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These are the user uploaded subtitles that are being translated: 1 00:00:08,240 --> 00:00:09,560 This is the Appian Way, 2 00:00:09,560 --> 00:00:12,400 one of the roads that took thousands of Romans 3 00:00:12,400 --> 00:00:14,840 in and out of their capital city every day. 4 00:00:16,360 --> 00:00:19,840 Young and old, rich and poor, clean and dirty. 5 00:00:22,360 --> 00:00:24,480 And it's where I want to start, 6 00:00:24,480 --> 00:00:28,000 asking a question that really interests me. 7 00:00:28,000 --> 00:00:30,080 Who were the ancient Romans? 8 00:00:31,720 --> 00:00:37,720 Outside the city, it was lined with thousands and thousands of tombs, 9 00:00:37,720 --> 00:00:41,640 so before you got into the city of Rome, you'd already met the Romans. 10 00:00:41,640 --> 00:00:43,120 Dead ones, that is. 11 00:00:46,520 --> 00:00:51,720 And the lives of many of them began or ended a long way from Rome. 12 00:00:51,720 --> 00:00:56,120 This is just a tiny fragment of someone's tomb. 13 00:00:56,120 --> 00:00:59,360 Someone called Eschinus. 14 00:00:59,360 --> 00:01:03,600 "Occisus est in Lusitania". 15 00:01:03,600 --> 00:01:06,800 He was murdered in Spain. 16 00:01:08,200 --> 00:01:11,000 This lady's Usia Prima, 17 00:01:11,000 --> 00:01:14,600 a priestess of the Egyptian goddess Isis, 18 00:01:14,600 --> 00:01:17,440 and there's her little sacred rattle. 19 00:01:17,440 --> 00:01:19,960 She's almost looking at you. 20 00:01:19,960 --> 00:01:23,600 I feel like saying, "Pleased to meet you, Prima." 21 00:01:26,000 --> 00:01:31,080 They come from every walk of life and every part of the Empire, 22 00:01:31,080 --> 00:01:33,720 and a lot of them had once been slaves. 23 00:01:33,720 --> 00:01:36,440 These aren't the kind of guys we usually think of 24 00:01:36,440 --> 00:01:38,440 when we think of Romans. 25 00:01:44,280 --> 00:01:47,520 These Romans all lived at the centre of a vast Empire 26 00:01:47,520 --> 00:01:50,440 that stretched from Spain to Syria, 27 00:01:50,440 --> 00:01:54,720 and which dominated the Western world for over 700 years. 28 00:01:57,800 --> 00:02:01,280 Like it or not, ancient Rome is still all around us, 29 00:02:01,280 --> 00:02:05,160 in our roads, laws and architecture. 30 00:02:05,160 --> 00:02:08,520 We keep on recreating it in film and fiction, 31 00:02:08,520 --> 00:02:10,920 and every year, thousands of us trek here 32 00:02:10,920 --> 00:02:13,320 to see its monuments up close, 33 00:02:13,320 --> 00:02:15,720 and to imagine the emperors and the armies, 34 00:02:15,720 --> 00:02:18,880 the gladiators, and let's be honest, the gore. 35 00:02:18,880 --> 00:02:20,720 But hidden all over the modern city, 36 00:02:20,720 --> 00:02:23,320 in its walls, behind the facades, 37 00:02:23,320 --> 00:02:25,320 even under its streets, 38 00:02:25,320 --> 00:02:29,400 is something much harder to find but just as captivating - 39 00:02:29,400 --> 00:02:32,640 the forgotten voices of the ordinary people. 40 00:02:32,640 --> 00:02:34,920 They're still there, if you know where to look. 41 00:02:36,160 --> 00:02:40,160 Calidius Eroticus means "Mr Hot Sex". 42 00:02:40,160 --> 00:02:43,680 This is a Roman menage a trois. 43 00:02:43,680 --> 00:02:46,520 This wasn't just a mugging. 44 00:02:46,520 --> 00:02:48,360 This was mass murder. 45 00:02:48,360 --> 00:02:52,200 The Romans didn't just carve their names and dates on their tombstones. 46 00:02:52,200 --> 00:02:54,880 Keen never to be forgotten, 47 00:02:54,880 --> 00:02:56,800 they left their thoughts, 48 00:02:56,800 --> 00:03:01,360 their achievements, even entire life stories chiselled into stone. 49 00:03:01,360 --> 00:03:04,280 It's a unique record of real Roman lives. 50 00:03:05,440 --> 00:03:08,000 I've spent most of my life with the ancient Romans, 51 00:03:08,000 --> 00:03:12,800 and not just the big guys - the emperors, the politicians, 52 00:03:12,800 --> 00:03:15,080 the generals, the posh ones. 53 00:03:15,080 --> 00:03:18,760 The people I've most enjoyed getting to know are the ordinary ones, 54 00:03:18,760 --> 00:03:21,600 who had their own part to play in the story 55 00:03:21,600 --> 00:03:23,640 of this extraordinary city. 56 00:03:23,640 --> 00:03:26,640 And what gets to me every time 57 00:03:26,640 --> 00:03:29,280 is that we can still have a conversation with them - 58 00:03:29,280 --> 00:03:31,240 even 2,000 years later. 59 00:03:31,240 --> 00:03:35,760 In this series, I'm going to get their voices speaking again, 60 00:03:35,760 --> 00:03:39,960 to piece together a very different story of life in ancient Rome. 61 00:03:39,960 --> 00:03:42,640 I'll step behind the doors of their homes to meet 62 00:03:42,640 --> 00:03:45,880 flesh and blood Roman families whose lives and possessions 63 00:03:45,880 --> 00:03:49,800 can reflect our own in surprising ways. 64 00:03:49,800 --> 00:03:51,520 This is something a bit special. 65 00:03:51,520 --> 00:03:55,680 She's not just Barbie, she's Empress Barbie. 66 00:03:56,680 --> 00:03:59,800 I'll go down into the streets, where the dirt, crime, 67 00:03:59,800 --> 00:04:04,080 sex and humour in everyday Roman life shows us 68 00:04:04,080 --> 00:04:08,640 what it was like to live in an ancient city of a million people. 69 00:04:08,640 --> 00:04:13,160 "Baths, wine and sex," he said, "ruin your body." 70 00:04:13,160 --> 00:04:18,400 True. But they're what makes life really worth living. 71 00:04:21,600 --> 00:04:24,440 But I'll start by telling the real story of Imperial Rome, 72 00:04:24,440 --> 00:04:27,520 looking beyond the violence and spectacle 73 00:04:27,520 --> 00:04:30,880 to find a global city which reached for talent and treasure 74 00:04:30,880 --> 00:04:33,400 from the far ends of the earth - 75 00:04:33,400 --> 00:04:37,000 a place where everything and everyone was from somewhere else. 76 00:04:37,000 --> 00:04:39,640 These are the Romans I'm interested in. 77 00:04:39,640 --> 00:04:41,560 Welcome to my Rome. 78 00:05:06,240 --> 00:05:10,440 When you arrived in Rome at its imperial height 2,000 years ago, 79 00:05:10,440 --> 00:05:14,240 you found yourself in a new kind of city. 80 00:05:14,240 --> 00:05:17,760 Rome had once been a small city-state, 81 00:05:17,760 --> 00:05:19,720 but in conquest after conquest, 82 00:05:19,720 --> 00:05:22,400 it became capital of a vast Empire, 83 00:05:22,400 --> 00:05:25,280 a place in which, for the first time in history, 84 00:05:25,280 --> 00:05:29,160 a million people from three continents managed to live together. 85 00:05:29,160 --> 00:05:32,440 One thing we know about Rome is it wasn't just a city, 86 00:05:32,440 --> 00:05:34,080 it was an Empire, 87 00:05:34,080 --> 00:05:37,800 and for us, that means marauding armies, 88 00:05:37,800 --> 00:05:40,840 conquering generals and bloodthirsty emperors. 89 00:05:40,840 --> 00:05:44,880 We tend not to think about the ordinary people 90 00:05:44,880 --> 00:05:47,880 who lived here at the very heart of it all. 91 00:05:47,880 --> 00:05:53,720 For them, the Empire brought them into contact with a whole world, 92 00:05:53,720 --> 00:05:57,000 from Scotland to Afghanistan, 93 00:05:57,000 --> 00:06:01,400 and it made this city a more cosmopolitan place 94 00:06:01,400 --> 00:06:03,920 than anywhere had ever been before or would be again 95 00:06:03,920 --> 00:06:06,640 for hundreds of years. 96 00:06:06,640 --> 00:06:10,480 And we're always asking, "What did the Romans do for us?" 97 00:06:10,480 --> 00:06:12,560 I think we should be asking, 98 00:06:12,560 --> 00:06:15,880 "What did the Empire do to the Romans? 99 00:06:15,880 --> 00:06:18,880 "And who were those Romans, anyway?" 100 00:06:18,880 --> 00:06:23,040 Around the city, there's more evidence than you'd think 101 00:06:23,040 --> 00:06:25,520 for the impact that Roman conquest had 102 00:06:25,520 --> 00:06:27,960 on the lives of ordinary people here. 103 00:06:27,960 --> 00:06:32,080 All it requires is that we look from a slightly different angle. 104 00:06:37,960 --> 00:06:40,200 One of the most famous monuments in the forum 105 00:06:40,200 --> 00:06:44,880 celebrates the moment when one conquering army came home. 106 00:06:47,800 --> 00:06:50,640 In 71 AD, the city got a day off 107 00:06:50,640 --> 00:06:55,280 for the triumphal return of the emperor Vespasian and his son Titus, 108 00:06:55,280 --> 00:06:59,080 who had crushed a rebellion in Judea. 109 00:07:00,280 --> 00:07:03,640 We've got here the victorious general, Titus, 110 00:07:03,640 --> 00:07:06,840 driving through the streets of Rome in his chariot 111 00:07:06,840 --> 00:07:09,360 to celebrate his victory... 112 00:07:11,080 --> 00:07:12,720 ...and on the other side, 113 00:07:12,720 --> 00:07:16,160 we've got the booty that he's brought home with him. 114 00:07:16,160 --> 00:07:20,160 Titus had devastatingly conquered the Jews, 115 00:07:20,160 --> 00:07:24,960 and here we can see the loot that he has got from the Jewish temple. 116 00:07:24,960 --> 00:07:26,800 It's a grand display, 117 00:07:26,800 --> 00:07:28,320 but what I want to do is 118 00:07:28,320 --> 00:07:31,440 to try and undercut the pomposity of it a bit, 119 00:07:31,440 --> 00:07:35,600 and to ask what was it like for the people, 120 00:07:35,600 --> 00:07:38,920 the ordinary Romans who showed up to watch this, 121 00:07:38,920 --> 00:07:42,000 left their apartments and came to see the spectacle? 122 00:07:44,400 --> 00:07:47,840 A triumph like this would have been the first sight the Roman people had 123 00:07:47,840 --> 00:07:53,040 of all the things the armies brought back from their distant victories. 124 00:07:53,040 --> 00:07:57,520 The rich spoils, the maps of the conquered territory, 125 00:07:57,520 --> 00:08:00,480 the models of the fighting, 126 00:08:00,480 --> 00:08:05,480 even the trees that they'd uprooted and brought back to Rome. 127 00:08:05,480 --> 00:08:08,160 How did people react? 128 00:08:08,160 --> 00:08:11,680 Some must have gasped, others would have jeered the captives. 129 00:08:11,680 --> 00:08:15,400 Or maybe their minds were on other things. 130 00:08:15,400 --> 00:08:18,840 One Roman poet recommends the triumphal procession 131 00:08:18,840 --> 00:08:21,080 as a place to pick up a girl. 132 00:08:21,080 --> 00:08:22,640 How would you do it? 133 00:08:22,640 --> 00:08:26,480 Well, he says, watch the stuff go past, nudge up to her and say, 134 00:08:26,480 --> 00:08:29,080 "Ooh. I think that's the Euphrates there, 135 00:08:29,080 --> 00:08:31,160 "and that's the Tigris over there." 136 00:08:31,160 --> 00:08:34,960 You don't have to know, he says, you just have to sound confident. 137 00:08:34,960 --> 00:08:38,760 And then you'll make your own conquest! 138 00:08:39,760 --> 00:08:41,200 It's a good joke. 139 00:08:41,200 --> 00:08:44,800 But it also hints at the way Roman lives could be changed 140 00:08:44,800 --> 00:08:47,320 by the spoils coming back from the Empire. 141 00:08:47,320 --> 00:08:50,800 This girl can't have been the only person who found all this 142 00:08:50,800 --> 00:08:54,080 pretty strange, but also exciting. 143 00:08:57,280 --> 00:09:00,000 So what did the Roman armies bring back from the Empire? 144 00:09:02,160 --> 00:09:04,680 The import that made the biggest impact 145 00:09:04,680 --> 00:09:08,560 is one we don't think about often enough - human beings. 146 00:09:11,720 --> 00:09:15,120 These are forgotten people, but if we take the time to listen, 147 00:09:15,120 --> 00:09:19,160 we can still hear the voices of some of the millions 148 00:09:19,160 --> 00:09:21,280 who followed the Roman armies into the city 149 00:09:21,280 --> 00:09:23,720 for all sorts of different reasons. 150 00:09:27,680 --> 00:09:31,080 "This is for my brother, Habibi Annu from Palmyra. 151 00:09:31,080 --> 00:09:34,000 "I'm Germanus, Regulus' mule driver." 152 00:09:36,120 --> 00:09:41,200 "This is for Diocles, champion chariot racer from Spain." 153 00:09:41,200 --> 00:09:43,480 Here we've got a young slave girl, age 17, 154 00:09:43,480 --> 00:09:46,440 Phryne, the slave of Tertulla. 155 00:09:46,440 --> 00:09:50,440 "Africana". She came from Africa. 156 00:09:50,440 --> 00:09:54,400 This one is put up by a soldier for his wife Carnuntilla, 157 00:09:54,400 --> 00:09:57,520 born near Vienna in ancient Pannonia. 158 00:09:57,520 --> 00:10:03,000 What's weird is that Carnuntilla isn't really a real name. 159 00:10:03,000 --> 00:10:08,600 It comes from the name of a town in Pannonia, Carnuntum. 160 00:10:08,600 --> 00:10:11,960 It means, sort of, "my babe from Carnuntum". 161 00:10:11,960 --> 00:10:14,560 So my guess is, 162 00:10:14,560 --> 00:10:18,920 he perhaps bought this girl as a slave, 163 00:10:18,920 --> 00:10:23,640 he freed her, he brought her back to Rome, he married her. 164 00:10:24,640 --> 00:10:30,520 But sadly, his babe from Carnuntum died when she was just 19. 165 00:10:32,360 --> 00:10:35,720 Poignant stories like this are everywhere in the city. 166 00:10:35,720 --> 00:10:38,160 They're reminders of the different ways 167 00:10:38,160 --> 00:10:41,040 real lives could begin abroad and end in Rome. 168 00:10:42,880 --> 00:10:44,600 But there's more to it than that. 169 00:10:44,600 --> 00:10:48,360 These people weren't just brought in to serve the Romans. 170 00:10:48,360 --> 00:10:50,120 They were becoming Romans. 171 00:10:51,320 --> 00:10:54,000 One of the tombs on the Appian Way 172 00:10:54,000 --> 00:10:57,120 gives us the other side of the story of the Arch of Titus. 173 00:10:59,360 --> 00:11:03,520 It's a tombstone of three guys, 174 00:11:03,520 --> 00:11:07,160 one called Baricha, one called Zabda, 175 00:11:07,160 --> 00:11:11,720 and one called Achiba - typical Jewish names. 176 00:11:13,600 --> 00:11:19,040 So the question is, what's the story of Baricha, Zabda and Achiba? 177 00:11:19,040 --> 00:11:20,800 How did they get here? 178 00:11:20,800 --> 00:11:22,720 If they did start out life in Judea, 179 00:11:22,720 --> 00:11:27,000 how come they end up as Roman citizens in Rome? 180 00:11:27,000 --> 00:11:30,280 It's more surprising than you think. 181 00:11:30,280 --> 00:11:33,760 To judge from the letters and how they're written on this stone, 182 00:11:33,760 --> 00:11:36,960 this was carved in the first century AD, 183 00:11:36,960 --> 00:11:40,440 and at that point, we can put two and two together. 184 00:11:42,760 --> 00:11:47,160 I'm almost certain that these three men 185 00:11:47,160 --> 00:11:51,240 must have been part of the Jewish rebellion against the Romans 186 00:11:51,240 --> 00:11:53,360 in the late 60s AD. 187 00:11:53,360 --> 00:11:56,960 These men surely came into Rome with Titus' army, 188 00:11:56,960 --> 00:11:59,400 as prisoners of war. 189 00:12:00,600 --> 00:12:04,240 It must have seemed like the worst moment of their lives - 190 00:12:04,240 --> 00:12:08,920 jeered at, catcalls, people throwing things at them. 191 00:12:08,920 --> 00:12:11,080 But perhaps worse was to come. 192 00:12:11,080 --> 00:12:14,400 They were auctioned off as slaves 193 00:12:14,400 --> 00:12:16,880 and bought by a man called Lucius Valerius. 194 00:12:18,560 --> 00:12:22,960 What their life in slavery was like, we don't know, but he freed them, 195 00:12:22,960 --> 00:12:26,360 and they become new Roman citizens, 196 00:12:26,360 --> 00:12:30,320 with his name, Lucius Valerius, 197 00:12:30,320 --> 00:12:32,520 but their Jewish names 198 00:12:32,520 --> 00:12:37,480 still asserting their Jewish sense of identity. 199 00:12:37,480 --> 00:12:40,360 This is one of the ways that Roman conquest works. 200 00:12:40,360 --> 00:12:43,160 It does bring slaves, but it also brings, 201 00:12:43,160 --> 00:12:46,640 eventually, new Roman citizens. 202 00:12:51,040 --> 00:12:53,600 It's a fairy-tale happy ending, 203 00:12:53,600 --> 00:12:55,760 and a classic Roman story. 204 00:12:56,760 --> 00:12:58,920 When guys like this were freed, 205 00:12:58,920 --> 00:13:01,920 they didn't just go back to their old lives in Judea. 206 00:13:01,920 --> 00:13:04,960 They stayed in their new home, and what's more, 207 00:13:04,960 --> 00:13:09,200 they became Romans, with all the rights and privileges 208 00:13:09,200 --> 00:13:13,120 which came with full Roman citizenship. 209 00:13:13,120 --> 00:13:16,840 But what kept them in Rome? How many of them were there? 210 00:13:16,840 --> 00:13:20,440 And where did all these new Romans live? 211 00:13:20,440 --> 00:13:22,280 To try and make sense of it all, 212 00:13:22,280 --> 00:13:26,360 I went to meet a colleague in Trastevere, which literally means 213 00:13:26,360 --> 00:13:29,560 "across the Tiber from the ancient city centre". 214 00:13:29,560 --> 00:13:34,040 It's got a reputation as a bit of an immigrant area in Rome even now. 215 00:13:35,440 --> 00:13:38,480 This area, Trastevere, across the Tiber, 216 00:13:38,480 --> 00:13:40,520 was the fringe of the ancient city of Rome, 217 00:13:40,520 --> 00:13:43,240 and this is where we have the biggest evidence 218 00:13:43,240 --> 00:13:47,760 for immigrant communities - Jews, the Syrians. 219 00:13:47,760 --> 00:13:50,640 I guess if you said to an ancient Roman, 220 00:13:50,640 --> 00:13:53,680 "Where's the biggest immigrant area of the ancient city of Rome?" 221 00:13:53,680 --> 00:13:56,560 They'd have said... Over the river. Over. On the other side, yeah. 222 00:13:58,000 --> 00:13:59,680 Part of the answer to the question 223 00:13:59,680 --> 00:14:03,080 of why an area like this could be so cosmopolitan 224 00:14:03,080 --> 00:14:08,520 lies in the story of slaves like Baricha, Zabda and Achiba. 225 00:14:08,520 --> 00:14:11,040 Greeks thought Romans were really weird 226 00:14:11,040 --> 00:14:13,240 for freeing as many slaves as they did. 227 00:14:13,240 --> 00:14:14,640 And making them citizens? Yes. 228 00:14:14,640 --> 00:14:16,040 Although it's very brutal, 229 00:14:16,040 --> 00:14:19,240 being a slave can be a kind of stage in a life, like an apprenticeship. 230 00:14:19,240 --> 00:14:22,280 You come in as a German, you get a Roman name, you learn Latin, 231 00:14:22,280 --> 00:14:23,960 or you learn to manage in Latin, 232 00:14:23,960 --> 00:14:26,520 you learn some kind of job that's useful to your master, 233 00:14:26,520 --> 00:14:28,640 your master sets you free, and there you are - 234 00:14:28,640 --> 00:14:31,080 you're a Roman citizen with a trade and a Roman name 235 00:14:31,080 --> 00:14:33,360 and a bunch of powerful people you know. 236 00:14:33,360 --> 00:14:35,640 Yeah. This is your entry into Roman society. 237 00:14:35,640 --> 00:14:42,680 Now, multiply that by hundreds and thousands of slaves being freed, 238 00:14:42,680 --> 00:14:46,320 and you can see that the whole ethnic nature 239 00:14:46,320 --> 00:14:49,000 of the people who call themselves Roman citizens 240 00:14:49,000 --> 00:14:52,600 is really changing very quickly. 241 00:14:52,600 --> 00:14:54,520 Roman is a kind of vocation. 242 00:14:54,520 --> 00:14:57,120 It's a movement into which other people are drawn. 243 00:14:57,120 --> 00:14:59,640 This was a completely new idea. 244 00:14:59,640 --> 00:15:02,960 And, in many ways, the secret of the Empire's success. 245 00:15:02,960 --> 00:15:08,720 "Roman" was no longer a word which described the city you came from, 246 00:15:08,720 --> 00:15:11,360 it was something you could become. 247 00:15:11,360 --> 00:15:14,680 Almost everyone in Rome was descended from someone 248 00:15:14,680 --> 00:15:17,120 who arrived from outside. 249 00:15:17,120 --> 00:15:20,120 Not just ex-slaves. 250 00:15:20,120 --> 00:15:23,760 People coming in to work on the docks. Builders. Prostitutes. 251 00:15:23,760 --> 00:15:25,560 Peasants, who'd come into Rome 252 00:15:25,560 --> 00:15:28,400 because they think they can eat there cos they can't eat at home. 253 00:15:28,400 --> 00:15:33,440 So, this huge, chaotic mix of people who arrive not knowing anybody. 254 00:15:33,440 --> 00:15:36,400 These were journeys into the unknown, 255 00:15:36,400 --> 00:15:39,480 and into a place where there was no guarantee you would survive. 256 00:15:39,480 --> 00:15:44,800 And, oddly, that was one reason that Rome welcomed people in. 257 00:15:44,800 --> 00:15:47,520 Any city the size of Rome has to have immigration 258 00:15:47,520 --> 00:15:49,680 because the number of people who die in it 259 00:15:49,680 --> 00:15:51,840 greatly exceeds the number who are born. 260 00:15:51,840 --> 00:15:54,480 Rome's a malarial city, in antiquity. 261 00:15:54,480 --> 00:15:58,520 So people come here who don't have any immunity. 262 00:15:58,520 --> 00:16:00,800 They catch the disease. They're dead within years. 263 00:16:00,800 --> 00:16:02,640 So, just to keep Rome the size it is, 264 00:16:02,640 --> 00:16:05,800 it needs to constantly top up the population. 265 00:16:05,800 --> 00:16:08,880 Rome is swallowing people. 266 00:16:08,880 --> 00:16:12,120 It's a city which consumes people. 267 00:16:12,120 --> 00:16:13,800 It spews them out, dead. 268 00:16:15,400 --> 00:16:19,720 Perhaps we should stop thinking of Romans as a nation, 269 00:16:19,720 --> 00:16:23,560 a master race who conquered the world, 270 00:16:23,560 --> 00:16:26,080 and think instead of a Babel of rootless people, 271 00:16:26,080 --> 00:16:28,720 piled up together, a long way from home. 272 00:16:28,720 --> 00:16:32,040 And, no doubt, hoping for a brighter future. 273 00:16:32,040 --> 00:16:37,040 Because, for foreigners, Rome wasn't all doom and gloom. 274 00:16:37,040 --> 00:16:40,760 Sometimes, I guess, people would have come to Rome 275 00:16:40,760 --> 00:16:44,480 just to seek their fortunes. 276 00:16:44,480 --> 00:16:47,760 This is an epitaph, written in Greek, 277 00:16:47,760 --> 00:16:52,040 of a man who's said to have been always laughing, 278 00:16:52,040 --> 00:16:55,040 always having a joke and really good at music. 279 00:16:55,040 --> 00:16:58,320 He might have come as part of a band, I guess. 280 00:16:59,960 --> 00:17:02,520 And, actually, 281 00:17:02,520 --> 00:17:05,840 the stone tells us that he came, 282 00:17:05,840 --> 00:17:09,560 "To the land of Italy, ex-Asiaes". 283 00:17:09,560 --> 00:17:12,000 "From Asia". 284 00:17:12,000 --> 00:17:14,160 That's modern Turkey. 285 00:17:14,160 --> 00:17:17,600 It says he died here when he was young 286 00:17:17,600 --> 00:17:20,040 and it ends up saying, 287 00:17:20,040 --> 00:17:23,840 "toy noma Menopholos", in Greek. 288 00:17:23,840 --> 00:17:27,320 "Menopholos" is the name. 289 00:17:27,320 --> 00:17:31,480 Now, Rome might have consumed people. 290 00:17:31,480 --> 00:17:33,760 It might have been a dangerous place. 291 00:17:33,760 --> 00:17:37,200 It might have been disease-ridden and dirty, 292 00:17:37,200 --> 00:17:40,720 but I guess, to a man like Menopholos, 293 00:17:40,720 --> 00:17:44,480 the streets must have seemed paved with gold. 294 00:17:48,320 --> 00:17:51,840 And not all immigrants in Rome were at the bottom of the heap. 295 00:17:51,840 --> 00:17:54,960 The Senate and the Imperial Palace 296 00:17:54,960 --> 00:17:56,560 were full of people from outside, 297 00:17:56,560 --> 00:17:59,120 just like the streets of Trastevere. 298 00:17:59,120 --> 00:18:04,680 Rome was international, from the bottom to the very top. 299 00:18:08,640 --> 00:18:11,680 ACCORDION PLAYS 300 00:18:14,440 --> 00:18:19,800 Increasingly, this city belonged to the likes of Menopholos. 301 00:18:23,280 --> 00:18:26,400 As new people arrived, 302 00:18:26,400 --> 00:18:29,560 Rome's population doubled, then doubled again, 303 00:18:29,560 --> 00:18:31,120 till it reached over a million. 304 00:18:31,120 --> 00:18:34,520 There was nowhere in Europe bigger, until Victorian London. 305 00:18:36,920 --> 00:18:40,160 We think of Rome as a very old city. 306 00:18:41,440 --> 00:18:44,120 But, 2,000 years ago, 307 00:18:44,120 --> 00:18:46,680 this place was brand new. 308 00:18:48,720 --> 00:18:51,680 It must have been full of building sites, 309 00:18:51,680 --> 00:18:54,680 new high-rise, of temporary accommodation. 310 00:18:54,680 --> 00:18:57,080 It must have felt a bit like Dubai. 311 00:18:57,080 --> 00:18:59,320 But there's a big question. 312 00:19:00,320 --> 00:19:04,760 If you've got a mass of a million people, from everywhere, 313 00:19:04,760 --> 00:19:07,880 how do you keep them alive? How do you feed them? 314 00:19:07,880 --> 00:19:11,920 How do you keep the vast Roman multi-cultural show 315 00:19:11,920 --> 00:19:14,240 on the road? 316 00:19:14,240 --> 00:19:19,880 Feeding a million people was a completely unprecedented challenge. 317 00:19:22,040 --> 00:19:24,720 Bang in the centre of the modern city 318 00:19:24,720 --> 00:19:27,120 is a site which gives you an idea 319 00:19:27,120 --> 00:19:31,640 of the colossal scale of consumption in Ancient Rome. 320 00:19:34,160 --> 00:19:37,400 Locals call it Monte Testaccio. 321 00:19:37,400 --> 00:19:40,680 That's "broken pot mountain". 322 00:19:40,680 --> 00:19:43,720 I think it's one of the most extraordinary archaeological sites 323 00:19:43,720 --> 00:19:46,040 anywhere in the world. 324 00:19:46,040 --> 00:19:49,840 Phew! Made it. 325 00:19:51,560 --> 00:19:53,680 This is absolutely extraordinary. 326 00:19:55,920 --> 00:19:58,200 'Each of these fragments 327 00:19:58,200 --> 00:20:01,640 'was once part of an Ancient Roman storage jar.' 328 00:20:01,640 --> 00:20:04,080 What is amazing about this, 329 00:20:04,080 --> 00:20:06,720 is that you really see here 330 00:20:06,720 --> 00:20:08,920 that it is a broken pot mountain. 331 00:20:08,920 --> 00:20:12,160 There's no earth mixed in with the other stuff. 332 00:20:12,160 --> 00:20:17,320 So, you see how, actually quite neatly, 333 00:20:17,320 --> 00:20:20,640 these shards of pottery have been stacked. 334 00:20:20,640 --> 00:20:24,080 It's a mountain, not a heap. 335 00:20:24,080 --> 00:20:26,400 It's a real hill. 336 00:20:26,400 --> 00:20:29,400 But there's nothing natural about it. 337 00:20:29,400 --> 00:20:31,680 This is a huge, ancient rubbish dump, 338 00:20:31,680 --> 00:20:35,520 composed entirely of discarded containers - 339 00:20:35,520 --> 00:20:40,000 amphorae - that held just one of the products consumed by Rome. 340 00:20:41,400 --> 00:20:44,320 It was olive oil, which seeped into the jars, 341 00:20:44,320 --> 00:20:47,600 and made them go really rancid, 342 00:20:47,600 --> 00:20:50,920 so they were the only containers that couldn't be recycled. 343 00:20:50,920 --> 00:20:54,320 Poor old amphorae had taken off to be pick-axed up 344 00:20:54,320 --> 00:20:56,520 and made into the mountain. 345 00:20:56,520 --> 00:20:59,400 And the olive oil that was in them gets everywhere. 346 00:20:59,400 --> 00:21:02,000 It's the stuff of Roman life. 347 00:21:02,000 --> 00:21:04,560 You'd find it being used in cooking. 348 00:21:04,560 --> 00:21:07,320 It's what's going to help you make perfume. 349 00:21:07,320 --> 00:21:09,760 It's what the guys in the baths who are exercising, 350 00:21:09,760 --> 00:21:14,040 rubbing themselves, scraping themselves down, would have used. 351 00:21:14,040 --> 00:21:17,200 And in the end, it's what the poor little old lady in the garret, 352 00:21:17,200 --> 00:21:21,520 who has just got one pottery lamp... 353 00:21:21,520 --> 00:21:26,480 What came in this amphora would have been her only source of light, 354 00:21:26,480 --> 00:21:28,000 at night. 355 00:21:29,200 --> 00:21:33,560 It's no exaggeration to say that Rome ran on olive oil. 356 00:21:33,560 --> 00:21:37,280 This place gives archaeologists a great opportunity 357 00:21:37,280 --> 00:21:40,120 to work out how it got here. 358 00:21:40,120 --> 00:21:43,720 It came in massive quantities. 359 00:21:43,720 --> 00:21:46,200 This must have been what, originally...? 360 00:21:46,200 --> 00:21:47,760 Even larger. 361 00:21:47,760 --> 00:21:49,720 Even larger than that? 362 00:21:49,720 --> 00:21:52,840 These are 30 kilos when they're empty. Empty, yes. 363 00:21:52,840 --> 00:21:55,880 My suitcase, when it's full, 364 00:21:55,880 --> 00:21:58,280 is this amphora when it's empty. 365 00:21:58,280 --> 00:22:00,840 'And what's amazing is that you can often find out 366 00:22:00,840 --> 00:22:03,600 'exactly where the oil came from.' 367 00:22:03,600 --> 00:22:07,480 We know that it is "A-R-V-A". 368 00:22:07,480 --> 00:22:10,080 Arva is a town called this way 369 00:22:10,080 --> 00:22:13,240 in the shores of the Guadalquivir. 370 00:22:13,240 --> 00:22:15,920 So, that's linking that precise chart 371 00:22:15,920 --> 00:22:18,840 to a site in southern Spain. 372 00:22:18,840 --> 00:22:21,600 So, Roman town, southern Spain. 373 00:22:21,600 --> 00:22:23,960 The guy who is making this amphora 374 00:22:23,960 --> 00:22:26,040 is stamping it with his town's name, 375 00:22:26,040 --> 00:22:28,920 saying, "This is a product of Arva"? Yeah. 376 00:22:30,320 --> 00:22:32,240 According to these trademarks, 377 00:22:32,240 --> 00:22:35,680 almost all the oil in this mountain was coming from Spain, 378 00:22:35,680 --> 00:22:37,880 and a bit from North Africa. 379 00:22:37,880 --> 00:22:40,400 Today, Italy is famous for its olive oil, 380 00:22:40,400 --> 00:22:42,160 but in ancient times, 381 00:22:42,160 --> 00:22:45,800 they were importing most of it from somewhere else. 382 00:22:45,800 --> 00:22:48,840 The fascinating thing about this mountain 383 00:22:48,840 --> 00:22:54,040 is the way you can start to piece together little life stories 384 00:22:54,040 --> 00:22:56,640 of these pots and their contents. 385 00:22:56,640 --> 00:23:00,320 It gets down to the coast in Spain, 386 00:23:00,320 --> 00:23:02,080 gets loaded onto boats. 387 00:23:02,080 --> 00:23:03,560 If it's lucky, it makes it, 388 00:23:03,560 --> 00:23:06,360 but there's lots of shipwrecks in the ancient Mediterranean. 389 00:23:06,360 --> 00:23:09,040 It arrives at the coast. It's humped off the boat. 390 00:23:09,040 --> 00:23:10,360 It's put into barges. 391 00:23:10,360 --> 00:23:13,560 It's brought up the Tiber to the city of Rome itself. 392 00:23:13,560 --> 00:23:15,600 Humped off the boat again, 393 00:23:15,600 --> 00:23:17,920 put into warehouses, 394 00:23:17,920 --> 00:23:19,640 decanted into small containers. 395 00:23:19,640 --> 00:23:22,360 The amphorae end up here. 396 00:23:22,360 --> 00:23:24,320 It might not look it at first sight, 397 00:23:24,320 --> 00:23:27,160 but, in fact, it's one of the most impressive monuments 398 00:23:27,160 --> 00:23:31,160 to the idea of Rome as an imperialist, consumer city, 399 00:23:31,160 --> 00:23:35,000 bringing in the foodstuffs she needs from all around the Mediterranean. 400 00:23:38,320 --> 00:23:40,040 It wasn't just olive oil. 401 00:23:42,040 --> 00:23:44,440 A short trip down the river Tiber 402 00:23:44,440 --> 00:23:46,760 is the seaport, Ostia. 403 00:23:52,160 --> 00:23:57,400 'Today, Ostia is one of Rome's best-kept secrets. 404 00:23:57,400 --> 00:24:01,920 'And it helps us discover what Rome was importing, from where.' 405 00:24:06,760 --> 00:24:09,320 'Martin Millett has been excavating near here, 406 00:24:09,320 --> 00:24:12,640 'and together, we went to explore an intriguing piazza 407 00:24:12,640 --> 00:24:17,240 'next to the theatre, which we call, "The Square of the Corporation".' 408 00:24:17,240 --> 00:24:22,560 OK, Martin. This is where I get to do the housework. 409 00:24:22,560 --> 00:24:25,000 Never live this down! 410 00:24:25,000 --> 00:24:26,880 'If you sweep away the pine needles, 411 00:24:26,880 --> 00:24:29,160 'there are mosaics all around here, 412 00:24:29,160 --> 00:24:33,480 'advertising companies importing goods from abroad.' 413 00:24:33,480 --> 00:24:35,240 "Stuppatoresres". 414 00:24:35,240 --> 00:24:37,440 BOTH: Rope-makers! 415 00:24:38,520 --> 00:24:42,360 This is the organisation of fur traders. 416 00:24:43,360 --> 00:24:46,800 The Naviculariorum Lignariorum, 417 00:24:46,800 --> 00:24:48,360 That's the wood-traders. 418 00:24:48,360 --> 00:24:50,280 So, what we've got so far is... 419 00:24:50,280 --> 00:24:52,120 Rope, 420 00:24:52,120 --> 00:24:53,520 pelts, 421 00:24:53,520 --> 00:24:54,880 and wood. 422 00:24:54,880 --> 00:24:57,600 'There are at least 50 of these mosaics. 423 00:24:57,600 --> 00:25:01,480 'Most of them give us a place as well as a product. 424 00:25:01,480 --> 00:25:03,320 'They add up to one conclusion. 425 00:25:03,320 --> 00:25:07,760 'Rome was being supplied from all corners of the Mediterranean.' 426 00:25:07,760 --> 00:25:11,440 Italy's not big enough to support the city of Rome. 427 00:25:11,440 --> 00:25:15,920 It is a city that's drawing in resources from everywhere. 428 00:25:15,920 --> 00:25:18,720 This was a new moment in western history. 429 00:25:18,720 --> 00:25:22,120 Rome had become what we now call "a consumer city", 430 00:25:22,120 --> 00:25:25,120 on a vast scale. These aren't luxury products, 431 00:25:25,120 --> 00:25:27,080 they're basic commodities. 432 00:25:27,080 --> 00:25:29,080 Wood, leather, oil, 433 00:25:29,080 --> 00:25:33,040 wine and, most important by far, grain. 434 00:25:33,040 --> 00:25:36,520 People talk about Rome being a consumer city, 435 00:25:36,520 --> 00:25:38,680 with a population of about a million. 436 00:25:38,680 --> 00:25:43,800 That implies 150,000 metric tonnes of grain a year. 437 00:25:43,800 --> 00:25:45,880 I don't know how big those ships are, 438 00:25:45,880 --> 00:25:47,880 but you need a lot of ships like that 439 00:25:47,880 --> 00:25:51,160 to bring in 150,000 metric tonnes of grain. 440 00:25:51,160 --> 00:25:53,440 'As the city grew, 441 00:25:53,440 --> 00:25:57,080 'farms in Sicily, Libya, and then Egypt, 442 00:25:57,080 --> 00:26:01,840 'were given over to producing wheat for the people of Rome. 443 00:26:01,840 --> 00:26:03,960 When the grain ships arrived in Italy, 444 00:26:03,960 --> 00:26:06,560 the word would pass round Rome. 445 00:26:06,560 --> 00:26:07,960 The food had arrived. 446 00:26:07,960 --> 00:26:10,880 This was one thing the Empire did for Rome. 447 00:26:10,880 --> 00:26:12,080 It kept them alive. 448 00:26:15,600 --> 00:26:17,720 But it did more than that. 449 00:26:19,480 --> 00:26:22,960 I want to think about life in that consumer city. 450 00:26:22,960 --> 00:26:25,480 Who were the winners, and who were the losers? 451 00:26:25,480 --> 00:26:29,560 One really interesting thing is how they used this imported grain. 452 00:26:29,560 --> 00:26:34,840 That means thinking about bread. Not just eating it, but making it. 453 00:26:34,840 --> 00:26:38,760 I'm very much second-in-command here. 454 00:26:38,760 --> 00:26:40,080 THEY LAUGH 455 00:26:43,600 --> 00:26:48,040 OK, so, I'm now being trusted with the action. 456 00:26:49,360 --> 00:26:54,680 200,000 Roman citizens, living in the city of Rome, 457 00:26:54,680 --> 00:26:58,200 got, each month, what was called a corn dole, 458 00:26:58,200 --> 00:27:00,680 a free ration of corn, 459 00:27:00,680 --> 00:27:05,120 that means about 35 to 40 kilos of corn. 460 00:27:06,600 --> 00:27:12,160 Which was enough to make bread for a month for about two people. 461 00:27:12,160 --> 00:27:17,040 'This was an extraordinary privilege for citizens in Rome. 462 00:27:17,040 --> 00:27:21,480 '200,000 of them received free rations from the state. 463 00:27:21,480 --> 00:27:23,920 'But how did it work? 464 00:27:23,920 --> 00:27:27,280 'Many of them lived in one-room apartments with no kitchens. 465 00:27:27,280 --> 00:27:30,960 'So they relied on the baker to turn their 40 kilos 466 00:27:30,960 --> 00:27:33,280 'into something they could eat.' 467 00:27:33,280 --> 00:27:34,400 Ha ha! 468 00:27:34,400 --> 00:27:35,680 Are you going to try it? 469 00:27:35,680 --> 00:27:37,640 Yeah. Proviamo. 470 00:27:40,640 --> 00:27:43,280 Good. Not bad for a first attempt. 471 00:27:45,040 --> 00:27:47,120 It's not bad. 472 00:27:47,120 --> 00:27:51,720 And also, it's wonderful people's food, 473 00:27:51,720 --> 00:27:56,760 this is... this is tearing and sharing bread. 474 00:27:56,760 --> 00:28:00,800 You don't even have to own a bread knife to be able to tuck into this. 475 00:28:00,800 --> 00:28:02,400 Good. 476 00:28:02,400 --> 00:28:05,800 'For poor Romans, this was the staple food that kept them alive. 477 00:28:05,800 --> 00:28:10,560 'But they didn't distribute it in the way we would expect.' 478 00:28:10,560 --> 00:28:13,880 You've got to put out of your mind, I think, 479 00:28:13,880 --> 00:28:16,360 this was some kind of proto-welfare state. 480 00:28:16,360 --> 00:28:21,000 Sure, some of the poor would have benefited from the grain, 481 00:28:21,000 --> 00:28:25,160 but charity wasn't what was uppermost in the Emperor's mind 482 00:28:25,160 --> 00:28:29,360 when he put all that time and money into distributing this grain. 483 00:28:29,360 --> 00:28:32,434 What he was concerned about was the idea 484 00:28:32,459 --> 00:28:36,240 that a hungry populace was a dissatisfied populace, 485 00:28:36,240 --> 00:28:40,560 and a dissatisfied populace was a dangerous one. 486 00:28:40,560 --> 00:28:47,200 Also, the fact that distributions didn't go to the poorest in Rome, 487 00:28:47,200 --> 00:28:50,800 they went only to Roman citizens themselves - 488 00:28:50,800 --> 00:28:53,800 you had to be a citizen in order to get this grain. 489 00:28:53,800 --> 00:28:59,520 And that made it a really important perk of being a full Roman. 490 00:28:59,520 --> 00:29:04,200 In a way, what this tells us is that being a full citizen of Rome 491 00:29:04,200 --> 00:29:08,440 was a privileged status to which outsiders could aspire. 492 00:29:08,440 --> 00:29:11,680 And perks like the grain handout help you understand why 493 00:29:11,680 --> 00:29:14,800 people wanted to be Roman. 494 00:29:14,800 --> 00:29:17,440 But it also shows us that all these things, the Empire, 495 00:29:17,440 --> 00:29:21,280 the imports, new citizens, were all part of the cycle. 496 00:29:21,280 --> 00:29:24,480 The bigger Rome got, the more it consumed, 497 00:29:24,480 --> 00:29:26,880 the bigger the Empire had to be to support it. 498 00:29:29,080 --> 00:29:33,280 So, how did Rome's massive consumption change life in the city? 499 00:29:33,280 --> 00:29:38,120 Well, for one thing, this was one of the best times in history to be a baker. 500 00:29:38,120 --> 00:29:44,280 And it's a baker who left one of the strangest monuments in Rome. 501 00:29:44,280 --> 00:29:46,960 Now hidden beneath one of the main city gates. 502 00:29:46,960 --> 00:29:52,160 It's the tomb monument of a man called Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces. 503 00:29:54,200 --> 00:29:57,680 He is almost certainly an ex-slave, 504 00:29:57,680 --> 00:30:01,640 and he was a baker and a contractor. 505 00:30:03,200 --> 00:30:06,040 He must have made a whole pile of money in that job, 506 00:30:06,040 --> 00:30:09,240 otherwise he wouldn't be able to afford a tomb like this. 507 00:30:14,760 --> 00:30:18,920 What Eurysaces has done is given himself a theme tomb. 508 00:30:18,920 --> 00:30:23,280 At the very top, all around the monument, 509 00:30:23,280 --> 00:30:26,400 there were scenes from the life of the bakery. 510 00:30:26,400 --> 00:30:31,560 It's the kneading, putting the bread in the oven, weighing the stuff out. 511 00:30:31,560 --> 00:30:35,560 And even these rather strange circles and columns underneath 512 00:30:35,560 --> 00:30:40,880 will be instantly recognisable to a Roman as bakery equipment. 513 00:30:40,880 --> 00:30:44,280 The circles are almost certainly the kneading machines, 514 00:30:44,280 --> 00:30:49,160 and the columns are the bins in which the dough is kneaded. 515 00:30:49,160 --> 00:30:53,920 What this says in Latin is, "This is the tomb of Eurysaces, 516 00:30:53,920 --> 00:30:58,440 "the baker and contractor, 'apparet'." It's obvious. 517 00:30:58,440 --> 00:31:03,840 Or what I think we'd say, "This is the monument of the baker, get it?" 518 00:31:03,840 --> 00:31:06,680 And I really like the way that, "get it", 519 00:31:06,680 --> 00:31:09,360 still speaks to us 2,000 years later. 520 00:31:09,360 --> 00:31:12,160 Have we got that this is the tomb of the baker? Yeah. 521 00:31:12,160 --> 00:31:16,840 Eurysaces could joke because things had gone pretty well for him. 522 00:31:16,840 --> 00:31:21,440 His name sounds Greek, so, most likely he came from abroad, 523 00:31:21,440 --> 00:31:23,840 but he ended up as one of a new class of people 524 00:31:23,840 --> 00:31:26,560 getting rich on the proceeds of Empire. 525 00:31:26,560 --> 00:31:29,880 I've got a tremendous soft spot for Eurysaces, 526 00:31:29,880 --> 00:31:33,200 but I doubt that all Romans would have felt that way. 527 00:31:33,200 --> 00:31:37,320 My guess is that if some old money, old-fashioned Roman 528 00:31:37,320 --> 00:31:43,200 walked past this tomb, he would've thought it was all a bit tacky. 529 00:31:43,200 --> 00:31:46,960 A bit like I might feel if some Premier league football player 530 00:31:46,960 --> 00:31:51,040 designed his own tomb in the shape of a giant football boot. 531 00:31:52,880 --> 00:31:57,400 What Eurysaces' joke reminds us is that the Empire had a direct effect 532 00:31:57,400 --> 00:32:00,280 on how people in Rome made their living. 533 00:32:00,280 --> 00:32:05,200 It was becoming a city of urban professionals. 534 00:32:05,200 --> 00:32:09,960 One of the reasons that ancient Rome still seems quite familiar to us 535 00:32:09,960 --> 00:32:15,280 is that people could do a whole variety of different jobs, just like us. 536 00:32:15,280 --> 00:32:18,320 But it's important not to forget 537 00:32:18,320 --> 00:32:21,600 that, obvious as that seems, 538 00:32:21,600 --> 00:32:23,631 it was actually one of the ways 539 00:32:23,656 --> 00:32:27,464 in which the city of Rome was radically new and different. 540 00:32:28,720 --> 00:32:32,040 In the traditional, small, ancient city, 541 00:32:32,040 --> 00:32:37,800 the idea was that the inhabitants were, well, all-rounders, 542 00:32:37,800 --> 00:32:42,320 that the same men fought the city's wars, 543 00:32:42,320 --> 00:32:46,200 ploughed the city's fields and produced the city's food. 544 00:32:46,200 --> 00:32:50,880 But in Imperial Rome, because of the huge size of the city, 545 00:32:50,880 --> 00:32:52,720 those duties were outsourced. 546 00:32:54,400 --> 00:32:57,280 The food now came from overseas. 547 00:32:57,280 --> 00:33:00,960 It wasn't made by local farmers. 548 00:33:00,960 --> 00:33:05,280 And the armed forces that were stationed around the Roman Empire, 549 00:33:05,280 --> 00:33:08,360 they weren't just citizens doing their military duty, 550 00:33:08,360 --> 00:33:10,920 they were making a career out of the military. 551 00:33:10,920 --> 00:33:14,560 The Empire freed, or you might say forced, 552 00:33:14,560 --> 00:33:18,600 Romans to make a living by specialising. 553 00:33:18,600 --> 00:33:23,800 Whether that was being a pearl trader, a warehouse manager, 554 00:33:23,800 --> 00:33:27,920 or even a hairstylist to the rich and famous. 555 00:33:27,920 --> 00:33:31,760 What this did was create a completely new way 556 00:33:31,760 --> 00:33:34,280 of differentiating between people. 557 00:33:35,600 --> 00:33:38,440 If you'd asked an Egyptian or a Greek who they were, 558 00:33:38,440 --> 00:33:43,480 they'd have given their father's name, or their home town. 559 00:33:43,480 --> 00:33:45,400 If you'd ask the average Roman, 560 00:33:45,400 --> 00:33:48,160 I bet he would have told you what he did for a living. 561 00:33:48,160 --> 00:33:50,400 They do on their tombstones at any rate. 562 00:33:53,760 --> 00:33:59,400 These guys are working in the "piperataria". 563 00:33:59,400 --> 00:34:01,280 That's the pepper market. 564 00:34:04,120 --> 00:34:07,400 These are just warehouse men, "horreoreorum". 565 00:34:07,400 --> 00:34:11,000 And here's a bloke, he's a "sagarius" - 566 00:34:11,000 --> 00:34:13,080 a big overcoat maker. 567 00:34:13,080 --> 00:34:17,160 A "saga" is an ancient equivalent of a duffle coat. 568 00:34:17,160 --> 00:34:19,640 An accounts manager?! 569 00:34:21,640 --> 00:34:26,080 She's great, she's a "piscatrix". She's a female fishmonger. 570 00:34:27,640 --> 00:34:30,120 And he was a gold worker. 571 00:34:32,240 --> 00:34:37,320 And here is an urn, an ash urn, 572 00:34:37,320 --> 00:34:40,160 for a lady called Sellia Epyre 573 00:34:40,160 --> 00:34:45,080 and she was an "aurivestrix". 574 00:34:45,080 --> 00:34:49,400 She was a very, very, very upmarket clothes maker. 575 00:34:49,400 --> 00:34:54,280 It's very striking how each one of these people 576 00:34:54,280 --> 00:34:58,520 does tell you on their tombstone what they did. 577 00:34:58,520 --> 00:35:01,800 Now, I think we have to relate that 578 00:35:01,800 --> 00:35:05,920 to the sheer size and potential anonymity 579 00:35:05,920 --> 00:35:09,120 of a great, imperial metropolis. 580 00:35:09,120 --> 00:35:12,360 In a world without ID cards, without passports, 581 00:35:12,360 --> 00:35:14,960 without birth certificates, 582 00:35:14,960 --> 00:35:18,400 how do you know what you are, who you are? 583 00:35:19,720 --> 00:35:22,240 You know that because of your job. 584 00:35:22,240 --> 00:35:25,920 I am Sellia Epyre, 585 00:35:25,920 --> 00:35:28,920 a luxury clothes maker. 586 00:35:28,920 --> 00:35:34,480 How do you make your identity clear? You say, "This is what I do." 587 00:35:35,760 --> 00:35:39,880 This is where Imperial Rome gets really fascinating for me. 588 00:35:39,880 --> 00:35:43,240 This is not simply a story of one city getting rich 589 00:35:43,240 --> 00:35:45,480 off the back of everywhere else. 590 00:35:46,760 --> 00:35:51,480 It's a story of a place where people were trying a new way of living. 591 00:35:51,480 --> 00:35:53,440 They arrived from across the world, 592 00:35:53,440 --> 00:35:56,000 and became a small cog in this big machine. 593 00:35:56,000 --> 00:35:58,640 You maybe didn't know your neighbours, 594 00:35:58,640 --> 00:36:00,680 and they didn't know you. 595 00:36:00,680 --> 00:36:05,200 Everyone was looking for new ways to make their mark and stand out. 596 00:36:05,200 --> 00:36:08,720 The Empire didn't only help people to move up in the world, 597 00:36:08,720 --> 00:36:12,640 it helped those who did to show that they had made it. 598 00:36:14,840 --> 00:36:19,240 It created new opportunities for conspicuous consumption. 599 00:36:26,400 --> 00:36:29,400 The Empire gave most people in western Europe 600 00:36:29,400 --> 00:36:33,240 their first experience of pepper, lemons, and cherries. 601 00:36:33,240 --> 00:36:36,040 One po-faced Roman complained 602 00:36:36,040 --> 00:36:40,440 that cooking had gone from a mere function to a high art. 603 00:36:44,000 --> 00:36:47,440 The Empire transformed the sensory experience of the city. 604 00:36:47,440 --> 00:36:52,680 There were new smells, new tastes, new colours. 605 00:36:54,480 --> 00:36:59,480 And nowhere is this clearer than in the elaborate paintings 606 00:36:59,480 --> 00:37:02,240 many better-off Romans put on their walls. 607 00:37:02,240 --> 00:37:06,400 In Pompeii is perhaps the most famous Roman painting of all. 608 00:37:06,400 --> 00:37:09,960 Pretty strange scene, phallus appearing, 609 00:37:09,960 --> 00:37:11,800 and some female suckling a goat. 610 00:37:11,800 --> 00:37:16,240 But it was probably the colours that would have dazzled an ancient visitor, 611 00:37:16,240 --> 00:37:18,320 as much as the racy subject matter. 612 00:37:18,320 --> 00:37:20,503 Now, you mustn't make the mistake of thinking 613 00:37:20,528 --> 00:37:22,640 that poor old Romans lived in black-and-white 614 00:37:22,640 --> 00:37:25,920 until they started conquering the Mediterranean. 615 00:37:25,920 --> 00:37:29,760 Of course, there were all kinds of local minerals and plants 616 00:37:29,760 --> 00:37:31,840 that would give them pigments for paint. 617 00:37:31,840 --> 00:37:33,200 But as time went on, 618 00:37:33,200 --> 00:37:37,840 they got more and more interested in the special, bright colours 619 00:37:37,840 --> 00:37:40,760 that you could get from their far-flung territories. 620 00:37:42,440 --> 00:37:47,200 Now, this here is one of the best candidates there is 621 00:37:47,200 --> 00:37:51,720 for real red, Spanish vermillion. 622 00:37:51,720 --> 00:37:53,680 Lovely, lustrous red. 623 00:37:53,680 --> 00:37:57,240 I think we have to imagine that if you came to dinner here 624 00:37:57,240 --> 00:38:00,400 and the generous host started showing you round, 625 00:38:00,400 --> 00:38:02,200 he might have come and said, 626 00:38:02,200 --> 00:38:06,840 "Now this lady here is whipping this one because etcetera, etcetera." 627 00:38:06,840 --> 00:38:12,160 But he might have said, "It's a really lovely red, isn't it? 628 00:38:12,160 --> 00:38:17,000 "Actually, it's Spanish vermillion, specially imported, 629 00:38:17,000 --> 00:38:22,000 "all the way from Spain. I paid for it as an extra myself." 630 00:38:24,160 --> 00:38:28,080 We live in a world of cheap, bright, synthetic colours. 631 00:38:28,080 --> 00:38:30,160 But the Romans didn't. 632 00:38:30,160 --> 00:38:33,800 In Rome, bright colours smacked of a kind of luxury that only came from abroad. 633 00:38:33,800 --> 00:38:38,400 And the desire for them created an even more niche range of jobs 634 00:38:38,400 --> 00:38:41,400 for ordinary Romans on the make. 635 00:38:41,400 --> 00:38:45,760 This is a guy who was really keen on what he did. 636 00:38:45,760 --> 00:38:51,000 He put up this tombstone when he was alive, "vivos fecit", 637 00:38:51,000 --> 00:38:53,240 for himself and for his family. 638 00:38:53,240 --> 00:38:57,560 He put on it symbols of the tools of his trade. 639 00:38:57,560 --> 00:39:01,440 Now, he worked as a dyer, in the dying industry. 640 00:39:01,440 --> 00:39:05,800 And you've got here little flasks in which his dye went, 641 00:39:05,800 --> 00:39:10,000 scales in which he measured out his ingredients, 642 00:39:10,000 --> 00:39:13,720 and the skeins of material that he dyed. 643 00:39:15,440 --> 00:39:17,560 But he wasn't any old dyer. 644 00:39:17,560 --> 00:39:20,640 At the top, he tells us his name. 645 00:39:20,640 --> 00:39:23,040 Caius Pupius Amicus. 646 00:39:24,040 --> 00:39:27,800 Pupurarius - he was a dyer of purple. 647 00:39:29,480 --> 00:39:32,400 In Rome, purple was special. 648 00:39:32,400 --> 00:39:35,000 It came from the eastern Mediterranean 649 00:39:35,000 --> 00:39:38,480 and it was extracted from tiny shellfish. 650 00:39:38,480 --> 00:39:41,600 It looked spectacular and it didn't fade. 651 00:39:41,600 --> 00:39:44,560 It was not only expensive, 652 00:39:44,560 --> 00:39:46,320 it's use came to be regulated by law. 653 00:39:47,600 --> 00:39:51,280 If you saw a man in the street wearing a toga 654 00:39:51,280 --> 00:39:53,200 with a broad, purple stripe, 655 00:39:53,200 --> 00:39:56,840 you'd know that he must be a senator, 656 00:39:56,840 --> 00:39:58,840 one of the political elite. 657 00:39:58,840 --> 00:40:02,040 The only person later on in the Roman Empire 658 00:40:02,040 --> 00:40:05,680 who was allowed to wear clothes completely of purple, 659 00:40:05,680 --> 00:40:09,160 was the Roman Emperor himself. 660 00:40:09,160 --> 00:40:11,760 It's kind of colour policing. 661 00:40:11,760 --> 00:40:14,520 It's a bit like as if Queen Elizabeth II 662 00:40:14,520 --> 00:40:19,840 was the only person in the country who was allowed to wear pink. 663 00:40:19,840 --> 00:40:26,280 But it tells you quite a lot about Rome and the Roman Empire, 664 00:40:26,280 --> 00:40:31,120 that this one very visible marker of political and social status 665 00:40:31,120 --> 00:40:35,320 should have been the product of something that came from 666 00:40:35,320 --> 00:40:39,360 the far-eastern side of the Mediterranean. 667 00:40:39,360 --> 00:40:47,000 No wonder Caius Pupius Amicus was proud of being a pupurarius. 668 00:40:49,920 --> 00:40:53,600 The story of colour isn't just a story of luxury, 669 00:40:53,600 --> 00:40:55,080 it's a story of identity. 670 00:40:55,080 --> 00:40:57,720 The power that conspicuous consumption had 671 00:40:57,720 --> 00:41:01,680 to mark you out as someone special, 672 00:41:01,680 --> 00:41:04,320 whether you were supplying them or consuming them. 673 00:41:05,760 --> 00:41:08,640 All these imports helped you distinguish yourself. 674 00:41:08,640 --> 00:41:11,720 Like products and people, 675 00:41:11,720 --> 00:41:16,400 even new gods arrive from far-flung parts of the empire. 676 00:41:16,400 --> 00:41:20,760 You could have your own style, your own taste, your own beliefs. 677 00:41:22,800 --> 00:41:26,440 But let's not get too carried away by all this exotic stuff 678 00:41:26,440 --> 00:41:28,440 that the empire offered up. 679 00:41:28,440 --> 00:41:31,720 What the foreign purple on the senator's toga tells us 680 00:41:31,720 --> 00:41:35,480 is that you could be completely foreign and absolutely Roman 681 00:41:35,480 --> 00:41:37,720 at the same time. 682 00:41:37,720 --> 00:41:41,280 The Romans had a way of thinking about other cultures 683 00:41:41,280 --> 00:41:43,520 that is quite unlike our own. 684 00:41:44,960 --> 00:41:48,440 We mustn't make the mistake of imagining 685 00:41:48,440 --> 00:41:55,920 that Rome is a sort of touchy-feely cultural melting pot. 686 00:41:55,920 --> 00:41:58,440 Yes. If you wear the wrong clothes, they make fun of you, 687 00:41:58,440 --> 00:42:00,520 if you speak strangely, they make fun of you. 688 00:42:00,520 --> 00:42:03,560 They're big conformists. There's too many Greeks here, 689 00:42:03,560 --> 00:42:06,000 the Jews don't eat food properly on the Sabbath, 690 00:42:06,000 --> 00:42:07,520 all that sort of stuff. 691 00:42:07,520 --> 00:42:10,200 Why don't they eat pork? How silly! 692 00:42:10,200 --> 00:42:15,000 The poet Martial, who is going on about the puella Romana 693 00:42:15,000 --> 00:42:19,160 who hasn't experienced a mentula Romana. 694 00:42:19,160 --> 00:42:22,320 The Roman chick who's never had a Roman dick. 695 00:42:22,320 --> 00:42:26,440 You know, it's crude stuff, but nasty in its way. 696 00:42:26,440 --> 00:42:30,600 'The irony is, the man who wrote this came from Spain. 697 00:42:30,600 --> 00:42:32,640 'They're not laughing at other races, 698 00:42:32,640 --> 00:42:36,240 'they're laughing about people who don't do things the Roman way.' 699 00:42:36,240 --> 00:42:39,760 Although people come to this city from all over the world, 700 00:42:39,760 --> 00:42:43,080 you don't end up with a Chinatown or a Little Italy 701 00:42:43,080 --> 00:42:46,640 in the way that we have in the great metropolitan cities today. 702 00:42:46,640 --> 00:42:51,160 These people are ruling the world, the senators govern Portugal, 703 00:42:51,160 --> 00:42:53,320 govern in Egypt, they govern along the Danube, 704 00:42:53,320 --> 00:42:54,800 and they never come back and say, 705 00:42:54,800 --> 00:42:56,520 "I had this great meal the other day." 706 00:42:56,520 --> 00:42:59,080 They'll talk about ingredients from all over the world, 707 00:42:59,080 --> 00:43:02,680 but you do with it, the actual cuisine, the cooking, 708 00:43:02,680 --> 00:43:05,080 it's got to end up proper Roman cookery. 709 00:43:05,080 --> 00:43:08,520 They've got this city that is unlike anything 710 00:43:08,520 --> 00:43:10,240 that has been created before. 711 00:43:10,240 --> 00:43:12,800 It has a much greater diversity 712 00:43:12,800 --> 00:43:16,000 of people, of customs, of languages, 713 00:43:16,000 --> 00:43:20,360 thousands of languages probably, hundreds of languages at least, 714 00:43:20,360 --> 00:43:22,120 spoken in the city of Rome. 715 00:43:22,120 --> 00:43:25,560 But they only write in Greek and Latin more or less all the time, 716 00:43:25,560 --> 00:43:26,720 a tiny bit of Hebrew. 717 00:43:26,720 --> 00:43:28,680 What we are seeing here 718 00:43:28,680 --> 00:43:32,720 is the most culturally, 719 00:43:32,720 --> 00:43:36,040 ethnically, religiously diverse city 720 00:43:36,040 --> 00:43:38,520 that there had ever been in the world, 721 00:43:38,520 --> 00:43:41,680 but the way they are doing multiculturalism 722 00:43:41,680 --> 00:43:45,520 is quite different from the way we do multiculturalism. 723 00:43:45,520 --> 00:43:47,760 Yes. There is cultural diversity, 724 00:43:47,760 --> 00:43:49,120 but what there isn't 725 00:43:49,120 --> 00:43:50,560 is a diversity of cultures. 726 00:43:52,240 --> 00:43:55,000 There's an ironic logic here. 727 00:43:55,000 --> 00:43:57,760 Because Roman culture was in itself such an amalgam, 728 00:43:57,760 --> 00:43:59,320 they simply saw no need 729 00:43:59,320 --> 00:44:02,640 for alternative cultures to exist in parallel, 730 00:44:02,640 --> 00:44:05,640 still less to respect them. 731 00:44:05,640 --> 00:44:09,760 In Rome, diversity wasn't about separateness. 732 00:44:09,760 --> 00:44:13,160 There wasn't a Chinatown or even a Jewish quarter. 733 00:44:13,160 --> 00:44:16,720 In fact, your average Roman would have been amazed 734 00:44:16,720 --> 00:44:22,080 at the way we try to respect and preserve different cultures. 735 00:44:22,080 --> 00:44:25,080 Here, the people were from everywhere, 736 00:44:25,080 --> 00:44:27,200 the food came from everywhere, 737 00:44:27,200 --> 00:44:29,400 the gods were from everywhere, 738 00:44:29,400 --> 00:44:31,600 but it all went into the blender 739 00:44:31,600 --> 00:44:34,320 and it came out Roman. 740 00:44:37,120 --> 00:44:40,040 The empire was doing two things to Rome. 741 00:44:41,520 --> 00:44:45,080 They were parading all the exotic and luxurious strangeness 742 00:44:45,080 --> 00:44:46,760 of the outside world. 743 00:44:46,760 --> 00:44:50,760 But at the same time, the distinction between Romans 744 00:44:50,760 --> 00:44:52,560 and the subject peoples 745 00:44:52,560 --> 00:44:54,760 was dissolving all the time. 746 00:44:54,760 --> 00:44:59,200 Eventually, every free adult male in the empire 747 00:44:59,200 --> 00:45:03,200 could call himself a Roman citizen. 748 00:45:03,200 --> 00:45:05,440 For me, there's one place 749 00:45:05,440 --> 00:45:10,240 which captures the contradictions of Imperial Rome... 750 00:45:18,440 --> 00:45:23,400 There was a people's palace here - it was the Colosseum. 751 00:45:23,400 --> 00:45:27,240 It was built and paid for out of the spoils of the Jewish War 752 00:45:27,240 --> 00:45:29,680 as a gift to the Roman people. 753 00:45:31,560 --> 00:45:36,080 But one thing's for sure, some of them had to climb a lot of stairs! 754 00:45:41,520 --> 00:45:44,920 I'm in the only part of the Colosseum 755 00:45:44,920 --> 00:45:47,000 that I'd be allowed to go to. 756 00:45:48,600 --> 00:45:53,240 Women, slaves and other undesirables in the Roman world 757 00:45:53,240 --> 00:45:55,920 had to be up on the gods. 758 00:46:01,760 --> 00:46:06,120 So what does it look like from the undesirables' point of view? 759 00:46:06,120 --> 00:46:08,760 Let's not think for a moment about the blood and guts - 760 00:46:08,760 --> 00:46:10,760 there was certainly plenty of that. 761 00:46:10,760 --> 00:46:13,560 Let's think of it in terms of Empire. 762 00:46:13,560 --> 00:46:18,760 What you had on display in front of you 763 00:46:18,760 --> 00:46:24,320 was all the biggest and best the Empire could offer. 764 00:46:28,240 --> 00:46:31,040 People often compare this to a football match, 765 00:46:31,040 --> 00:46:36,000 but if so, this is not just Premier League, this is the World Cup. 766 00:46:36,000 --> 00:46:38,400 Fantastic combat, 767 00:46:38,400 --> 00:46:41,760 weird, exotic creatures, 768 00:46:41,760 --> 00:46:45,480 animals you could only have dreamt of. 769 00:46:47,120 --> 00:46:49,360 When this place opened, 770 00:46:49,360 --> 00:46:54,360 they even had a rhinoceros running wild down there. 771 00:46:56,360 --> 00:47:00,320 This is one place we can see the Roman Empire 772 00:47:00,320 --> 00:47:04,280 from the ordinary person's-eye view. 773 00:47:04,280 --> 00:47:07,600 This guy is looking at the show and then... 774 00:47:07,600 --> 00:47:09,920 During a pause, or while he wasn't looking at it, 775 00:47:09,920 --> 00:47:15,520 he's scratching the scene that he was seeing in the arena. 776 00:47:15,520 --> 00:47:16,800 And what have we got? 777 00:47:16,800 --> 00:47:20,560 We can see wild animals, like a panther... 778 00:47:20,560 --> 00:47:22,680 There's two bears! ...and a couple of bears. 779 00:47:22,680 --> 00:47:24,400 Right. And Bestiarius. 780 00:47:24,400 --> 00:47:29,320 And Bestiarius. Look at those muscles in his arm, 781 00:47:29,320 --> 00:47:30,800 biceps or whatever they are, 782 00:47:30,800 --> 00:47:33,040 a really muscly bloke. 783 00:47:33,040 --> 00:47:34,440 I think this is great, 784 00:47:34,440 --> 00:47:38,280 because it not only gives us a spectator's viewpoint 785 00:47:38,280 --> 00:47:43,200 but it also captures that moment of what it was like to be here. 786 00:47:43,200 --> 00:47:45,600 'This guy wasn't alone. 787 00:47:45,600 --> 00:47:49,480 'The Romans just couldn't get enough of drawing the beasts 788 00:47:49,480 --> 00:47:51,560 'they ogled in the Colosseum.' 789 00:47:53,480 --> 00:47:55,960 'When you saw them for the first time, 790 00:47:55,960 --> 00:47:59,680 'these exotic animals must have been breathtaking. 791 00:47:59,680 --> 00:48:04,200 'The same goes for the other stars of the show - 792 00:48:04,200 --> 00:48:07,000 'the human performers.' 793 00:48:07,000 --> 00:48:10,320 This is a fantastic treat for me 794 00:48:10,320 --> 00:48:13,560 because it's a real-live gladiator's helmet - 795 00:48:13,560 --> 00:48:18,840 or a real-dead gladiators helmet - from Pompeii. 796 00:48:18,840 --> 00:48:21,320 It's very weird and heavy. 797 00:48:21,320 --> 00:48:23,680 If you pick it up, 798 00:48:23,680 --> 00:48:26,640 it's got a great crest on it 799 00:48:26,640 --> 00:48:32,240 and a bust of Hercules just facing out at you, 800 00:48:32,240 --> 00:48:34,480 just to scare the opponent. 801 00:48:34,480 --> 00:48:35,840 I can't quite put it on 802 00:48:35,840 --> 00:48:38,760 but I can get the feeling of what it's like having it on. 803 00:48:38,760 --> 00:48:44,080 What it makes you see is it's jolly heavy 804 00:48:44,080 --> 00:48:49,960 and you get a very, very difficult view from inside 805 00:48:49,960 --> 00:48:54,600 because everything's kind of shaded off 806 00:48:54,600 --> 00:48:57,720 both by the peak and by the protective grill. 807 00:48:57,720 --> 00:49:01,120 I mean, I don't quite see 808 00:49:01,120 --> 00:49:04,360 how you would know where the blasted enemy was, honestly. 809 00:49:04,360 --> 00:49:10,400 The other thing about it is it looks to us fantastically weird 810 00:49:10,400 --> 00:49:12,840 and I think it would look like that to the Romans too. 811 00:49:12,840 --> 00:49:14,880 The point about these gladiators 812 00:49:14,880 --> 00:49:18,400 is that they're not dressed in standard Roman army issue. 813 00:49:18,400 --> 00:49:20,840 They're not the kind of fighters you'd see 814 00:49:20,840 --> 00:49:22,960 if you went to fight the Barbarians. 815 00:49:22,960 --> 00:49:29,080 These are mad, weird, exotic foreign costumes, 816 00:49:29,080 --> 00:49:32,840 meant to exude the mysterious outside world 817 00:49:32,840 --> 00:49:35,560 and all the violence that there might be in it. 818 00:49:35,560 --> 00:49:42,480 In a way I think, what we're seeing here is sort of a fancy dress. 819 00:49:42,480 --> 00:49:45,160 I think what you'd get the sense was... 820 00:49:45,160 --> 00:49:47,240 that people would come to see the costume 821 00:49:47,240 --> 00:49:50,760 as much as they'd come to see you. 822 00:49:50,760 --> 00:49:52,480 Margh! 823 00:49:54,240 --> 00:49:56,960 Where do I go now? Hard to see! 824 00:49:59,720 --> 00:50:03,120 So, when I think about gladiatorial combat, 825 00:50:03,120 --> 00:50:06,640 I know that some of it was to the death. People did get killed. 826 00:50:06,640 --> 00:50:11,120 But more, and more often, 827 00:50:11,120 --> 00:50:16,880 it was a show, it was a spectacle, it was theatre. 828 00:50:16,880 --> 00:50:22,800 In my mind, it's kind of more like the sort of charade of wrestling 829 00:50:22,800 --> 00:50:24,920 than the real-life combat of boxing. 830 00:50:24,920 --> 00:50:29,800 And part of the reason for that was simply economics. 831 00:50:29,800 --> 00:50:34,040 You've got hundreds of gladiators, they're extremely expensive, 832 00:50:34,040 --> 00:50:36,960 you don't want them killed off too often. 833 00:50:40,000 --> 00:50:43,920 Bit of a disparity of size here but I'm afraid Thraex is out. 834 00:50:45,800 --> 00:50:47,560 Whoops! 835 00:50:47,560 --> 00:50:49,400 We have a victorious Murmillo. 836 00:50:52,240 --> 00:50:54,240 Congratulations! 837 00:50:54,240 --> 00:50:58,840 To the Romans, gladiators represented a violent fantasy 838 00:50:58,840 --> 00:51:03,360 of the outside world fighting in their midst. 839 00:51:03,360 --> 00:51:06,840 But there's a fascinating irony 840 00:51:06,840 --> 00:51:11,600 in the real origins of the men behind the masks. 841 00:51:11,600 --> 00:51:14,920 I've got a wonderful drawing, an old drawing here, 842 00:51:14,920 --> 00:51:18,440 the original stone has long ago been lost, 843 00:51:18,440 --> 00:51:23,560 but it's a tombstone of a man called Marcus Antonius Exochus, 844 00:51:23,560 --> 00:51:27,520 who tells us he came from Alexandria 845 00:51:27,520 --> 00:51:34,000 to fight in some gladiatorial games put on by the Emperor Trajan. 846 00:51:34,000 --> 00:51:37,320 And here's another text of a tombstone, 847 00:51:37,320 --> 00:51:41,560 put up by a man called Phouskinos, 848 00:51:41,560 --> 00:51:46,400 who was a provocateur, another sort of gladiator. 849 00:51:46,400 --> 00:51:52,560 His tombstone's in Greek and he tells us that he was an Egyptian. 850 00:51:54,520 --> 00:51:57,520 These gladiators came from the same wildly different backgrounds 851 00:51:57,520 --> 00:51:59,720 as everyone else in Rome. 852 00:51:59,720 --> 00:52:02,840 But their real stories were much more mundane 853 00:52:02,840 --> 00:52:06,480 than the exotic roles they were forced to play in the arena. 854 00:52:07,640 --> 00:52:11,960 It reveals the kind of smoke and mirrors aspect of all this 855 00:52:11,960 --> 00:52:14,000 because underneath all that, 856 00:52:14,000 --> 00:52:16,320 some gladiators were pretty domestic, 857 00:52:16,320 --> 00:52:18,840 or they certainly ended up so. 858 00:52:18,840 --> 00:52:22,440 They finished up, perhaps long retired, 859 00:52:22,440 --> 00:52:25,040 longish life, wife and kids. 860 00:52:25,040 --> 00:52:29,760 One of the nicest ones is a man here 861 00:52:29,760 --> 00:52:33,360 who lived to the age of 45. 862 00:52:33,360 --> 00:52:36,440 He'd come from Tungria, he was a Belgian. 863 00:52:36,440 --> 00:52:41,280 But the tombstone is put up to him by his wife 864 00:52:41,280 --> 00:52:43,560 and little Justus, his son. 865 00:52:45,520 --> 00:52:50,560 Even Exochus , exotic as he looks, 866 00:52:50,560 --> 00:52:54,240 seems to have ended up life, to judge from his name, 867 00:52:54,240 --> 00:52:56,640 as a Roman citizen. 868 00:52:56,640 --> 00:52:59,160 He presumably retired 869 00:52:59,160 --> 00:53:03,920 and lived out his life somewhere in suburban Italy. 870 00:53:03,920 --> 00:53:09,280 A bit like Marcus Antonius Exochus of Tunbridge Wells. 871 00:53:09,280 --> 00:53:13,520 An Egyptian playing the part of a Thracian warrior, 872 00:53:13,520 --> 00:53:16,960 then settling down as a Roman family man? 873 00:53:16,960 --> 00:53:20,840 To me, that's Imperial Rome in a nutshell. 874 00:53:22,480 --> 00:53:25,800 The Colosseum dramatised this frightening, 875 00:53:25,800 --> 00:53:29,760 thrilling idea of Rome and the outside world. 876 00:53:29,760 --> 00:53:33,560 It's all violence, confrontation and strangeness. 877 00:53:34,680 --> 00:53:40,200 The truth is that the real Empire was not just fighting in the arena, 878 00:53:40,200 --> 00:53:42,240 it was sitting in the seats. 879 00:53:43,600 --> 00:53:47,280 There are places in the Colosseum reserved for the Gaditani, 880 00:53:47,280 --> 00:53:49,360 the people of Cadiz in Spain, 881 00:53:49,360 --> 00:53:52,480 for an African senator and a Gothic chieftain. 882 00:53:52,480 --> 00:53:58,000 In reality, the fearsome barbarians had become Romans 883 00:53:58,000 --> 00:54:01,960 and were watching the action like everyone else. 884 00:54:06,560 --> 00:54:10,200 So, what's the Colosseum doing then? 885 00:54:10,200 --> 00:54:12,960 At one level, it's showing the people of the city 886 00:54:12,960 --> 00:54:15,680 what they get from Empire. 887 00:54:15,680 --> 00:54:19,760 But in a deeper sense, it's showing them that they fit in. 888 00:54:21,040 --> 00:54:24,200 If the people who were killing each other in the arena 889 00:54:24,200 --> 00:54:26,840 were stereotypical foreigners, 890 00:54:26,840 --> 00:54:31,880 then by implication, if you were watching them, you were a Roman. 891 00:54:33,400 --> 00:54:38,960 It's trying to put everything in an order that makes sense. 892 00:54:41,560 --> 00:54:43,920 The point about the Colosseum 893 00:54:43,920 --> 00:54:48,120 is that it was both a microcosm of the city of Rome 894 00:54:48,120 --> 00:54:51,760 and a microcosm of the Roman Empire 895 00:54:51,760 --> 00:54:56,120 and it helps to show how the boundaries between what was Roman 896 00:54:56,120 --> 00:55:00,480 and what was foreign increasingly broke down. 897 00:55:02,040 --> 00:55:04,880 In Rome, for the first time in history, 898 00:55:04,880 --> 00:55:07,600 people from Asia, Africa and Europe 899 00:55:07,600 --> 00:55:11,320 could sit together as citizens of the same state. 900 00:55:16,600 --> 00:55:20,160 Rome was the first global city and it contained in it 901 00:55:20,160 --> 00:55:24,320 all the contradictions that global cities have had ever since. 902 00:55:24,320 --> 00:55:28,040 It was diverse but it wasn't tolerant. 903 00:55:28,040 --> 00:55:30,000 Foreign enemies were crucified, 904 00:55:30,000 --> 00:55:32,440 enslaved and forced to fight in the arena 905 00:55:32,440 --> 00:55:35,600 but equally, foreigners could rise to be emperor. 906 00:55:35,600 --> 00:55:39,480 Point is, the distinction the Empire made 907 00:55:39,480 --> 00:55:41,920 was not between Romans and foreigners 908 00:55:41,920 --> 00:55:46,120 but between those who resisted and those who joined in. 909 00:55:46,120 --> 00:55:49,200 The key question in our story is 910 00:55:49,200 --> 00:55:53,640 what was it like to live in the world's first city 911 00:55:53,640 --> 00:55:58,080 where almost everyone came from somewhere else? 912 00:55:58,080 --> 00:56:00,280 There must have been plenty of people 913 00:56:00,280 --> 00:56:03,520 who felt very far from home and rootless. 914 00:56:03,520 --> 00:56:07,800 For some, there were profits to be made and success to be had 915 00:56:07,800 --> 00:56:10,640 and an exciting, even if bewildering, 916 00:56:10,640 --> 00:56:15,760 mixture of new ideas, different cultures and different religions. 917 00:56:15,760 --> 00:56:20,960 Whatever you'd been back home, in Rome, you could reinvent yourself. 918 00:56:20,960 --> 00:56:25,440 It's not hard to imagine the fears and anxieties 919 00:56:25,440 --> 00:56:28,720 of those ordinary Romans, wherever they were from. 920 00:56:28,720 --> 00:56:31,720 "How do I fit into all this? 921 00:56:31,720 --> 00:56:33,520 "Who knows who I am? 922 00:56:33,520 --> 00:56:37,000 "Who's going to remember me when I'm dead?" 923 00:56:37,000 --> 00:56:39,520 Perhaps that's why they were so keen 924 00:56:39,520 --> 00:56:42,800 to write their stories onto their tombstones. 925 00:56:44,480 --> 00:56:49,040 They're deliberately speaking to you and me. 926 00:56:51,120 --> 00:56:53,800 This guy's really having a conversation. 927 00:56:55,080 --> 00:56:56,880 "Stranger," he says, 928 00:56:56,880 --> 00:56:59,880 "hospes", hang on a minute! 929 00:56:59,880 --> 00:57:02,640 "Resiste", stop here! 930 00:57:02,640 --> 00:57:05,200 "Take a look down to your left. 931 00:57:05,200 --> 00:57:08,720 "That's where my bones are buried," 932 00:57:08,720 --> 00:57:11,480 my ossa. 933 00:57:11,480 --> 00:57:17,360 "I was a good man, I was a kind man," misericordis, 934 00:57:17,360 --> 00:57:23,600 "and I was a lover of the poor," amantis pauperis. 935 00:57:23,600 --> 00:57:26,800 "Please, traveller," please, viator, 936 00:57:26,800 --> 00:57:31,280 "I beg you, don't mess with my tomb." 937 00:57:31,280 --> 00:57:37,040 And the name of the guy is Gaius Attilius Euhodus, 938 00:57:37,040 --> 00:57:40,800 the ex-slave of a man called Serranis. 939 00:57:40,800 --> 00:57:45,480 Euhodus sounds Greek to me and he tells us what he did. 940 00:57:45,480 --> 00:57:49,400 He was a margaritarius, he was a pearl seller. 941 00:57:49,400 --> 00:57:53,040 That's who's buried in this tomb. 942 00:57:53,040 --> 00:57:57,640 "Traveller", he says, viator, "on your way now." 943 00:57:57,640 --> 00:58:01,200 "Goodbye," vale. 944 00:58:01,200 --> 00:58:03,640 Vale. 945 00:58:06,640 --> 00:58:09,000 Next time... 946 00:58:09,000 --> 00:58:11,160 I'll descend into the city streets 947 00:58:11,160 --> 00:58:16,240 to explore their high-rise tenements, crime-ridden slums 948 00:58:16,240 --> 00:58:19,640 and life in the bars and the bathhouses. 949 00:58:19,640 --> 00:58:22,560 And we'll find some very distinctive Roman voices, 950 00:58:22,560 --> 00:58:27,160 born from the earthiness of communal city life. 951 00:58:27,160 --> 00:58:31,080 This is how we have to imagine the ancient city, 952 00:58:31,080 --> 00:58:34,440 everyone shitting together. 953 00:58:34,440 --> 00:58:40,840 Tunics up, togas up, trousers down, chatting as they went. 79317

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