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00:00Ancient Rome was once the centre of a vast empire that stretched from Spain to Syria,
00:15dominating the Western world for over 700 years.
00:20In many ways, we still live under its shadow.
00:24Like it or not, the Romans are still all around us,
00:28in our laws, our architecture, in our roads.
00:31And we keep on recreating them in film and fiction,
00:35and every year thousands of us trek here to Rome to see the monuments up close.
00:42But hidden all over the modern city, in its walls, behind its facades,
00:47even under its streets, is something much harder to find,
00:51but just as captivating, the forgotten voices of its ordinary people.
00:59Here's a great kid holding his little pet dog,
01:02and I guess it's his mum and dad on either side.
01:06And up above, there's the tombstone of Curatia Ammia,
01:12and she was someone's best beloved partner,
01:16Concubinae Ammantissimae.
01:20In this series, I'm getting the voices of these Romans speaking again
01:24to piece together a more intriguing view of ancient Roman life.
01:29This wasn't just a mugging.
01:32This was mass murder.
01:34They'll reveal a world so different from our own, and yet eerily familiar.
01:38She liked to get a bit drenched in Bacchus.
01:43So what he's saying is, she was a bit of a wild thing,
01:47and she really liked to drink hot tea.
01:50We've already seen how the Empire turned Rome
01:54into the world's first global city,
01:57where everyone, everything, was from somewhere else.
02:01Now I'm going down into the streets
02:04to explore its slums, its bathhouses and bars,
02:09where the crime, sex and humour in everyday Roman life
02:14shows us what it was really like
02:16to live in an ancient city of a million people.
02:21We think of ancient Rome as all white marble columns and classical order,
02:27but actually, it was a chaotic place, rambling and dirty.
02:33It was a right mess.
02:35It was as much a shantytown as it was Trafalgar Square or Washington DC.
02:40Welcome to my Rome.
02:45Rome
02:47Trafalgar Square
02:49Washington DC
02:51Trafalgar Square
02:53Washington DC
02:55Trafalgar Square
02:57Trafalgar Square
02:59Trafalgar Square
03:01Trafalgar Square
03:03Trafalgar Square
03:05Trafalgar Square
03:07Trafalgar Square
03:09Trafalgar Square
03:11Trafalgar Square
03:14This is a fantastically detailed model of the ancient city of Rome.
03:19It's got all the familiar things in it,
03:22the Colosseum, the Imperial Palace,
03:25the temples, the gleaming marble,
03:28the pleasure gardens.
03:30For my taste, it's all a bit grand.
03:34And it's a bit misleading,
03:36because it misses out so many important things
03:39that I want to try and get back in.
03:42The smell.
03:44The dirt.
03:46The pubs.
03:47The slums.
03:49And it doesn't answer the questions that we want to ask.
03:53What was it like to be a kid in this city?
03:57Where did you go to the lavatory?
04:00What did you do if you got ill?
04:04What was it like to be just an ordinary Roman?
04:13So how do we start to answer these questions?
04:16In fact, there's a lot more evidence than you might think,
04:20hidden away all over modern Rome.
04:23When you first come into a place like this,
04:25what hits you in the eye is the rich Romans,
04:28the great and the grand.
04:30But look behind them, look at the wallpaper, as it were,
04:35and you'll hear a babble of ordinary Roman voices
04:39trying to be heard.
04:41In fact, behind this emperor here,
04:44there's the tombstone of a little girl
04:47who lived just two years, ten months and 23 days.
04:54She's waving goodbye.
04:57Most tombstones today record just the bare essentials,
05:01but the Romans often told us a lot more about themselves.
05:05They're asking anyone and everyone
05:07to read about their ordinary and extraordinary lives
05:10from beyond the grave.
05:12And what they give us aren't just the success stories,
05:16but a unique vision of life at the bottom of the social heap too.
05:21This guy certainly wants us to know about his troubles in life.
05:25His name is Anchorinus Nothus.
05:28He lived for 43 years and he's the ex-slave of a woman,
05:33which is what that symbol means.
05:35This is what he has to say about his life
05:39and what it's like being dead.
05:41It happens to everybody, he says.
05:44My bones are now resting sweetly, dulcet hair,
05:49and I'm no longer worried that I might die of starvation, isurium,
05:55and I don't any longer have those awful aching feet
05:59and I'm not contracted to my rent payments, pensionibus.
06:04It's a quite technical phrase,
06:06but it really means I'm no longer in hock to the rent collector.
06:10In fact, I'm enjoying board and lodging, hospitio,
06:17gratis, for free, for eternity, aeterno.
06:23The stone was put up by his wife and by his daughter
06:27to her father, who she calls Indulgentissimus,
06:32a father who was very indulgent.
06:34He spoiled her something rotten.
06:36There are three things that stand out.
06:40How am I going to get my next meal?
06:43What shall I do if I'm ill?
06:45And how shall I pay the rent?
06:48And we know that the figure of the rent collector,
06:52cum bailiff, it's called extractor in Latin,
06:57was one that terrified the Roman poor.
07:01And Corina's notice might have been a bit of a joker
07:04and his family might have been trying to tug on our heartstrings.
07:09But the important point is that these few lines sum up the plight,
07:15the grim realities of life for so many ordinary Romans.
07:23So where might someone like Ancorina's notice have lived with his family?
07:29It's pretty clear he didn't live in the marble villas we think of
07:33when we think ancient Rome.
07:35One of the best places to get a glimpse of his world
07:39actually still survives in the centre of town,
07:42hidden in the shadow of the Vittorio Emanuele monument,
07:46one of Rome's most famous modern landmarks.
07:50This humble brick building doesn't look like much on the outside.
07:55Most visitors walk past it without even giving it a glance.
07:59But once you know what it is,
08:01a very different Rome opens up before your eyes.
08:04This building was converted into a Christian church,
08:08but originally it was an ancient Roman high-rise apartment block.
08:14The city was full of them.
08:17They were called, in Latin, insulae.
08:20That means islands.
08:23So think away the churchy bits,
08:26and ancient Rome lies underneath.
08:31Right down there, you can still see the ancient street level,
08:36and facing onto the street,
08:38there are a series of shops with wide entrances
08:41and, above them, little mezzanine flats.
08:44These guys were literally living above the shop.
08:48But up here, there were six, perhaps seven more floors,
08:53more than survive today.
08:55But to get the real authentic Roman impression,
08:59you have to remember that just a few feet that way,
09:04there was another block like this.
09:07So this wasn't so much a nice open road down there,
09:11it was a narrow alley.
09:13It was like a canyon between two vast buildings.
09:20The flats are usually locked up,
09:22but I've got permission to have a look around with my colleague,
09:26Ed Bisphum, who's been here many times before.
09:29So we are at what's the first floor?
09:32This is the first floor level, yeah.
09:35And this, then, is the window?
09:37This is the window, so we're really burgling,
09:39we're breaking and entering here. Right, OK.
09:44Gosh!
09:47The windows have since been blocked up,
09:49but on the first floor, there was once a spacious apartment
09:52where a reasonably well-off family might have lived,
09:55with their children and slaves.
09:57You wouldn't be pushed for space in here as a single family.
10:00I mean, you've got probably four nicely barrel-vaulted rooms here.
10:04But further up the building,
10:06light, space and fresh air was in much shorter supply.
10:10Up here, off each dark corridor,
10:13are four or five rooms just a few metres square.
10:16We don't know for sure how many people lived here,
10:19but to get a million people into a city the size of Rome,
10:22you had to pile them high and squash them in.
10:25My guess is that these weren't single occupancy.
10:28This looks a bit spacious,
10:30but that's because the dividing walls have gone,
10:33so you've got to imagine a wall here going...
10:37..going right the way up to the vault,
10:39with maybe a little light window in it.
10:41The thing that always kind of shocks me
10:44is the sense that we might have had six people
10:47living, in inverted commas, in here.
10:50This is one step up, one or two steps up, actually,
10:54from the real bottom of Roman society itself.
10:57Yeah, compared to sleeping in a tomb or under an aqueduct arch,
11:00this is quite bijou.
11:08Here's another bijou apartment.
11:11This is really small.
11:13We've got to get...
11:14Well, let's say we might have four or six people in here.
11:17You know, one question is, how do they fit?
11:20And I'm now going to see what it would be like.
11:23How much space does one person take up
11:25trying to get to sleep on the floor?
11:28Oh!
11:31Not much space left. No, no.
11:35And who are the guys and the women who are living in these?
11:40What are they doing?
11:41The guys are probably working on construction projects.
11:44Think of a big thing like the bars of Caracalla,
11:47bars of Diocletian.
11:49We're talking 6,000 to 10,000 people on a four-year building job.
11:53And then there's portraiture.
11:55Humping the amphorae from the barges to the warehouse.
11:58Sacks of grain, yeah.
12:00Day labour. You get it when you can.
12:02You think about it, you've been working all day,
12:04you've been humping stuff about, you get back here,
12:06you're soaked in sweat, you stink,
12:08you don't have any spare clothes,
12:10there's no running water, you can't have a bath,
12:12and there's three other smelly guys sleeping on the floor too.
12:15Or there's your partner, your female partner, and two kids.
12:21Yes.
12:22I mean, that's...
12:24One thing is to think about these as sort of male dorm accommodation,
12:28which I think a lot of them must be,
12:30but for some of them, you know, there are women having babies here.
12:33Yeah, yeah, yes.
12:34And actually, where I'm sitting, some woman probably gave birth.
12:39That's what's scary. Yeah.
12:44And that wasn't even the top of the block.
12:46There were even more stories above this one.
12:49The basic rule was, the further you went up, the worse it got.
12:53There were no luxury penthouses here.
12:56This was social climbing backwards.
13:01In their time, these tenements must have been
13:04the tallest residential buildings on the planet.
13:07But they were built poorly, cheaply and fast,
13:11and only a handful have survived to any height.
13:14So the fact is, we no longer think of ancient Rome like this.
13:18But that is how we should see it.
13:21Not just a city of marble,
13:24but a city of tower blocks and the ordinary people who lived in them.
13:31MUSIC CONTINUES
13:37Perhaps the best place to get a snapshot
13:39of the kind of community you might have found in a Roman high-rise
13:43is now hidden at the bottom of a garden in a Roman suburb.
13:47In this extraordinary communal tomb
13:49lie the remains of every walk of Roman life.
13:53There's hundreds and hundreds of them here.
14:01And greeting you when you come in
14:06is a little face, and it's a touching story
14:11because it's Valeria Vitalis,
14:14who was the sweetheart of Hilarus.
14:18I bet he made sure that he got his sweetheart into prime position.
14:24This is a just fantastic kind of career directory
14:30of the ordinary Roman people.
14:32This was probably quite a bruiser.
14:35It's Sinio, the bodyguard.
14:37And in the corner here,
14:41we've got the barber.
14:45Marcus Valerius the barber.
14:47And...
14:50Ah!
14:52Hygieia, the midwife.
14:56And up there, and I'm not going to risk a Roman ascent up there,
15:01we've got a nice accountant.
15:03All of Roman life is here.
15:05But this isn't just a Roman job directory.
15:08It's a wonderful glimpse into how the Romans lived
15:12stacked up in death, not just in life.
15:14Trying to understand ancient Rome
15:16is always a bit of a post-mortem.
15:18I mean, they're dead. The Romans are dead.
15:22But they can still speak to us.
15:25Not just the rich and powerful, not just the great writers,
15:30but the ordinary people, like those in this tomb.
15:33They send us these little tweak-sized messages
15:37telling us who they were, what they did,
15:39and saying, remember me.
15:42It's one of my favourite stories.
15:44Remember me.
15:46It's one of my very favourite places in the city of Rome
15:50because it gets us close to real people
15:53with real jobs and real names.
15:57Sineo, the body god.
15:59Hygieia, the midwife.
16:01We find them here living in death, just like they did in life.
16:07This is a kind of burial high-rise.
16:10I can't help thinking somewhere behind this
16:13there might have been a landlord asking the dead for their rent.
16:25Today, modern Rome isn't a world apart from the ancient one.
16:29Seen from the air, it's still a city of rented apartment blocks
16:33in a grid of little islands.
16:36But apart from that modern model,
16:38how else can we get closer to the way the ancient city
16:42was actually laid out?
16:47At the Museum of Roman Civilisation,
16:50packed up in boxes is a tantalising clue.
16:58It's sadly not usually on display,
17:00but what's inside are the remains of a precious Roman map
17:05carved in stone, a kind of marble A to Z,
17:08that once showed a complete ground plan of the city.
17:12Over the last few hundred years,
17:14about 1,000 fragments have been discovered, only 10% of it.
17:18But luckily, a few bits do still fit together.
17:22It's not hard on any jigsaw puzzle to recognise the Colosseum.
17:29And here you can see circular lines of the seating of the Colosseum
17:35and above it is written what looks like,
17:40although we've only got the very end of the word,
17:43Amphitheatrum, the amphitheatre.
17:46And that was what people called the Colosseum in the Roman world.
17:49They didn't call it Colosseum.
17:51What strikes me as I just look at it here, actually,
17:54is how big this thing was.
17:57The calculation is that it's at the scale of 1 to 240.
18:02It makes a whole whacking wall full of an image of the city of Rome.
18:12But even more intriguing than those pieces of the Grand Rome
18:16are the fragments of the map which show in extraordinary detail
18:19the streets, houses and apartment blocks
18:22where ordinary Romans lived and worked.
18:24And what they show is that Rome had not been laid out by city planners.
18:29It's grown chaotically over time.
18:32It fits.
18:36So what we've got here is a really mixed area.
18:40We've got the rich houses, rather large ones, quite posh,
18:44with little porticoed gardens at the back.
18:47Even these large houses have got shops or workshops
18:52opening directly onto the street in front.
18:56As I sit at those houses,
18:58there's what looks to me like a kind of medium-rank, high-rise building.
19:04Over here is what looks, for all the world, like a warehouse.
19:09This thing's a bit more of a mystery.
19:12It's got columns round about,
19:15and these rather strange U-shaped things in the middle.
19:20The current idea is that these are hedges,
19:23so this is some sort of garden,
19:27possibly private, possibly public, possibly religious.
19:31Who knows?
19:32What this reminds me is that Rome is not zoned
19:37in the way that many modern cities are.
19:40Rome was a place where the rich lived next to the shops
19:44and to the workshops and to the bar and to the not-so-rich
19:48and to the warehouse and to the public garden.
19:51The idea is that the streets themselves are pretty narrow.
19:57And this one on the plan looks like a main highway,
20:01and in a way it is, but if you look at its width,
20:04it's only as wide as these little shops are deep.
20:08And if you go round here, there's a tiny little passageway
20:12that certainly you wouldn't want to walk down late at night.
20:16Rome is not like Paris.
20:19It's full of boulevards.
20:21Rome was a rabbit warren.
20:26It's frustrating in a way that so little of the map has survived,
20:30but there are other ways to get a feel for the ancient streetscape,
20:34like coming to a medieval street in the modern city.
20:38Ancient Rome's roads were so narrow and its roofs so perilously high
20:43that they were full of dangers, like falling chamber pots,
20:46and writers jokingly recommended no Roman go out without writing a will.
20:52We even know of one 13-year-old tourist, Papirius Proculus,
20:57who was brained by a flying roof tile.
21:01There are all kinds of things here that remind me of the Roman streetscape.
21:06This little shop opening directly onto the street,
21:11the lock-ups, how narrow it all is.
21:16There's actually a story told by one Roman writer
21:21about how he could shake hands with the guy living in the apartment across the road.
21:27Now, you couldn't quite do that here unless you had really long arms,
21:31but it's not far off.
21:34And you also wonder about the kind of street community you had here.
21:39The funny thing is about the story of the two guys who could shake hands
21:44is that they never did.
21:47In fact, the writer says he never saw the guy on the other side of the street.
21:52He never even heard him.
21:54Which makes me think that amongst all this face-to-face proximity,
21:59amongst the kind of on-top-of-each-other living,
22:02for some people it must have been a pretty anonymous kind of city.
22:10That Roman writer was a poet called Juvenal,
22:14a satirist who lived in Rome around 100 AD.
22:18So how might his domestic arrangements compare with ours today?
22:22To help me find out, a very gracious Italian lady living on the same street
22:27has let me poke around her apartment.
22:29Hello. How are you?
22:31Good. I'm Mary.
22:33I'm Rita.
22:36Looking at the modern set-up can help us see
22:39what's distinctively different about the ancient one.
22:49It may seem a bit odd, just barging into someone's house like this,
22:53but I've got a very simple point to make.
22:56On the outside, a place like this
23:01looks much like an ancient Roman apartment block.
23:06But come inside and it reminds you of the differences.
23:10Now, that's not just the washing machine and the microwave.
23:13We know the Romans didn't have those.
23:15But all the things that we take for granted
23:18as absolutely basic services here.
23:21Running water, a lavatory, heating,
23:26and actually some natural light.
23:29Many of the people living on the upper floors of a Roman high-rise
23:34wouldn't even have those.
23:36Now, the consequence of that is absolutely obvious.
23:40You simply had to go out
23:43to get almost everything that we take for granted as having at home.
23:49You went out to eat and to wash, to get water.
23:53And, if you didn't throw it out of the window, to go to the lavatory.
23:59Grazie. Grazie.
24:06It's a way of life that has largely disappeared
24:09from modern cities in the West.
24:11But in ancient Rome, life was lived outdoors.
24:14Rooms in a high-rise were used mostly just for sleeping
24:17and your basic facilities were spread out all over the city.
24:21As one amazing archaeological site not far from Rome
24:25made it clear for ordinary Romans
24:28what we now do in private could be a far more public affair.
24:34I just love this place.
24:36If you want to understand a culture,
24:39look to its lavatories is not a bad motto.
24:43And this is a Roman communal toilet.
24:48According to one ancient guidebook that survives,
24:51there were 54 public latrines in downtown Rome.
24:55Though, of course, we don't know how many seats each had.
25:03It's not exactly clear how this worked.
25:06What about this channel here?
25:08Did it have running water in it?
25:10Or was it just to catch the drips and the bad aims?
25:14And what about this hole here?
25:16Was that for men to pee through?
25:19Or did you put the sponge to wire at your bottom?
25:22Perhaps both.
25:24Do we think it was unisex?
25:26Who knows?
25:28But the point's a simple one.
25:30This is how we have to imagine the ancient city.
25:34Everyone shitting together.
25:37Tunics up, togas up, trousers down, chatting as they went.
25:45And it wasn't just going to the lav that was a social activity.
25:48In Rome, there was no sanitation on the upper floors of a high-rise,
25:52so most Romans went to the public baths to wash and let it all hang out.
25:57We don't often get to hear what the baths meant to ordinary people.
26:03But this tombstone of an ordinary guy
26:08interestingly lists baths and associated activities
26:14as one of the great pleasures of life.
26:17And he says, here I am, I'm in this tomb.
26:21Primus Notissimus, known to the world as Primus,
26:25or famous Primus.
26:28Then he goes on to say, I lived on leucrine oysters.
26:33It's the very best you could get.
26:35And I often drank Falernian wine.
26:38It's like saying, I often drank the really best claret.
26:42And then he has a nice summing up.
26:45Balnia vina venus.
26:49Baths, wine and sex.
26:52Mecum senuere per annus.
26:55They grew old with me. I enjoyed them, I suppose, till I was old.
27:00Now, we find that combination, baths, wine and sex, elsewhere.
27:05In fact, there's another nice tombstone
27:07of a man called Tiberius Claudius Secundus.
27:11And he appeals to the same threesome.
27:14But in a slightly more worldly wise way.
27:18Baths, wine and sex, he said, ruin your body.
27:22True.
27:24But they're what makes life really worth living.
27:33When you look at Rome's baths,
27:35it's not hard to see why ordinary Romans were so keen on them.
27:39Built by various emperors,
27:41the most famous were the size of small towns
27:44and their ruins still loom large in the Roman cityscape.
27:50By far the best preserved is actually one of the smaller sort,
27:54in the town of Herculaneum, not far from Pompeii.
27:58It's an extraordinary place.
28:00The only one where you can walk through Roman baths
28:04pretty much as they were.
28:11More Turkish baths than local swimming pool,
28:14they were centres of social life,
28:16where locals didn't just get a place to sweat and steam,
28:19they also got stalls for food and drink
28:22and booths for a massage, a shave, or maybe even sex on the side.
28:27And although it's hard to visualise today,
28:29there are vivid descriptions of the baths as rough, noisy places,
28:33full of grunting gym-goers,
28:35men getting their armpits plucked and loitering thieves,
28:38where you were as likely to get your coat nicked as catch the clap.
28:43The baths weren't just about hygiene,
28:46they were about pleasure and about community.
28:50Even the rich, who had their own private baths at home,
28:54even the emperor might occasionally put in
28:57a celebrity appearance at the people's baths.
29:01In some ways, they were a great social leveller.
29:07Imagine, everybody's here in the nude,
29:11it's then that the poor man, aged 20, with a great body,
29:16can turn the tables on that 60-year-old Roman plutocrat
29:22with a paunch and a hernia.
29:25But in other ways, they tended to reinforce the social hierarchy.
29:30The poor came along with no-one to carry their stuff or rub them down.
29:36The rich came with a whole retinue of staff,
29:39elbowing the man's way through to the pool,
29:43pushing the poor aside.
29:45In fact, there's a lovely anecdote of the emperor Hadrian,
29:49who goes to the public baths one day
29:52and sees a man rubbing himself down against the wall.
29:58Hadrian says,
30:01Someone replies,
30:09So the generous emperor gives him a slave.
30:13The next time Hadrian shows up at the baths,
30:16there's 20 or so men rubbing themselves down against the wall,
30:21all hoping for a little piece of imperial generosity.
30:25But Hadrian's a canny old bird,
30:28and he says,
30:30Tell them to rub each other down.
30:37However exotic this world might now seem,
30:40for me, spaces like the public baths and toilets
30:44tell us a lot about how Roman communal living
30:47created those voices that feel so familiar today.
30:52Sure, some of them have got serious messages,
30:55but they're also wonderfully sardonic, irreverent,
30:59and so recognisably urban.
31:02There's a marvellous guy from Tivoli, Flavius Agricola,
31:06and he's got some great advice on his tombstone.
31:11Put on your party hats, my friend, drink down that wine,
31:16and don't say no to sex with pretty girls,
31:20because you won't get a chance when you're dead.
31:23That's what urban living, cheek-by-jowl, bottom-by-bottom,
31:27is all about.
31:29It makes you live faster, talk faster, and think a bit differently.
31:40One of the best places to glimpse the humour and saltiness of this world
31:45is the ancient Roman bar.
31:47Much like any modern Italian city,
31:50Rome was awash with hundreds of taverns and eating places,
31:53ranging from seedy dens and strip joints
31:56to something much more like the modern wine bar or gastropub.
32:00Today, these places are nice lifestyle extras.
32:04But if you were living at the top of an ancient high-rise,
32:07the streets were your living room, the baths your bathroom,
32:11and this was your kitchen.
32:13So, who do you meet in a Roman bar?
32:17Well, the poet Juvenal conjures up a really disreputable crew
32:22who he says hang out in Roman bars.
32:25Thieves and cutthroats, runaways, even the local coffin maker.
32:30Because in Rome, it's the poor who are eating out,
32:33the rich dining at home.
32:35We mustn't forget the landlord and the landlady,
32:39and we get a little glimpse of them in an amazing tombstone
32:43found just outside Rome, put up to a pair of innkeepers, man and wife.
32:49He's called Lucius Callidius Eroticus,
32:53and she's Fania Voluptas.
32:57Now, these have just got to be trade names,
33:01because Callidius Eroticus means Mr Hot Sex,
33:07and Fania Voluptas, well, she's Madam Gorgeous.
33:12So, it's the bar of Hot Sex and Mrs Gorgeous.
33:16Don't get the wrong idea about Fania, though,
33:19because it doesn't mean that in Latin.
33:28Quite a few ancient bars have actually survived,
33:31but one in particular, in Pompeii,
33:34captures the flavour of ancient bar life on its walls.
33:39Here, at eye level in its back saloon,
33:42are wonderfully vivid images of Romans eating and drinking,
33:46gambling and being served wine.
33:48And here, one that's been sadly hacked away,
33:52probably by some Victorian moralist,
33:55because what it showed, as we can tell from an early 19th century picture of it,
34:01is a couple of people, bloke, woman, having sex...
34:07..with wine glasses in their hand, simultaneously,
34:10and balanced on a tightrope.
34:14All that's left of it is the bloke's feet.
34:19Whether life in the average Roman pub was quite as raunchy
34:24as these pictures suggest, I don't know,
34:27but there are plenty of graffiti around Pompeii
34:31saying words to the effect of, I screwed the barmaid.
34:34So, it doesn't take much to guess what happened after closing time.
34:40And certainly, the Roman rich were paranoid about pub culture.
34:45It's here they thought that the people got above themselves,
34:49planned riots, got awkward, got very drunk,
34:53and they were hugely disdainful of the kind of vulgarity of it all.
34:57Of course, the rich have always said that kind of thing.
35:01They gamble themselves silly, but take a couple of poor travellers
35:05and give them a game of dice,
35:07and the rich a prophesying instant moral decline.
35:15The best example of a bar that isn't bothered by any of this moralising
35:20is in ancient Ostia, harbour town not far from Rome.
35:24Inside are a set of paintings that take us right into the world
35:28of Roman anti-establishment bar humour.
35:31The art historian John Clarke has come to explore it with me.
35:36Just come in here and you see these men,
35:39and we've only got the tops of them, the torsos,
35:42because later on it got cut off and lost,
35:45but they are sitting on a common latrine.
35:48And here the artist has given them speech lines above each of the heads.
35:54So we have...
36:00And a mule driver was a common saying for being constipated
36:03because mule drivers were very stubborn,
36:06and so this is a very stubborn evacuation procedure.
36:10So this guy's got constipation. Right.
36:13Oh, that one is quite wonderful.
36:15It's my favourite, actually.
36:17HE SPEAKS LATIN
36:23Oh, that's a bad word.
36:25Well, it would be something like this.
36:27Buddy, don't you know the saying?
36:29Shit well and bugger the doctors.
36:32In other words, you don't need them.
36:35Higher up on the wall are images of the great thinkers of ancient Greece,
36:39the seven sages, only three of which are left.
36:43Thales from Miletus, Solon from Athens, Cylon from Sparta.
36:48Much loved by Roman teachers,
36:50they were known for their high-minded catchphrases on how best to live.
36:54Yet here, even they are literally talking crap.
36:58Oh, he's the best of all, really, isn't he?
37:04Clever Cylon taught people how to fart without making noise.
37:09Silent farting was his specialty, apparently.
37:13Cylon's the one who did say you shouldn't...
37:16His canonical saying is you shouldn't desire the impossible.
37:20Oh, well, maybe it's possible to learn how to be a silent farter.
37:25Who knows?
37:34We shouldn't get the impression from a place like this
37:37that the only thing the ordinary Romans joked about
37:41was their bowels and their constipation.
37:44In fact, an amazing collection of Roman popular jokes still survives.
37:51Almost 300 of them.
37:53The Roman Joke Book.
37:55And that shows Romans joking about almost everything.
38:00One of my favourites goes like this.
38:02A man's walking along the street.
38:04He meets a friend and he says,
38:07Are you alive? I heard you were dead.
38:10The guy replies,
38:11Oh, look, you can see I'm alive.
38:13Oh, said the other.
38:15The man who told me you were dead is much more reliable than you are.
38:22Silly joke, perhaps a slightly nasty joke,
38:25but for me it opens up one of the big problems of big city living.
38:32In a world without ID cards or passports, who are you?
38:37How do you know who you are?
38:39And how do you prove who you are?
38:42That's a problem.
38:50What jokes like these do is take us into the minds of ordinary Romans,
38:55but they also give us a different view
38:57on how to picture the ancient city's streets.
39:00They really weren't filled with all the big guys,
39:03the toffs, the togas, the politicians.
39:07They were flooded by its ordinary people.
39:09This was the people's city.
39:17You wouldn't have come across many of the rich and powerful
39:20in the streets and squares of ancient Rome.
39:23They'd much more likely have been hurried along in a sedan chair,
39:27carried by slaves, curtains drawn,
39:30a bit like a modern celeb in a chauffeur-driven blacked-out limo.
39:35These kind of places were the people's places,
39:38for doing business, for grabbing a bite to eat,
39:41for fighting, for flirting, for just hanging out.
39:47And it could all get pretty packed,
39:49as one tragic tombstone makes horribly clear.
39:53It's called Eumidia and to Eumidius Primagenius,
39:57a boy of 13 years old.
39:59And it's put up by Eumidius Anoptes, probably her partner.
40:04He explains,
40:06Una dies, one day, carried them both off.
40:09They met the final day of their destiny together.
40:14How did they die?
40:16Compressi examinae torbi.
40:20They were crushed like a swarm of a crowd.
40:24Now, we don't know what was going on in Rome that day,
40:27but it sure gives you a very clear idea
40:30of just how crowded the city could get.
40:39So, if this gives us a clue on how to re-people
40:42the streets of ancient Rome,
40:44what happens when you look at its most famous public space
40:49That space is known as the Forum.
40:52It's now a picturesque but sad wreck of what it once was.
40:56And, honestly, it's hard for almost anyone to make head or tail of.
40:59But this was once the location of some of the city's main law courts,
41:03political meeting places and grandest temples.
41:08Let's forget for a bit the Forum of the great speechmakers,
41:13the politicians, the celebrity lawyers,
41:16the friends, Romans, countrymen types.
41:20Of course, all that stuff happened here.
41:23But my Forum isn't the Forum of those bigwigs in their white togas.
41:29My Forum's the Forum of the poor people,
41:32the middling people, the ordinary people,
41:35in their tunics, even in their trousers.
41:38In fact, one Roman comic writer has left us a guide
41:42to the types of the Forum,
41:44a satirical guide to who you might find where.
41:48And I'm off to follow him.
41:54This writer was a man called Plautus,
41:56the author of Boy Meets Girl farces.
41:59And what he gives us is not the official guide to the Forum,
42:02as the big guys might want us to see it,
42:05but a down and dirty rough guide.
42:08This doesn't look great now,
42:11but it used to be a big public hall.
42:14But what does Plautus say?
42:16He says, this is where you find the bargain hunters
42:20and the clapped-out prostitutes.
42:26Elsewhere, Plautus talks about the Wide Boys,
42:29the sort you might have found playing for profit
42:31at one of the gaming boards you can still see,
42:34scratched all over the steps of one of the main law courts.
42:38This is the board, and it's got loads of dips in it.
42:43Now, actually, someone has spent quite a long time
42:46making those great pockets.
42:48It's always hard to reconstruct the rules of these games.
42:51It's like having a Monopoly board and a house
42:53and a get-out-of-jail-free card
42:55and trying to reconstruct what on earth you're supposed to do.
42:58Well, I'm going to give this game a try.
43:02First off, the marbles.
43:08Losing my marbles.
43:10Perhaps what you did, actually, was tiddlywinks.
43:12That's possible, too.
43:17Oh, look at that!
43:20So, my conclusion from this academic experiment
43:25is that this is a tiddlywink board.
43:30So, what about the Forum's Temples of the Roman Gods?
43:33What does Plautus have to say about those?
43:37This is one place where all those different levels of life in the Forum
43:41come very nicely together.
43:44It's the Temple of the God Castor,
43:47and those three columns are one of the most iconic images of the whole Forum.
43:53But round the corner, we find a really different kind of temple.
43:57Underneath, built actually into the temple itself,
44:01there's a row of little shops.
44:05You walk a bit further on, and you look to the back of the temple,
44:10you go back to Plautus, what does he say?
44:13Ramp boys.
44:18And we don't just have to rely on a comic writer
44:21for evidence of ordinary life in the Forum.
44:24Modern archaeology has succeeded in backing him up.
44:27When a group of Scandinavian archaeologists
44:30excavated one of the temple's shops,
44:32they unearthed some extraordinary ordinary objects,
44:36including evidence of what looks like a Roman dentist's.
44:40Siri, tell me about these teeth,
44:43because they're one of the most amazing archaeological discoveries ever made.
44:48There's 86 of them.
44:50Where exactly were they found?
44:52They were found in the drain of one of the shops
44:55in the podium of the Temple of Castor and Pollux,
44:58and they were meant to be flushed down into the big Cloaca Maxima,
45:02which runs by the side of the temple,
45:04but for some reason or other, they got stuck.
45:07And they've all been actually extracted, haven't they,
45:10because their roots are still pretty much whole.
45:13No anaesthetic apart from a quick glass of wine.
45:15They must have screamed during these operations.
45:18This is just somebody's agony.
45:21Yes.
45:22And they didn't just find rotten Roman teeth.
45:24It was something like a beauty parlour, I think.
45:27We have these fine glasses, you see, for oils and creams.
45:32This is a drinking cup.
45:34They could also gamble, you see, these dices.
45:38These are very nice dices.
45:40Perhaps you're playing dice while you're waiting.
45:42Instead of reading magazines, you're playing dice.
45:44Yes, indeed.
45:46And this looks, for all the world, like a tongue depressor.
45:52Open wide, Siri.
45:54Yes!
45:56Putting all this stuff together,
45:58it's a really wonderful glimpse of the kind of other side of the form.
46:03So this is the people's place as much as it is the rich people's place.
46:08Yes.
46:09And this is the kind of stuff that the people are doing there.
46:14They're playing dice and having their appalling teeth.
46:17Yes.
46:19Oh!
46:27The Roman Forum is a great example
46:30of how our traditional images of Rome are so skewed.
46:34Sure, Rome was a society where the rich dominated the poor,
46:39but it was also an incredibly mixed place,
46:42where even its most sacred spaces were shared.
46:46But just occasionally, we can see some aggressive attempts
46:50to divide the toffs from the rich.
46:53Some aggressive attempts to divide the toffs from the poor.
47:14Most people come here to look at this vast temple
47:17put up by the Emperor Augustus.
47:19Nobody pays much attention, though,
47:22but there's a massive wall behind it,
47:25and in a way, that wall can tell us more about life in ancient Rome
47:30than the marble can.
47:32On the other side of it was an area known as the Suburra.
47:36Not exactly slums, but mention Suburra to your average Roman
47:40and they'd think crime, prostitution, something pretty seedy.
47:46This wall's an ideological barrier.
47:49To me, to anyone who lived in the Suburra,
47:52this is posh territory. Keep out.
47:57But there's another story, too.
47:59The Suburra was full of rickety, wooden,
48:04jerry-built high-rise blocks constantly falling down.
48:09It was a real fire trap.
48:11Actually, this wall is a vast fire wall.
48:16Unsurprisingly, the buildings of the Suburra have largely disappeared,
48:20but some of the voices from the tenants
48:22and from that dangerous side of the city have survived.
48:25One was found in the foundations of a modern office block
48:29in a rather grey part of suburban Rome.
48:46This is the tombstone of a little girl called Doris.
48:51She was infelicissima, terribly unlucky.
48:56Why was she unlucky?
48:58Because she died in a fire, a sudden fire of incredible violence.
49:04She'd only just had her seventh birthday.
49:06She was seven years and 22.
49:10This was put up to her by one of her friends or family,
49:14a woman called Licinia Haydeni,
49:18and she ends rather touchingly,
49:21May your bones rest quietly
49:24and may the earth lie lightly on you.
49:40Doris can't have been the only kid to die this way.
49:43Fires were so common that large parts of the city
49:46burned to the ground on numerous occasions.
49:50The point is, it wasn't just easy to start a fire.
49:55It was very hard to put one out once it had started,
49:59and there was no efficient, effective public fire brigade
50:03in the terms that we know.
50:06There was, it's true, a kind of paramilitary organisation of watchmen,
50:11of vigiles, who did keep an eye open for fires starting,
50:16but they hadn't got much effective equipment to deal with them if they did.
50:21A few poles to pull buildings down to make a fire break,
50:25some pails of water and vinegar,
50:28and some blankets to try and stifle the flame.
50:32Some of them were probably pretty brave,
50:35but others were corrupt and on the make.
50:38One story is that in the great fire of Rome under the Emperor Nero,
50:43the watch, instead of trying to put the flames out,
50:47they joined in looting the buildings that were already ablaze.
50:51I wonder if anyone came to try and rescue Doris.
51:06And that's the big difference with our modern cities.
51:09When you look around them, it's easy to see all the things we take for granted.
51:14Everything from litter bins to friendly or unfriendly cops on the corner.
51:19But in ancient Rome, there were none of these services.
51:23There was hardly a fire brigade, there was no police force, no prisons,
51:27and the only real security forces were in the pay of the rich.
51:32To flesh out the picture, I went to meet Corey Brennan
51:35from the American Academy in Rome.
51:39This, for me, is why they didn't provide services.
51:42Did the poor want services?
51:46Oh, I'm sure they did.
51:48Because when that guy Ignatius Rusus, in the reign of the Emperor Augustus,
51:53starts his own fire brigade,
51:55the Emperor Augustus, instead of saying,
51:58you know, congratulations, thank you very much for helping the people of Rome,
52:02I mean, actually, basically, he's executing.
52:04Yes, precisely.
52:05It goes to show the competition amongst the ruling class, amongst the elites,
52:09because each one of them knew if they were to step forward
52:12and effectively provide these types of social services
52:15that were really needed and that people really wanted,
52:19the type of political cachet that they could build just from that act
52:23really would make it unbeatable.
52:25So they really worked to cancel each other out.
52:27And the people who suffered were, in fact, the Romans themselves.
52:33But the lack of social services weren't the only problems on the city streets.
52:38They might have been filled with real life,
52:41but real life, as in any modern city, could be hard to control.
52:45Violence was an ever-present danger,
52:48as one nastily familiar story tells us.
52:52I'm about to reveal a nasty bit of Roman street crime.
52:57A kind of Roman cold case.
52:59It needs a bit of cleaning up first.
53:02It's very dusty.
53:04It's a tombstone.
53:07And it's put up by a lady called Ottakilia Narcissa
53:13to her darling husband, Coniugi Dulcissima.
53:19Coniugi Dulcissima.
53:23And his name was Julius Timotheos.
53:29And he lived, she said,
53:32p.m., plus or minus, 28 years.
53:36That means Ottakilia wasn't entirely certain how old the husband was.
53:42And he had his blameless life
53:46snatched away from him a la tronibus, by robbers.
53:54Not just him.
53:56He was with his seven alumni.
54:02That can mean foster kids, dependents, sometimes even pupils.
54:08And they were all killed too.
54:10If that's what it really means, this wasn't just a mugging.
54:16It was mass murder.
54:23If the streets were never completely safe by day,
54:26then by night we know they were lawless places.
54:30The poet Juvenal writes graphically of having to pick his way home
54:34in the dark, dodging the violent gangs and drunken bullies
54:38on the prowl for fights.
54:41Preserved under the foundations of a church in central Rome
54:45that helps us get close to this atmosphere,
54:48here are the mean streets of a real Roman neighbourhood.
54:52We're a few hundred metres from the Colosseum
54:54and this is the back alleys.
54:56This feels like a Roman street.
54:59Well, it's because it is a Roman street.
55:04What you have to do, if you're trying to reconstruct this,
55:08you've got to think dirt.
55:10A lot of it.
55:11This is very clean.
55:13There's a great smell.
55:15A lot of it.
55:16But it feels kind of a bit scary.
55:20It's a mugger's paradise, there's no doubt about it.
55:23I mean, street crime's one thing,
55:25but, you know, apartment blocks directly on the street,
55:30you know, it's a burglar's, a cat burglar's paradise.
55:33Precisely.
55:34When the Emperor Augustus really wanted to get people
55:37to come to his games, what he did was he distributed armed guards
55:41throughout the city because otherwise people would be reluctant
55:44to leave their houses because it was known that when it's a big game day,
55:48so to speak, that's precisely, it's like New Year's Eve,
55:51basically, that is the prime day to go robbing.
55:54I mean, when there's a question of a serious breach of public order,
55:59then the officials get interested.
56:05So, if the authorities had little interest in the day-to-day
56:08welfare of their ordinary citizens,
56:10what happened if you got murdered in streets like this?
56:13How could your family pursue justice?
56:15The Romans had the system of public courts,
56:18and the name is misleading because what it was was courts
56:22that saw to breaches of the social order.
56:25So you get murder, but really when there's a political aspect to it...
56:29Topping it. It's upper-class murder.
56:31Exactly. They looked at conspiracy, setting fires.
56:34In order to come in the purview of Roman law,
56:37you either have to go after someone who's rich, well-connected and powerful,
56:41or you have to be making a very big tear in the social fabric.
56:45Yeah, so if somebody murders my brother, unless he's important,
56:51that's the only person who's going to do anything about it, really, is me.
56:55Yes, the self-help.
57:01Today, when we look at Rome's impressive marble monuments,
57:05it's hard to imagine the dirty, dangerous, chaotic city
57:09in which ordinary Romans lived their lives.
57:12So little of it has survived above ground.
57:15But if you know where to look,
57:17it is still possible to get glimpses of their world.
57:21The high-rise tenement blocks,
57:23where tenants lived in fear of fires and the rent collector.
57:27The grunts of gamblers and gym-goers in its bars and bathhouses.
57:32And the hustle of life on its mean streets,
57:35where there was no safety nets when things went wrong.
57:39These streets must have been a tough place to live your life.
57:43All the same, I can't help feeling that they had a spontaneity
57:47and a fun about them that many of our streets have lost.
57:51And just listen to those voices.
57:54What they're saying is that, despite all the dangers,
57:59Rome was an exhilarating, a life-affirming place to be.
58:04And that's why it still speaks to us after 2,000 years.
58:11Next week, I'll meet the Romans at home,
58:14where I'll discover some familiar objects of domestic family life.
58:18It's a really, really precious piece
58:20because it's the only cradle to survive from the Roman world.
58:26A surprising view of Roman marriage, childhood, slavery and sex.
58:32This is a Roman ménage à trois.
58:45Next this evening here on BBC HD,
58:47we've got live music headed your way with Jules Holland.
58:50Stay with us.
58:56Subtitling by SUBS Hamburg