All language subtitles for Meet the Romans with Mary Beard - Streetlife

'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.