All language subtitles for BBC.Mary.Beards.Ultimate.Rome.Empire.Without.Limit.3of4.720p.HDTV.x264.AAC.MVGroup.org.eng

This is the skull of a Roman.

When we say "Romans", we tend to
think of men from Italy

dressed up in togas, orating in
the Forum, trampling over

the fields in armour, building
bridges and probably overeating.

This Roman lived in York.

And this Roman was a woman.

All we know about her comes from her
bones and what was found with them.

She can't have been more than about
20 when she died

and she must have been pretty
well-off,

to judge from the nice jewellery
that was found with her.

It's a lovely little blue
necklace...

..a jet bracelet, an ivory bangle,

a nice blue glass vase and a pair of
little glass earrings.

There's actually more to
her than that.

We can tell from the shape of the
skull

that she was certainly of mixed
race.

Either she came from North Africa
or maybe her parents

or perhaps her grandparents.

So she really makes us think -

who were the Romans?

And what did it mean to be Roman?

Of all the ingredients that helped
the Romans build their empire,

none was so successful or surprising
as the one you can't see.

Citizenship.

And their ability to turn people not
born in Rome

into fully fledged Romans.

He saw the toga everywhere.
"Frequens toga."

A Roman could be all sorts of
different people.

Rich or poor, black or white, from
the fringes of the Sahara

to the damp frontier of northern
Britain.

The Britons were really tough.
It was true grit!

So what difference did it
make to be a Roman?

And how did you become one?

Buried behind a modern industrial
estate in southern Spain

are the ruins of a small Roman
settlement.

You have to be pretty determined to
find this site.

I don't think it's on the main
tourist beat, really.

This is the beginning and the
entrance to the site.

It's beginning to look a bit more
hopefully Roman.

Right.

This one looks fairly ordinary,
but for me, this place is one

of the most important places in the
whole history of the Roman Empire.

The story goes back to 171 BC.

A delegation from Spain turned up in
Rome,

representing more than 4,000 men who
were the sons of Roman soldiers

and Spanish women, and as such,
they had no political rights.

They were effectively stateless and
they were looking for a home.

It was one of the unintended
consequences of conquest and,
interestingly,

the historian Livy calls these
people "a new species".

And the Romans, characteristically,
improvised a new solution.

For a start, they gave them Carteia
to be their home.

But the Romans did more than that.

They didn't just give them a home,
they gave them a status.

They made them Latins, which was
the kind of halfway house

between being full Roman citizens
and not citizens at all.

And that may not sound very much,
but it was actually revolutionary,

because it established the principle
that you could be a Roman citizen

of some sort without having anything
to do with Rome and Italy itself.

And it kick-started a process that
ended up, hundreds of years later,

with every free inhabitant of the
Roman Empire being a Roman citizen.

CALL TO PRAYER

Throughout history, citizenship has
come in many forms.

But the idea that outsiders in large
numbers could become Roman citizens

was entirely new in the ancient
world.

Radical, startling and the unique
ingredient of empire.

To see what being Roman looked like
thousands of kilometres from Rome
itself,

I've come to what is now Algeria, on
the Empire's southern edges.

When the Romans conquered a place,
they didn't

set about imposing their norms,
they didn't make people learn Latin,

they didn't make people
worship Roman gods,

they didn't even make people use
the Roman calendar.

They exercised their power
through incorporation.

Now, I'm not talking about the poor
suffering peasants here,

but they managed to get
the local elites onside.

And one of the main ways
they managed that was by extending

full Roman citizenship.

Salud!

Roman citizenship was always a gift.

You didn't have to pass
a citizenship test, or pay a fee,

you didn't have to learn Latin, and
you didn't have to salute the flag.

Not that Romans had flags,
but you know what I mean.

So, why would you want to be
a Roman citizen?

Well, there were all
kinds of particular legal rights it

gave you - to make contracts,
marriage rights,

and it meant you could never
be crucified.

I doubt that that's what's
driving most people.

The important thing about Roman
citizenship was that it gave

you a stake in Rome.

It's a bit like the American Dream.

You know it doesn't work for most
people, but the dream still matters.

We don't know how far
the extension of citizenship was

a carefully planned strategy,
or one of history's lucky accidents,

but the Roman Empire worked
better by bringing people in

and not by keeping them down.

Now,
we shouldn't exaggerate the effect.

I bet many locals here wouldn't have
been keen on becoming Roman

citizens or wouldn't have
cared either way.

And in any case, imperialism
is never cosily consensual.

Algeria is no stranger to
the conflicts of empire,

to put it mildly.

From the Ancient Phoenicians,
through the Arabs

and Ottomans, to the French, and
that's not to mention the Romans.

In fact, it's in Algeria that
some of the most impressive Roman

remains in the whole
world are to be found.

And they have really important
stories to tell.

The story of Roman Algeria began,
as most stories of the empire

began, with the brutal
oppression of the native population.

I'm driving through what were once
the killing fields of Africa.

It's where the Romans fought for
decades and even after the conquest

proper, there were thousands
of soldiers stationed here,

policing
and nudging the frontier sand.

Even in parts of the empire where
there had been no towns before,

the Romans sponsored,

encouraged and bankrolled

the building of cities, Roman style.

Timgad was originally
built for retired Roman soldiers,

serving nearby, to settle.

And it reveals a lot about how Rome
put down roots far from Italy

and how its identity

and culture flourished
at the fringes of the empire.

I'm beginning to
get my bearings now.

This must have been one of the
main gateways into the town.

When you first walk in, it looks
a terrible jumble, actually,

but almost instantly,
you come to a cross street, you can

see another paved street,
an absolute grid pattern.

This must be one of the best
surviving examples of Roman

town planning
anywhere in the empire.

It's a pretty aggressive statement
of Roman-ness in the middle of the

desert, which means it's not that
hard for me to find my way around.

And I guess I'm now in a little
house, and a rather splendid door...

This is a truly regal
set of Roman loos.

It's on the standard
multi-seater pattern.

You get a little bit of privacy from
these rather natty dolphins here.

It's a nice thought, I think,
that one of the poshest sets

of loos anywhere in the Roman world
is still to be found in Algeria.

Ooh!

What I've got in my sights now is
a rather grand building coming up,

the grandest we've seen really,
with a whole load of columns,

which is worth exploring, I think.

A rather posh entrance courtyard.
What on earth is it?

This is really interesting. It's
a bibliotheca. It's a library.

If that's the case, it must be,
this is a very, very rare example

of a surviving public, presumably,
library from the Roman world.

It's very smart.

Sort of...

It's quite interesting that
we've come into this town

and the first monument we really met
is indeed a monument to culture.

The public library.

I think if I'd been
a citizen of Timgad,

this is where I would have
spent my time, if I'd been allowed.

My guess is that this library was
a pretty blokeish community.

It might have started off as a Roman
soldiers' retirement home,

but within just a few
generations of its birth,

Timgad had expanded well
beyond its original foundations,

home to over 10,000
reasonably peaceful

inhabitants of Roman, African
and Berber descent.

You might expect to see a very
filtered down version

of Roman-ness here, and yet,
we find quite the opposite.

This is the main square, the forum,
the centre of business life,

commerce, law and local government.

What is striking is it actually
looks so standard.

Anyone visiting here
from Roman Italy would instantly

recognise this as the forum.

recognise this as the forum.

And yet, we're
just on the edge of the Sahara.

Whoever designed this must have
been working from some

kind of kit for Roman forums.

Or actually,
a kit for a whole Roman town.

You really do get the feeling
that the people of Timgad are

investing unusually heavily in high
culture and in their Roman identity.

All around the forum,
all around town,

there are thousands
of inscriptions proclaiming

the Roman-ness of the inhabitants,

but the man who really capped it all
for culture is this man, Vocontius.

And it's actually written, not in
the usual capital letters that you

see on inscriptions, but in the
lower case

that you get in manuscripts,

so it's as if you're
reading a book here.

Now, instead of the usual CV that
you'd expect under his statue,

you get an elaborate hymn of praise

to Vocontius's culture.

The ordo, the local council,
has put this up to him.

It's the council of the town
that lives next to a spring,

a spring that brings it water.

But Vocontius is a spring, they say,
that brings them something more.

He's their "other source".

What he's a source of is not water,
it's culture, literature

and eloquence.

Here, on the margins of the empire,
the people of Timgad

are as committed as anyone else
to showing they are Romans.

All these mosaics come from the
floors of buildings in Timgad

and they give you some
idea of what the original

colour of the place must
have been like.

And also, the richness.

We might call this Roman soft power.

Most of the people who
lived in Timgad would never actually

have seen Rome, but they're
using their Roman-ness as a badge

of honour,
a way of showing they belong.

That must come from a
little bath building -

"Have a good bath," it says.

And I suppose it means -
flip-flops only in here.

And here, we've got some of the
classic scenes of Roman mythology.

There's the goddess Venus up there,
rising from the ocean

and balanced a bit awkwardly
on the bum of a sea monster.

And there is the god Neptune,
rowing his trident.

He's the god of the sea.

What's interesting is that there
are artists round here who can

produce this kind of stuff

and the people of Timgad
are literally at home with it.

They're really unmistakably
doing the Roman thing.

I'm sure there must have been awful
quarrels going on here,

but on the surface, Timgad looks
a pretty happy little place.

And that's summed up by this
bit of pavement art.

What it is is a gaming board,
with words written across.

In fact, you move your piece
from letter to letter.

And the words make a slogan.
"Venari, lavari."

Hunting and bathing.

"Ludere, ridere."
Gaming and laughing.

"Occ est vivere." That's living.

Kind of makes you realise
how far this place

and its inhabitants have come.

They started out as a bunch
of top ex-squaddies.

A few generations later, they're not
just hunting and bathing,

they're bookworms in the local
library, and they're visiting

a rather posh local lavatory
with dolphin fittings.

In some ways,

it didn't matter how far from the
centre of the empire you were.

Being Roman meant belonging.

If you had lots of money.

By allowing the local elite into the
club, Rome secured their support.

In return, the local rich felt
part of a bigger world

and it's here in Algeria that we
have one of the most

extraordinary cases of how one could
climb the greasy pole of Roman

political power.

This is a really proud
boast of success.

It's a standout memorial,

designed to show just how far you
could go, even if you were

brought up on the margins of the
empire, in what's now rural Algeria.

It's put up by a man called
Quintus Lollius Urbicus to his dad,

to his mum, his brothers
and his uncle.

But most of all,
it's put up to himself.

We know precious
little about Urbicus's roots,

whether he was of Roman or Berber
descent, or perhaps both.

What we do know is that he grew up
just a few kilometres

away from the family mausoleum,
in the small remote Roman

town of Tiddis
and his family were Roman citizens.

And you can tell it's Roman
because of all these winged willies.

Even in its heyday,

Tiddis is unlikely to have had more
than 1,000 inhabitants.

It's more of a village than a town.

And I doubt that it was particularly
well known in Algeria.

No-one else in the Roman world
would even have heard of it.

This really must take
the prize for being the smallest

forum in the whole
of the Roman Empire.

Local offices there,
loads of plinths that once carried

statues of emperors
and local bigwigs.

This one was actually the statue of

a rather important local Roman lady.

But here was the statue to the

biggest local bigwig of them

all, Quintus Lollius Urbicus.

The statue's lost, but you can see
where his feet would have been,

perhaps in marble,
maybe even in bronze.

And it's underneath that,
on this plinth,

that you find his CV written out.

It's terribly abraded now, but
you can just about feel the letters.

You can see his name here,
Lollius Urbicus.

You can see that...

Well, you can feel that he was
consul and underneath, you get loads

of the other things that he did
in his life, the offices he held.

We learn that he was
a bit of a war hero,

he served in the expedition against
Judea with the Emperor Hadrian

and he seems to have won military
decorations, a sort of

honorific spear and a golden crown,
a bit like a purple heart or an MC.

He's the biggest thing that ever
came out of Tiddis.

He's the local boy who really made
good and no-one made gooder

and round here, he would have been
absolutely exceptional.

What we've got to remember,
though, is that there were

thousands of people
like Lollius Urbicus

in the Roman Empire, going
from provincial towns to make it

big in the city itself
and in the army.

In some ways, for me, that's what's
exceptional about the Roman Empire.

The story of Urbicus
doesn't end here.

If we follow his trail,
Urbicus takes us about as far

away from Africa as you could
possibly get in the Roman Empire.

To the empire's northern frontier.

It's in Britain that a plaque was
discovered, put up by a unit

of the Roman army, recording some
new building they'd just erected.

This unit says they're
working underneath

Quinto Lollio Urbico, Quintus
Lollius Urbicus, who was "leg aug",

he was the Legatus Augusti,
he was the emperor's representative.

That's to say he was
the governor of the province.

So, our man from Africa has ended up
with the top job in Britain.

So, what we have here is one
provincial turned Roman now

governing other provincials
on the other side of the Roman world

and that was part of
a regular pattern.

What Lollius Urbicus
from North Africa

made of his time in Britain,
we can only guess,

but in the Roman imagination, this
island had particular significance.

By expanding beyond the
Mediterranean world, and conquering

a place across different seas, they
were venturing into the unknown.

For the Romans, this wasn't just
the sea, it was the ocean.

It was part of that vast waterway

that went round the inhabited world.

It meant, really, that Britain

was in another world.

That made it hugely attractive
to conquer and explore,

but it was almost as if they were
going into space, in our terms.

And of course,
they told loads of tall and not

so tall stories about what you might
find in Britain when you got here.

It was cold, it was wet,
it was foggy,

and the sun didn't shine very much,
but the natives had weird habits.

They grew very tall
cos it was so cold

and they lived to a vast age, 120
years old, you'd find people here.

Some people even said it
didn't exist.

But there were others who thought
that, actually, Britain was

where you found real virtue.

The Romans had become
corrupted by decadence and luxury,

the Britons however were
really tough.

It was true grit!

Britain was certainly the perfect
target for the doddery

Emperor Claudius, who needed
a decisive military conquest to

bolster his unmilitary reputation.

Yet like anywhere, even here,

where the cultural gap was perhaps
at its widest, an outsider could

become Roman, if he served
for 20-odd years in the Roman army,

a clever mechanism that turned
the conquered into the conquerors.

These pieces of bronze must once
have been someone's most

precious possession.

They belonged to a man called
Reburrus,

and what they do is
they document the fact that

when he'd completed his years
of army service,

the emperor had then given him
Roman citizenship.

I think what we have to imagine
is that there would be some very

big document on public
display in Rome,

naming a load of people
who were given citizenship,

but individuals could get their own
personalised little copy, like this.

It does a bit more than just
give him citizenship.

It's very clear about that,
"civitatem".

It also gives citizenship to his
children, to his descendents, and if

he's living with someone as man and
wife, the wife gets citizenship too.

But if he's a bachelor,

then anybody he subsequently marries
will get those same rights,

provided, it says, there is
no polygamy going on.

"Dumtaxat singuli singulas."

As long as it's kind of one each,
which I think is probably

an attempt to stop any sham
marriages for immigration purposes.

Reburrus was Spanish in origin,
but he'd done his military

service in Britain and almost
certainly

settled here on retirement.

He was one of very many.

Because long after
the Emperor Claudius had

celebrated his British conquest,

guerrilla warfare raged on
and there were thousands of Roman

soldiers based in barracks
across the country, like this one,

tucked away amongst modern terraced
houses in South Shields.

This all looks very Roman
and very military,

but we shouldn't imagine that this
was a world in which Roman

soldiers were cooped
up in their barracks

and the native British were
somewhere outside.

There were all kinds of things going
on here and all sorts of people -

traders and money makers,
slaves and women and children.

It was a small community,
but a very mixed one.

And we certainly shouldn't imagine
that all the Roman soldiers

came from sunny Italy,

just itching to get back home to
better weather and better food.

Most of the men actually came
from places much like this in other

parts of the empire - from Belgium,
Germany, or northern France.

And for a real glimpse into the
cultural complexity that you

find on the northern frontier,
I think

this tombstone is absolutely
extraordinary.

It's the tombstone to a woman called

Regina and she is an ex-slave,

a "liberta".

And she's the wife,
"coniuge," of a man called Barates.

And Barates wants us to know that
he is from a long way away.

He's Palmyrenus, he says very
proudly across the middle.

He is a man of Palmyra, that's
in Syria. She came from down south.

She's "Natione Catuallauna".

She's a member, originally,
of the Catuvellauni tribe,

somewhere around St Albans now.

Interestingly, underneath,

we've got another text,

written this time in Palmyrene.

Now, my Palmyrene's a bit rusty,

but I'm assured it says, "Regina,
the ex-slave of Barates, alas."

How much I miss her.
But that's not all there is to it.

The image, too, has that
kind of cultural mishmash to it.

Partly,
she looks here like many Roman

women are represented in death.

They're obedient, they're
doing their spinning, we've got

her wool down here,
got a little treasure chest here.

But it's not
quite as simple as it seems

because various bits of the image
seem to be drawn almost

directly from Palmyrene
or Syrian examples.

Sadly,
someone's bashed off her face,

but what you can still
see of her hairstyle is

a kind of hairstyle that you
find in tombs in Syria

and this little idea of having this
spindle held in her hand and put

across her lap, that's also found
very often in Palmyra,

so you've got
Palmyrene, Roman, British identity,

being paraded both by the writing
and by the image.

Now, for me,
this raises any number of questions.

I mean, I wonder, for example,

how a poor girl from the
Catuvellauni tribe ended up

being the slave of a Palmyrene
and eventually marrying him

and ending up here on
Hadrian's Wall,

but I wonder even more, really,

did this couple stick out
in 2nd century AD, South Shields?

Did people sort of think that
their relationship was noticeable or

did they just blend in with
a lot of other people who were

enjoying very kind of mixed
relationships?

And what language do we think
they spoke at home?

And I guess overall,

this looks to me as if it's
an absolutely perfect example

of the kind of clashes of cultural
identity, the merging of cultures.

If you like, the sort of cultural
mess that you find

when you look carefully at the kind
of communities that you have here.

This is about mobility of people.

This was a world where people
moved around freely.

All kinds of migrants travelled
the empire in search of a career

opportunity,
or simply dreaming of fortune.

We can see what this mobility
meant by looking at their skeletons.

It's changing our view
of the communities of Roman Britain.

They weren't static little places,
but full of people born elsewhere.

Archaeologist Hella Eckardt,
from the University of Reading,

has been investigating
the identity of individuals

discovered in ancient burial sites
throughout the country.

How do you actually go about working
out where the guy or woman

came from?

We usually start with the grave
goods and here you can see

an array of finds from Catterick
and they're quite unusual.

So, there are crossbow
brooches here, like this.

And they are thought to be
worn as badges of office,

so soldiers
and administrators wear them.

And the object itself might
not be unusual,

but the idea of placing
it in the grave is.

So this is hinting foreignness.
It is.

Then what do you do with the skull?

So what we do with the skull is
we will test the teeth,

so we will look at the molar and
we will test the chemical signature,

preserved in the tooth's enamel,
and it will tell us

what was the geology like where
this person grew up.

So, when my teeth were forming,
when I was kind of three, four,

five, what I was eating

and drinking kind of gets
locked inside the tooth enamel.

That's absolutely right.
It's like a chemical fingerprint.

The water relates to the climate,

so if you grow up in a hot coastal
North African climate,

that will look different chemically
to a continental cool climate,

like Germany or Poland.

Right. And for this one?

For this one, we think that this
individual and a whole group of...

Most of these men
come from somewhere colder

and more continental.

Be somewhere like Germany or Poland,
something like that. Right.

'So Polish migration to Britain
isn't as new as we think.'

If I were to ask you to just guess -
what rough proportion

of the people in Roman Britain do
you reckon didn't grow up here?

If we look at the countryside,
for example, we simply don't know.

We haven't tested

and we assume that people didn't
move very much in the countryside.

But for the cities, which is where
our work has been, we think 20 to

30% of the ones we've sampled may be
incomers, from outside of Britain.

So quite a significant
proportion of migrants, doing what?

The cities are very mixed
and diverse

and what they seem to be doing,

a lot of these individuals
are in quite high-status roles,

so the lady from York has very
rich grave goods,

these individuals, they have these
crossbow brooches and the belt

fittings, so they're probably
soldiers and administrators.

They're running the Roman Empire.

So our picture of Roman Britain
has to be, it's not

just that there are cities,

it's that there are cities
with a very different

sort of community than you could
ever possibly have found,

you know, a couple of hundred
years before the Roman invasion.

Absolutely. Yeah.

These migrants, Poles and Germans,

people like the Yorkshire lady
with roots in North Africa,

or Barates from Syria,
made the Roman Empire,

just as much as the emperors
and the politicians did.

And it isn't just a question
of moving around the empire.

It's also people from the provinces
making it to Rome, getting to

hold the highest positions of power
in the capital itself.

In our terms,
the Roman ruling class

was strikingly ethnically diverse,
but we shouldn't

conclude from that that the Romans
were all sugar coated liberals.

When they felt like it, they could
be just as xenophobic as anyone.

And we can see
that from an extraordinary

survival in the French city of Lyon.
That's to say, in Gaul.

It's all related to
a proposal of the Emperor Claudius -

the same man who took
Britain as his trophy.

He stirred up a real hornet's
nest in Rome when he suggested

that Gauls should be allowed
into the heart of Roman government.

Claudius ran in to all
kinds of objections.

Some people complained that the
Gauls had only recently been

vicious enemies of Rome and others
said they didn't much fancy

kowtowing to a load of nouveau riche
men from the backwoods.

What's amazing is that we

still have a word-for-word

transcript of Claudius's reply,

later inscribed on bronze and put up
in Gaul.

The interesting thing
is that Claudius

justifies his policy by going
right back to the very

beginning of Roman time,
when he says -

"aileni et quidem exter ni."

Aliens, foreigners, and some
outsiders already came to Rome,

and that's going
back to the time of Romulus.

Now, to be honest,
Claudius's speech is a bit nerdy

and he grindingly goes
through every example

he can think of of foreigners
coming in to the political

structure of Rome,
people who - "Romam migravit" -

the people who
came as migrants to Rome.

But objections or not,
Claudius got his way.

And the Gauls were incorporated
into the power structure of Rome.

And that was really
the standard pattern.

One notable exception was Britain.

We don't know of any native Brit
who made it big at Rome.

If the Brits never dominated Rome,
the Roman way dominated Britain.

Whether that was
spending their afternoons,

like we imagine every Roman did,
going to the baths,

or whatever the weather,
dressing up in a sheet.

Some locals probably just
didn't get all this bathing stuff.

Or take to wearing the toga.

But some must have relished
the fun you could have here.

And some probably got
a bit too hooked

in the kind of,
"Is that a toga version 5

"or a version 6 you're wearing?"

And that's exactly what one Roman
writer, referring to Britain,

has to say.

He says he saw the toga everywhere.

"Frequens toga."

And they took to baths
and to elegant dining

and they called it culture.

But it was really
"pars servitutis" -

part of their enslavement.

This was partly mocking the people
for their Roman pretensions.

And at the same time acknowledging

that it played into
the hands of Rome.

But the cultural interactions
are more complicated than that.

Here in Roman Bath,
long before the Roman invasion,

the local population had
worshipped the goddess Sulis

at these hot springs.

After the conquest, the Romans
saw her as the equivalent

of their own goddess Minerva
and addressed her by that name.

She began to be called
Sulis Minerva, a hybrid god

combining both identities.

But was she really native,
or was she Roman?

What's left of the facade
of the temple tells us

a lot about the world of Roman Bath.

Some of it is really
very, very Roman.

But not all.

It looks as if,
in the middle of the gable,

the sculptor's been asked to do

an image of the shield
of the goddess Minerva.

Which in Roman mythology
had at its middle

a snaky-headed female figure.

The gorgon looking out.

That's fine, except what we've got
here is a bloke with a moustache.

Now, the question is,
has the sculptor just got it wrong?

You know, has he failed
to be properly Roman?

Or has he perhaps refused
to be entirely Roman?

And is this Sulis,
you know, creeping in?

Or is it actually something
a bit more interesting than that?

Is this really a new hybrid
culture for a new Britain?

In the merging of Roman
and pre-Roman images in art,

in the worship of dual gods,

and in the cultural mix
of its towns and cities,

what we're beginning
to see is the emergence

of a new identity in Britain.

Perhaps we shouldn't think
of these people as being

either native or Roman,

perhaps being Roman here meant
something new altogether.

That is - British.

When the Romans invaded this island,

it was home to thousands
and thousands of people.

Lots of different groups,

each one thinking a little
bit of it was their own.

It wasn't a political
unity in any sense.

That's what the Romans
tried to make it.

And in that sense,
they didn't just find Britain,

they didn't just conquer it,
they created it.

And it's thanks to the
Romans that we have London.

London was a brand-new Roman city.

Basically, there was
just open country here before.

And it's actually
thanks to the Romans

that London became the capital city,
stuck down here in the South East

with all the disadvantages
and advantages that brings.

And what's amazing
is if you dig down

underneath the later
buildings that we now see,

you find all kinds of
elements still surviving

of the Roman city itself.

For us, that's the Guildhall.

But it's where the Roman
amphitheatre once was.

And underneath here
was the Roman forum.

The city centre.

Supposed to be one of the largest
public buildings north of the Alps.

Most people here are looking
at the Tower Of London.

Behind them, they'd see part of the
Roman wall, 1,000 years older.

But we can't ignore that all this

was bought at the price
of violent conquest

and that not everyone in Britain

and the other provinces
of the empire were busy

happily embracing
their new identity.

In fact, one of the heroines
of British national culture

is a rebel and resistance fighter
against the Roman occupation.

She's Boudicca,
the wife of a local king,

who'd actually got on
rather well with the Romans

and had left his kingdom to them.

The trouble was, that the Romans
took over their inheritance

with terrible brutality.

They flogged Boudicca
and they raped her daughters.

Boudicca seized her
chance and led a revolt.

Storming London and other Roman
towns, burning them to the ground.

On one occasion,

Boudicca's forces are supposed
to have cut off the breasts

of the Roman women and
sewed them into their mouths

when they killed them.

In the end, however, Roman
firepower won out, as it always did.

And Boudicca killed herself.

The strange thing is,
that a couple of hundred years ago,

Boudicca, that virulent
opponent to the Roman Empire,

was reinvented as an ancestor
of the British Empire.

The words on the base
of her statue say it all.

Basically, don't worry, Boudicca,
your descendants will conquer

more territory than
those Romans ever did.

I have to say
that for different reasons,

a bit of my heart's
invested in Boudicca.

The tough woman who stood up
to the might of the Roman Empire.

But my head says a bit different.

I'm sort of ashamed to say it,
but I'm kind of glad she didn't win.

Even if the Romans were
exaggerating about her crimes,

she was a brutal terrorist.

And what sort of place would this
have been if she'd got her way?

I often find it hard to
decide which side I'm on.

Romans or rebels.

But one thing's for sure,

Romans had to fight to
maintain a hold over Britain.

And the island was always something
of an awkward and exotic possession.

On the other side, going east,
things are very different.

The Greek world, that also
included what we call Turkey

and much of the Near East,

cities, urban living and
long-standing relations with Rome

had existed for centuries.

MAN SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

Becoming Roman here took
a very different form.

All the same, there was
still a desire to make sense

of the brave new world
to which they now belonged.

I'm in a place that
I haven't been for almost 40 years.

It's Aphrodisias,
the city of the goddess Aphrodite.

And it's very special

because it's probably the place
in the whole of the Roman Empire

where you can see
better than anywhere else

how it was that people outside Rome

represented the power
of Rome to themselves.

'And we can see how the two
civilisations of Greece and Rome

'came together and what the empire
looked like from the Greek side.'

People in the eastern
part of the empire

went on speaking and writing Greek
like they had for centuries.

The Romans didn't
make them change to Latin,

they went on being Greek,
under Rome.

They went to Greek plays,
they read Greek books,

they worshipped Greek gods
in Greek temples.

And they did something the
Romans rather disapproved of.

Naked athletics.

In stadia like this one.

This is the 30,000-seater
stadium of Aphrodisias.

In contrast to the new towns
and cities that sprung up

in Britain and Algeria,

here there are at first sight
few clear signs

of specifically Roman culture.

But if we dig beneath the surface,
another story begins to emerge.

It takes a bit of a
leap of the imagination

to imagine the scene of
Greek athletics going on

underneath all this long grass.

But that's what happened here.

But it wasn't the only
thing that happened here.

It's always worth looking
very hard at the details

on these big lumps of stone.

We can see some strong hints
of a very Roman kind of use.

All along the front
row of the seats,

there are these little fixings.

There's a hole here
which must have taken rope.

There's some kind of wedge here
which presumably took a post.

What these are,
are part of a structure

of ropes and posts and nets

which keep the audience
safe from something dangerous

going on in the stadium.

Now, that's not athletics.

That's animals.

What we've got to imagine is that
sometimes the people of Aphrodisias

were showing up here to watch
the very Greek sport of athletics.

Sometimes, they showed up for the
characteristic Roman entertainment

of gladiatorial combat
and wild-beast hunts.

So, this stadium is
kind of dual use.

And it shows just how much this
Greek culture is incorporating

bits of Rome.

And there's another
even more obvious way

that the people of
Aphrodisias incorporated Rome

into their own cultural world.

That is in the worship
of the Roman emperors.

And in a brand-new sanctuary,

sponsored by some local grandees,
for exactly that purpose.

This is one of the most important
archaeological discoveries

of the last 50, even 100, years.

It's a temple complex dedicated
to the honour and worship

of the Roman emperor.

And I'm sitting on the temple steps.

We have to be a bit careful
about what we mean by worship.

I think there's no chance that
the people of Aphrodisias

thought the Roman emperor
was just the same

as Zeus, or Aphrodite,
or any of those traditional gods.

What they did think is that
the power of the Roman emperor

was very like the power of a god.

And they worshipped
him in those terms.

Temples dedicated
to the Roman emperors

have been found all over the empire.

But what made this discovery

so special was that it
was loaded with sculptures.

Represented are the
emperors, their families,

images of the traditional
gods and myths

and the conquered provinces
imagined in human form.

This wasn't simple
flattery of the central power,

though there was
no doubt a bit of that,

this was a local initiative
designed for a local audience.

Setting in stone
their own interpretation

of the Roman world
and their place in it.

And here's an almost-naked emperor
having a go at a province.

What's quite interesting
about all the ways

that provinces and conquered
territories are represented

in this series is
that they're all female.

So, there's a wonderful
bit of gender...

Or a horrible bit of
gender politics going on,

with the heroic,
masculine emperor slaughtering,

or raping the helpless woman.

A woman trying not
to reveal her naked body.

And is putting her hand up,
probably to ask for mercy.

He's got his hand
tugging on her hair.

The caption is
wonderfully revealing.

The emperor is
Tiberius Claudius Kaisar.

That is the Emperor Claudius.

But the province is
a bit of a surprise.

Because she's "Bretannia".

It's about the easiest bit
of Greek you could ever see.

This actually is the very, very
first image of Britannia

ever to appear in world art.

And I think it's a bit of a shock
to discover that she's not appearing

as a proud warrior woman
on the back of a coin,

but she's here as a
rather sad victim of what is,

to all intents and purposes,
rape by a Roman.

It's funny that once you get
down to look at the captions,

you start to see these sculptures
in a bit of a different light.

Because they were really meant
to be seen very high up from below.

And they look quite
different from this angle.

And the lower you get, actually,
the better this one works.

And so if you actually lie down,
what you find is you're looking

straight up into the rather
pathetic face of Britannia.

And that must be the view
of her that the Aphrodisians

walking down the porticoes
must have had.

We can only wonder what they
would have thought as they looked.

My guess is that a few of them
might have been on Britannia's side.

But many of them
would have been in awe

of the god-like power of Claudius.

And many would have seen
Rome's glory as their own.

Not so much subjects,
as partners in the empire.

Here, you could be Greek
and Roman with no contradiction.

For me, the really important
thing that comes out of all this

is that there was no
single way to be Roman.

We've been all over
the Roman Empire,

we've found Romans in togas,
in tunics, in trousers, probably.

We found them speaking
Latin, Greek, Celtic.

There wasn't a rule book
for how to be Roman.

In fact, it was the sheer diversity

and the acceptance of diversity

that actually underpinned
the Roman Empire.

Whether you came from the margins
of the empire in the east,

its northern frontiers, or the
fringes of the Sahara in the south,

if you were a Roman citizen,

you had the same rights and
privileges as a citizen in Rome.

And that was radical and new.

An idea still worth cherishing.

Rome's extension of
citizenship was one factor

that gave its empire unity.

Something few empires before
or since have managed.

But one man would put that
unity on an entirely new footing.

The Emperor Caracalla
was born here, in Lille.

And he's gone down in history
as an awful brute.

He started his reign
by murdering his brother.

A bit like Romulus.

But in this case, the poor lad
was sheltering on his mother's lap.

Things went on from there.

But in 212, he changed the world.

He gave full Roman citizenship
to every free inhabitant

of the Roman Empire.

About 30 million people became
Roman citizens at a stroke.

Why he did it? We haven't a clue.

By the look of him, I don't
imagine it was simple generosity.

All the same, it was the
culmination of the Roman project

of incorporating outsiders,
extending citizenship

and making the Roman way
of doing things seem universal.

Even natural.

After 1,000 years, in a way,

this was the triumphant
finale of that project.

But the truth is that when
they became all the same,

the Romans soon found
new ways to divide and exclude.

'Now, the Roman Empire
would come under pressure

'both from the outside...'

The wall must have been something
to do with controlling that.

'..and from a new threat within.'

This was Romans attacking Romans.

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