always she liked to get a bit drenched in
10:51Bacchus
10:52now Bacchus is the god of wine so what he's saying is she was a bit of a wild thing
11:01and she really liked
11:02a drink or two it's a pity he says she didn't live forever after all that affection the next one
11:11reveals
11:12a much darker side to Roman marriage here's another tombstone which doesn't look very special but it's
11:19a horrible sting in the tail it's put up by a husband and wife he's called restutus piscinesis
11:30and the wife is called prima restuta and they put it up fake errant to prima florentia their dearest
11:44daughter filiae carissima dearest daughter so far so ordinary but how did she die she was thrown
11:55de kept her est in tibory into the tiber by her husband orpheus she was just 16 and a half
12:07years old
12:09if mum and dad are right this was a case of domestic murder I'm afraid some things never change
12:20the woman in this last tombstone deserves to be a lot more famous than she is
12:24her story gives us a very different view on Roman virtue and fidelity
12:29and is put up to a woman called Alia Potestas and she's an ex-slave she's a liberta of a
12:39man called
12:40Aulus her partner starts off with some pretty standard praise for a Roman woman she was always
12:49the first to get out of bed in the morning and the last to go to bed at night i
12:55.e. she was doing all the
12:56housework then starts to get a bit weirder because the writer becomes a bit strangely explicit about
13:09her body um he says here she got lovely snow white breasts and small nipples and that her arms and
13:21legs
13:21were beautifully smooth and then he explains why it's because she was a very active depilator
13:28she sought out every little hair and plucked it out but it gets even weirder than that this woman
13:36had actually two lovers that she was living with one household held them all una domus held them all
13:48and they lived in a spirit of perfect harmony this is in other words a Roman menage a trois
13:58but after she died the blokes went their separate ways and they're now growing old apart
14:06he wanted just one example of how Roman relationships could be as messy as murky and as mixed up as
14:17our
14:17own it would have to be the household of alia potestas can't help wondering though what alia potestas's
14:27version of the story about these guys would have been so if these three voices tell us how we can
14:36fill the Roman home with a more unexpected set of occupants what about the house itself well if you
14:43look beyond those rather posh houses in pompeii with their grand entrance halls and expensive paintings
14:49you'll find that Roman homes came in just as many shapes and sizes as their relationships
15:02this place was in multiple occupancy it had three or four separate apartments and actually the walls
15:09inside partly made of wicker the kind of ancient equivalent of prefab but don't think dirt poor there
15:18was a really pricey little collection of bronze statuettes found in there
15:25this one is a pretty interesting one actually because it seems to be partly apartment block
15:32but also partly lodging house partly b&b just around the corner is one of my favorite roman homes
15:41the ground floor flat of what was once a quite comfortable roman apartment block anyone at home
15:49what's so surprising about this place is that its layout basically a series of rooms off a central
15:55corridor feels like any flat that you might find in any modern city it's now called the insular of the
16:01painted ceiling for obvious reasons i almost feel i could move right in today now we don't know how many
16:08people would actually have lived here and that does make a difference to how we picture it and we
16:13certainly don't know exactly who they were but i don't find it difficult to imagine glyconis or alia potestas
16:23waking up early in a place like this point is that most romans didn't live in those grand houses
16:32that you see in pompeii they had all kinds of variety of accommodation right at the bottom there
16:39were people who lived in slum tenements in a room over the shop or people who just bedded down under
16:47somebody else's staircase and this is comfortably in the middle this was someone's home sweet home
16:57all the same part of the difficulty we have in trying to bring spaces like these alive is that
17:03hardly any of the stuff that went into them has survived imagine trying to work out what went on in
17:09a modern house if we didn't have any of the furniture but the task is not entirely impossible
17:22hidden away in a storeroom in herculaneum is a priceless treasure trove of domestic furniture
17:29found in houses around the town carbonized when vesuvius erupted in ad 79 they've been painstakingly
17:38put back together it's terribly evocative i mean here we've got a table it's the kind of thing
17:43that you'd have by your bed it's what you eat and drink off don't imagine that all romans lie down
17:50to eat they put their takeaways on here and sit down and have a nosh and this here
18:00it's two little wicker baskets you could actually take the lid off
18:10it's the kind of it's just the stuff the bric-a-brac that you'd find just in any roman house
18:22it's as close as you can get to a roman furniture shop there are table legs with stunning ivory
18:29decoration others with strange dogs carved all over them there's what we call a sofa bed which you can
18:36still see was beautifully inlaid even a perfectly preserved cupboard that i guess once held all sorts
18:43of trinkets but it's beautiful you can see all the little bone hinges and a little handle but one find
18:52is the rarest of all this is a baby's cradle it's a really really precious piece because it's absolutely
19:07the only cradle to survive from the roman world and that i suppose makes you think um you know maybe
19:16we've just been unlucky and not getting the other kids cradles or maybe most babies didn't sleep in
19:21something like this but they bedded down in the ancient equivalent of a drawer or actually they
19:28slept in bed with mum or nurse when it was found it actually had a tiny little skeleton in it
19:36and
19:38around the skeleton were bits of fabric textiles and a whole load of leaves and it looks as if this
19:47baby was sleeping on a mattress stuffed full of leaves covered by a blanket when the eruption of
19:55vesuvius came in 79 and put an end to that little life still touching though isn't it
20:04rocking the cradle that's been rocked by roman mums and nurses
20:13for me that collection of furniture is a symbol of all the things we can put back into the roman
20:19home if we try not just the clutter but husbands and wives and their messy relationships too
20:26but seeing a child's cradle up close reminds us not to forget the children in the roman household
20:32that baby of course didn't survive the eruption of vesuvius but if it had how different would
20:38its childhood have been from our own nowadays we separate childhood off from the adult world
20:46we dress kids in clothes quite different from adults we give them their own entertainment their own
20:53books we even feed them different food and in the last 50 years we've even invented the category of
21:00the teenager in ancient rome childhood was quite different
21:08we hardly ever see or hear the kids in the roman home they're usually cast out at the back of
21:14the house
21:15rarely mentioned today the only way we can hear their voices is to look at the dead ones these books
21:23hold a record of over 30 000 tombstones from the city of rome every age sex and walk of life
21:29but what
21:30hits you first is the sheer number of child tombstones there's just hundreds and hundreds of them i mean
21:37here's little titius eutychus he lived to be just four and he is titius phosphorus he made it to five
21:48and over the page titia regular she was one years old five months and 11 days that's only a few
21:56of the t's
21:58it all fits absolutely with what we know about child mortality in rome at least half the kids wouldn't
22:05have lived till they were 10 a third wouldn't have made it to their first birthday
22:13and i think you have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by that statistic
22:19all the same it isn't quite all gloom and doom my absolute absolute favorite
22:27it is tremendous character a little girl who died when she was just five but we can really get a
22:36sense
22:36of her she was called gaminia agathe marta it turns out she was a bit of a tomboy i had
22:45a pueri
22:45waltom the face of a boy but i was a gentle soul in genio doculi i was pretty and i
22:55got a bit spoiled
22:56veneranda i had red hair cut short on top but i let it grow long down the back and then
23:05she says
23:07don't grieve too much for me have a drink and don't be too sad at the rest that my little
23:16body's
23:16having it's as it were speaking to her relatives there's also a message there i think for us
23:26because although these tombstones are kind of obviously about death for me they also reek
23:35of love of warmth actually of life
23:43so what happened if kids like little gem and amato did survive are we talking school or did roman
23:49parents have something else in store for them well rather predictably it depended on where you were in
23:55the pecking order in their labs on the outskirts of rome a group of italian anthropologists have
24:02analyzed over 6 000 roman skeletons dug up in and around rome over the past century alongside full adult
24:10skeletons are some rare child bones found in poorer graves for although roman kids died in vast numbers
24:18their fragile little skeletons rarely survive these are these are the rest of a very small individual
24:25of a child of about six years of age to death while this individual is an adolescent
24:42and what's extraordinary is that these bones show some very telling signs of wear and tear
24:48and what's extraordinary is that these bones show some very telling signs of wear and tear
25:22so this guy has been doing hard work with his legs for many years and he's only 60
25:31on however theaton can occurs to which
25:37is that the you could not get though he's kind of loss just by playing football or skipping or
26:01Or this has to be hard manual work.
26:04Sia per il sito dove sono stati trovati questi individui una fullonica, sia proprio per
26:13il tipo di lesione che quest'individuo potesse lavorare in questa fullonica.
26:20And in fullonica you're treating the cloth, you're dyeing the cloth, you're stamping on
26:28the cloth, so what we've got is a kid doing heavy manual labour at a time when we think
26:36they should be in infant school.
26:42Also found by Paola's team, in the grave of a one-year-old girl, there's a strange collection
26:48of trinkets that once formed a gorgeous little necklace.
26:52They look pretty innocuous.
26:53There's an amber rabbit, a figurine of an Egyptian god, a mini phallus and
26:57some beads.
26:59But hidden within them is a much darker story.
27:03These are what the Romans would have called crepundia.
27:07They'd have been strung together and worn round the neck of a child.
27:11So they're half toy, half amulet or lucky charm.
27:16But they also have a part to play in one aspect of Roman culture that we find rather shocking.
27:23And that is child exposure.
27:27What that means, if in Rome you have a child you don't want, you can just throw it away
27:34on the street, on the rubbish dump.
27:37And that's where the crepundia come in, because some parents were supposed to have left these
27:44babies out with their crepundia round their necks as a kind of link to their birth family,
27:52to their original identity.
27:54It's a wonderful plot line, actually, in some Roman comedies, that the slave girl heroine
28:00is suddenly spotted and recognised by her mum and dad because they've seen the crepundia
28:07that they'd left out with her.
28:09So in some Roman comedies, these things can bring about a very nice happy ending.
28:16In real life, I'm not so sure.
28:25The unavoidable fact, then, for Roman kids in poorer families is that if you weren't exposed
28:30and, let's be honest, we don't know how many babies really were, they were put to work
28:36as soon as they were fit and able, perhaps as early as five.
28:40But further up the social scale, things were predictably different.
28:44In the centre of Rome, in a covered arcade just behind the Forum, we can still find evidence
28:50of a Roman school.
28:51All over its plaster walls, you find writing, drawing, and even caricatures of a schoolmaster.
28:57It reminds us just how little kids have changed.
29:00Here's a great picture of a bloke with a big beard, full on.
29:05Here, we're in Rome, a willy.
29:08What you've got here is people's letter practice, A, B, C, D. You've also got little snatches
29:16of Latin poetry written.
29:19What it looks like to me is an old-fashioned school desk, and that, in a way, is exactly
29:27what it is.
29:28Schools in Rome weren't schools in our sense.
29:31Lessons took place in arcades like this, under shady trees, even in the streets.
29:35They were fee-paying for the most part, so only for the well-off, and only for boys.
29:41Some of those lessons would have been much like ours.
29:43They would have learnt to read and write.
29:45They would have done a modern language.
29:47In their case, it would have been ancient Greek.
29:50No science and PSE.
29:51It would be public speaking and poetry.
29:57An image of a Roman school in action still survives.
30:00The original painting in Pompeii is pretty faded, but this 19th-century copy shows exactly
30:06what's going on.
30:07Here are the good boys at their lessons, but here is the unfortunate malefactor.
30:15He's the one who must have been caught doing a caricature of the master on the wall.
30:22He's been beaten.
30:23He's been held down by two of his fellow pupils.
30:27And he's been stripped down to his pants.
30:30Well, they're sort of pants.
30:32And the master here is whacking him, and he's clearly screaming.
30:38This was such a well-known form of Roman corporal punishment that it even had its own name,
30:44Catomus.
30:45Perhaps it's not surprising that one favourite nickname for a schoolmaster in Rome was Plagosus.
30:53Whacker.
30:57For wealthy Roman families then, rote learning and discipline was the ideal boy's education.
31:03But it also served as an ideal to families trying to climb the social ladder.
31:08The best way to put a human faith to this story is to pay a visit to one of my
31:12favourite
31:13characters, a real Roman schoolboy, the son of ex-slaves whose memorial can still be found
31:19overlooking a square in central Rome.
31:22I've come here to meet up with this little lad.
31:25Solpicius Maximus was his name, and he was something of a Roman child prodigy.
31:30Aged just 11, he entered a grown-up poetry competition, a sort of Rome's got talent.
31:37But stardom was not to come.
31:40He died, and his mum and dad put up this great memorial to him.
31:45It says up there that he died of too much study, but I can't help thinking he might have
31:51been a bit of a victim of pushy parents.
31:56Solpicius' original memorial is now in an unloved corner of a Rome museum.
32:01But it's a chance to meet the boy face to face.
32:04His story makes me wonder what life was really like for kids like him in families desperately
32:10trying to get on.
32:11Were you never naughty?
32:13Were you never naughty?
32:13Did you ever refuse to do your homework?
32:15Did you never lose your school shoes?
32:19I can't help thinking that life in Solpicius' household wasn't quite what his parents wrote
32:27it up to be.
32:28But all the same, there is a sense that childhood, as a category that we know, didn't really exist
32:35in the Roman world.
32:37I mean, look at him.
32:39If you came across this statue, and you didn't know the story written round about him, you'd
32:44think this was some orator haranguing the masses in the Roman Forum.
32:49In fact, it's a kid of 11 years old, and you'd never know it.
32:55For aspiring Roman families, if you wanted to educate your boy, you concentrated on public
33:00life, on oratory, even poetry, not on what we would call emotional development.
33:06But how different was it for rich Roman girls?
33:08In the storeroom of the same museum is one remarkable object that helps to tell their
33:13side of the story.
33:18This is the most exquisitely beautiful Roman doll.
33:25She's the most perfect specimen to survive from the Roman world, and she's so precious
33:30and fragile that, although I'm just itching to pick her up, I'm not allowed to.
33:36She looks as if she's made of wood, but in fact, she's ivory.
33:41She's a woman with very cleverly jointed limbs.
33:45She's got a rather posh, fashionable hairdo, and on her hand, she's got a little gold ring.
33:54Now, there's no such thing as a toy shop in the Roman world.
33:58And for most kids, like Solpicius, if they went out to play, they'd be improvising with
34:03nuts and stones and playing ducks and drakes on the river.
34:07This is something a bit special.
34:09She's not just Barbie, she's Empress Barbie.
34:12But there's another side to a toy like this.
34:18It's not just about play.
34:20Like all toys, it's helping to teach whoever owns it what their role is going to be in life.
34:28Roman women were made for marriage and for breeding children.
34:34In fact, some Roman writers tell us that just before they do get married, Roman girls would go along to
34:41a temple
34:41and they would leave their dolls in the temple.
34:45But that didn't happen to this doll, because actually, it was found in a big stone coffin
34:54of a woman called Creporea Trevina.
34:58To judge from the skeleton, Creporea was about 20.
35:03She presumably hadn't got married, so she took her doll with her to her tomb.
35:10That's quite extraordinary to us.
35:12We wouldn't ever imagine burying a 20-year-old with her Barbie.
35:21An awful lot of Roman girls must have gone to the grave with their dolls.
35:26In fact, one of the most famous writers of the Roman world, Pliny,
35:30tells the story of one girl who died young, Minicia Marcella,
35:35the daughter of a friend of his, Sundanus.
35:39Pliny says that she was going on 14, but she had an old head on young shoulders.
35:46She was wise beyond her years.
35:48She was sweet and charming, and she was a spitting image of her dad.
35:53The really sad thing, he says, is that she was just about to be married.
35:58By an absolutely extraordinary piece of good fortune,
36:02we actually have Minicia Marcella's tombstone.
36:07Here it is, this rather elegant, austere affair,
36:11to the spirits of Minicia Marcella, it says, the daughter of Fundanus.
36:19But there's a sting in the last line.
36:22Pliny said she was going on 14.
36:26This says she lived for 12 years, 11 months and 7 days.
36:36So she was 12 years old and just about to be married.
36:42Now, we don't know how many Roman girls got married this young,
36:47but a significant minority, I think.
36:52And it raises an obvious question.
36:55Were marriages like this consummated straight away?
37:00We like to think not.
37:02But the chances are that they were.
37:10When you put all these children together, our child workers,
37:13child poets and child brides,
37:16Roman childhood can appear a pretty brutal phase of life.
37:21But I don't think we should get too carried away.
37:23To help me put it into context,
37:25I met up with a colleague and father of two, Greg Wolf.
37:29I still find it hard to get my head around Roman childhood.
37:32I mean, was it really that brutal?
37:35I'm not really sure.
37:38It's quite as unfamiliar as that.
37:40Some bits were brutal and some bits were different,
37:43but a lot is just the same.
37:44They had a childhood,
37:45even if it's a bit shorter than the childhood that our kids have.
37:49But they're not the kind of protected species
37:53that modern Western kids have.
37:55That must be right.
37:56They haven't got a kids' room full of kids' stuff.
37:58They don't have kids' entertainment.
38:00They don't have kids' clothes.
38:03Maybe just a few children of the very rich
38:05with their Greek pedagogos slaves taking them to school
38:09and their wet nurses.
38:10But most children are just doing what adults did
38:13in the same places with them.
38:14We're undergoing a huge transition
38:17from a world where lots of children are born
38:19and lots of them die,
38:20where they're fully part of the world with the adults,
38:23to a world where not many children are born,
38:26and most of them survive,
38:28and their childhoods are prolonged to a point
38:31which Romans would have thought was well into young adulthood.
38:35Yes.
38:35If you reckon that half of them,
38:38at least half of them,
38:39are going to be dead before the age of ten,
38:42what does that do to the relationship between parents and kids?
38:45I think they were tragedies when you lose a child in any society,
38:49any period.
38:50And when Romans lost their children,
38:53we know sometimes they were devastated.
38:55But it was a normal tragedy.
38:57It was the same tragedy that the other families on your street had.
39:00It's the same tragedy your parents had.
39:03And the tombstones kind of show us, really, don't they,
39:07that even if it happens often, it still is terribly hurtful.
39:12It isn't in some ways half as unfamiliar as we like to make it.
39:16I mean, I was struck by the tombstone up on the wall of this bar up there.
39:22It was obviously mum and dad,
39:24a little kid, and he's holding a dog, he's holding his pet.
39:27And you can sort of recognise that as mum, dad and child
39:32with all the things that we think go with it.
39:34The difference is the project of having that.
39:36It's much more risky.
39:38It's much more precarious existence.
39:40Yeah, I mean...
39:42I mean, really the bottom line is Roman childhood a big risk.
39:50Of course, we mustn't forget that for a Roman woman,
39:53the risk was not just child-rearing, it was also child-bearing.
39:58In a world with little medical care as we know it,
40:01Roman pregnancy wasn't always straightforward.
40:05One of the most suggestive objects to open up this world to us
40:08is an eerie-looking medical instrument found in Pompeii.
40:20Every woman will recognise exactly what this is.
40:24It's an ancient Roman gynaecological speculum.
40:29The principle's pretty clear.
40:30You have the prongs here and they're put into the vagina.
40:35You then turn the screw...
40:39..which opens the prongs and so extends the vagina
40:43so you can examine the woman.
40:45We all know how it works.
40:46I don't need to demonstrate it.
40:48It's a rather nice one, decorated at the top.
40:51I think this was a rather pricey doctor who owned this
40:54with rather expensive female clients.
40:56I don't think this got shoved up by any poor woman.
40:59But I think we shouldn't get carried away with the familiarity.
41:03One of the nastiest bits of Roman literature that I've ever read,
41:07and there's plenty of nasty bits to choose from,
41:10describes what you do when you can't get a baby out of a woman,
41:15when the baby's got stuck and you want to save the mother's life.
41:19You put a speculum up.
41:20You get a sight of what's going on.
41:23You then put a hook into the woman and try to pull the baby out.
41:28You'll kill it in the process.
41:29It's going through its eye, its skull.
41:31I can't imagine, even if it was intended to save her life,
41:35that many women could have survived that process.
41:38Childbirth today has its dangers.
41:41But in the Roman world, there was a battlefield.
41:45I think if, in the Roman world, men died as soldiers,
41:50women died in childbirth.
41:57It's hard to get a feel for such experiences in the Roman home itself.
42:01The rooms they used for sex and childbirth
42:04have given us a few beds, though curiously no double ones,
42:08and plenty of erotic pictures.
42:10But just occasionally, we get a glimpse
42:13of how women could transcend the traditional roles
42:16that were expected of them.
42:18In a house in Pompeii,
42:20now known as the house of Julius Polybius,
42:23after the man who owned it,
42:24is one example of a woman who may have done just that.
42:29I've come to see her with my colleague Andrew Wallace Hadron.
42:33What I'm interested in is this rather extraordinary painting.
42:37It's actually showing a religious sacrifice going on,
42:40and it's full of slightly weird religious symbolism,
42:43like this snake in the altar.
42:46But what I'm interested in is this couple here,
42:49because this, to me, looks as if it's meant to be
42:54the head of the household and his wife.
42:58And it's very unusual, because the standard scene
43:01is just the man in his toga doing the sacrifice,
43:05and everyone always says,
43:06this must be the head of the household.
43:07And here, suddenly, we have her, too.
43:10She's cut in on the action.
43:13The woman, because her property is completely separate
43:15from that of her husband,
43:18could be more wealthy and more powerful.
43:20What's this lady doing here, right bang in the middle of the picture,
43:24if she isn't richer and more important
43:27than the little man at her side?
43:33So, in some cases, it is possible to turn upside down
43:37the traditional roles in the Roman household.
43:40But there's still one part of the Roman home
43:42that feels completely alien to us,
43:45the part that actually made it function.
43:47And by that, I mean the slaves.
43:50Archaeology itself has produced very little material
43:53that relates directly to slavery,
43:55but tucked away in a Roman museum
43:57is one rare object that speaks volumes about its dark side.
44:01You'd think this was a Roman dog collar,
44:04a band of iron and a little metal tag on it.
44:07And on the tag, it's written in Latin,
44:11Fugi, teneme.
44:13I've escaped. Catch me.
44:16If you take me back to my master, Zominus,
44:19you'll get a solidus, a gold coin.
44:22It's probably not a dog collar.
44:24It's probably the collar of a Roman slave.
44:28Admittedly, it's quite small.
44:31But things like this have been found
44:33around the necks of human skeletons.
44:36And actually, the fact that we can't really be sure
44:39whether it's a slave collar or a dog collar
44:44tells us quite a lot about Roman slavery
44:47and the inhumanity that it invoked.
44:51There's a horribly touching story about the Emperor Hadrian,
44:56who got cross with one of his slaves,
44:58so cross that he gouged his eye out with a stylus pen.
45:04Hadrian instantly felt apologetic, sorry,
45:07humbled by what he'd done, and he said to the slave,
45:10have any present from me, I'm so sorry,
45:12have anything that you want.
45:13The slave remained quite dumb.
45:17Hadrian pressed him, said, I'll give you anything.
45:19And the slave said, I just want my eye back.
45:22So it's not hard to see why Roman slaves
45:25might have wanted to escape,
45:27and why Roman masters might have wanted to tag their slaves
45:31as their property, either this way
45:33or perhaps with branding or tattoos.
45:37My hunch, though, is that fewer actually escaped
45:42or even tried to escape than we like to think.
45:45My guess is that most slaves
45:48showed their resentment against their masters
45:50by much more kind of domestic sort of warfare.
45:54They'd have pilfered things.
45:56They'd have broken the precious ornaments.
45:59They'd have pocketed the loose change.
46:01And I expect they'd have spat in the master's soup.
46:13Today, slavery is one of the nasty clichés of Roman culture.
46:17It's a word loaded, understandably,
46:19with all kinds of modern preconceptions.
46:21But the fact is, it was deeply embedded in Roman culture.
46:25In a population of a million, one third might have been slaves.
46:29And they weren't just for the rich.
46:30Poorer households had them too.
46:32Even some slaves had slaves.
46:35Of course, Roman slavery was brutal.
46:37But relations between masters and slaves
46:40weren't anything like as black and white as we tend to imagine.
46:43Sure, there must have been fear, suspicion, hatred on both sides, actually.
46:50And there were some marvellous Roman urban myths about crafty slaves running rings around their poor, long-suffering masters.
46:58But at the same time, there was plenty of respect, affection, even love.
47:07One of the best places to see evidence of these conflicting emotions at the heart of this relationship is actually
47:13in one of Pompeii's grandest houses.
47:16In a suite of rooms off the back garden is a private bathhouse with some pretty graphic mosaics.
47:22They hint rather heavily at one part of every slave's job description we tend to forget.
47:28Sex.
47:29So this is the entrance way to the hot room, the sauna room?
47:35Yes, yes.
47:35So what you've got here are some stridules, the kind of bronze things that you used for scraping the oil
47:41off.
47:42It's really rather gynaecological in the end.
47:44And the thing is, we can't really read that without looking at this guy here, this strange sort of naked
47:50black figure.
47:52He's got little white panties on.
47:53He's got little white loincloth, which is completely failing to do its job.
47:58Because the one thing it's not covering is his genitals, which are enormous, hanging down.
48:04The bronze tip matches those lamps or flasks or whatever he's carrying in his hands.
48:11Which they themselves look phallic.
48:14So we're being given a very strong sexual theme as we enter.
48:20So this is the dinky little sauna.
48:23You can hear, the moment you get to hear, it echoes around us.
48:26It echoes, it's lovely, isn't it?
48:27It's an amazing space.
48:28And it's...
48:29Look at this mosaic.
48:30Which is, well, it kind of says sex in the swimming pool to me.
48:34It appears to be another slave, doesn't it?
48:36What comes out of this is something about the sexuality of bathing,
48:40but also about use of slaves.
48:42Their total availability, their bodily availability to their masters for sex.
48:49I mean, no one living in a big house says,
48:52I know what I'll do.
48:53I'll go down to the local brothel.
48:55They use a slave as they want, when they want,
48:59and that's the basic deal of slavery.
49:01But then isn't it interesting that it's not just the master of the house exploiting female slaves and male slaves,
49:08it's also the female owners and dominant figures in the house exploit male and possibly female slaves.
49:18That's the really nasty bit of Roman slavery.
49:21To be pressurised into having sex with the master or the mistress,
49:25well, it's an assault on your freedom, but that's the point.
49:28You've lost your freedom, the freedom to control your body.
49:31But you mustn't think that because sex happens between master and slave,
49:36it's necessarily a bad thing for the slaves all the time.
49:40What about the fact that we constantly find slaves marrying their masters?
49:45Sex is a way of earning money, but it's also a route to freedom.
49:52And that's the great paradox about Roman slavery.
49:56We might think it was brutal, at times even amounting to rape,
50:00but it was not always a life sentence.
50:02And if you look at the tombstones,
50:04what's striking is that the majority of those that survived from the city of Rome
50:09belonged to ex-slaves.
50:10They were freed in their thousands.
50:12Here's a lady with a really great name.
50:16She's an ex-slave, she tells us, a Libertus,
50:19and her name is Vettia Erotici.
50:24I like that name.
50:28Here's a nicely complicated one.
50:30It's a tombstone put up by an ex-slave, a Libertus,
50:34to his own slave and was very dear to him, Carissimo.
50:41This is a woman with an interesting job.
50:43She's called Dorcas, and she's the ex-slave of Julia Augusta.
50:49That's the Empress Olivia.
50:51What was her job?
50:52She was an ornatrix.
50:54She was the Empress's hairdresser.
50:57Nice work, if you could get it.
51:00This one's a nice picture.
51:01It's from a tombstone.
51:03It shows a husband and wife, I guess, having a banquet.
51:06But it's the little chap on the left that I'm interested in.
51:09He's serving at table, and he must be a young slave boy.
51:13There was thousands and thousands like him at Rome.
51:17I don't know exactly where they all came from,
51:19but almost certainly not all of them from the slave market,
51:24as we like to think.
51:26Probably the majority of them would actually have been born in the household.
51:31And like this little guy, they'd have got pretty up close and personal with their owners.
51:38Wait at table, wet nurses, tutors, nannies.
51:43And it starts to give us a different slant on Roman slavery.
51:48And it helps to explain why you could get quite strong bottoms of affection between owners and their slaves.
51:55Actually, the Roman word for family, familia, doesn't just include husband, wife and couple of kids.
52:04It also includes the slaves.
52:06So, in Rome, slaves really were part of the family.
52:14And that's what I find so disappointing about the standard image of the Roman family.
52:19The slaves were not always segregated.
52:21They were the familia as much as the master and mistress.
52:26In fact, the best way to see just how open it could be is to visit a Roman family tomb.
52:32I've come to see some in ancient Ostia with Cory Brennan from the American Academy in Rome.
52:37This feels like a kind of back alley in the city of the dead.
52:41Well, that's precisely what it is.
52:43And here is a home in the city of the dead, so to speak.
52:47And it's something that Marcus Sinius Aristo set up for himself and for his ex-slaves.
52:56The libertis, the male ex-slaves, and the libertavus, the female ex-slaves.
53:01It's interesting, too, that in the last line here, he makes clear how much land he owns for this tomb,
53:07doesn't he?
53:08It's not just a marking off the legal perimeter of his space here, but it's a way of boasting precisely
53:15how much real estate he has here in the city of the dead.
53:21What's important, then, is that masters and slaves chose to live together in death, not just in life.
53:27In a way, these tombs are like mirrors of their own homes, with separate rooms, upper stories, and spaces for
53:34urns that outnumber the nuclear family.
53:37What strikes you when you come in is the kind of communality of the sheer number of burials that must
53:44have been here.
53:45Yeah, well, there's about two dozen of these niches, and each niche is a double, and so you're talking 48
53:53people or so.
53:54It's interesting to see how they're all mixed in here. You don't walk in here and say, there's the master's
53:59niche.
53:59In fact, it's pretty hard to tell where it would have been.
54:02And it's so completely different from, well, from what we're familiar with in, say, Victorian England, where the idea that
54:12Mr. and Mrs. Posh and their posh kids would be buried in the same tomb as the cook or the
54:19tweenie or the butler is absolutely unthinkable.
54:23But this is meant to be an ideal. This is the image which these folks, these aspirational folks, wanted to
54:30convey, which was that of inclusivity of the large family.
54:35Harshness was not in anyone's interest. It shows us a softer side of this horrible institution of slavery.
54:42Yeah, it's great. You know, you boast. This is a tomb for me and my ex-slaves.
54:52But it wasn't always happy families, as the unusual tombstone of a little girl called Junia Procula tells us. Its
55:01storyline reads like a Roman soap opera.
55:03The stone was put up by her father, a man called Euphrosianus. And he was putting it up for the
55:12little girl and eventually for himself and for somebody else whose name has been hacked out.
55:19That's puzzling. Why has it been hacked out? On the back of the stone, the puzzle's solved.
55:26Because there's another text written there. And what we can see has happened is that Euphrosianus had had a slave
55:35called Acti, he'd freed her, he'd married her, they'd had the kid, the kid had died, and then things had
55:43gone very badly off the rails.
55:46He's cursing her on the back. These are the eternal marks of infamy, he says, on that ex-slave of
55:54mine, who was a poisoner, who was perfider, who was faithless, who was dolosa, who was deceitful.
56:02And then he really curses her, he says, I'm bringing a nail and a piece of rope, so that she
56:08can hang herself.
56:09And I'm bringing piquem candentem, burning pitch, to consume her awful heart.
56:16What on earth had happened? Well, he then explains. She had gone off with an adulterer, secuta adulterum.
56:25And what is more, she'd pinched two of his slaves, a boy and a girl.
56:32She left behind, poor old Euphrosianus, lying in bed, robbed, all alone, an old man.
56:42Now, we've got to remember that we don't know Acti's side of this story, and that might have been very
56:47different.
56:47But what is clear is that one man's domestic fluidity could be another man's domestic mess.
56:58In a way, that's the Roman home, in a nutshell.
57:02For sure, it was a place inhabited by the traditional Roman cliches, the pompous husbands in their togas,
57:09and the dutiful wives weaving their wool.
57:11But it was also far more intriguing, especially if we put back all the clutter and the cradles
57:18and the topsy-turvy relationships.
57:20And above all, the extraordinary voices of the Romans themselves,
57:25that still talk to us after 2,000 years.
57:28I lived on Lucrine oysters.
57:31It was a very dangerous life.
57:33Snatched away from him.
57:35And then she had gone off with an adulterer, secuta adulterum.
57:39To nama menophilus.
57:40Menophilus.
57:41And I don't any longer have those awful aching feet.
57:44This is the monument of the baker. Get it?
57:47She much preferred to be a bit wild.
57:51Lasky.
57:52A Roman menage a trois.
57:56And what they tell us is that ordinary life in ancient Rome was as wonderfully mixed up,
58:02as messy and as emotional as our own.
58:07It's almost as if they're holding up a mirror to us and our own lives.
58:13And they're speaking to anyone with the time to stop and listen to them.
58:19Turns out, that's you and me.
58:34An all-new series from Lucy Worsley, here on BBC HD tomorrow night,
58:39reveals how certain items have changed the way we live.
58:42A look at the sofa, first up in Antiques Uncovered at 8.
58:46Next tonight, it's Later Live with Jules Holland.
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