Original subtitles

This is the Appian Way,

one of the roads that took thousands of Romans

in and out of their capital city every day.

Young and old, rich and poor, clean and dirty.

And it's where I want to start,

asking a question that really interests me.

Who were the ancient Romans?

Outside the city, it was lined with thousands and thousands of tombs,

so before you got into the city of Rome, you'd already met the Romans.

Dead ones, that is.

And the lives of many of them began or ended a long way from Rome.

This is just a tiny fragment of someone's tomb.

Someone called Eschinus.

"Occisus est in Lusitania".

He was murdered in Spain.

This lady's Usia Prima,

a priestess of the Egyptian goddess Isis,

and there's her little sacred rattle.

She's almost looking at you.

I feel like saying, "Pleased to meet you, Prima."

They come from every walk of life and every part of the Empire,

and a lot of them had once been slaves.

These aren't the kind of guys we usually think of

when we think of Romans.

These Romans all lived at the centre of a vast Empire

that stretched from Spain to Syria,

and which dominated the Western world for over 700 years.

Like it or not, ancient Rome is still all around us,

in our roads, laws and architecture.

We keep on recreating it in film and fiction,

and every year, thousands of us trek here

to see its monuments up close,

and to imagine the emperors and the armies,

the gladiators, and let's be honest, the gore.

But hidden all over the modern city,

in its walls, behind the facades,

even under its streets,

is something much harder to find but just as captivating -

the forgotten voices of the ordinary people.

They're still there, if you know where to look.

Calidius Eroticus means "Mr Hot Sex".

This is a Roman menage a trois.

This wasn't just a mugging.

This was mass murder.

The Romans didn't just carve their names and dates on their tombstones.

Keen never to be forgotten,

they left their thoughts,

their achievements, even entire life stories chiselled into stone.

It's a unique record of real Roman lives.

I've spent most of my life with the ancient Romans,

and not just the big guys - the emperors, the politicians,

the generals, the posh ones.

The people I've most enjoyed getting to know are the ordinary ones,

who had their own part to play in the story

of this extraordinary city.

And what gets to me every time

is that we can still have a conversation with them -

even 2,000 years later.

In this series, I'm going to get their voices speaking again,

to piece together a very different story of life in ancient Rome.

I'll step behind the doors of their homes to meet

flesh and blood Roman families whose lives and possessions

can reflect our own in surprising ways.

This is something a bit special.

She's not just Barbie, she's Empress Barbie.

I'll go down into the streets, where the dirt, crime,

sex and humour in everyday Roman life shows us

what it was like to live in an ancient city of a million people.

"Baths, wine and sex," he said, "ruin your body."

True. But they're what makes life really worth living.

But I'll start by telling the real story of Imperial Rome,

looking beyond the violence and spectacle

to find a global city which reached for talent and treasure

from the far ends of the Earth -

a place where everything and everyone was from somewhere else.

These are the Romans I'm interested in.

Welcome to my Rome.

When you arrived in Rome at its imperial height 2,000 years ago,

you found yourself in a new kind of city.

Rome had once been a small city-state,

but in conquest after conquest,

it became capital of a vast Empire,

a place in which, for the first time in history,

a million people from three continents managed to live together.

One thing we know about Rome is it wasn't just a city,

it was an Empire,

and for us, that means marauding armies,

conquering generals and bloodthirsty emperors.

We tend not to think about the ordinary people

who lived here at the very heart of it all.

For them, the Empire brought them into contact with a whole world,

from Scotland to Afghanistan,

and it made this city a more cosmopolitan place

than anywhere had ever been before or would be again

for hundreds of years.

And we're always asking, "What did the Romans do for us?"

I think we should be asking,

"What did the Empire do to the Romans?

"And who were those Romans, anyway?"

Around the city, there's more evidence than you'd think

for the impact that Roman conquest had

on the lives of ordinary people here.

All it requires is that we look from a slightly different angle.

One of the most famous monuments in the forum

celebrates the moment when one conquering army came home.

In 71 AD, the city got a day off

for the triumphal return of the emperor Vespasian and his son Titus,

who had crushed a rebellion in Judea.

We've got here the victorious general, Titus,

driving through the streets of Rome in his chariot

to celebrate his victory...

..and on the other side,

we've got the booty that he's brought home with him.

Titus had devastatingly conquered the Jews,

and here we can see the loot that he has got from the Jewish temple.

It's a grand display,

but what I want to do is

to try and undercut the pomposity of it a bit,

and to ask what was it like for the people,

the ordinary Romans who showed up to watch this,

left their apartments and came to see the spectacle?

A triumph like this would have been the first sight the Roman people had

of all the things the armies brought back from their distant victories.

The rich spoils, the maps of the conquered territory,

the models of the fighting,

even the trees that they'd uprooted and brought back to Rome.

How did people react?

Some must have gasped, others would have jeered the captives.

Or maybe their minds were on other things.

One Roman poet recommends the triumphal procession

as a place to pick up a girl.

How would you do it?

Well, he says, watch the stuff go past, nudge up to her and say,

"Ooh. I think that's the Euphrates there,

"and that's the Tigris over there."

You don't have to know, he says, you just have to sound confident.

And then you'll make your own conquest!

It's a good joke.

But it also hints at the way Roman lives could be changed

by the spoils coming back from the Empire.

This girl can't have been the only person who found all this

pretty strange, but also exciting.

So what did the Roman armies bring back from the Empire?

The import that made the biggest impact

is one we don't think about often enough - human beings.

These are forgotten people, but if we take the time to listen,

we can still hear the voices of some of the millions

who followed the Roman armies into the city

for all sorts of different reasons.

"This is for my brother, Habibi Annu from Palmyra.

"I'm Germanus, Regulus' mule driver."

"This is for Diocles, champion chariot racer from Spain."

Here we've got a young slave girl, age 17,

Phryne, the slave of Tertulla.

"Africana". She came from Africa.

This one is put up by a soldier for his wife Carnuntilla,

born near Vienna in ancient Pannonia.

What's weird is that Carnuntilla isn't really a real name.

It comes from the name of a town in Pannonia, Carnuntum.

It means, sort of, "my babe from Carnuntum".

So my guess is,

he perhaps bought this girl as a slave,

he freed her, he brought her back to Rome, he married her.

But sadly, his babe from Carnuntum died when she was just 19.

Poignant stories like this are everywhere in the city.

They're reminders of the different ways

real lives could begin abroad and end in Rome.

But there's more to it than that.

These people weren't just brought in to serve the Romans.

They were becoming Romans.

One of the tombs on the Appian Way

gives us the other side of the story of the Arch of Titus.

It's a tombstone of three guys,

one called Baricha, one called Zabda,

and one called Achiba - typical Jewish names.

So the question is, what's the story of Baricha, Zabda and Achiba?

How did they get here?

If they did start out life in Judea,

how come they end up as Roman citizens in Rome?

It's more surprising than you think.

To judge from the letters and how they're written on this stone,

this was carved in the first century AD,

and at that point, we can put two and two together.

I'm almost certain that these three men

must have been part of the Jewish rebellion against the Romans

in the late 60s AD.

These men surely came into Rome with Titus' army,

as prisoners of war.

It must have seemed like the worst moment of their lives -

jeered at, catcalls, people throwing things at them.

But perhaps worse was to come.

They were auctioned off as slaves

and bought by a man called Lucius Valerius.

What their life in slavery was like, we don't know, but he freed them,

and they become new Roman citizens,

with his name, Lucius Valerius,

but their Jewish names

still asserting their Jewish sense of identity.

This is one of the ways that Roman conquest works.

It does bring slaves, but it also brings,

eventually, new Roman citizens.

It's a fairy-tale happy ending,

and a classic Roman story.

When guys like this were freed,

they didn't just go back to their old lives in Judea.

They stayed in their new home, and what's more,

they became Romans, with all the rights and privileges

which came with full Roman citizenship.

But what kept them in Rome? How many of them were there?

And where did all these new Romans live?

To try and make sense of it all,

I went to meet a colleague in Trastevere, which literally means

"across the Tiber from the ancient city centre".

It's got a reputation as a bit of an immigrant area in Rome even now.

This area, Trastevere, across the Tiber,

was the fringe of the ancient city of Rome,

and this is where we have the biggest evidence

for immigrant communities - Jews, the Syrians.

I guess if you said to an ancient Roman,

"Where's the biggest immigrant area of the ancient city of Rome?"

They'd have said... Over the river. Over. On the other side, yeah.

Part of the answer to the question

of why an area like this could be so cosmopolitan

lies in the story of slaves like Baricha, Zabda and Achiba.

Greeks thought Romans were really weird

for freeing as many slaves as they did.

And making them citizens? Yes.

Although it's very brutal,

being a slave can be a kind of stage in a life, like an apprenticeship.

You come in as a German, you get a Roman name, you learn Latin,

or you learn to manage in Latin,

you learn some kind of job that's useful to your master,

your master sets you free, and there you are -

you're a Roman citizen with a trade and a Roman name

and a bunch of powerful people you know.

Yeah. This is your entry into Roman society.

Now, multiply that by hundreds and thousands of slaves being freed,

and you can see that the whole ethnic nature

of the people who call themselves Roman citizens

is really changing very quickly.

Roman is a kind of vocation.

It's a movement into which other people are drawn.

This was a completely new idea.

And, in many ways, the secret of the Empire's success.

"Roman" was no longer a word which described the city you came from,

it was something you could become.

Almost everyone in Rome was descended from someone

who arrived from outside.

Not just ex-slaves.

People coming in to work on the docks. Builders. Prostitutes.

Peasants, who'd come into Rome

because they think they can eat there cos they can't eat at home.

So, this huge, chaotic mix of people who arrive not knowing anybody.

These were journeys into the unknown,

and into a place where there was no guarantee you would survive.

And, oddly, that was one reason that Rome welcomed people in.

Any city the size of Rome has to have immigration

because the number of people who die in it

greatly exceeds the number who are born.

Rome's a malarial city, in antiquity.

So people come here who don't have any immunity.

They catch the disease. They're dead within years.

So, just to keep Rome the size it is,

it needs to constantly top up the population.

Rome is swallowing people.

It's a city which consumes people.

It spews them out, dead.

Perhaps we should stop thinking of Romans as a nation,

a master race who conquered the world,

and think instead of a Babel of rootless people,

piled up together, a long way from home.

And, no doubt, hoping for a brighter future.

Because, for foreigners, Rome wasn't all doom and gloom.

Sometimes, I guess, people would have come to Rome

just to seek their fortunes.

This is an epitaph, written in Greek,

of a man who's said to have been always laughing,

always having a joke and really good at music.

He might have come as part of a band, I guess.

And, actually,

the stone tells us that he came,

"To the land of Italy, ex-Asiaes".

"From Asia".

That's modern Turkey.

It says he died here when he was young

and it ends up saying,

"toy noma Menopholos", in Greek.

"Menopholos" is the name.

Now, Rome might have consumed people.

It might have been a dangerous place.

It might have been disease-ridden and dirty,

but I guess, to a man like Menopholos,

the streets must have seemed paved with gold.

And not all immigrants in Rome were at the bottom of the heap.

The Senate and the Imperial Palace

were full of people from outside,

just like the streets of Trastevere.

Rome was international, from the bottom to the very top.

ACCORDION PLAYS

Increasingly, this city belonged to the likes of Menopholos.

As new people arrived,

Rome's population doubled, then doubled again,

till it reached over a million.

There was nowhere in Europe bigger, until Victorian London.

We think of Rome as a very old city.

But, 2,000 years ago,

this place was brand-new.

It must have been full of building sites,

new high-rise, of temporary accommodation.

It must have felt a bit like Dubai.

But there's a big question.

If you've got a mass of a million people, from everywhere,

how do you keep them alive? How do you feed them?

How do you keep the vast Roman multicultural show

on the road?

Feeding a million people was a completely unprecedented challenge.

Bang in the centre of the modern city

is a site which gives you an idea

of the colossal scale of consumption in Ancient Rome.

Locals call it Monte Testaccio.

That's "broken pot mountain".

I think it's one of the most extraordinary archaeological sites

anywhere in the world.

Phew! Made it.

This is absolutely extraordinary.

'Each of these fragments

'was once part of an Ancient Roman storage jar.'

What is amazing about this,

is that you really see here

that it is a broken pot mountain.

There's no earth mixed in with the other stuff.

So, you see how, actually quite neatly,

these shards of pottery have been stacked.

It's a mountain, not a heap.

It's a real hill.

But there's nothing natural about it.

This is a huge, ancient rubbish dump,

composed entirely of discarded containers -

amphorae - that held just one of the products consumed by Rome.

It was olive oil, which seeped into the jars,

and made them go really rancid,

so they were the only containers that couldn't be recycled.

Poor old amphorae had taken off to be pick-axed up

and made into the mountain.

And the olive oil that was in them gets everywhere.

It's the stuff of Roman life.

You'd find it being used in cooking.

It's what's going to help you make perfume.

It's what the guys in the baths who are exercising,

rubbing themselves, scraping themselves down, would have used.

And in the end, it's what the poor little old lady in the garret,

who has just got one pottery lamp...

What came in this amphora would have been her only source of light,

at night.

It's no exaggeration to say that Rome ran on olive oil.

This place gives archaeologists a great opportunity

to work out how it got here.

It came in massive quantities.

This must have been what, originally...?

Even larger.

Even larger than that?

These are 30 kilos when they're empty. Empty, yes.

My suitcase, when it's full,

is this amphora when it's empty.

'And what's amazing is that you can often find out

'exactly where the oil came from.'

We know that it is "A-R-V-A".

Arva is a town called this way

in the shores of the Guadalquivir.

So, that's linking that precise chart

to a site in southern Spain.

So, Roman town, southern Spain.

The guy who is making this amphora

is stamping it with his town's name,

saying, "This is a product of Arva"? Yeah.

According to these trademarks,

almost all the oil in this mountain was coming from Spain,

and a bit from North Africa.

Today, Italy is famous for its olive oil,

but in ancient times,

they were importing most of it from somewhere else.

The fascinating thing about this mountain

is the way you can start to piece together little life stories

of these pots and their contents.

It gets down to the coast in Spain,

gets loaded onto boats.

If it's lucky, it makes it,

but there's lots of shipwrecks in the ancient Mediterranean.

It arrives at the coast. It's humped off the boat.

It's put into barges.

It's brought up the Tiber to the city of Rome itself.

Humped off the boat again,

put into warehouses,

decanted into small containers.

The amphorae end up here.

It might not look it at first sight,

but, in fact, it's one of the most impressive monuments

to the idea of Rome as an imperialist, consumer city,

bringing in the foodstuffs she needs from all around the Mediterranean.

It wasn't just olive oil.

A short trip down the river Tiber

is the seaport, Ostia.

'Today, Ostia is one of Rome's best-kept secrets.

'And it helps us discover what Rome was importing, from where.'

'Martin Millett has been excavating near here,

'and together, we went to explore an intriguing piazza

'next to the theatre, which we call, "The Square of the Corporation".'

OK, Martin. This is where I get to do the housework.

Never live this down!

'If you sweep away the pine needles,

'there are mosaics all around here,

'advertising companies importing goods from abroad.'

"Stuppatoresres".

BOTH: Rope-makers!

This is the organisation of fur traders.

The Naviculariorum Lignariorum,

That's the wood-traders.

So, what we've got so far is...

Rope,

pelts,

and wood.

'There are at least 50 of these mosaics.

'Most of them give us a place as well as a product.

'They add up to one conclusion.

'Rome was being supplied from all corners of the Mediterranean.'

Italy's not big enough to support the city of Rome.

It is a city that's drawing in resources from everywhere.

This was a new moment in western history.

Rome had become what we now call "a consumer city",

on a vast scale. These aren't luxury products,

they're basic commodities.

Wood, leather, oil,

wine and, most important by far, grain.

People talk about Rome being a consumer city,

with a population of about a million.

That implies 150,000 metric tonnes of grain a year.

I don't know how big those ships are,

but you need a lot of ships like that

to bring in 150,000 metric tonnes of grain.

'As the city grew,

'farms in Sicily, Libya, and then Egypt,

'were given over to producing wheat for the people of Rome.

When the grain ships arrived in Italy,

the word would pass round Rome.

The food had arrived.

This was one thing the Empire did for Rome.

It kept them alive.

But it did more than that.

I want to think about life in that consumer city.

Who were the winners, and who were the losers?

One really interesting thing is how they used this imported grain.

That means thinking about bread. Not just eating it, but making it.

I'm very much second-in-command here.

THEY LAUGH

OK, so, I'm now being trusted with the action.

200,000 Roman citizens, living in the city of Rome,

got, each month, what was called a corn dole,

a free ration of corn,

that means about 35 to 40 kilos of corn.

Which was enough to make bread for a month for about two people.

'This was an extraordinary privilege for citizens in Rome.

'200,000 of them received free rations from the state.

'But how did it work?

'Many of them lived in one-room apartments with no kitchens.

'So they relied on the baker to turn their 40 kilos

'into something they could eat.'

Ha-ha!

Are you going to try it?

Yeah. Proviamo.

Good. Not bad for a first attempt.

It's not bad.

And also, it's wonderful people's food,

this is... this is tearing and sharing bread.

You don't even have to own a bread knife to be able to tuck into this.

Good.

'For poor Romans, this was the staple food that kept them alive.

'But they didn't distribute it in the way we would expect.'

You've got to put out of your mind, I think,

this was some kind of proto-welfare state.

Sure, some of the poor would have benefited from the grain,

but charity wasn't what was uppermost in the Emperor's mind

when he put all that time and money into distributing this grain.

What he was concerned about

was the idea that a hungry populace was a dissatisfied populace,

and a dissatisfied populace was a dangerous one.

Also, the fact that distributions didn't go to the poorest in Rome,

they went only to Roman citizens themselves -

you had to be a citizen in order to get this grain.

And that made it a really important perk of being a full Roman.

In a way, what this tells us is that being a full citizen of Rome

was a privileged status to which outsiders could aspire.

And perks like the grain hand-out help you understand why

people wanted to be Roman.

But it also shows us that all these things, the Empire,

the imports, new citizens, were all part of the cycle.

The bigger Rome got, the more it consumed,

the bigger the Empire had to be to support it.

So, how did Rome's massive consumption change life in the city?

Well, for one thing, this was one of the best times in history to be a baker.

And it's a baker who left one of the strangest monuments in Rome.

Now hidden beneath one of the main city gates.

It's the tomb monument of a man called Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces.

He is almost certainly an ex-slave,

and he was a baker and a contractor.

He must have made a whole pile of money in that job,

otherwise he wouldn't be able to afford a tomb like this.

What Eurysaces has done is given himself a theme tomb.

At the very top, all around the monument,

there were scenes from the life of the bakery.

It's the kneading, putting the bread in the oven, weighing the stuff out.

And even these rather strange circles and columns underneath

will be instantly recognisable to a Roman as bakery equipment.

The circles are almost certainly the kneading machines,

and the columns are the bins in which the dough is kneaded.

What this says in Latin is, "This is the tomb of Eurysaces,

"the baker and contractor, 'apparet'." It's obvious.

Or what I think we'd say, "This is the monument of the baker, get it?"

And I really like the way that, "get it",

still speaks to us 2,000 years later.

Have we got that this is the tomb of the baker? Yeah.

Eurysaces could joke because things had gone pretty well for him.

His name sounds Greek, so, most likely he came from abroad,

but he ended up as one of a new class of people

getting rich on the proceeds of Empire.

I've got a tremendous soft spot for Eurysaces,

but I doubt that all Romans would have felt that way.

My guess is that if some old money, old-fashioned Roman

walked past this tomb, he would've thought it was all a bit tacky.

A bit like I might feel if some Premier League football player

designed his own tomb in the shape of a giant football boot.

What Eurysaces' joke reminds us is that the Empire had a direct effect

on how people in Rome made their living.

It was becoming a city of urban professionals.

One of the reasons that ancient Rome still seems quite familiar to us

is that people could do a whole variety of different jobs, just like us.

But it's important not to forget

that, obvious as that seems,

it was actually one of the ways in which the city of Rome was radically new and different.

In the traditional, small, ancient city,

the idea was that the inhabitants were, well, all-rounders,

that the same men fought the city's wars,

ploughed the city's fields and produced the city's food.

But in Imperial Rome, because of the huge size of the city,

those duties were outsourced.

The food now came from overseas.

It wasn't made by local farmers.

And the armed forces that were stationed around the Roman Empire,

they weren't just citizens doing their military duty,

they were making a career out of the military.

The Empire freed, or you might say forced,

Romans to make a living by specialising.

Whether that was being a pearl trader, a warehouse manager,

or even a hairstylist to the rich and famous.

What this did was create a completely new way

of differentiating between people.

If you'd asked an Egyptian or a Greek who they were,

they'd have given their father's name, or their home town.

If you'd asked the average Roman,

I bet he would have told you what he did for a living.

They do on their tombstones at any rate.

These guys are working in the "piperataria".

That's the pepper market.

These are just warehouse men, "horreoreorum".

And here's a bloke, he's a "sagarius" -

a big overcoat maker.

A "saga" is an ancient equivalent of a duffle coat.

An accounts manager?!

She's great, she's a "piscatrix".

She's a female fishmonger.

And he was a gold worker.

And here is an urn, an ash urn,

for a lady called Sellia Epyre

and she was an "aurivestrix".

She was a very, very, very upmarket clothes maker.

It's very striking how each one of these people

does tell you on their tombstone what they did.

Now, I think we have to relate that

to the sheer size and potential anonymity

of a great, imperial metropolis.

In a world without ID cards, without passports,

without birth certificates,

how do you know what you are, who you are?

You know that because of your job.

I am Sellia Epyre,

a luxury clothes maker.

How do you make your identity clear? You say, "This is what I do."

This is where Imperial Rome gets really fascinating for me.

This is not simply a story of one city getting rich

off the back of everywhere else.

It's a story of a place where people were trying a new way of living.

They arrived from across the world,

and became a small cog in this big machine.

You maybe didn't know your neighbours,

and they didn't know you.

Everyone was looking for new ways to make their mark and stand out.

The Empire didn't only help people to move up in the world,

it helped those who did to show that they had made it.

It created new opportunities for conspicuous consumption.

The Empire gave most people in western Europe

their first experience of pepper, lemons, and cherries.

One po-faced Roman complained

that cooking had gone from a mere function to a high art.

The Empire transformed the sensory experience of the city.

There were new smells, new tastes, new colours.

And nowhere is this clearer than in the elaborate paintings

many better-off Romans put on their walls.

In Pompeii is perhaps the most famous Roman painting of all.

Pretty strange scene, phallus appearing,

and some female suckling a goat.

But it was probably the colours that would have dazzled an ancient visitor,

as much as the racy subject matter.

Now, you mustn't make the mistake of thinking that poor old Romans lived in black-and-white

until they started conquering the Mediterranean.

Of course, there were all kinds of local minerals and plants

that would give them pigments for paint.

But as time went on,

they got more and more interested in the special, bright colours

that you could get from their far-flung territories.

Now, this here is one of the best candidates there is

for real red, Spanish vermillion.

Lovely, lustrous red.

I think we have to imagine that if you came to dinner here

and the generous host started showing you round,

he might have come and said,

"Now this lady here is whipping this one because et cetera, et cetera."

But he might have said, "It's a really lovely red, isn't it?

"Actually, it's Spanish vermillion, specially imported,

"all the way from Spain. I paid for it as an extra myself."

We live in a world of cheap, bright, synthetic colours.

But the Romans didn't.

In Rome, bright colours smacked of a kind of luxury that only came from abroad.

And the desire for them created an even more niche range of jobs

for ordinary Romans on the make.

This is a guy who was really keen on what he did.

He put up this tombstone when he was alive, "vivos fecit",

for himself and for his family.

He put on it symbols of the tools of his trade.

Now, he worked as a dyer, in the dying industry.

And you've got here little flasks in which his dye went,

scales in which he measured out his ingredients,

and the skeins of material that he dyed.

But he wasn't any old dyer.

At the top, he tells us his name.

Caius Pupius Amicus.

Pupurarius - he was a dyer of purple.

In Rome, purple was special.

It came from the eastern Mediterranean

and it was extracted from tiny shellfish.

It looked spectacular and it didn't fade.

It was not only expensive,

it's use came to be regulated by law.

If you saw a man in the street wearing a toga

with a broad, purple stripe,

you'd know that he must be a senator,

one of the political elite.

The only person later on in the Roman Empire

who was allowed to wear clothes completely of purple,

was the Roman Emperor himself.

It's kind of colour policing.

It's a bit like as if Queen Elizabeth II

was the only person in the country who was allowed to wear pink.

But it tells you quite a lot about Rome and the Roman Empire,

that this one very visible marker of political and social status

should have been the product of something that came from

the far-eastern side of the Mediterranean.

No wonder Caius Pupius Amicus was proud of being a pupurarius.

The story of colour isn't just a story of luxury,

it's a story of identity.

The power that conspicuous consumption had

to mark you out as someone special,

whether you were supplying them or consuming them.

All these imports helped you distinguish yourself.

Like products and people,

even new gods arrive from far-flung parts of the empire.

You could have your own style, your own taste, your own beliefs.

But let's not get too carried away by all this exotic stuff

that the empire offered up.

What the foreign purple on the senator's toga tells us

is that you could be completely foreign and absolutely Roman

at the same time.

The Romans had a way of thinking about other cultures

that is quite unlike our own.

We mustn't make the mistake of imagining

that Rome is a sort of touchy-feely cultural melting pot.

Yes. If you wear the wrong clothes, they make fun of you,

if you speak strangely, they make fun of you.

They're big conformists. There's too many Greeks here,

the Jews don't eat food properly on the Sabbath,

all that sort of stuff.

Why don't they eat pork? How silly!

The poet Martial, who is going on about the puella Romana

who hasn't experienced a mentula Romana.

The Roman chick who's never had a Roman dick.

You know, it's crude stuff, but nasty in its way.

'The irony is, the man who wrote this came from Spain.

'They're not laughing at other races,

'they're laughing about people who don't do things the Roman way.'

Although people come to this city from all over the world,

you don't end up with a Chinatown or a Little Italy

in the way that we have in the great metropolitan cities today.

These people are ruling the world, the senators govern Portugal,

govern in Egypt, they govern along the Danube,

and they never come back and say,

"I had this great meal the other day."

They'll talk about ingredients from all over the world,

but what you do with it, the actual cuisine, the cooking,

it's got to end up proper Roman cookery.

They've got this city that is unlike anything

that has been created before.

It has a much greater diversity

of people, of customs, of languages,

thousands of languages probably, hundreds of languages at least,

spoken in the city of Rome.

But they only write in Greek and Latin more or less all the time,

a tiny bit of Hebrew.

What we are seeing here

is the most culturally,

ethnically, religiously diverse city

that there had ever been in the world,

but the way they are doing multiculturalism

is quite different from the way we do multiculturalism.

Yes. There is cultural diversity,

but what there isn't

is a diversity of cultures.

There's an ironic logic here.

Because Roman culture was in itself such an amalgam,

they simply saw no need

for alternative cultures to exist in parallel,

still less to respect them.

In Rome, diversity wasn't about separateness.

There wasn't a Chinatown or even a Jewish quarter.

In fact, your average Roman would have been amazed

at the way we try to respect and preserve different cultures.

Here, the people were from everywhere,

the food came from everywhere,

the gods were from everywhere,

but it all went into the blender

and it came out Roman.

The empire was doing two things to Rome.

They were parading all the exotic and luxurious strangeness

of the outside world.

But at the same time, the distinction between Romans

and the subject peoples

was dissolving all the time.

Eventually, every free adult male in the empire

could call himself a Roman citizen.

For me, there's one place

which captures the contradictions of Imperial Rome...

There was a people's palace here - it was the Colosseum.

It was built and paid for out of the spoils of the Jewish War

as a gift to the Roman people.

But one thing's for sure, some of them had to climb a lot of stairs!

I'm in the only part of the Colosseum

that I'd be allowed to go to.

Women, slaves and other undesirables in the Roman world

had to be up on the gods.

So what does it look like from the undesirables' point of view?

Let's not think for a moment about the blood and guts -

there was certainly plenty of that.

Let's think of it in terms of Empire.

What you had on display in front of you

was all the biggest and best the Empire could offer.

People often compare this to a football match,

but if so, this is not just Premier League, this is the World Cup.

Fantastic combat,

weird, exotic creatures,

animals you could only have dreamt of.

When this place opened,

they even had a rhinoceros running wild down there.

This is one place we can see the Roman Empire

from the ordinary person's-eye view.

This guy is looking at the show and then...

During a pause, or while he wasn't looking at it,

he's scratching the scene that he was seeing in the arena.

And what have we got?

We can see wild animals, like a panther...

There's two bears! ..and a couple of bears.

Right. And Bestiarius.

And Bestiarius. Look at those muscles in his arm,

biceps or whatever they are,

a really muscly bloke.

I think this is great,

because it not only gives us a spectator's viewpoint

but it also captures that moment of what it was like to be here.

'This guy wasn't alone.

'The Romans just couldn't get enough of drawing the beasts

'they ogled in the Colosseum.'

'When you saw them for the first time,

'these exotic animals must have been breathtaking.

'The same goes for the other stars of the show -

'the human performers.'

This is a fantastic treat for me

because it's a real-live gladiator's helmet -

or a real-dead gladiator's helmet, from Pompeii.

It's very weird and heavy.

If you pick it up,

it's got a great crest on it

and a bust of Hercules just facing out at you,

just to scare the opponent.

I can't quite put it on

but I can get the feeling of what it's like having it on.

What it makes you see is it's jolly heavy

and you get a very, very difficult view from inside

because everything's kind of shaded off

both by the peak and by the protective grille.

I mean, I don't quite see

how you would know where the blasted enemy was, honestly.

The other thing about it is it looks to us fantastically weird

and I think it would look like that to the Romans too.

The point about these gladiators

is that they're not dressed in standard Roman army issue.

They're not the kind of fighters you'd see

if you went to fight the Barbarians.

These are mad, weird, exotic foreign costumes,

meant to exude the mysterious outside world

and all the violence that there might be in it.

In a way I think, what we're seeing here is sort of a fancy dress.

I think what you'd get the sense was...

that people would come to see the costume

as much as they'd come to see you.

Margh!

Where do I go now? Hard to see!

So, when I think about gladiatorial combat,

I know that some of it was to the death. People did get killed.

But more, and more often,

it was a show, it was a spectacle, it was theatre.

In my mind, it's kind of more like the sort of charade of wrestling

than the real-life combat of boxing.

And part of the reason for that was simply economics.

You've got hundreds of gladiators, they're extremely expensive,

you don't want them killed off too often.

Bit of a disparity of size here but I'm afraid Thraex is out.

Whoops!

We have a victorious Murmillo.

Congratulations!

To the Romans, gladiators represented a violent fantasy

of the outside world fighting in their midst.

But there's a fascinating irony

in the real origins of the men behind the masks.

I've got a wonderful drawing, an old drawing here,

the original stone has long ago been lost,

but it's a tombstone of a man called Marcus Antonius Exochus,

who tells us he came from Alexandria

to fight in some gladiatorial games put on by the Emperor Trajan.

And here's another text of a tombstone,

put up by a man called Phouskinos,

who was a provocateur, another sort of gladiator.

His tombstone's in Greek and he tells us that he was an Egyptian.

These gladiators came from the same wildly different backgrounds

as everyone else in Rome.

But their real stories were much more mundane

than the exotic roles they were forced to play in the arena.

It reveals the kind of smoke and mirrors aspect of all this

because underneath all that,

some gladiators were pretty domestic,

or they certainly ended up so.

They finished up, perhaps long retired,

longish life, wife and kids.

One of the nicest ones is a man here

who lived to the age of 45.

He'd come from Tungria, he was a Belgian.

But the tombstone is put up to him by his wife

and little Justus, his son.

Even Exochus, exotic as he looks,

seems to have ended up life, to judge from his name,

as a Roman citizen.

He presumably retired

and lived out his life somewhere in suburban Italy.

A bit like Marcus Antonius Exochus of Tunbridge Wells.

An Egyptian playing the part of a Thracian warrior,

then settling down as a Roman family man?

To me, that's Imperial Rome in a nutshell.

The Colosseum dramatised this frightening,

thrilling idea of Rome and the outside world.

It's all violence, confrontation and strangeness.

The truth is that the real Empire was not just fighting in the arena,

it was sitting in the seats.

There are places in the Colosseum reserved for the Gaditani,

the people of Cadiz in Spain,

for an African senator and a Gothic chieftain.

In reality, the fearsome barbarians had become Romans

and were watching the action like everyone else.

So, what's the Colosseum doing then?

At one level, it's showing the people of the city

what they get from Empire.

But in a deeper sense, it's showing them that they fit in.

If the people who were killing each other in the arena

were stereotypical foreigners,

then by implication, if you were watching them, you were a Roman.

It's trying to put everything in an order that makes sense.

The point about the Colosseum

is that it was both a microcosm of the city of Rome

and a microcosm of the Roman Empire

and it helps to show how the boundaries between what was Roman

and what was foreign increasingly broke down.

In Rome, for the first time in history,

people from Asia, Africa and Europe

could sit together as citizens of the same state.

Rome was the first global city and it contained in it

all the contradictions that global cities have had ever since.

It was diverse but it wasn't tolerant.

Foreign enemies were crucified,

enslaved and forced to fight in the arena

but equally, foreigners could rise to be emperor.

Point is, the distinction the Empire made

was not between Romans and foreigners

but between those who resisted and those who joined in.

The key question in our story is

what was it like to live in the world's first city

where almost everyone came from somewhere else?

There must have been plenty of people

who felt very far from home and rootless.

For some, there were profits to be made and success to be had

and an exciting, even if bewildering,

mixture of new ideas, different cultures and different religions.

Whatever you'd been back home, in Rome, you could reinvent yourself.

It's not hard to imagine the fears and anxieties

of those ordinary Romans, wherever they were from.

"How do I fit into all this?

"Who knows who I am?

"Who's going to remember me when I'm dead?"

Perhaps that's why they were so keen

to write their stories onto their tombstones.

They're deliberately speaking to you and me.

This guy's really having a conversation.

"Stranger," he says,

"hospes", hang on a minute!

"Resiste", stop here!

"Take a look down to your left.

"That's where my bones are buried,"

my ossa.

"I was a good man, I was a kind man," misericordis,

"and I was a lover of the poor," amantis pauperis.

"Please, traveller," please, viator,

"I beg you, don't mess with my tomb."

And the name of the guy is Gaius Attilius Euhodus,

the ex-slave of a man called Serranis.

Euhodus sounds Greek to me and he tells us what he did.

He was a margaritarius, he was a pearl seller.

That's who's buried in this tomb.

"Traveller", he says, viator, "on your way now."

"Goodbye," vale.

Vale.

Next time,

I'll descend into the city streets

to explore their high-rise tenements, crime-ridden slums

and life in the bars and the bathhouses.

And we'll find some very distinctive Roman voices,

born from the earthiness of communal city life.

This is how we have to imagine the ancient city,

everyone shitting together.

Tunics up, togas up, trousers down,

chatting as they went.

'Ancient Rome was once the centre of a vast empire

'that stretched from Spain to Syria,

'dominating the Western world for over 700 years.

'In many ways, we still live under its shadow.'

Like it or not, the Romans are still all around us -

in our laws, in our architecture, in our roads.

And we keep on recreating them in film and fiction.

And every year, thousands of us trek here, to Rome,

to see the monuments up close.

'But hidden all over the modern city, in its walls,

'behind its facades, even under its streets,

'is something much harder to find but just as captivating -

'the forgotten voices of its ordinary people.'

Here's a great kid, holding his little pet dog.

And I guess it's his mum and dad on either side.

And up above, there's the tombstone

of "Curiatia Ammia."

And she was someone's best-beloved partner, "concubina amatissima."

'In this series,

'I'm getting the voices of these Romans speaking again,

'to piece together a more intriguing view of ancient Roman life.'

This wasn't just a mugging...

..this was mass murder!

'They'll reveal a world so different from our own,

'and yet eerily familiar.'

She liked to get a bit drenched in Bacchus.

So what he's saying is, she was a bit of a wild thing,

and she really liked a drink or two.

'We've already seen how the Empire turned Rome

'into the world's first global city,

'where everyone, everything was from somewhere else.

'Now I'm going down into the streets to explore its slums,

'its bathhouses and bars,

'where the crime, sex and humour in everyday Roman life

'shows us what it was really like

'to live in an ancient city of a million people.'

We think of ancient Rome as all white, marble columns,

and classical order.

But actually, it was a chaotic place, rambling and dirty.

It was a right mess.

It was as much a shanty town as it was Trafalgar Square or Washington DC.

Welcome to my Rome.

This is a fantastically detailed model of the ancient city of Rome.

It's got all the familiar things in it -

the Coliseum, the Imperial Palace,

the temples, the gleaming marble, the pleasure gardens.

But for my taste, it's all a bit grand.

And it's a bit misleading,

because it misses out so many important things

that I want to try and get back in.

The smell. The dirt.

The pubs. The slums.

And it doesn't answer the questions that we want to ask.

What was it like to be a kid in this city?

Where did you go to the lavatory?

What did you do if you got ill?

What was it like to be just an ordinary Roman?

'So how do we start to answer these questions?

'In fact, there's a lot more evidence than you might think,

'hidden away all over modern Rome.'

When you first come into a place like this,

what hits you in the eye is the rich Romans.

The great and the grand.

But look behind them, look at the wallpaper, as it were,

and you'll hear a babble of ordinary Roman voices

trying to be heard.

In fact, behind this emperor, here,

there's the tombstone of a little girl

who lived just two years, ten months and 23 days.

She's waving goodbye.

Most tombstones today record just the bare essentials.

But the Romans often told us a lot more about themselves.

They're asking anyone and everyone to read about their ordinary

and extraordinary lives from beyond the grave.

And what they give us aren't just the success stories,

but a unique vision of life at the bottom of the social heap too.

This guy certainly wants us to know about his troubles in life.

His name is Ankarenus Nothus.

He lived for 43 years

and he's the ex-slave of a woman, which is what that symbol means.

This is what he has to say about his life and what it's like being dead.

It happens to everybody, he says. My bones are now resting sweetly.

"Dulciter."

And I'm no longer worried that I might die of starvation.

"Esuriam."

And I don't any longer have those awful aching feet

and I'm not contracted to my rent payments.

"Pensionibus."

That's a quite technical phrase,

but it really means - I'm no longer in hock to the rent collector.

In fact, I'm enjoying board and lodging. "Hospitio.

"Gratis."

For free. For eternity.

"Aeterno."

The stone was put up by his wife and by his daughter

to her father, who she calls "indulgentissimus",

who's very indulgent.

He spoiled her something rotten.

There are three things that stand out.

How am I going to get my next meal?

What shall I do if I'm ill, and how shall I pay the rent?

And we know that the figure of the rent collector-cum-bailiff -

called extractor in Latin -

was one that terrified the Roman poor.

Ankarenus Nothus might have been a bit of a joker

and his family might have been trying to tug on our heartstrings,

but the important point is that these few lines sum up the plight.

The grim realities of life for so many ordinary Romans.

So, where might someone like Ankarenus Nothus have lived with his family?

It's pretty clear he didn't live in the marble villas

we think of when we think Ancient Rome.

One of the best places to get a glimpse of his world

actually still survives in the centre of town,

hidden in the shadow of the Vittorio Emanuele monument.

One of Rome's most famous modern landmarks.

This humble brick building doesn't look like much from the outside.

Most visitors walk past it without even giving it a glance.

But once you know what it is, a very different Rome opens up

before your eyes.

This building was converted into a Christian church.

But originally, it was an ancient Roman high-rise apartment block.

The city was full of them. They were called, in Latin, insulae.

That means islands.

So, think away the churchy bits, and Ancient Rome lies underneath.

Right down there, you can still see the ancient street level, and facing

onto the street, there are a series of shops with wide entrances.

And above them, little mezzanine flats.

So these guys were literally living above the shop.

But up here, there were six, perhaps seven more floors.

More than survive today. But to get the real authentic Roman impression,

you have to remember that just a few feet that way,

there was another block like this.

So this wasn't so much a nice open road down there,

it was a narrow alley.

It must have felt like a canyon between two vast buildings.

The flats are usually locked up,

but I've got permission to have a look around with my colleague

Ed Bisphum, who's been here many times before.

So we are at what's the first floor. This is the first floor proper, yeah.

And this, then, is the window. This is the window.

So we are really burgling. We are breaking and entering here.

Right, OK.

Gosh.

The windows have since been blocked, but on the first floor,

there was once a spacious apartment where a reasonably

well off family might have lived with their children and slaves.

You wouldn't be pushed for space in here as a single family.

You've got probably four nicely barrel-vaulted rooms here.

But further up the building, light, space

and fresh air was in much shorter supply.

Up here, off each dark corridor, are four or five rooms just a few

metres square.

We don't know for sure how many people lived here,

but to get a million people into a city the size of Rome,

you had to pile them high and squash them in.

My guess is that these weren't single occupancy.

This looks a bit spacious, but that's because

the dividing walls have gone, so you've got to imagine a wall here...

Going right the way up to the vault,

with maybe a little light window in it.

The thing that always kind of shocks me

is the sense that we might have had six people "living" in here.

This is one step up...

One or two steps up, actually, from the real bottom of Roman society, isn't it?

Yeah, compared to sleeping in a tomb or under an aqueduct arch,

this is quite bijou. SHE LAUGHS

Here's another bijou apartment. This is really small.

We've got to get, well,

let's say we might have four or six people in here.

You know, one question is, how do they fit?

And I'm now going to see what it would be like.

How much space does one person take up trying to get to sleep on the floor?

Urgh!

Not much space left. No, no.

And who are the guys and the women who are living in these?

What are they doing? The guys are probably working on constructions.

When you think of a big thing like the baths of Caracalla.

The baths of Diocletian.

We're talking 6,000 to 10,000 people on a four-year building job,

and then there's porterage.

Humping goods from the barges to the warehouse... Yeah, sacks of grain, yeah.

Day labour. You get it when you can.

You've been working all day, humping stuff about. You get back here.

You're soaked in sweat. You stink. You don't have any spare clothes.

There's no running water. You can't have a bath.

There's three other smelly guys sleeping on the floor too.

Or there's your, your partner. Your female partner, and two kids.

Yes. I mean...

One thing is to think about these as sort of male dorm accommodation,

which I think a lot of them must be, but for some of them...

You know, there are women having babies here. Yes. You know? And actually...

where I'm sitting, some woman probably gave birth.

That's what's scary. Yeah.

And that wasn't even the top of the block.

There were even more storeys above this one.

A basic rule was, the further you went up, the worse it got.

There were no luxury penthouses here.

This was social climbing backwards.

In their time, these tenements must have been the tallest

residential buildings on the planet.

But they were built poorly, cheaply and fast

and only a handful have survived to any height, so the fact is,

we no longer think of Ancient Rome like this.

But that is how we should see it.

Not just a city of marble, but a city of tower blocks,

and the ordinary people who lived in them.

Perhaps the best place to get a snapshot of the kind

of community you might have found in a Roman high-rise

is now hidden at the bottom of a garden in a Roman suburb.

In this extraordinary communal tomb lie the remains of every

walk of Roman life.

There's hundreds and hundreds of them here.

And greeting you when you come in is a little face, and it's a touching

story because it's Valeria Italis, who was the sweetheart of Hilarus.

I bet he made sure that he got his sweetheart into prime position.

This is a...just fantastic kind of career directory

of the ordinary Roman people.

This was probably quite a bruiser.

It's Sinnio, the bodyguard.

And, in the corner here...

..we've got the barber. Marcus Valerius, the barber.

And...

Ah... Hygia, the midwife.

And up there - and I am not going to risk a Roman ascent up there -

we have got a nice accountant.

All of Roman life is here.

But this isn't just a Roman job directory, it is a wonderful glimpse

into how the Romans lived, stacked up in death, not just in life.

Trying to understand ancient Rome is always a bit of a post-mortem.

I mean, they're dead, the Romans are dead.

But they can still speak to us.

Not just the rich and powerful, not just the great writers,

but the ordinary people, like those in this tomb.

They send us these little tweet-size messages telling us

who they were, what they did, and saying, "Remember me!"

It is one of my very favourite places in the city of Rome

because it gets us close to real people with real jobs, and real names.

Sinnio, the bodyguard. Hygia, the midwife.

We find them here in death, just like they did in life.

This is a kind of burial high-rise.

And also, I can't help thinking, somewhere behind this,

there might have been a landlord asking the dead for their rent.

Today, modern Rome isn't a world apart from the ancient one.

And seen from the air, it's still a city of rented apartment blocks in a grid of little islands.

But apart from that modern model, how else can

we get closer to the way the ancient city was actually laid out?

At the Museum of Roman Civilisation, packed up in boxes,

is a tantalising clue.

It's sadly not usually on display, but what's inside

are the remains of a precious Roman map, carved in stone -

a kind of marble A-Z that once showed

a complete ground plan of the city.

Over the last few hundred years,

about 1,000 fragments have been discovered - only ten percent of it.

But luckily, a few bits do still fit together.

It's not hard on any jigsaw puzzle to recognise the Colosseum.

And here, you can see circular lines of the seating of the Colosseum.

And above it is written what looks like,

although we've only got the very end of the word,

"amphitheatrum" the amphitheatre.

And that was what people called the Colosseum in the Roman world,

they didn't call it "Colosseum".

What strikes me as I look at it here, actually,

is how big this thing was.

The calculation is that it's at the scale of 1:240.

That fills a whole whacking wall with an image of the city of Rome.

But even more intriguing than those pieces of the grand Rome

are the fragments of the map which show in extraordinary detail

the streets, houses and apartment blocks where ordinary Romans

lived and worked.

And what they show is that Rome had not been laid out by city planners.

It had grown chaotically over time.

It fits! SHE LAUGHS

So what we've got here is a really mixed area.

We've got the rich houses, the rather large ones, quite posh

with little portico gardens at the back.

Even these large houses have got shops or workshops opening

directly onto the street in front.

And opposite those houses is what looks to me like

a kind of medium-rank high-rise building.

Over here is what looks, for all the world, like a warehouse.

This is a bit more of a mystery. It's got columns round about.

And these rather strange U-shaped things in the middle.

The current idea is that these are hedges,

so this is some sort of garden,

possibly private, possibly public, possibly religious, who knows.

What this reminds me

is that Rome is not zoned in the way that many modern cities are.

Rome was a place where the rich lived next to

the shops and to the workshops and to the bar,

and to the not-so-rich, and to the warehouse, and to the public garden.

The other thing is that the streets themselves are pretty narrow.

And this one, on the plan, looks like a main highway.

And in a way, it is. But if you look at its width,

it's only as wide as these little shops are deep.

And if you go round here, there is a tiny little passageway

that certainly, you wouldn't want to walk down late at night.

Rome is not like Paris. It isn't full of boulevards.

Rome was a rabbit warren.

It is frustrating in a way that so little of the map has survived,

but there are other ways to get a feel for the ancient streetscape,

like coming to a mediaeval street in the modern city.

Ancient Rome's roads were so narrow and its roofs

so perilously high that they were full of dangers,

like falling chamber pots.

And Roman writers jokingly recommended that

no Roman go out without writing a will.

We even know of one 13-year-old tourist, Papirius Proculus,

who was brained by a flying roof tile.

There are all kinds of things here that remind me of the Roman streetscape.

This little shop opening directly onto the street.

The lock-ups, how narrow it all is.

There is actually a story told by one Roman writer about how he could

shake hands with the guy living in the apartment across the road.

You couldn't quite do that here, unless you had really long arms,

but it's not far off.

I also wonder about the kind of street community you had here.

The funny thing about the story of the two guys who could shake hands is that they never did.

In fact, the writer says he never saw the guy on the other side of the street,

he never even heard him.

Which makes me think that amongst all this face-to-face proximity,

amongst the on-top-of-each-other living,

for some people, it must have been a pretty anonymous kind of city.

That Roman writer was a poet called Juvenal,

a satirist who lived in Rome around 100 AD.

So how might HIS domestic arrangements compare with ours today?

To help me find out, a very gracious Italian lady

living on the same street has let me poke around her apartment.

Buongiorno! Come va? Bene. Sono Mary...

'Looking at the modern setup can help us see

'what's distinctively different about the ancient one.'

It may seem a bit odd just barging into someone's house like this,

but I've got a simple point to make.

On the outside,

a place like this looks much like an ancient Roman apartment block.

But come inside and it reminds you of the differences.

Now, that's not just the washing machine, the microwave.

We know the Romans didn't have those.

But all the things that we take for granted as absolutely basic services here -

running water, a lavatory, heating.

Actually, some natural light.

Many of the people living on the upper floors of a Roman high-rise wouldn't even have those.

Now, the consequence of that is absolutely obvious.

You simply had to go out to get almost everything that we

take for granted as having at home.

You went out to eat, to wash, to get water,

and if you didn't throw it out of the window, to go to the lavatory.

Grazie. Grazie tante.

It's a way of life that has largely disappeared from modern cities in the West.

But in ancient Rome, life was lived outdoors.

Rooms in a high-rise were used mostly just for sleeping.

Your basic facilities were spread out over the city.

As one amazing archaeological site not far from Rome makes clear

for ordinary Romans,

what we now do in private could be a far more public affair.

I just love this place.

If you want to understand a culture, look to its lavatories.

It's not a bad motto.

And this is a Roman communal toilet.

According to one ancient guidebook that survives,

there are 144 public latrines in downtown Rome.

But of course, we don't know how many seats each had.

It's not exactly clear how this worked. What about this channel?

Did it have running water in it,

or was it just to catch the drips and the bad aims?

And what about this hole? Was that for men to pee through?

Or was that where you put the sponge to wipe your bottom? Perhaps both.

And do we think it was unisex? Who knows?

But the point's a simple one - this is how we have to imagine the ancient city.

Everyone shitting together.

Tunics up, togas up, trousers down, chatting as they went.

And it wasn't just going to the lav that was a social activity.

Often, there was no sanitation on the upper floors of a high-rise,

so most Romans went to the public baths to wash

and let it all hang out.

We don't often you get to hear what

the baths meant to ordinary people.

But this tombstone

of an ordinary guy

interestingly lists baths,

and associated activities,

as one of THE great pleasures of life.

And he says, Here I am, I'm in this tomb...

"Primus notissimus..."

..known to the world as Primus, or famous Primus.

Then he goes on to say,

I lived on Lucrine oysters...

It's the very best you could get.

..and I often drank Falernian wine.

That's like saying, "I often drank the really best claret."

He has a nice summing up.

"Balnea,

"vina, venus..."

Baths, wine and sex.

"..me cum senuere per annos."

They grew old with me, I enjoyed them - I suppose -

till I was old.

We find that combination -

baths, wine and sex - elsewhere.

There's another nice tombstone of a man called

Tiberius Claudius Secundus

and he appeals to the same threesome,

but in a slightly more worldly-wise way.

"Baths, wine and sex," he said,

"ruin your body!"

True!

But they're what makes life really worth living!

When you look at Rome's baths,

it's not hard to see why ordinary Romans were so keen on them.

Built by various emperors,

the most famous were the size of small towns

and their ruins still loom large in the Roman cityscape.

By far the best preserved is actually one of the smaller sort

in the town of Herculaneum, not far from Pompeii.

It's an extraordinary place,

the only one where you can walk through Roman baths,

pretty much as they were.

WATER DRIPS

More Turkish baths than local swimming pool, they were centres

of social life, where locals didn't just get a place to sweat and steam,

they also got stalls for food and drink

and booths for a massage, a shave,

or maybe even sex on the side.

Although it's hard to visualise today,

there are vivid descriptions of the baths as rough, noisy places,

full of grunting gym-goers, men getting their armpits plucked

and loitering thieves, where you were as likely

to get your coat nicked as catch the clap.

The baths weren't just about hygiene -

they were about pleasure and about community.

Even the rich,

who had their own private baths at home,

even the Emperor,

might occasionally put in a celebrity appearance

at the people's baths.

In some ways,

they were a great social leveller.

Imagine - everybody's here in the nude.

It's then that the poor man,

aged 20, with a great body,

can turn the tables on that

60-year-old Roman plutocrat,

with a paunch and a hernia!

But in other ways,

they tended to reinforce the social hierarchy.

The poor came along with no-one to carry their stuff

or rub them down.

The rich came with a whole retinue of staff,

elbowing the man's way through to the pool,

pushing the poor aside.

In fact, there's a lovely anecdote of the Emperor Hadrian,

who goes to the public baths one day

and sees a man rubbing himself down against the wall.

Hadrian says, "What's that guy doing?"

And someone replies, "Oh, he's rubbing himself down on the wall

"because he doesn't have a slave to do it for him."

So the generous Emperor gives him a slave.

The next time Hadrian shows up at the baths,

there's 20 or so men rubbing themselves down against the wall,

all hoping for a little piece of imperial generosity.

But Hadrian's a canny old bird

and he says,

"Tell them to rub each other down!"

However exotic this world might now seem,

for me, spaces like the public baths and toilets

tell us a lot about how

Roman communal living created those voices

that feel so familiar today.

Sure, some of them have got serious messages, but they're also

wonderfully sardonic,

irreverent, and so recognisably urban.

There's a marvellous guy from Tivoli, Flavius Agricola,

and he's got some great advice on his tombstone.

"Put on your party hats, my friend,

"drink down that wine,

"and don't say no to sex with pretty girls,

"because you won't get a chance when you're dead."

That's what urban living,

cheek-by-jowl, bottom-by-bottom, is all about.

It makes you live faster,

talk faster and think a bit differently.

PEOPLE CHATTER

One of the big best places to glimpse the humour

and saltiness of this world

is the ancient Roman bar.

Much like any modern Italian city,

Rome was awash with hundreds of taverns and eating places,

ranging from seedy dens and strip joints to something

much more like the modern winebar or gastropub.

Today, these places are nice lifestyle extras,

but if you were living at the top of an ancient high-rise, the streets

were your living room, the baths your bathroom

and this was your kitchen.

So, who do you meet in a Roman bar?

Well, the poet Juvenal

conjures up a really disreputable crew who, he says,

hang out in Roman bars - thieves and cutthroats,

runaways, even the local coffin-maker,

because in Rome, it's the poor who are eating out,

the rich are dining at home.

We mustn't forget the landlord and landlady.

We get a little glimpse of them in an amazing tombstone

found just outside Rome,

put up to a pair of innkeepers, man and wife.

He's called Lucius Calidius Eroticus

and she's Fanniae Voluptas.

Now, these have just got to be trade names,

because Calidius Eroticus

means Mr Hot Sex

and Fanniae Voluptas... well, she's Madame Gorgeous,

so it's the bar of Hot Sex and Mrs Gorgeous!

Don't get the wrong idea about Fanniae, though,

because it doesn't mean that in Latin!

Quite a few ancient bars have actually survived,

but one in particular, in Pompeii,

captures the flavour of ancient bar life on its walls.

Here, at eye level, in its back saloon,

are wonderfully vivid images

of Romans eating and drinking, gambling and being served wine.

And here, one that's been sadly hacked away,

probably by some Victorian moralist,

because what it showed,

as we can tell from an early 19th-century picture of it,

is a couple of people - a bloke and woman -

having sex,

with wine glasses in their hand,

simultaneously, and balanced on a tightrope.

All that's left of it is the bloke's feet!

Whether life in the average Roman pub

was quite as raunchy as these pictures suggest, I don't know,

but there are plenty of graffiti round Pompeii, saying words

to the effect of, "I screwed the barmaid,"

so it doesn't take much to guess

what happened after closing time.

And certainly, the Roman rich

were paranoid about pub culture.

It's here they thought that the people got above themselves,

planned riots, got awkward,

got very drunk, and they were hugely disdainful

of the kind of vulgarity of it all.

Of course, the rich have always said that kind of thing.

They gambled themselves silly,

but take a couple of poor travellers and give them a game of dice

and the rich are prophesying instant moral decline.

The best example of a bar that isn't bothered by any of this moralising

is in ancient Ostia, a harbour town not far from Rome.

Inside are a set of paintings that take us right into the world

of Roman anti-establishment bar humour.

The art historian John Clarke has come to explore it with me.

Come in here

and you see these men...

We've only got the tops of them

because later on, they got cut off and lost.

But they are sitting on a common latrine.

Here, the artist has given them speech lines

above each of their heads.

We have "mulione sedes" -

you're sitting on a mule driver.

A mule driver was a common saying for being constipated,

because mule drivers were very stubborn.

So this is a very stubborn evacuation procedure.

So this guy has got constipation. Right. That one is quite wonderful.

It's my favourite, actually.

"Amice fugit te proverbium - bene caca et irrima medicos?"

That's a bad word.

It would be something like this.

Buddy, don't you know the saying -

"shit well and bugger the doctors"?

In other words, you don't need them.

Higher up on the wall are images

of the great thinkers of ancient Greece -

the Seven Sages - only three of which are left.

Thales from Miletus.

Solon from Athens.

Chilon from Sparta.

Much loved by Roman teachers,

they were known for their high-minded catchphrases

on how best to live,

yet here, even they are literally talking crap.

Here's the best of all, really...

"Vissire tacite Chilon docuit subdolus."

Clever Chilon taught people how to fart without making noise.

Silent farting was a speciality, apparently!

Chilon's the one who did say, you shouldn't...

His canonical saying is - you shouldn't desire the impossible.

Maybe it's possible to learn how to be a silent farter. Who knows!

We shouldn't get the impression from a place like this

that the only thing the ordinary Romans joked about

was their bowels and their constipation.

In fact, an amazing collection of Roman popular jokes still survives.

Almost 300 of them. The Roman joke book.

And that shows Romans joking about almost everything.

One of my favourites goes like this...

A man is walking along the street, he meets a friend and says,

"Oh, are you alive? I heard you were dead."

He replies, "Look, you can see I'm alive."

"Oh," said the other.

"The man who told me you were dead, is much more reliable than you are."

Silly joke, perhaps a slightly nasty joke, but for me,

it opens up one of the big problems of big-city living.

In a world without ID cards or passports,

who are you?

How do you know who you are?

How do you prove who you are?

That's a problem.

What jokes like these do

is take us into the minds of ordinary Romans,

but they also give us a different view

on how to picture the ancient city streets.

They really weren't filled with all the big guys, the toffs,

the togas, the politicians, they were flooded by its ordinary people.

This was the people's city.

You wouldn't have come across

many of the rich and powerful in the streets and squares of ancient Rome.

They'd much more likely have been hurried along in a sedan chair

carried by slaves, curtains drawn, a bit like a modern celeb

in a modern, chauffeur-driven blacked-out limo.

These kind of places were the people's places

for doing business, for grabbing a bite to eat, for fighting,

for flirting, for just hanging out.

And it could all get pretty packed,

as one tragic tombstone makes horribly clear.

It's put up to a woman called Ummidia

and to Ummidius Primigenius, a boy of 13 years old.

It's put up by Ummidius Anoptes, probably her partner.

He explains, "una dies" - one day, carried them both off.

They met the final day of their destiny together.

How did they die?

"Compressi examine turbae."

They were crushed by the swarm of a crowd.

Now, we don't know what was going on in Rome that day,

but it sure gives you a very clear idea

of just how crowded the city could get.

If this gives us a clue

on how to re-people the streets of ancient Rome,

what happens when you look at its most famous public space

through this lens?

That space is known as The Forum.

It's now a picturesque but sad wreck of what it once was,

and honestly, it's hard for almost anyone to make head or tail of.

This was once the location of some of the city's main law courts,

political meeting places and grandest temples.

Let's forget for a bit the forum of the great speech makers,

the politicians, the celebrity lawyers,

the friends, Romans, countrymen types.

Of course, all of that stuff happened here,

but my Forum isn't the Forum of those bigwigs in their white togas.

My Forum is the Forum of the poor people, the middling people,

the ordinary people in their tunics, even in their trousers.

In fact, one Roman comic writer

has left us a guide to the types of the Forum.

A satirical guide to who you might find where.

I'm off to follow him.

This writer was a man called Plautus,

the author of boy-meets-girl farces.

What he gives us isn't the official guide

to the Forum as the big guys might want us to see it,

but a down and dirty rough guide.

This doesn't look great now, but it used to be a big public hall.

What does Plautus say?

He says,

this is where you find the bargain hunters

and the clapped-out prostitutes.

Elsewhere, Plautus talks about the wideboys,

the sort you might have found playing for profit

at one of the gaming boards you can still see

scratched all over the steps of one of the main law courts.

This is the board and it's got loads of dips in it.

Actually, someone has spent a long time making those great pockets.

It's always hard to reconstruct the rules of these games.

It's like having a Monopoly board

and a house and a get-out-of-jail-free card

and trying to reconstruct what you're supposed to do.

I'm going to give this game a try.

First off, the marbles.

Losing my marbles.

Perhaps what you did was tiddlywinks. That's a possibility.

Oh, look at that.

My conclusion from this academic experiment,

is that this is a tiddlywink board.

What about the Forum's temples of the Roman gods?

What does Plautus have to say about those?

This is one place where all those different levels of life

in the Forum come very nicely together.

It's the temple of the God Castor.

Those three columns are one of the most iconic images

of the whole forum.

But round the corner, we find a really different kind of temple.

Underneath, built into the temple itself,

is a row of little shops.

You walk a bit further on and you look to the back of the temple,

go back to Plautus, what does he say?

Rent boys.

And we don't just have to rely on a comic writer for evidence

of ordinary life in the Forum.

Modern archaeology has succeeded in backing him up.

When a group of Scandinavian archaeologists excavated

one of the temple's shops,

they unearthed some extraordinary ordinary objects,

including evidence of what looks like a Roman dentists.

Siri, tell me about these teeth.

They are one of the most amazing archaeological discoveries

ever made. There's 86 of them.

Where exactly were they found?

They were found in the drain of one of the shops

in the podium of the Temple of Castor and Pollux

and they were probably meant to be flushed down into the Cloaca Maxima,

which runs by the side of the temple, but for some reason, they got stuck.

And they've all been actually extracted, haven't they?

Their roots are pretty much whole.

No anaesthetic, apart from a quick glass of wine.

They must have screamed during these operations.

This is just somebody's agony. Yes.

'And I didn't just find rotten Roman teeth.'

It was something like a beauty parlour, I think.

We have these fine glasses for oils

and creams,

and this is a drinking cup.

They could also gamble.

See these dice?

Yeah, these are very nice dice.

Perhaps you were playing dice while you were waiting.

Instead of reading magazines, you were playing dice. Yes, yes, indeed.

And this looks like a tongue depressor.

Open wide! Yes!

Putting all this stuff together,

it's a really wonderful glimpse of the other side of the Forum.

This says the people's place as much as it is the rich people's place.

Yes. And this is the kind of stuff that the people are doing there.

They're playing dice and having their appalling teeth removed. Yes.

Urgh!

The Roman Forum is a great example

of how our traditional images of Rome are so skewed.

Sure, Rome was a society where the rich dominated the poor,

but it was also an incredibly mixed place,

where even its most sacred spaces were shared.

But just occasionally,

we can see some aggressive attempts to divide the toffs from the poor.

Most people come here to look at this vast temple

put up by the Emperor Augustus.

Nobody pays much attention though to that massive wall behind it,

and in a way, that wall can tell us

more about life in ancient Rome than the marble can.

On the other side of it was an area known as the Subura.

Not exactly slums, but mention Subura to your average Roman

and they'd think crime, prostitution,

something pretty seedy.

This wall's an ideological barrier.

It's saying to anyone who lived in the Subura,

"This is posh territory, keep out!"

There's another story too.

The Subura was full of rickety, wooden, jerry-built,

high-rise blocks, constantly falling down.

It was a real fire trap.

Actually, this wall is a vast firewall.

'Unsurprisingly, the buildings of the Subura have largely disappeared

'but some of the voices from the tenements,

'from that dangerous side of the city, have survived.

'One was found in the foundations of a modern office block in

'a rather grey part of suburban Rome.'

This is the tombstone of a little girl called Doris.

She was "Infelicissima", terribly unlucky.

Why was she unlucky?

Because she died in a fire, a sudden fire of incredible violence.

She had only just had her seventh birthday.

She was seven years and 22 days.

This was put up to her by one of her friends or family,

a woman called Licinia Hedone.

She ends rather touchingly,

"May your bones rest quietly

"and may the earth lie lightly on you."

Doris can't have been the only kid to die this way.

Fires were so common that large parts of the city

burned to the ground on numerous occasions.

But the point is, it wasn't just easy to start a fire,

it was very hard to put one out once it had started.

And there was no efficient, effective public Fire Brigade

in the terms that we know.

There was, it's true, a kind of paramilitary organisation

of watchmen, "vigiles", who did keep an eye open

for fires starting, but they hadn't got much effective equipment

to deal with them if they did.

A few poles to pull building downs to make a fire break,

some pails of water and vinegar

and some blankets to try and stifle the flames.

Some of them were probably pretty brave, but others were corrupt

and on the make.

One story is that in the Great Fire of Rome,

under the Emperor Nero,

the watch, instead of trying to put the flames out,

they joined in looting the buildings that were already ablaze.

I wonder if anyone came to try and rescue Doris?

And that's the big difference with our modern cities.

When you look around them,

it's easy to see all the things we take for granted,

everything from litter bins

to friendly or unfriendly cops on the corner.

But in ancient Rome, there were none of these services.

There was hardly a fire brigade, there was no police force,

no prisons, and the only real security forces

were in the pay of the rich.

To flesh out the picture, I went out to meet Corey Brennan,

from the American Academy in Rome.

The issue for me is why they didn't provide services.

Did the poor want the services?

Oh, I'm sure they did.

Because when that guy, Egnatius Rufus,

in the reign of the Emperor Augustus,

starts his own fire brigade, the Emperor Augustus,

instead of saying, "Well done, Egnatius, congratulations,

"thank you very much for helping the people of Rome,"

he basically had him executed. Yes, precisely.

It goes to show the competition amongst the ruling class,

amongst elites, because each one of them knew if they stepped forward

and effectively provided these types of social services,

that were really needed, that people really wanted,

the type of political cachet

that they could build just from that act

really would make it unbeatable,

so they really worked to cancel each other out, and the people who suffered

were, in fact, the Romans themselves.

But the lack of social services weren't the only problems

on the city streets.

They might have been filled with real life,

but real life, as in any modern city, could be hard to control.

Violence was an ever-present danger,

as one nastily familiar story tells us.

I am about to reveal

a nasty bit of Roman street crime,

a kind of Roman cold case.

It needs a bit of cleaning up first,

it's very dusty.

It's a tombstone

and it's put up by a lady called

Otacilia Narcisa,

to her darling husband.

"Coniugi dulcissimo."

His name...

was Julius Timotheus

and he lived, she said,

P-M - plus or minus 28 years.

That means Otacilia wasn't entirely certain

how old the husband was.

And he had "his blameless life

"snatched away from him

"a latronibus - by robbers."

Not just him -

he was with his

seven alumni.

That can mean foster kids, dependants,

sometimes even pupils.

They were all killed too.

That's what it really means.

This wasn't just a mugging,

this was mass murder.

If the streets were never completely safe by day, then by night,

we know they were lawless places.

The poet Juvenal writes graphically of having

to pick his way home in the dark, dodging the violent gangs

and drunken bullies on the prowl for fights.

Preserved under the foundations of a church in central Rome

is one place that helps us get close to this atmosphere.

Here are the mean streets of a real Roman neighbourhood.

We're a few hundred metres from the Colosseum

and this is a back alley.

This feels like a Roman street.

It's because it IS a Roman street!

What you've got to do,

if you try and reconstruct this,

you've got to think dirt. A lot of it. This is very clean.

You've got to think smell... A lot of it.

..but it's also...

it feels a bit scary.

It's a mugger's paradise, there's no doubt about it.

I mean, street crime's one thing but, you know,

apartment blocks directly on the street,

it's a burglar's, a cat burglar's paradise. Precisely.

When the Emperor Augustus really wanted people

to come to his games,

what he did was he distributed armed guards throughout the city,

because otherwise, people would be reluctant to leave their houses,

because it was known when there was a big game day, so to speak,

that's precisely... It's like New Year's Eve,

basically, that's the prime day to go robbing.

I mean, when there's a question of a serious breach of public order,

then the officials get interested.

So if the authorities had little interest in the day-to-day

welfare of their ordinary citizens,

what happened if you got murdered in streets like this?

How could your family pursue justice?

The Romans had the system of public courts

and the name is misleading because

what it was was courts that saw to

breaches of the social order.

So you get murder, but really, when there's a political...

Upper-class murder. Exactly.

They looked at conspiracy, setting fires.

In order to come in the purview of Roman law, you either have to go

after someone who's rich, well-connected and powerful,

or you have to be making a very big tear in the social fabric.

So if somebody murders my brother,

unless he's important, that's...

the only person who's going to do anything about it, really, is me.

Yes, the self-help.

Today, when we look at Rome's impressive marble monuments,

it's hard to imagine the dirty, dangerous, chaotic city

in which ordinary Romans lived their lives.

So little of it has survived above ground.

But if you know where to look,

it is still possible to get glimpses of their world -

the high-rise tenement blocks,

where tenants lived in fear of fires and the rent collector,

the grunts of gamblers and gym-goers in its bars and bathhouses,

and the hustle of life on its mean streets,

where there was no safety nets when things went wrong.

These streets must have been a tough place to live your life.

All the same, I can't help feeling that they had a spontaneity

and a fun about them that many of our streets have lost.

And just listen to those voices.

What they're saying is that despite all the dangers,

Rome was an exhilarating,

a life-affirming place to be.

And that's why it still speaks to us

after 2,000 years.

'Next week, I'll meet the Romans at home,

'where I'll discover some familiar objects of domestic family life...'

It's a really, really precious piece, because it's the only

cradle that survived from the Roman world.

'..and where I'll piece together a surprising view

'of Roman marriage, childhood,

'slavery and sex.'

This is a Roman menage-a-trois.

Today, when we think of ancient Rome, this is what we see.

A city of marble ruins, colossal amphitheatres

and imperial power.

A world of emperors and armies and lavish spectacle.

All those gladiators fighting to the death.

But what happens if we turn that upside down?

We take a look at Rome from the bottom up.

Hidden away, all over the modern city,

you can still find evidence for a very different ancient Rome.

The forgotten voices of its bakers and butchers,

its slaves and children.

Gosh, this is a sad one. "He lived for just one year."

"Vixet Annum Unum." The death of a baby.

Here we've got a young slave girl, aged 17.

"Africana."

"She came from Africa."

This wasn't just a mugging.

This was mass murder.

In this series, I've been exploring the lives of these ordinary Romans

through the extraordinary stories they tell us on their tombstones.

We've already seen how the Empire turned Rome

into the world's first global city,

a place where a million people from three continents lived together,

where life was full of luxury and laughter,

but also disease and danger.

In this final film, I want to delve even deeper

and go behind the closed doors of the Roman home

to lift the lid on their personal lives and prized possessions.

It's a really, really precious piece because it's the only cradle...

SHE LAUGHS ..to survive from the Roman world.

And take you to meet some extraordinary, ordinary Romans

who'll reveal an intimate, at times dark,

but very surprising picture of the Roman family.

Step through the front door into a Roman home

and you'll find a place brimming with stories,

from the shocking to the sweet.

Loving couples, that's for sure, but also teenage pregnancies,

abandoned babies, drunken housewives, runaway slaves,

menage-a-trois

and a very nasty case of domestic violence.

Welcome to my Rome.

This house in Pompeii

is the perfect example of a conventional Roman home.

You come through the front door into a grand formal hall

with several rooms off it.

Pool for collecting water, and opposite the front door,

a reception room-cum-study called, in Latin, the tablino.

'The standard view is that this is where

the master of the house presided,

dressed in his toga, receiving his guests,

while at the back of the house, in the private quarters,

is where we find the wife and kids

and the cook, slaving away over a hot oven.

The problem with that is

there's a touch of the Frankie Howerd Mr and Mrs Pompeii about it.

Or, to put it another way,

there's temptation for us to take a rather idealising image

of our own families,

dress them up in togas, add a couple of slaves,

and say, "Hey presto! That's a Roman family."

And it's not actually entirely wrong,

and there's some quite strikingly familiar things about a Roman house,

right down to some of them having a "Beware Of The Dog" sign

at the front door.

But if you look a bit harder, you find it isn't quite so simple.

So, how do we start to bring back to life

what really went on within the walls of a Roman home?

And how do we get close to a real Roman family?

Well, the best way is to look at what the Romans themselves

tell us from beyond the grave.

When you come into a place like this,

what first hits you in the eye are the statues of the rich,

stern emperors and ladies with expensive hairdos.

But if you look behind them,

you'll find thousands of ordinary Roman voices,

compelling us to read their stories.

Some have forked out on portraits,

others on just a few lines of text.

But they all give you clues

about who they lived with and who they loved.

Here's a cute little boy with his pet dog.

Here's a dad.

He's commemorating his daughter, Giulia.

There she is. Really natty hairdo.

She must've been quite fashion-conscious, I think.

But one of the most striking things about all these tombstones

is how Roman husbands and wives portray themselves in death.

And if you want to know why we've inherited such a traditional view

of the Roman family,

then the best place to start is with Roman marriage.

So, this is one end of a big Roman marble coffin.

We don't know who was originally inside it,

but this end, at least, talks to us about marriage.

Got a husband, wife, and they're holding hands.

That's the absolutely classic image of the Roman married couple.

It's really such a cliched logo of Roman marriage

that stone carvers would have churned these things out

by the dozen.

This will all be prepared,

and the stonemason will just put your faces onto the heads.

Whatever it looks like,

it isn't an equal relationship, though.

In the stereotype, the husband has all the control.

The wife's job is to serve him every which way.

You even get some Roman epitaphs that sum up a woman's life,

just by listing her service.

She talked nicely, she walked nicely,

she had kids, she kept house, she made wool. Enough said.

And it goes right to the top of Roman society, too.

There's a lovely story about the Empress Livia,

the scheming, poisoning wife of the Emperor Augustus.

She's supposed to have taken great care that people saw her,

in the Imperial Palace itself,

spinning and weaving the wool for her husband's togas.

That was what Roman women were supposed to do.

On the surface, then, these tombstones show us

a rather poised, cool, even cold view of Roman marriage.

But tombstones tend to give that impression.

Even today, they trade in cliches.

But there's plenty of other evidence

that helps us get behind these stereotyped impressions.

At the British Museum in London is a wonderful collection

of Roman rings covered in the same imagery.

They look pretty familiar to us.

We know, actually, that what we call the wedding finger

was the favourite place to put a ring.

Some Roman doctors thought it was a direct link

between that finger and the heart.

But it's hard to get through these sort of standardised images

of the clasped hands.

Just occasionally, you can.

This ring here...

..it's a pretty plain ring,

but in the centre, it's got, written on it in Latin,

"Te Amo Parem."

Which means, literally, umm...

"I love you not enough." "I don't love you enough."

It's slightly odd at first sight.

It's particularly odd to imagine that

you would give a rather expensive gold ring to somebody to say,

"Here you are. Have this lovely ring.

"But I don't care for you that much!"

Think it's probably a bit cleverer than that.

And I think what the message must mean is,

"I can't love you possibly as much as you deserve to be loved.

"You are so fantastic and gorgeous and loveable

"that nobody could love you as much as you ought to be loved."

It's like a wonderfully rare, really rare, glimpse

of somebody's kind of personal voice,

sort of shouting through these rather cliched images of marriage.

That ring hints some of the passion you can find in Roman relationships.

But it's also there if you look beyond the man's voice

and think about it from the woman's side.

Scattered across Rome is an amazing trio of tombstones,

which although still written by men,

give us a much more intimate,

a more honest portrait of their partners.

You have to be a bit careful

about what husbands and wives say about each other on their epitaphs.

They do tell such terrible whoppers about their marriage.

"We lived together for 30 years without a cross word."

I don't imagine that that could've been any more true in ancient Rome

than it is now.

But just occasionally,

you find someone who comes a bit off-centre,

breaks through those cliches

and really conjures up the character.

This is a great example.

It's a tombstone of a woman called Glyconis,

put up by her husband.

Now, Glyconis is a Greek name and it means "sweet".

So, she's Sweetie. And he says that, in fact.

He says she is, "sweet by name but even sweeter by nature.

"She didn't like to be all proper and austere," he says.

"She much preferred to be a bit wild."

"Lascivos." "Rather sexy."

"Suaves." She liked to "get a bit drenched in Bacchus."

Now, Bacchus is the god of wine.

So, what he's saying is she was a bit of a wild thing

and she really liked a drink or two.

"It's a pity," he says, "she didn't live for ever."

After all that affection,

the next one reveals a much darker side to Roman marriage.

Here's another tombstone which doesn't look very special,

but has got a horrible sting in the tail.

It's put up by a husband and wife.

He's called Restutus Piscinesis.

And the wife is called Prima Restuta.

And they've put it up, "Fecerunt,"

to Primae Florentiae, their "dearest daughter,"

"Filiae Carissimai," "Dearest Daughter."

So far, so ordinary.

But HOW did she die?

"She was thrown," "Deceptaest,"

"In Tiberi," "into the Tiber,"

"by her husband, Orpheus."

"She was just 16-and-a-half years old."

If Mum and Dad are right, this was a case of domestic murder.

I'm afraid some things never change.

The woman in this last tombstone

deserves to be a lot more famous than she is.

Her story gives us a very different view

on Roman virtue and fidelity

and is put up to a woman called Alliae Potestatis.

And she's an ex-slave.

She's a "Liberta" of a man called Aulus, her partner.

Starts off with some pretty standard praise for a Roman woman.

She was "always the first to get out of bed in the morning

and "the last to go to bed at night,"

i.e. she was doing all the housework.

But then,

it starts to get a bit weirder...

..because the writer becomes...

..a bit strangely explicit about her body.

He says here,

"she's got lovely snow white breasts and small nipples"

and that "her arms and legs were beautifully smooth."

And then he explains why.

It's because she was a very "active depilator."

She "sought out every little hair and plucked it out."

But it gets even weirder than that.

This woman had actually "two lovers that she was living with."

One household held them all. "Una domus" held them all,

and they lived in a spirit of perfect harmony.

This is, in other words, a Roman menage-a-trois.

But after she died, the blokes went their separate ways,

and they're now growing old apart.

If you wanted just one example

of how Roman relationships could be as messy, as murky

and as mixed-up as our own,

it would have to be the household of Allia Potestas.

I can't help wondering, though, what Allia Potestas' version

of the story about these guys would have been.

So if these three voices tell us how we can fill the Roman home

with a more unexpected set of occupants,

what about the house itself?

Well, if you look beyond those rather posh houses in Pompeii

with their grand entrance halls and expensive paintings,

you'll find that Roman homes

came in just as many shapes and sizes as their relationships.

This place was in multiple occupancy.

It had three or four separate apartments,

and actually the walls inside were partly made of wicker.

A kind of ancient equivalent of prefab.

But don't think dirt poor,

there was a really pricey little collection of bronze statuettes

found in there.

This one is a pretty interesting one, actually,

because it seems to be partly apartment block,

but also partly lodging house,

partly B&B.

Just around the corner is one of my favourite Roman homes.

The ground floor flat

of what was once a quite comfortable Roman apartment block.

Anyone at home?

What's so surprising about this place is that its layout,

basically a series of rooms off a central corridor,

feels like any flat that you might find in any modern city.

It's now called the Insula of the Painted Ceiling,

for obvious reasons.

I almost feel I could move right in today!

Now, we don't know how many people would actually have lived here,

and that does make a difference to how we picture it.

And we certainly don't know exactly who they were,

but I don't find it difficult to imagine Glyconis or Allia Potestas

waking up early in a place like this.

The point is that most Romans didn't live in those grand houses

that you see in Pompeii.

They had all kinds of variety of accommodation.

Right at the bottom there were people who lived in slum tenements,

in a room over the shop,

or people who just bedded down under somebody else's staircase.

And this is comfortably in the middle.

This was someone's home, sweet home.

All the same, part of the difficulty we have

in trying to bring spaces like these alive

is that hardly any of the stuff that went into them has survived.

Imagine trying to work out what went on in a modern house

if we didn't have any of the furniture!

But the task is not entirely impossible.

Hidden away in a store room in Herculaneum

is a priceless treasure trove of domestic furniture

found in houses around the town.

Carbonised when Vesuvius erupted in AD 79,

they have been painstakingly put back together.

It's terribly evocative.

Here we've got a table, the kind of thing that you'd have by your bed,

it's what you eat and drink off,

don't imagine that all Romans lie down to eat,

they put their takeaways on here and sit down and have a nosh.

And here...

..two little wicker baskets.

I'm going to actually take the lid off.

Almost the kind of...

It's the stuff, the bric-a-brac that you'd find just in any Roman house.

It's as close as you can get to a Roman furniture shop.

There are table legs with stunning ivory decoration,

others with strange dogs carved all over them.

There's what we call a sofa bed,

which you can still see was beautifully inlaid.

Even a perfectly preserved cupboard

that I guess once held all sorts of trinkets.

It's beautiful. You can see all the little hinges

and the little handle.

But one find is the rarest of all.

And this is a baby's cradle.

It's a really, really precious piece,

because it's the absolutely the only cradle

that has survived from the Roman world,

and that makes you think that maybe we've just been unlucky

in not getting the other kids' cradles,

or maybe most babies didn't sleep in something like this,

but they bedded down in the ancient equivalent of a drawer,

or, actually, they slept in the bed with Mum or nurse.

When it was found, it actually had a tiny little skeleton in it,

and around the skeleton were bits of fabric textiles

and a whole load of leaves,

and it looks as if this baby was sleeping on a mattress

stuffed full of leaves, covered by a blanket,

when the eruption of Vesuvius came in 79

and put an end to that little life.

Still touching, though, isn't it?

Rocking the cradle that's been rocked by Roman mums and nurses.

For me, that collection of furniture is a symbol of all the things

we can put back into the Roman home if we try.

Not just the clutter,

but husbands and wives and their messy relationships, too.

Seeing a child's cradle up close reminds us

not to forget the children in the Roman household.

That baby, of course, didn't survive the eruption of Vesuvius,

but if it had, how different would its childhood have been from ours?

Nowadays, we separate childhood off from the adult world.

We dress kids in clothes quite different from adults,

we give them their own entertainment, their own books,

we even feed them different food,

and in the last 50 years,

we even invented the category of the teenager.

In ancient Rome, childhood was quite different.

We hardly ever see or hear the kids in a Roman home.

They're usually cast out at the back of the house, rarely mentioned.

Today, the only way we can hear their voices

is to look at the dead ones.

These books hold a record of over 30,000 tombstones

from the city of Rome.

Every age, sex and walk of life,

but what hits your first is the sheer number of child tombstones.

There's just hundreds and hundreds of them.

I mean, here's little Titius Eutychus.

He lived to be just four.

Here's Titius Posphorus.

He made it to five.

Over the page, Titiae Regillae.

She was one years old and five months and 11 days.

That's only a few of the Ts.

And it fits absolutely with what we know about child mortality in Rome.

At least half of the kids wouldn't have lived until they were ten,

a third wouldn't have made it to their first birthday.

And I think you have to have a heart of stone

not to be moved by that statistic.

All the same, it isn't quite all gloom and doom.

My absolute, absolute favourite

is a tremendous character.

A little girl who died when she was just five,

but we can really get a sense of her.

She was called Geminiae Agathe Matri.

It turns out she was a bit of a tomboy.

"I had a 'pueri voltum' - the face of a boy.

"But I was a gentle soul - 'ingenio docili'.

"I was pretty and I got a bit spoilt.

"'Veneranda'. I had red hair cut short on top,

"but I let it grow long down the back."

And then she says, "Don't grieve too much for me.

"Have a drink,

"and don't be too sad at the rest that my little body is having."

It's, as it were, speaking to her relatives.

There's also a message there, I think, for us.

Because although these tombstones are kind of obviously about death,

for me, they also reek of love, of warmth,

actually of life.

So what happened if kids like little Geminiae Matri did survive?

Are we talking school,

or did Roman parents have something else in store for them?

Well, rather predictably,

it depended on where you were in the pecking order.

In their labs on the outskirts of Rome,

a group of Italian anthropologists have analysed

over 6,000 Roman skeletons,

dug up in and around Rome over the past century.

Alongside full adult skeletons are some rare child bones,

found in poorer graves.

For although Roman kids died in vast numbers,

their fragile little skeletons rarely survive.

SHE SPEAKS ITALIAN

TRANSLATION:

What's extraordinary is that these bones

show some very telling signs of wear and tear.

So this guy has been doing hard work with his legs

for many years, and he is only 16.

You couldn't get those kind of lesions just by

playing football, or... skipping?

This has to be hard manual work?

And Fullonica...

You're treating the cloth, you're dyeing the cloth,

you're stamping on the cloth.

So what we've got is a kid doing heavy manual labour

at a time when we think they should be in infant school.

Also found by Paola's team, in the grave of a one-year old girl,

was a strange collection of trinkets that once formed

a gorgeous little necklace. They look pretty innocuous.

There's an amber rabbit, a figurine of an Egyptian god,

a mini phallus and some beads.

But hidden within them is a much darker story.

These are what the Romans would have called crepundia.

They'd have been strung together and worn around the neck of a child,

so they are half-toy, half-amulet or lucky charm.

But they also have a part to play

in one aspect of Roman culture that we find rather shocking.

And that is child exposure.

What that means, if in Rome you have a child you don't want,

you can just throw it away.

In the street, on the rubbish dump.

And that's where the crepundia come in.

Because some parents were supposed to have left these babies out

with their crepundia around their necks,

as a kind of link to their birth family, to their original identity.

It's a wonderful plotline, actually,

in some Roman comedies, that the slave girl heroine

is suddenly spotted and recognised by her mum and dad

because they've seen the crepundia that they had left out with her.

So in some Roman comedies,

these things can bring about a very nice happy ending.

In real life, I'm not so sure.

The unavoidable fact then, for Roman kids in poorer families,

is that if you weren't exposed, and let's be honest,

we don't know how many babies really were,

they were put to work as soon as they were fit and able,

perhaps as early as five.

But further up the social scale, things were predictably different.

In the centre of Rome, in a covered arcade just behind the forum,

we can still find evidence of a Roman school.

All over its plaster walls you find writing, drawing,

and even caricatures of the schoolmaster.

Which reminds us just how little kids have changed.

Here's a great picture of a bloke with a big beard, full on.

Here we're in Rome, a willy.

What you've got here is people's letter practice, A-B-C-D,

you've also got little snatches of Latin poetry written.

What it looks like to me is an old-fashioned school desk.

And that, in a way, is exactly what it is.

Schools in Rome weren't schools in our sense.

Lessons took place in arcades like this, under shady trees,

even in the streets. They were fee-paying, for the most part,

so only for the well-off and only for boys.

Some of those lessons would have been much like ours.

They would have learned to read and write,

they would have done a modern language,

in their case, it would have been ancient Greek,

no science and PSE, it would be public speaking and poetry.

An image of a Roman school in action still survives.

The original painting in Pompeii is pretty faded,

but this 19th-century copy shows exactly what's going on.

Here are the good boys at their lessons.

But here is the unfortunate malefactor.

He's the one who must have been caught

doing a caricature of the master on the wall.

He's being beaten.

He's being held down by two of his fellow pupils,

and he's been stripped down to his pants,

well, they're sort of pants.

And the master here is whacking him. And he is clearly screaming.

This was such a well-known form of Roman corporal punishment

that it even had its own name, catomus.

Perhaps it's not surprising that one favourite nickname

for a schoolmaster in Rome was Plagosus - "whacker".

For wealthy Roman families, then,

rote learning and discipline was the ideal boys' education.

But it also served as an ideal

to families trying to climb the social ladder.

The best way to put a human face to this story is to pay a visit

to one of my favourite characters, a real Roman schoolboy,

the son of ex-slaves whose memorial can still be found

overlooking a square in central Rome.

I have come here to meet up with this little lad.

Sulpicius Maximus was his name,

and he was something of a Roman child prodigy.

Aged just 11, he entered a grown-up poetry competition,

a sort of Rome's Got Talent.

But stardom was not to come.

He died, and his mum and dad put up this great memorial to him.

It says up there that he died of too much study.

I can't help thinking he might have been

a bit of a victim of pushy parents.

Sulpicius's original memorial is now

in an unloved corner of a Rome museum,

but it's a chance to meet the boy face-to-face.

His story makes me wonder what life was really like for kids like him

in families desperately trying to get on.

Were you never naughty? Did you ever refuse to do your homework?

Did you never lose your school shoes?

I can't help thinking that life in Sulpicius's household

wasn't quite what his parents wrote it up to be.

But all the same, there is a sense that childhood,

as a category that we know, didn't really exist in the Roman world.

I mean, look at him.

If you came across this statue

and you didn't know the story written round about him,

you'd think this was some orator haranguing the masses

in the Roman forum.

In fact, it's a kid of 11-years-old,

and you'd never know it.

For aspiring Roman families, if you wanted to educate your boy,

you concentrated on public life, and oratory, even poetry.

Not on what we would call emotional development.

But how different was it for rich Roman girls?

In the store room of the same museum is one remarkable object

that helps to tell their side of the story.

This is the most exquisitely beautiful Roman doll.

She's the most perfect specimen to survive from the Roman world,

and she is so precious and fragile that,

although I'm just itching to pick her up, I'm not allowed to.

She looks as if she's made of wood, but in fact she's ivory.

She's a woman with very cleverly jointed limbs,

she's got a rather posh, fashionable hairdo,

and on her hand she's got a little gold ring.

Now, there's no such thing as a toy shop in the Roman world,

and for most kids like Sulpicius if they went out to play,

they would be improvising with nuts and stones

and playing ducks and drakes on the river.

This is something a bit special.

She's not just Barbie, she's Empress Barbie.

But there's another side to a toy like this.

It's not just about play, like all toys,

it's helping to teach whoever owns it

what their role is going to be in life.

Roman women were made for marriage and for breeding children.

And in fact, some Roman writers tell us

that just before they do get married,

Roman girls would go along to a temple

and they would leave their dolls in the temple.

But that didn't happen to this doll.

Because, actually,

it was found in a big stone coffin

of a woman called Creperia Tryphaena.

To judge from the skeleton, Creperia was about 20.

She presumably hadn't got married,

so she took her doll with her to her tomb.

That's quite extraordinary to us.

We wouldn't ever imagine burying a 20-year-old with her Barbie.

An awful lot of Roman girls

must have gone to the grave with their dolls.

In fact, one of the most famous writers of the Roman world, Pliny,

tells the story of one girl who died young, Minicia Marcella,

the daughter of a friend of his, Fundanus.

Pliny says that she was going on 14,

but she had an old head on young shoulders.

She was wise beyond her years.

She was sweet and charming, and she was the spitting image of her dad.

The really sad thing, he says,

is that she was just about to be married.

By an absolutely extraordinary piece of good fortune,

we actually have Minicia Marcella's tombstone.

Here it is, this rather elegant, austere affair.

"To the spirits of Minicia Marcella," it says,

"the daughter of Fundanus."

But there's a sting in the last line.

Pliny said she was going on 14.

This says she lived for 12 years,

11 months, and seven days.

So she was 12 years old, and just about to be married.

Now, we don't know how many Roman girls got married this young,

but a significant minority, I think.

And it raises an obvious question.

Were marriages like this consummated straight away?

We like to think not.

But the chances are that they were.

When you put all these children together, our child workers,

child poets and child brides,

Roman childhood can appear a pretty brutal phase of life.

But I don't think we should get too carried away.

To help me put it into context, I met up with a colleague

and father of two Greg Woolf.

I still find it hard to get my head around Roman childhood.

I mean, was it really that brutal?

I'm not really sure that it is quite as unfamiliar as that.

Some bits were brutal, and some bits were different,

but a lot is just the same. They had a childhood, even if

it's a bit shorter than the childhood that our kids have.

But they're not the kind of protected species

that modern Western kids are? That must be right.

They haven't got a kids' room full of kids' stuff.

They don't have kids' entertainment, they don't have kids' clothes.

Maybe just a few children of the very rich,

with their Greek pedagogue

or slaves taking them to school and their wet nurses,

but most children are just doing what adults did

in the same places with them.

We're undergoing a huge transition from a world where

lots of children are born and lots of them die,

where they are fully part of the world of the adults,

to a world where not many children are born and most of them survive,

and their childhoods are prolonged to a point

which Romans would have thought was well into young adulthood.

Yeah. If you reckon that half of them,

at least half of them are going to be dead before the age of ten,

what does that do

to the relationship between parents and kids?

I think they were tragedies when you lose a child,

in any society, any period.

And when Romans lost their children

we know sometimes they were devastated.

But it was a normal tragedy,

it was the same tragedy that the other families on your street had.

It's the same tragedy your parents had.

The tombstones kind of show us, really,

that even if it happens often, it still is terribly hurtful.

It isn't in some ways half as unfamiliar as we like to make it,

and I was struck by the tombstone on the wall of this bar up there

what's obviously mum and dad, a little kid,

and he's holding a dog, he's holding his pet.

You can sort of recognise that as mum, dad and child,

with all the things that we think go with it.

The difference is the project of having that is much more risky.

It's a much more precarious existence. Yeah.

I mean, really, the bottom line is Roman childhood - a big risk.

Of course, we mustn't forget that for a Roman women the risk

was not just child-rearing, it was also child-bearing.

In a world with little medical care as we know it,

Roman pregnancy wasn't always straightforward.

One of the most suggestive objects to open this world to us

is an eerie-looking medical instrument found in Pompeii.

Every woman will recognise exactly what this is.

It's an ancient Roman gynaecological speculum.

The principle's pretty clear,

you have the prongs here and they're put into the vagina.

You then turn the screw,

which opens the prongs

and so extends the vagina, so you can examine the woman.

We all know how it works, I don't need to demonstrate it.

So a rather nice one, decorated at the top.

I think this was a rather pricy doctor who owned this,

with rather expensive female clients,

I don't think this got shoved up any poor woman.

But I think we shouldn't get carried away with the familiarity.

One of the nastiest bits of Roman literature I've ever read,

and there's plenty of nasty bits to choose from,

describes what you do when you can't get a baby out of a woman.

When the baby's got stuck and you want to save the mother's life.

You put a speculum up, you get a sight of what's going on.

You then put a hook into the woman and try to pull the baby out.

You'll kill it in the process,

it's going through its eye and skull.

I can't imagine, even if it was intended to save her life,

that many women could have survived that process.

Childbirth today has its dangers,

but in the Roman world, it was a battlefield.

I think if in the Roman world men died as soldiers,

women died in childbirth.

It's hard to get a feel for such experiences

in the Roman home itself.

The rooms they used for sex and childbirth have given us a few beds,

but curiously no double ones and plenty of erotic pictures.

But occasionally we get a glimpse of how women could transcend

the traditional roles that were expected of them.

In a house in Pompeii, now known as the House of Julius Polibius

after the man who owned it,

is one example of a woman who may have done just that.

I have come to see her with my colleague, Andrew Wallace-Hadrill.

What I'm interested in is this extraordinary painting.

It's showing a religious sacrifice going on

and it is full of weird religious symbolism,

like this snake and the altar,

but what I'm interested in is this couple here

because this to me

looks as if it's meant to be the head of a household and his wife.

And it's very unusual, because the standard scene

is just the man in his toga doing the sacrifice

and everyone always says,

"This must be the head of household" and here we have her too.

She's cut in on the action.

But the woman, because her property's completely separate

from that of her husband,

could be more wealthy and more powerful.

What's this lady doing here right bang in the middle of picture,

if she isn't richer and more important

than the little man at her side?

So in some cases it is possible to turn upside down

the traditional roles in the Roman household.

But there is still one part of the Roman home

that feels completely alien to us.

The part that actually made it function.

And by that I mean the slaves.

Archaeology has produced very little material

that relates directly to slavery,

but tucked away in a Roman museum is one rare object

that speaks volumes about its dark side.

You'd think this was a Roman dog collar,

a band of iron and a little metal tag on it.

And on the tag is written in Latin, "fugi - teneme".

"I've escaped, catch me, if you take me back to my master, Zoninus,

"you'll get a solidus, a gold coin."

It's probably not a dog collar.

It's probably the collar of a Roman slave.

Admittedly it's quite small,

but things like this have been found around the necks of human skeletons.

And actually the fact that we can't really be sure

whether it's a slave collar or a dog collar

tells us quite a lot about Roman slavery

and the inhumanity that it evoked.

There is a horribly touching story about the Emperor Hadrian,

who got cross with one of his slaves,

so cross that he gouged his eye out with a stylus pen.

Hadrian instantly felt apologetic,

humbled by what he has done and he said to the slave,

"Have any present from me, I'm so sorry, have anything you want."

The slave remained quite dumb.

Hadrian pressed him and said, "I'll give you anything."

The slave said, "I just want my eye back."

So it's not hard to see why Roman slaves might have wanted

to escape and why Roman masters might have wanted

to tag their slaves as their property.

Either this way, or with branding or tattoos.

My hunch, though, is that fewer actually escaped

or even tried to escape than we like to think.

My guess is that most slaves showed their resentment

against their masters by much more kind of domestic sort of warfare.

They'd have pilfered things, broken precious ornaments,

they'd have pocketed the loose change,

and I expect they'd have spat in the master's soup.

Today, slavery is one of the nasty cliches of Roman culture.

It's a word loaded, understandably,

with all kinds of modern preconceptions,

but the fact is, it was deeply embedded in Roman culture.

In a population of a million, one-third might have been slaves.

And they weren't just for the rich. Poorer households had them too.

Even some slaves had slaves.

Of course Roman slavery was brutal,

but relations between masters and slaves weren't anything like

as black and white as we tend to imagine.

Sure, there must have been fear, suspicion,

hatred, on both sides actually.

There are some marvellous Roman urban myths about crafty slaves

running rings around their poor long-suffering masters.

But at the same time, there was plenty of respect,

affection, even love.

One of the best places to see evidence

of these conflicting emotions at the heart of this relationship

is actually in one of Pompeii's grandest houses.

In a suite of rooms off the back garden is a private bath house

with some pretty graphic mosaics.

They hint rather heavily,

at one part of every slave's job description we tend to forget - sex.

So this is the entrance-way to the hot room, the sauna room. Yes.

So what you've got here are some strigils,

bronze things that you use for scraping the oil off.

It's really rather gynaecological in the end.

The thing is, we can't really read that

without looking at this guy here.

This strange sort of naked black figure.

He's got little white panties on.

A white loincloth, which is completely failing to do its job.

The one thing it's not covering is his genitals,

which are enormous, hanging down.

The bronze tip matches those lamps or flasks,

or whatever he's carrying in his hands.

And they themselves look phallic.

So we're being given a very strong sexual theme as we enter.

So this is the dinky little sauna. You can hear it echoes around us.

It's lovely. It's an amazing space. And this mosaic, which is...

well, it kind of says "sex in the swimming pool" to me.

It appears to be another slave, doesn't it?

What comes out of this is something about the sexuality of bathing,

but also about the use of slaves.

Their total availability,

their bodily availability to their masters for sex.

No-one living in a big house says, "I'll go down to the local brothel."

They use a slave as they want, when they want,

and that's the basic deal of slavery.

Isn't it interesting that it's not just the master of the house

exploiting female slaves and male slaves,

it's also the female owners and dominant figures in the house

exploit male and possibly female slaves.

That's the really nasty bit of Roman slavery.

To be pressurised into having sex with the master or mistress,

it's an assault on your freedom, but that's the point,

you've lost your freedom, the freedom to control your body.

But you mustn't think that because sex happens

between master and slave,

it's necessarily a bad thing for the slaves all the time.

What about the fact that we constantly find

slaves marrying their masters?

Sex is a way of earning money, but it's also a route to freedom.

And that's the great paradox about Roman slavery.

We might think it was brutal, at times even amounting to rape,

but it was not always a life sentence.

And if you look at the tombstones, what's striking is that the majority

of those that survive from the city of Rome belong to ex-slaves.

They were freed in their thousands.

Here's a lady with a really great name.

She is and ex-slave, she tells us, a "liberta".

And her name is Vettia Erotice.

I like that name.

Here's a nicely complicated one.

It's a tombstone put up by an ex-slave, a "libertus",

to his own slave, and was "very dear to him", "carissimo".

This is a woman with an interesting job.

She's called Dorcas and she's the ex-slave of Julia Augusta,

that's the Empress Livia.

What was her job? She was an "ornatrix".

She was the Empress's hairdresser.

Nice work if you can get it.

This one's a nice picture. It's from a tombstone,

it shows a husband and wife, I guess, having a banquet.

But it's the little chap on the left but I'm interested in.

He's serving at table and he must be a young slave boy.

There were thousands and thousands like him at Rome.

I don't know exactly where they all came from, but,

almost certainly not all of them from the slave market,

as we like to think.

Probably the majority of them

would actually have been born in the household.

And like this little guy, they'd have got

pretty up close and personal with their owners,

wait at table, wet nurses,

tutors, nannies.

And it starts to give us a different slant on Roman slavery,

and it helps to explain

why you could get quite strong bonds of affection

between owners and their slaves.

Actually, the Roman word for family, "familia",

doesn't just include husband, wife and a couple of kids,

it also includes the slaves.

So, in Rome, slaves really were part of the family.

And that's what I find

so disappointing about the standard image of the Roman family.

The slaves are not always segregated,

they WERE the familia, as much as the master and mistress.

In fact, the best way to see

just how open it could be is to visit a Roman family tomb.

I've come to see some in ancient Ostia, with Corey Brennan

from the American Academy in Rome.

This feels like the kind of back alley in the city of the dead.

That's precisely what it is.

And here is a home in the city of the dead, so to speak,

and it's something that Marcus Saenius Aristo set up

for himself and for his ex-slaves,

the "libertis", the male ex-slaves,

and the "libertabus", the female ex-slaves.

It's interesting too that in the last line here,

he makes clear how much land he owns for this tomb, doesn't he?

It's not just marking off the legal perimeter of his space here,

but it's a way of boasting how much real estate he has here

in the city of the dead.

What's important then

is that masters and slaves chose to live together in death,

not just in life.

In a way, these tombs are like mirrors of their own homes,

with separate rooms, upper storeys,

and spaces for urns that outnumber the nuclear family.

What strikes you when you come in, is the kind of communality,

the sheer number of burials that must have been here.

Well, there's about two dozen of these niches,

and each niche is a double

and so you're talking 48 people or so.

It's interesting to see how they are all mixed in here.

You don't walk in here and say, "There's the masters niche."

In fact, it's hard to tell where it would have been.

And it's so completely different from what we're familiar with in,

say, Victorian England, where the idea that Mr and Mrs Posh

and their Posh kids would be buried in the same tomb

as the cook or the tweeny or the butler, is absolutely unthinkable.

This is meant to be an ideal, this is the image which these folks,

these aspirational folks, wanted to convey,

which was that of inclusivity, of the large family.

Harshness was not in anyone's interests.

It shows us a softer side of this horrible institution of slavery.

Yeah, it's great, you boast, "This is a tomb for me and my ex slaves."

But it wasn't always happy families,

as the unusual tombstone of a little girl called Junia Procula tells us.

Its storyline reads like a Roman soap opera.

The stone was put up by her father, a man called Euphrosinus.

When he was putting it up, for the little girl,

and eventually for himself and for somebody else,

whose name has been hacked out.

That's puzzling. Why has it been hacked out?

On the back of the stone, the puzzle's solved.

Because there's another text written there.

And what we can see has happened is that Euphrosinus

had had a slave called Acti.

He'd freed her, he'd married her, they'd had the kid, the kid had died

and then things had gone very badly off the rails.

He's cursing her on the back.

"These are the eternal marks of infamy," he says.

"On that ex-slave of mine who was a poisoner, who was 'perfida',

"who was faithless, who was 'dolosa', who was deceitful,"

and then he really curses her, he says,

"I'm bringing a nail and a piece of rope

"so that she can hang herself, and I'm bringing 'picem candentem'

"burning pitch, to consume her awful heart."

What on earth had happened? Well, he then explains.

"She had gone off with an adulteress, 'secuta adultorum'",

and what is more, she'd pinched two of his slaves, a boy and a girl.

She left behind poor old Euphrosinus

"lying in bed, robbed, all alone, an old man."

Now, we've got to remember that we don't know Acti's side of the story,

and that might have been very different, but what is clear is that

one man's domestic fluidity could be another man's domestic mess.

In a way, that's the Roman home in a nutshell.

For sure, it was a place inhabited by the traditional Roman cliches,

the pompous husbands in their togas,

the dutiful wives weaving their wool.

But it was also far more intriguing.

Especially if we put back all the clutter and the cradles

and the topsy-turvy relationships.

And above all, the extraordinary voices of the Romans themselves

that still talk to us after 2,000 years.

"I lived on Lucrine oysters."

"..snatched away from him."

"She had gone off with an adulteress."

"Secuta adultorum."

Menopholos.

"And I don't any longer have those old, flaking feet."

This is a monument of the baker, get it?

"She much preferred to be a bit wild."

"..a Roman menage-a-trois."

And what they tell us is that ordinary life in ancient Rome

was as wonderfully mixed up, as messy and as emotional as our own.

It's almost as if they are holding up a mirror to us and our own lives

and they're speaking to anyone with the time to stop and listen to them.

It turns out, that's you and me.