- 21 hours ago
Professor Mary Beard explores the bustling, cosmopolitan reality of ancient Rome by focusing on the ordinary citizens, immigrants, and formerly enslaved people who fueled the empire rather than just the emperors and generals...
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00:07This is the Appian Way, one of the roads that took thousands of Romans in and out of their
00:13capital city every day. Young and old, rich and poor, clean and dirty.
00:22And it's where I want to start, asking a question that really interests me.
00:27Who were the ancient Romans? Outside the city, it was lined with thousands and thousands of tombs.
00:37So before you got into the city of Rome, you'd already met the Romans. Dead ones, that is.
00:46And the lives of many of them began or ended a long way from Rome.
00:51This is just a tiny fragment of someone's tomb. Someone called Iskynos.
00:59Orchisus est in Lusitania. He was murdered in Spain.
01:07This lady's Uzzia Prima, a priestess of the Egyptian goddess Isis. And there's her little sacred rattle.
01:17She's almost looking at you. I feel like saying, pleased to meet you, Prima.
01:26They come from every walk of life and every part of the empire. And a lot of them had once
01:32been slaves.
01:34These aren't the kind of guys we usually think of when we think of Romans.
01:44These Romans all lived at the centre of a vast empire that stretched from Spain to Syria and which dominated
01:51the western world for over 700 years.
01:57Like it or not, ancient Rome is still all around us in our roads, laws and architecture.
02:04We keep on recreating it in film and fiction. And every year, thousands of us trek here to see its
02:11monuments up close and to imagine the emperors and the armies, the gladiators and, let's be honest, the gore.
02:18But hidden all over the modern city, in its walls, behind the façades, even under its streets, is something much
02:26harder to find but just as captivating.
02:29The forgotten voices of the ordinary people. They're still there if you know where to look.
02:36Calidius eroticus means Mr. Hot Sex.
02:39This is a Roman Ménage à Trois.
02:43This wasn't just a mugging. This was mass murder.
02:48The Romans didn't just carve their names and dates on their tombstones.
02:53Keen never to be forgotten, they left their thoughts, their achievements, even entire life stories, chiselled into stone.
03:01It's a unique record of real Roman lives.
03:05I've spent most of my life with the ancient Romans, and not just the big guys, the emperors, the politicians,
03:12the generals, the posh ones.
03:14The people I've most enjoyed getting to know are the ordinary ones, who had their own part to play in
03:21the story of this extraordinary city.
03:23And what gets to me, every time, is that we can still have a conversation with them, even 2,000
03:30years later.
03:31In this series, I'm going to get their voices speaking again, to piece together a very different story of life
03:38in ancient Rome.
03:39I'll step behind the doors of their homes to meet flesh-and-blood Roman families, whose lives and possessions can
03:46reflect our own in surprising ways.
03:49This is something a bit special. She's not just Barbie, she's Empress Barbie.
03:56I'll go down into the streets, where the dirt, crime, sex and humour in everyday Roman life shows us what
04:04it was like to live in an ancient city of a million people.
04:09Baths, wine and sex, he said, ruin your body.
04:13True.
04:13But they're what makes life really worth living.
04:20But I'll start by telling the real story of imperial Rome, looking beyond the violence and spectacle to find a
04:28global city which reached for talent and treasure from the far ends of the earth.
04:33A place where everything and everyone was from somewhere else.
04:37These are the Romans I'm interested in.
04:39Welcome to my Rome.
05:05When you arrived in Rome at its imperial height 2,000 years ago, you found yourself in a new kind
05:11of city.
05:15Rome had once been a small city-state, but in conquest after conquest, it became capital of a vast empire.
05:22A place in which for the first time in history, a million people from three continents managed to live together.
05:29One thing we know about Rome is it wasn't just a city, it was an empire.
05:33And for us that means marauding armies, conquering generals, and bloodthirsty emperors.
05:41We tend not to think about the ordinary people who lived here at the very heart of it all.
05:48For them, the empire brought them into contact with the whole world, from Scotland to Afghanistan.
05:56And it made this city a more cosmopolitan place than anywhere had ever been before or would be again for
06:04hundreds of years.
06:06And we're always asking, what did the Romans do for us?
06:10I think we should be asking, what did the empire do to the Romans?
06:19Around the city, there's more evidence than you'd think for the impact that Roman conquest had on the lives of
06:26ordinary people here.
06:27All it requires is that we look from a slightly different angle.
06:37One of the most famous monuments in the Forum celebrates the moment when one conquering army came home.
06:47In 71 AD, the city got a day off for the triumphal return of the emperor Vespasian and his son
06:54Titus, who had crushed a rebellion in Judea.
06:59We've got here the victorious general, Titus, driving through the streets of Rome in his chariot to celebrate his victory.
07:11And on the other side, we've got the booty that he's brought home with him.
07:16Titus had devastatingly conquered the Jews, and here we can see the loot that he has got from the Jewish
07:24temple.
07:24It's a grand display.
07:26But what I want to do is try and undercut the pomposity of it a bit, and to ask, what
07:33was it like for the people, the ordinary Romans,
07:36who showed up to watch this, left their apartments, and came to see the spectacle?
07:44A triumph like this would have been the first sight the Roman people had of all the things the armies
07:50brought back from their distant victories.
07:52The rich spoils, the maps of the conquered territory, the models of the fighting, even the trees that they'd uprooted
08:03and brought back to Rome.
08:06How did people react?
08:08Some must have gasped, others would have jeered the captives, or maybe their minds were on other things.
08:15One Roman poet recommends the triumphal procession as a place to pick up a girl.
08:21How would you do it?
08:22Well, he says, watch the stuff go past, nudge up to her and say, oh, I think that's the Euphrates
08:28there, and that's the Tigris over there.
08:31You don't have to know, he says, you just have to sound confident, and then you'll make your own conquest.
08:39It's a good joke, but it also hints at the way Roman lives could be changed by the spoils coming
08:46back from the empire.
08:47This girl can't have been the only person who found all this pretty strange, but also exciting.
08:57So what did the Roman armies bring back from the empire?
09:01The import that made the biggest impact is one we don't think about often enough, human beings.
09:11These are forgotten people, but if we take the time to listen, we can still hear the voices of some
09:18of the millions who followed the Roman armies into the city for all sorts of different reasons.
09:27This is for my brother, Habibi Anu, from Palmyra.
09:31I'm Germanus, Regulus' mule driver.
09:35This is for Diocles, champion chariot racer from Spain.
09:41Here we've got a young slave girl, age 17, Phryne, the slave of Tortula, Africana.
09:48She came from Africa.
09:50This one is put up by a soldier for his wife, Carnuntilla, born near Vienna in ancient Pannonia.
09:57What's weird is that Carnuntilla isn't really a real name.
10:02It comes from the name of a town in Pannonia, Carnuntum.
10:08It means, sort of, my babe from Carnuntum.
10:11So, my guess is, he perhaps bought this girl as a slave, he freed her, he brought her back to
10:22Rome, he married her, but sadly, his babe from Carnuntum died when she was just 19.
10:32Poignant stories like this are everywhere in the city.
10:35They remind us of the different ways real lives could begin abroad and end in Rome.
10:42But there's more to it than that.
10:44These people weren't just brought in to serve the Romans.
10:48They were becoming Romans.
10:51One of the tombs on the Appian Way gives us the other side of the story of the Arch of
10:56Titus.
10:59It's a tombstone of three guys, one called Barica, one called Zabda, and one called Akiba.
11:10Typical Jewish names.
11:13So the question is, what's the story of Barica, Zabda, and Akiba?
11:19How did they get here?
11:20If they did start out life in Judea, how come they end up as Roman citizens in Rome?
11:27It's more surprising than you think.
11:30To judge from the letters and how they're written on this stone, this was carved in the first century AD.
11:37And at that point, we can put two and two together.
11:42I'm almost certain that these three men must have been part of the Jewish rebellion against the Romans in the
11:51late 60s AD.
11:54These men surely came into Rome with Titus' army as prisoners of war.
12:00It must have seemed like the worst moment of their lives.
12:04Jeered at catcalls, people throwing things at them.
12:08But perhaps worse was to come.
12:10They were auctioned off as slaves and bought by a man called Lucius Valerius.
12:17What their life in slavery was like, we don't know.
12:20But he freed them, and they become new Roman citizens, with his name, Lucius Valerius,
12:30but their Jewish names still asserting their Jewish sense of identity.
12:37This is one of the ways that Roman conquest works.
12:40It does bring slaves, but it also brings, eventually, new Roman citizens.
12:51It's a fairytale happy ending, and a classic Roman story.
12:56When guys like this were freed, they didn't just go back to their old lives in Judea.
13:02They stayed in their new home, and what's more, they became Romans,
13:07with all the rights and privileges which came with full Roman citizenship.
13:12But what kept them in Rome?
13:14How many of them were there?
13:16And where did all these new Romans live?
13:20To try and make sense of it all, I went to meet a colleague in Trastevere,
13:25which literally means across the Tiber, from the ancient city centre.
13:29It's got a reputation as a bit of an immigrant area in Rome, even now.
13:35This area, Trastevere, across the Tiber, was the fringe of the ancient city of Rome,
13:40and this is where we have the biggest evidence for immigrant communities, Jews, the Syrians.
13:48I guess if you said to an ancient Roman,
13:50where's the biggest immigrant area of the ancient city of Rome, they'd have said...
13:54Over the river, on the other side.
13:57Part of the answer to the question of why an area like this could be so cosmopolitan lies in the
14:04story of slaves like Barica, Zabda and Akiba.
14:08Well, Greeks thought Romans were really weird for freeing as many slaves as they did.
14:13And making them citizens.
14:14Yes. Although it's very brutal, being a slave can be a kind of stage in a life, like an apprenticeship.
14:19You come in as a German, you get a Roman name, you learn Latin, or you learn to manage in
14:23Latin,
14:24you learn some kind of job that's useful to your master, your master sets you free,
14:27and there you are, you're a Roman citizen with a trade and a Roman name, and a bunch of powerful
14:32people you know.
14:33This is your entry into Roman society.
14:35Now, multiply that by hundreds of thousands of slaves being freed,
14:42and you can see that the whole ethnic nature of the people who call themselves Roman citizens is really changing
14:51very quickly.
14:52Roman is a kind of vocation, it's a movement into which other people are drawn.
14:57This was a completely new idea, and in many ways, the secret of the empire's success.
15:04Roman was no longer a word which described the city you came from, it was something you could become.
15:11Almost everyone in Rome was descended from someone who arrived from outside, not just ex-slaves.
15:19People coming in to work on the docks, builders, prostitutes, peasants who come into Rome because they think that they
15:26can eat there because they can't eat at home.
15:27So, this huge sort of chaotic mix of people who arrived not knowing anybody.
15:33Yeah.
15:34These were journeys into the unknown, and into a place where there was no guarantee you would survive.
15:40And oddly, that was one reason that Rome welcomed people in.
15:44Any city the size of Rome has to have immigration because the number of people who die in it greatly
15:50exceeds the number who were born.
15:51Rome is a malarial city in antiquity, so people come here who don't have any immunity, they catch the disease,
15:59they're dead within years.
16:00So, just to keep Rome the size it is, it needs to constantly top up the population.
16:05Rome is swallowing people.
16:08It's actually, you know, it's a city which consumes people, spews them out dead.
16:16Perhaps we should stop thinking of Romans as a nation, a master race who conquered the world, and think instead
16:23of a babel of rootless people piled up together a long way from home.
16:28And no doubt hoping for a brighter future.
16:32Because for foreigners, Rome wasn't all doom and gloom.
16:37Sometimes, I guess, people would have come to Rome just to seek their fortunes.
16:43This is an epitaph written in Greek of a man who's said to have been always laughing, always having a
16:52joke, and really good at music.
16:55He might have come as part of a band, I guess.
16:59And actually, the stone tells us that he came to the land of Italy, ex-Asias, from Asia.
17:11That's modern Turkey.
17:14It says he died here when he was young, and it ends up saying,
17:20Touloma Menophilos in Greek.
17:23Menophilos is the name.
17:27Now, Rome might have consumed people.
17:31It might have been a dangerous place.
17:33It might have been disease-ridden and dirty.
17:37But I guess, to a man like Menophilos, the streets must have seemed paved with gold.
17:48And not all immigrants in Rome were at the bottom of the heap.
17:52The Senate and the Imperial Palace were full of people from outside, just like the streets of Trastevere.
17:59Rome was international from the bottom to the very top.
18:14Recreasingly, this city belonged to the likes of Menophilos.
18:23as new people arrived Rome's population doubled then doubled again till it reached over a million
18:30there was nowhere in Europe bigger until Victorian London we think of Rome as a very old city but
18:412,000 years ago this place was brand new it must have been full of building sites new high-rise
18:52of
18:52temporary accommodation it must have felt a bit like Dubai but there's a big question if you've
19:01got a mass of a million people from everywhere how do you keep them alive how do you feed them
19:07how do you keep the vast Roman multicultural show on the road feeding a million people was a
19:17completely unprecedented challenge bang in the center of the modern city is a site which gives
19:25you an idea of the colossal scale of consumption in ancient Rome locals call it Monte Testaccio that's
19:37broken pot mountain I think it's one of the most extraordinary archaeological sites anywhere in
19:45the world few made it this is absolutely extraordinary each of these fragments was once part of an ancient
19:59Roman storage jar what is amazing about this is that you you really see here that it's it is a
20:07broken
20:08pot mountain there's no earth mixed in with the other stuff so you see how caught actually quite neatly
20:16these are these sherds of pottery have been stacked it's it's a mountain not heap it's a real hill but
20:27there's nothing natural about it this is a huge ancient rubbish dump composed entirely of discarded
20:34containers anthory that held just one of the products consumed by Rome it was olive oil which seeped into
20:43the jars and made them go really rancid so they were the only containers that couldn't be recycled
20:50poor old amphorae are taken off to be pickaxed up and made into the mountain and the olive oil that
20:57was in them gets everywhere it's the stuff of Roman life you'd find it being used in cooking it's what's
21:05going to help you make perfume it's what the guys in the baths who are exercising rubbing themselves
21:11scraping themselves down would have used and in the end it's what the poor little old lady in the
21:17garret he's just got one pottery lamp what came in his amphora would have been her only source of light
21:26at night it's no exaggeration to say that Rome ran on olive oil and this place gives archaeologists a
21:35great opportunity to work out how it got here it came in massive quantities that's a place this must
21:44have been what originally even larger even larger than that you know and that's they say 30 kilos when
21:51they're empty empty yes that's my suitcase when it's full is this out for when it's empty yeah and
21:58what's amazing is it you can often find out exactly where the oil came from we know that is a
22:05r v a is
22:07arva is a town called this way in the shores of the well alquivir so that's linking that that's precise
22:14chart to a site in the in the southern Spain so Roman town southern Spain the guy who's making this
22:23amphora is stamping it with his town's name saying this is a product of Arthur yeah according to these
22:31trademarks almost all the oil in this mountain was coming from Spain and a bit from North Africa today
22:38Italy is famous for its olive oil but in ancient times they were importing most of it from somewhere
22:43else the fascinating thing about this mountain is the way that you can start to piece together
22:52little life stories of these pots and their contents it gets down to the coast in Spain gets
23:00loaded onto boats if it's lucky it makes it but there's lots of shipwrecks in the ancient Mediterranean
23:06it arrives at the coast it's humped off the boat it's put into barges it's brought up the Tiber to
23:12the
23:12city of Rome itself humped off the boat again put into warehouses decanted into small containers the
23:20Amphrey and up here it might not look at first sight but in fact it's one of the most impressive
23:26monuments to the idea of Rome as an imperialist consumer city bringing in the foodstuff she needs
23:33from all around the Mediterranean it wasn't just olive oil a short trip down the river Tiber is the seaport
23:51Ostia today Ostia is one of Rome's best-kept secrets and it helps us discover what Rome was importing from
24:00where
24:06Martin Millet has been excavating near here and together we went to explore an intriguing piazza next to the
24:14theatre which we call the square of the corporation okay Martin this is where I get to do the housework
24:22now live this down if you sweep away the pine needles there are mosaics all around here advertising
24:29companies importing goods from abroad
24:32stupor tores
24:35ropemakers
24:38this is the organization of fur traders the naviculariorum lignariorum
24:46that's uh the wood traders so what we've got so far is rope pelts and wood
24:55there are at least 50 of these mosaics most of them give us a place as well as a product
25:00they add up
25:02to one conclusion Rome was being supplied from all corners of the Mediterranean Italy's not big enough
25:09to support the city of Rome it is a city that's drawing in resources from everywhere this was a new
25:17moment in Western history Rome had become what we now call a consumer city on a vast scale these aren't
25:24luxury products their basic commodities wood leather oil wine and most important by far grain people talk
25:33about Rome being a consumer city with a population of about a million and that implies 150,000 metric tons
25:43of grain a year I don't know how big those ships are but you need a lot of ships like
25:47that to bring
25:48in 150,000 metric tons grain as the city grew bombs in Sicily Libya and then Egypt were given over
25:57to
25:57producing wheat for the people of Rome when the grain ships arrived in Italy the word would pass around
26:05Rome the food had arrived this was one thing the Empire did for Rome it kept them alive
26:15but it did more than that I want to think about life in that consumer city who are the winners
26:23and who
26:23were the losers one really interesting thing is how they used this imported grain and that means thinking
26:31about bread not just eating it but making it I'm very much second-in-command
26:44okay I'm not being trusted with the action
26:50200,000 Roman citizens living in the city of Rome got each month what was called a corn doll a
26:59free ration of
27:00corn that means about 35 to 40 kilos of corn which was enough to make bread for a month for
27:11about two
27:11people this was an extraordinary privilege for citizens in Rome 200,000 of them received free
27:19rations from the state but how did it work many of them lived in one-room apartments with no kitchens
27:26so they relied on the baker to turn their 40 kilos into something they could eat
27:40good not bad for a first attempt it's not bad well so it's wonderful people's food and this is this
27:55is tearing and sharing bread you don't even have to own a bread knife to be able to tuck into
28:00this
28:01good for poor Romans this was the staple food that kept them alive but they didn't distribute it in the
28:08way we would expect
28:11you've got to put out of your mind I think this was some kind of proto welfare state sure some
28:17of the poor would have benefited from the grain
28:19but charity wasn't what was uppermost in the emperor's mind when he put all that time and money into distributing
28:28this grain
28:29what he was concerned about was the idea that a hungry populace was a dissatisfied populace and a dissatisfied populace
28:38was a dangerous one
28:40also the fact that the distributions didn't go to the poorest in Rome they went only to Roman citizens themselves
28:50you had to be a citizen in order to get this grain and that made it a really important perk
28:56of being a full Roman
29:00in a way what this tells us is that being a full citizen of Rome was a privileged status to
29:06which outsiders could aspire
29:08and perks like the grain handout help you understand why people wanted to be Roman but it also shows us
29:15that all these things the empire the imports the new citizens were all part of a cycle
29:21the bigger Rome got the more it consumed the bigger the more it consumed the bigger the empire had to
29:25be to support it
29:28so how did Rome's massive consumption change life in the city well for one thing this was one of the
29:36best times in history to be a baker
29:38and it's a baker who left one of the strangest monuments in Rome now hidden beneath one of the main
29:45city gates
29:46it's the tomb monument of a man called Marcus Vigilius Eurisaces he's almost certainly an ex-slave and he was
29:59a baker and a contractor
30:02he must have made a whole pile of money in that job otherwise he wouldn't be able to afford a
30:08tomb like this
30:14what Eurisaces has done is given himself a theme tomb at the very top all around the monument there were
30:24scenes from the life of the bakery
30:25there's the kneading putting the bread in the oven weighing the stuff out and even these rather strange circles and
30:34columns underneath
30:35will be instantly recognizable to a Roman as bakery equipment the circles or almost certainly the kneading machines
30:43and the columns are the bins in which the dough is kneaded
30:49what this says in Latin is this is the tomb of Eurisaces the baker and contractor
30:55a parrot it's obvious all I think we'd say this is the monument of the baker get it and I
31:04really like the way that
31:05I get it still speaks to us 2,000 years later have we got that this is the tomb of
31:10the baker yeah
31:13Eurisaces could joke because things had gone pretty well for him his name sounds Greek so most likely he came
31:20from abroad
31:21but he ended up as one of a new class of people getting rich on the proceeds of Empire
31:26I've got a tremendous soft spot for Eurisaces but I doubt that all Romans would have felt that way
31:32my guess is that if some old money old fashioned Roman walked past this tomb he'd have thought it was
31:41all a bit tacky
31:42a bit like I might feel if some Premier League football player designed his own tomb in the shape of
31:49a giant football boot
31:53what Eurisaces joke reminds us is that the Empire had a direct effect on how people in Rome made their
32:00living
32:00it was becoming a city of urban professionals
32:05one of the reasons that ancient Rome still seems quite familiar to us is that people could do a whole
32:12variety of different jobs just like us
32:15but it's important not to forget that obvious as that seems it was actually one of the ways in which
32:24the city of Rome was radically new and different
32:27in the traditional small ancient city the idea was that the inhabitants were all-rounders
32:37the same men fought the city's wars ploughed the city's fields and produced the city's food
32:46but in imperial Rome because of the huge size of the city those duties were outsourced
32:52the food now came from overseas it wasn't made by local farmers and the armed forces that were stationed around
33:04the Roman Empire
33:05they weren't just citizens doing their military duty they were making a career out of the military
33:10the Empire freed or you might say forced Romans to make a living by specializing
33:18whether that was being a pole trader a warehouse manager or even a hair stylist to the rich and famous
33:27what this did was create a completely new way of differentiating between people
33:36if you'd asked an Egyptian or a Greek who they were they don't give them their father's name or their
33:41hometown
33:43if you'd ask the average Roman I bet he'd have told you what he did for a living
33:47well they do on their tombstones at any rate
33:53these guys are working in the peperataria that's the pepper market
34:03these are just warehouse men hori-hori-hori-hori and here's a bloke he's a sagarius a big overcoat maker
34:12perhaps he's a saga is the ancient equivalent of a duffelcoat
34:17an accounts manager
34:21oh she's great she's our piscatrix
34:24she's a female fishmonger he was a gold worker
34:31and here is an urn an ash urn for a lady called
34:37Celia Epare and she was an houri vestrix
34:44she was a very very very upmarket clothes maker
34:50it's very striking how each one of these people does tell you on their tombstone what they did
34:58now I think we have to relate that to the sheer size and potential anonymity of a great imperial metropolis
35:08in a world without ID cards without passports without birth certificates
35:14how do you know what you are who you are
35:19you know that because of your job
35:22I am Celia Epare a luxury clothes maker
35:28how do you make your identity clear you say this is what I do
35:35this is where imperial Rome gets really fascinating for me
35:39this is not simply a story of one city getting rich off the back of everywhere else
35:46it's a story of a place where people were trying a new way of living
35:50they arrived from across the world
35:53and became a small cog in this big machine
35:57you maybe didn't know your neighbours and they didn't know you
36:00everyone was looking for new ways to make their mark and stand out
36:04the empire didn't only help people to move up in the world
36:08it helped those who did to show that they made it
36:14it created new opportunities for conspicuous consumption
36:26the empire gave most people in Western Europe their first experience of pepper lemons and cherries
36:32one po-faced Roman complained that cooking had gone from a mere function to a high art
36:43the empire transformed the sensory experience of the city
36:47there were new smells, new tastes, new colours
36:54and nowhere is this clearer than in the elaborate paintings
36:58many better off Romans put on their walls
37:01in Pompeii it's perhaps the most famous Roman painting of all
37:06pretty strange scene phallus appearing
37:08some female suckling a goat
37:11but it was probably the colours that would have dazzled an ancient visitor
37:15as much as the racy subject matter
37:18now we mustn't make the mistake of thinking that
37:20the poor old Romans lived in black and white
37:23until they started conquering the Mediterranean
37:25of course there were all kinds of local minerals and plants
37:29that would give them pigments for paint
37:31but as time went on they got more and more interested in the special and bright colours
37:37that you could get from their far flung territories
37:41now this here is one of the best candidates there is
37:47for real red Spanish vermilion
37:51lovely lustrous red
37:53I think we have to imagine
37:55that if you came to dinner here
37:57and the generous host started showing you round
38:00he might have come and said
38:02now this lady here is whipping this one because
38:05etc etc
38:06but he might have said
38:08it's a really lovely red isn't it
38:12actually it's Spanish vermilion
38:15specially imported all the way from Spain
38:18I paid for it as an extra myself
38:23we live in a world of cheap bright synthetic colours
38:27but the Romans didn't
38:28in Rome bright colours smacked of a kind of luxury
38:32that only came from abroad
38:34and the desire for them created an even more niche range of jobs
38:39for ordinary Romans on the make
38:41this is a guy who was really keen on what he did
38:45he put up this tombstone when he was alive
38:49vivos fake it for himself and for his family
38:53and he put on it symbols of the tools of his trade
38:57now he worked as a dyer in the dyeing industry
39:01and you've got here little flasks in which his dye went
39:05scales in which he measured out his ingredients
39:09and the skeins of material that he dyed
39:15but he wasn't any old dyer
39:17at the top he tells us his name
39:20Gaius Pupius Amicus
39:24Pupurarius he was a dyer of purple
39:29in Rome purple was special
39:32it came from the eastern Mediterranean
39:34and it was extracted from tiny shellfish
39:38it looked spectacular and it didn't fade
39:41it was not only expensive
39:43its use came to be regulated by law
39:47if you saw a man in the street
39:49wearing a toga with a broad purple stripe
39:53you'd know that he must be a senator
39:56one of the political elite
39:58and the only person later on in the Roman Empire
40:02who was allowed to wear clothes completely of purple
40:06was the Roman Emperor himself
40:09its kind of colour policing
40:12its a bit like as if Queen Elizabeth II
40:15was the only person in the country
40:16who was allowed to wear pink
40:19but it tells you quite a lot
40:22about Rome and the Roman Empire
40:25that this one very visible marker
40:28of political and social status
40:31should have been the product
40:33of something that came
40:34from the far eastern side of the Mediterranean
40:39no wonder Gaius Pupius Amicus
40:42was proud of being a Pupurarius
40:49the story of colour isn't just a story of luxury
40:53it's a story of identity
40:55the power that conspicuous consumption had
40:58to mark you out as someone special
41:00whether you are supplying them or consuming them
41:04all these imports helped you distinguish yourself
41:08like products and people
41:12even new gods arrived from far-flung parts of the Empire
41:16you could have your own style
41:18your own taste
41:19your own beliefs
41:22but let's not get too carried away
41:24by all this exotic stuff that the Empire offered up
41:28what the foreign purple on the senator's toga tells us
41:31is that you could be completely foreign
41:33and absolutely Roman at the same time
41:37the Romans had a way of thinking about other cultures
41:41that is quite unlike our own
41:45we really mustn't make the mistake of kind of imagining
41:48that Rome is a sort of touchy-feely cultural melting pot
41:55if you wear the wrong clothes they make fun of you
41:58if you speak strangely they make fun of you
42:00they're big conformists
42:01there's too many Greeks here
42:03the Jews don't eat food properly on the Sabbath
42:06all that sort of stuff
42:07yes, why don't they eat pork?
42:09and how silly
42:10the poet Marshall who's going on about the Puella Romana
42:14who hasn't experienced a Mentula Romana
42:19the Roman chick who's never had a Roman dick
42:21I mean, you know, it's crude stuff
42:24but, you know, nasty in its way
42:26the irony is
42:27the man who wrote this came from Spain
42:30they're not laughing at other races
42:32they're laughing about people who don't do things the Roman way
42:36although people come to this city from all over the world
42:39you don't end up with a Chinatown
42:41or a little Italy
42:42in the way that we have
42:43in the great metropolitan cities today
42:47and these people are going out
42:48they're ruling the world
42:49the senators are governing Portugal
42:51they're governing Egypt
42:52they're governing on the Danube
42:53and they never come back and say
42:54I had this great meal the other day
42:56and they'll talk about ingredients from all over the world
42:59but what you do with it
43:00the actual cuisine, the cooking
43:02it's got to end up proper Roman cookery
43:05they've got this city that is unlike anything that's been created before
43:09that has a much greater diversity of people
43:13of customs, of languages
43:17thousands of languages probably
43:19hundreds of languages at least
43:20spoken in the city of Rome
43:22but they only write in Greek and Latin
43:24more or less all the time
43:25a tiny bit of Hebrew
43:26what we're seeing here
43:28is the most culturally, ethnically, religiously, diversity
43:36that there have ever been in the world
43:37but the way they're doing multiculturalism
43:41is quite different from the way we do multiculturalism
43:45yes, there's cultural diversity
43:47but what there isn't is the diversity of cultures
43:52there's an ironic logic here
43:54because Roman culture was in itself such an amalgam
43:58they simply saw no need for alternative cultures
44:01to exist in parallel
44:03still less to respect them
44:05in Rome, diversity wasn't about separateness
44:09there wasn't a Chinatown or even a Jewish quarter
44:13in fact, your average Roman would have been amazed
44:16at the way we try to respect and preserve different cultures
44:21here, the people were from everywhere
44:25the food came from everywhere
44:27the gods were from everywhere
44:29but it all went into the blender
44:31and it came out Roman
44:36the Empire was doing two things to Rome
44:41they were parading all the exotic and luxurious strangeness
44:45of the outside world
44:47but at the same time
44:48the distinction between Romans and the subject peoples
44:52was dissolving all the time
44:54eventually, every free adult male in the Empire
44:59could call himself a Roman citizen
45:03for me, there's one place
45:06which captures the contradictions of Imperial Rome
45:18there was a people's palace here
45:20it was the Colosseum
45:23it was built and paid for
45:25out of the spoils of the Jewish war
45:27as a gift to the Roman people
45:31but one thing's for sure
45:32some of them had to climb a lot of stairs
45:42I'm in the only part of the Colosseum
45:45that I'd be allowed to go to
45:49women, slaves and other undesirables in the Roman world
45:53had to be up on the gods
46:01so what does it look like
46:02from the undesirables point of view?
46:06let's not think for a moment about the blood and guts
46:08there was certainly plenty of that
46:10but let's think of it in terms of Empire
46:14what you had on display in front of you
46:18was all the biggest and best the Empire could offer
46:28people often compare this to a football match
46:31but if so, this is not just a Premier League
46:33this is the World Cup
46:37fantastic combat
46:49this is one place we can see the Roman Empire
47:00from the ordinary person's eye view
47:04this guy is looking at the show
47:06and then...
47:07during a pose
47:08or while he was looking at
47:10he was scratching the scene
47:13that he was seeing in the arena
47:16and what have we got?
47:17we can see wild animals like a panther
47:20oh there's two bears
47:22right
47:24and bestiarius
47:25the bestiarius
47:26you can really...
47:27look at those muscles
47:28you know, biceps
47:30whatever they are
47:30really muscly bloke
47:32and I think this is great
47:33because it...
47:34it not only gives us a spectator's viewpoint
47:37but it also kind of captures that moment
47:41of what it was like to be here
47:43you put your feet...
47:44this guy wasn't alone
47:45the Romans just couldn't get enough
47:48of drawing the beasts they ogled in the Colosseum
47:53when you saw them for the first time
47:55these exotic animals must have been breathtaking
48:00and the same goes for the other stars of the show
48:04the human performers
48:07this is a fantastic treat for me
48:09because it's...
48:11it's a real live gladiator's helmet
48:13or a real dead gladiator's helmet
48:16from Pompeii
48:19it's very weird and heavy
48:21I'm gonna pick it up
48:22it's got a great crest on it
48:26and a bust of Hercules
48:28which is facing out at you
48:32just to scare the opponent
48:34I can't quite put it on
48:35but I can get the feeling of what it's like having it on
48:38but what it makes you see is it's jolly heavy
48:43and you get a very...
48:46very difficult view from inside
48:49because everything's kind of shaded off
48:53both by the peak
48:55and by the protective grill
48:57I mean...
48:59I don't quite see it
49:01I didn't know where the blasted enemy was honestly
49:05the other thing about it
49:06is it looks to us
49:08fantastically weird
49:09and I think it would look like that to the Romans too
49:12the point about these gladiators
49:14is that they're not dressed
49:15in standard Roman army issue
49:18they're not the kind of fighters you'd see
49:20if you went to fight the barbarians
49:22these are mad, weird, exotic, foreign costumes
49:29they're meant to exude the mysterious outside world
49:33and all the violence there might be in it
49:35and in a way I think
49:37what we're seeing here is
49:39well it's sort of a fancy dress
49:42I think what you'd get the sense was
49:44that people would come to see the costume
49:48as much as they'd come to see you
49:54where do I go now?
49:55hard to see
49:59so
50:01when I think about gladiatorial combat
50:03I know that some of it was to the death
50:05people did get killed
50:07but more
50:08and more often
50:11it was a show
50:12it was a spectacle
50:13it was theatre
50:16and in my mind it's kind of more like
50:19the sort of
50:21charade of wrestling
50:22than the real life combat of boxing
50:26and part of the reason for that
50:27was simply economics
50:30you've got hundreds of gladiators
50:31they're extremely expensive
50:33you don't want them killed off
50:35too often
50:39a little bit of a disparity asides here
50:41but I'm afraid
50:42Thrax is out
50:46whoops
50:47we have a victorious murmillo
50:51congratulations
50:54to the Romans
50:56gladiators represented a violent fantasy
50:59of the outside world
51:00fighting in their midst
51:03but there's a fascinating irony
51:06in the real origins
51:07of the men behind the masks
51:11I've got a wonderful drawing
51:13an old drawing here
51:15the original stone has long ago been lost
51:18but it's a tombstone of a man called
51:21Marcus Antonius Exoccus
51:23who tells us he came from Alexandria
51:26to fight in some gladiatorial games
51:30put on by the Emperor Trajan
51:32and here's another text of a tombstone
51:37put up by a man called Fuskinos
51:40who was a provocator
51:43that's another sort of gladiator
51:46there's tombstones in Greek
51:48and he tells us
51:49that he was an Egyptian
51:53these gladiators came from the same
51:56wildly different backgrounds
51:57as everyone else in Rome
51:59but their real stories
52:00were much more mundane
52:02than the exotic roles
52:04they were forced to play in the arena
52:07it reveals the kind of smoke and mirrors
52:10aspect of all this
52:11because underneath all that
52:13some gladiators
52:15were pretty domestic
52:16or they certainly ended up so
52:18they finished up
52:20perhaps long retired
52:21longish life
52:23wife and kids
52:27one of the nicest ones
52:28is a man here
52:30who lived to the age of 45
52:33he'd come from Tungria
52:34he was a Belgian
52:36but the tombstone
52:37is put up to him
52:38by his wife
52:40and little Justus
52:42his son
52:45and even Exoccus
52:48exotic as he looks
52:50seems to have ended up life
52:52to judge from his name
52:54as a Roman citizen
52:56he presumably retired
52:58and lived out his life
53:00somewhere in suburban Italy
53:03a bit like
53:05Marcus Antonius Exoccus
53:07of Tunbridge Wells
53:10an Egyptian
53:11playing the part of a Thracian warrior
53:13then settling down as a Roman family man
53:17to me
53:18that's Imperial Rome in a nutshell
53:21the Colosseum
53:23dramatised
53:24this frightening
53:25thrilling idea
53:26of Rome
53:27and the outside world
53:29that's all violence
53:30confrontation
53:31and strangeness
53:34the truth is
53:35that the real empire
53:37was not just fighting in the arena
53:39it was sitting in the seats
53:43there are places in the Colosseum
53:45reserved for the Gaditani
53:47people of Cadiz
53:48in Spain
53:49for an African senator
53:51and a Gothic chieftain
53:52in reality
53:54the fearsome barbarians
53:56had become Romans
53:58and were watching the action
53:59like everyone else
54:07so what's the Colosseum doing then?
54:09at one level
54:11it's showing the people of the city
54:13what they get from empire
54:15but in a deeper sense
54:17it's showing them
54:18that they fit in
54:21if the people who are killing each other
54:23in the arena
54:24were stereotypical foreigners
54:26then by implication
54:28if you were watching them
54:29you were a Roman
54:33it's trying to put everything
54:35in an order that makes sense
54:41the point about the Colosseum
54:43is that it was
54:44both a microcosm
54:46of the city of Rome
54:47and a microcosm
54:49of the Roman Empire
54:51and it helps to show
54:52how the boundaries
54:54between what was Roman
54:56and what was foreign
54:57increasingly broke down
55:01in Rome
55:02for the first time in history
55:04people from Asia
55:05Africa
55:06and Europe
55:07could sit together
55:08as citizens
55:09of the same state
55:16Rome was the first global city
55:18and it contained in it
55:20all the contradictions
55:21that global cities have had
55:23ever since
55:23it was diverse
55:25but it wasn't tolerant
55:26foreign enemies
55:28were crucified
55:28enslaved
55:29and forced to fight
55:31in the arena
55:31but equally
55:33foreigners could rise
55:34to be emperor
55:35the point is
55:36the distinction the Empire
55:38made
55:38was not between
55:40Romans and foreigners
55:41but between those who resisted
55:43and those who joined in
55:45the key question
55:47in our story
55:48is
55:49what was it like
55:51to live
55:52in the world's first city
55:54where almost everyone
55:56came from somewhere else
55:57there must have been
55:59plenty of people
55:59who felt very far from home
56:01and rootless
56:03for some
56:04there were profits
56:05to be made
56:05and success
56:06to be had
56:07and an exciting
56:08even if bewildering mixture
56:11of new ideas
56:12different cultures
56:13and different religions
56:14whatever you'd been back home
56:17in Rome
56:18you could reinvent yourself
56:21it's not hard to imagine
56:23the fears and anxieties
56:25of those ordinary Romans
56:26wherever they were from
56:28how do I fit into all this?
56:30who knows who I am?
56:33who's going to remember me
56:35when I'm dead?
56:37perhaps that's why
56:38they were so keen
56:39to write their stories
56:41onto their tombstones
56:44they're deliberately speaking
56:46to you and me
56:50oh this guy's really having a conversation
56:55stranger he says
56:56hospice
56:58hang on a minute
56:59resiste
57:01stop here
57:01take a look down to your left
57:04that's where my bones are buried
57:08my
57:09ossa
57:11I was a
57:12good man
57:13I was a kind man
57:16misericordis
57:17and I was a lover of the poor
57:20amantis
57:21pauperis
57:23please
57:24please
57:25traveler
57:25please
57:25I beg you
57:28don't mess with my tomb
57:31and the name of the guy
57:32is
57:33Gaius
57:34Atilius
57:36Euhodos
57:37the ex-slave
57:38of
57:39a man called
57:40Serenus
57:41Euhodos
57:42sounds Greek to me
57:43and he tells us what he did
57:44he was a
57:45margaritarius
57:47he was a pearl seller
57:49that's who's buried
57:50in this tomb
57:52traveler
57:53he says
57:54we are to
57:55on your way now
57:57goodbye
57:58wale
58:01wale
58:07wale
58:08next time
58:09I'll descend into the city streets
58:11to explore their high-rise tenements
58:13crime-ridden slums
58:15and life in the bars
58:17and the bath houses
58:19we'll find some very distinctive Roman voices
58:22born from the earthiness
58:24of communal city life
58:27this is how we have to imagine
58:29the ancient city
58:30everyone
58:32shitting
58:33together
58:33tunics up
58:35togas up
58:36trousers down
58:37chatting
58:38as they went
58:46re-building
58:47medieval Britain
58:48brick by brick
58:49here on BBC HD
58:50on Friday nights
58:51at nine
58:52but back to tonight
58:53now
58:53and there's live music
58:55coming up with Jules Holland
58:56and there's still a town
58:56to be fun
58:56and all our people
59:02and here's how it is
59:02and we're happy with you
59:03from the land
59:04we'll see you
59:05You