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00:00This is the Appian Way, one of the roads that took thousands of Romans
00:13in and out of their capital city every day.
00:17Young and old, rich and poor, clean and dirty.
00:24And it's where I want to start, asking a question that really interests me.
00:29Where were the ancient Romans?
00:33Outside the city, it was lined with thousands and thousands of tombs.
00:39So before you got into the city of Rome,
00:41you'd already met the Romans, dead ones, that is.
00:47And the lives of many of them began or ended a long way from Rome.
00:53This is just a tiny fragment of someone's tomb,
00:57someone called Ischinus.
01:04He was murdered in Spain.
01:08This lady's Uzziah Prima, a priestess of the Egyptian goddess Isis.
01:14And there's her little sacred rattle.
01:17She's almost looking at you.
01:20I feel like saying, pleased to meet you, Prima.
01:27They come from every walk of life and every part of the empire,
01:31and a lot of them had once been slaves.
01:35These aren't the kind of guides we usually think of when we think of Romans.
01:45These Romans all lived at the centre of a vast empire
01:49that stretched from Spain to Syria
01:52and which dominated the Western world for over 700 years.
01:58Like it or not, ancient Rome is still all around us,
02:02in our roads, laws and architecture.
02:05We keep on recreating it in film and fiction,
02:08and every year thousands of us trek here to see its monuments up close
02:13and to imagine the emperors and the armies, the gladiators,
02:17and, let's be honest, the gore.
02:19But hidden all over the modern city, in its walls, behind the facades,
02:24even under its streets,
02:26is something much harder to find but just as captivating.
02:30The forgotten voices of the ordinary people.
02:33They're still there if you know where to look.
02:37Callidius Eroticus means Mr Hot Sex.
02:41This is a Roman ménage à trois.
02:44This wasn't just a mugging.
02:47This was mass murder.
02:49The Romans didn't just carve their names and dates on their tombstones.
02:54Keen never to be forgotten, they left their thoughts, their achievements,
02:58even entire life stories, chiselled into stone.
03:02It's a unique record of real Roman lives.
03:06I've spent most of my life with the ancient Romans,
03:09and not just the big guys, the emperors, the politicians,
03:13the generals, the posh ones.
03:16But what I've most enjoyed getting to know are the ordinary ones,
03:20who had their own part to play in the story of this extraordinary city.
03:25And what gets to me every time
03:28is that we can still have a conversation with them, even 2,000 years later.
03:32In this series, I'm going to get their voices speaking again
03:36to piece together a very different story of life in ancient Rome.
03:40I'll step behind the doors of their homes
03:43to meet the one-blood Roman families
03:46whose lives and possessions can reflect our own in surprising ways.
03:51This is something a bit special.
03:54She's not just Barbie, she's Empress Barbie.
03:57I'll go down into the streets,
04:00where the dirt, crime, sex and humour in everyday Roman life
04:05shows us what it was like to live in an ancient city of a million people.
04:10It wasn't about wine and sex, he said, and ruin your body.
04:14True.
04:16But what makes life really worth living?
04:22But I'll start by telling the real story of Imperial Rome,
04:26looking beyond the violence and spectacle to find a global city
04:30which reached for talent and treasure from the far ends of the earth,
04:34a place where everything and everyone was from somewhere else.
04:38Is this the Romans I'm interested in?
04:41Welcome to my Rome.
04:43Welcome to my Rome.
05:07When you arrived in Rome at its imperial height 2,000 years ago,
05:11you found yourself in a new kind of city.
05:16Rome had once been a small city-state,
05:19but in conquest after conquest, it became capital of a vast empire.
05:24A place in which, for the first time in history,
05:27a million people from three continents managed to live together.
05:31One thing we know about Rome is it wasn't just a city, it was an empire.
05:36It was a city of kings, queens, marauding armies,
05:40conquering generals and bloodthirsty emperors.
05:44Pretend not to think of the ordinary people
05:47who lived here at the very heart of it all.
05:51For them, the empire brought them into contact with the whole world,
05:56from Scotland to Afghanistan.
05:59And it made this city a more cosmopolitan place
06:03than it had been before, or would be again, for hundreds of years.
06:07And we're always asking, what did the Romans do for us?
06:11I think we should be asking, what did the empire do to the Romans?
06:17And who were those Romans, anyway?
06:21Around the city, there's more evidence than you'd think
06:24for the impact that Roman conquest had on the lives of ordinary people here.
06:29What it requires is that we look from a slightly different angle.
06:39One of the most famous monuments in the Forum celebrates the moment
06:43when one conquering army came home.
06:49In 71 AD, the city got a day off for the triumphal return
06:53of the Emperor Vespasian and his son Titus,
06:56who had crushed a rebellion in Judea.
07:01We've got here the victorious general, Titus,
07:04driving through the streets of Rome in his chariot
07:08to celebrate his victory.
07:12And on the other side, we've got the booty that he's brought home with him.
07:17Titus had devastatingly conquered the Jews,
07:21and here we can see the loot that he has got from the Jewish temple.
07:25It's a grand display.
07:27But what I want to do is try and undercut the pomposity of it a bit
07:32and to ask, what was it like for the people, the ordinary Romans,
07:37who showed up to watch this,
07:39left their apartments and came to see the spectacle?
07:45A triumph like this would have been the first sight the Roman people had
07:49of all the things the armies brought back from their distant victories.
07:53The rich spoils, the maps of the conquered territory,
07:57the models of the fighting,
08:00even the trees that they'd uprooted and brought back to Rome.
08:06How did people react?
08:08Some must have gasped, others would have jeered the captives,
08:12or maybe their minds were on other things.
08:15One Roman poet recommends the triumphal procession
08:19as a place to pick up a girl.
08:21How would you do it?
08:23Well, he says, watch the stuff go past, nudge up to her and say,
08:27oh, I think that's the Euphrates there and that's the Tigris over there.
08:31You don't have to know, he says, you just have to sound confident.
08:35And then you'll make your own conquest.
08:40It's a good joke, but it also hints at the way Roman lives
08:44could be changed by the spoils coming back from the Empire.
08:48This girl can't have been the only person
08:50who found all this pretty strange, but also exciting.
08:57So what did the Roman armies bring back from the Empire?
09:02The import that made the biggest impact
09:05is one we don't think about often enough.
09:07Human beings.
09:12These are forgotten people, but if we take the time to listen,
09:16we can still hear the voices of some of the millions
09:19who followed the Roman armies into the city
09:22for all sorts of different reasons.
09:27This is for my brother, Habibi Anu, from Palmyra.
09:31I'm Germanus, Regulus's mule driver.
09:36This is for Diocles, champion chariot racer from Spain.
09:41Here we've got a young slave girl, age 17,
09:44Phryne, the slave of Tortola.
09:46Africana.
09:48She came from Africa.
09:51This one is put up by a soldier for his wife, Carnon Tiller,
09:55born near Vienna in ancient Pannonia.
09:57What's weird is that Carnon Tiller isn't really a real name.
10:03It comes from the name of a town in Pannonia, Carnuntum.
10:08Carnuntum means sort of my babe from Carnuntum.
10:13So my guess is he perhaps bought this girl as a slave.
10:19He freed her.
10:21He brought her back to Rome.
10:23He married her.
10:25But, sadly, his babe from Carnuntum died when she was just 19.
10:33Poignant stories like this are everywhere in the city.
10:36They remind us of the different ways
10:38real lives could begin abroad and end in Rome.
10:43But there's more to it than that.
10:45These people weren't just brought in to serve the Romans.
10:49They were becoming Romans.
10:53One of the tombs on the Appian Way
10:55gives us the other side of the story of the Arch of Titus.
11:00It's a tombstone of three guys,
11:04one called Barica, one called Zabda and one called Akiba.
11:10Typical Jewish names.
11:14So the question is, what's the story of Barica, Zabda and Akiba?
11:19How did they get here?
11:21If they did start out life in Judea,
11:23how come they end up as Roman citizens in Rome?
11:28It's more surprising than you think.
11:30To judge from the letters and how they're written on this stone,
11:34this was carved in the 1st century AD.
11:38And at that point, we can put two and two together.
11:43I'm almost certain that these three men
11:47must have been part of the Jewish rebellion
11:50against the Romans in the late 60s AD.
11:54These men surely came into Rome with Titus' army as prisoners of war.
12:01It must have seemed like the worst moment of their lives.
12:05Jirat, cat calls, people throwing things at them.
12:10But perhaps worse was to come.
12:12They were auctioned off as slaves
12:15and bought by a man called Lucius Valerius.
12:19What their life in slavery was like, we don't know.
12:22But he freed them and they become new Roman citizens.
12:28It's a Roman name, Lucius Valerius,
12:32but they're Jewish names still asserting their Jewish sense of identity.
12:39This is one of the ways that Roman conquest works.
12:42It does bring slaves,
12:44but it also brings, eventually, new Roman citizens.
12:49It's a fairy-tale happy ending and a classic Roman story.
12:55When guys like this were freed,
12:57they didn't just go back to their old lives in Judea,
13:01they stayed in their new home and, what's more, they became Romans,
13:06with all the rights and privileges which came with full Roman citizenship.
13:11But what kept them in Rome? How many of them were there?
13:16And where did all these new Romans live?
13:19To try and make sense of it all, I went to meet a colleague in Trastevere,
13:24which literally means across the Tiber from the ancient city centre.
13:29It's got a reputation as a bit of an immigrant area in Rome even now.
13:34This area, Trastevere, across the Tiber,
13:37was the fringe of the ancient city of Rome
13:40and this is where we have the biggest evidence
13:43for immigrant communities, Jews, Assyrians.
13:48I guess if you said to an ancient Roman,
13:50where's the biggest immigrant area of the ancient city of Rome,
13:53they'd have said... Over the river, on the other side.
13:57Part of the answer to the question of why an area like this
14:01could be so cosmopolitan lies in the story of slaves
14:05like Barica, Zabda and Akiba.
14:08Greeks thought Romans were really weird
14:11for freeing as many slaves as they did.
14:13And making them citizens. Yes.
14:15Although it's very brutal, being a slave can be a stage in a life,
14:18like an apprenticeship.
14:19You come in as a German, you get a Roman name, you learn Latin,
14:22or you learn to manage in Latin,
14:24you learn some kind of job that's useful to your master,
14:26your master sets you free, and there you are,
14:28you're a Roman citizen with a trade and a Roman name
14:31and a bunch of powerful people you know.
14:33This is your entry into Roman society.
14:36Now, multiply that by hundreds of thousands of slaves being freed
14:42and you can see that the whole ethnic nature
14:46of the people who call themselves Roman citizens
14:49is really changing very quickly.
14:52Roman is a kind of vocation,
14:54it's a movement into which other people are drawn.
14:57This was a completely new idea,
14:59and in many ways, the secret of the Empire's success.
15:04Roman was no longer a word which described the city you came from,
15:09it was something you could become.
15:12Almost everyone in Rome was descended from someone
15:16who arrived from outside, not just ex-slaves.
15:20People coming in to work on the docks, builders, prostitutes,
15:24peasants who come into Rome because they think they can eat there
15:27because they can't eat at home.
15:29It was a sort of chaotic mix of people who arrived not knowing anybody.
15:34These were journeys into the unknown
15:37and into a place where there was no guarantee you would survive.
15:41And, oddly, that was one reason that Rome welcomed people in.
15:45Any city the size of Rome has to have immigration
15:48because the number of people who die in it
15:50greatly exceeds the number who are born.
15:53Rome is a malarial city in antiquity,
15:56so people come here who don't have any immunity,
15:59they catch the disease, they're dead within years.
16:02So, just to keep Rome the size it is,
16:04it needs to constantly top up the population.
16:07Rome is swallowing people.
16:10It's actually, you know, it's a city which consumes people,
16:13it's used them out dead.
16:17Perhaps we should stop thinking of Romans as a nation,
16:21a master race who conquered the world,
16:24a people of a babel of rootless people
16:27piled up together a long way from home,
16:30and, no doubt, hoping for a brighter future.
16:34Because, for foreigners, Rome wasn't all doom and gloom.
16:38Sometimes, I guess, people would have come to Rome
16:42just to seek their fortunes.
16:45This is an epitaph, written in Greek,
16:48of a man who's said to have been always laughing,
16:52always having a joke, and really good at music.
16:56He might have come as part of a band, I guess.
17:01And, actually, the stone tells us
17:05that he came to the land of Italy ex-Azies,
17:10from Asia.
17:12That's modern Turkey.
17:15It says he died here when he was young,
17:18and it ends up saying,
17:20''Tounama menopholos'' in Greek.
17:24''Menopholos'' is the name.
17:27Now, Rome might have consumed people,
17:31it might have been a dangerous place,
17:34it might have been disease-ridden and dirty,
17:37but I guess, to a man like Menopholos,
17:41the streets must have seemed paved with gold.
17:49And not all immigrants in Rome were at the bottom of the heap.
17:53The Senate and the Imperial Palace were full of people from outside,
17:57just like the streets of Trastevere.
18:00Rome was international, from the bottom to the very top.
18:05MUSIC FADES
18:15Increasingly, this city belonged to the likes of Menopholos.
18:24As new people arrived, Rome's population doubled,
18:28then doubled again, till it reached over a million.
18:32It was nowhere in Europe bigger until Victorian London.
18:38We think of Rome as a very old city.
18:42But 2,000 years ago, this place was brand new.
18:49It must have been full of building sites,
18:52new high-rise, of temporary accommodation.
18:56It must have felt a bit like Dubai.
18:59But there's a big question.
19:01We've got a mass of a million people from everywhere.
19:05How do you keep them alive? How do you feed them?
19:09How do you keep the vast Roman multicultural show on the road?
19:16Feeding a million people was a completely unprecedented challenge.
19:23Bang in the centre of the modern city is a site which gives you
19:27the colossal scale of consumption in ancient Rome.
19:35Locals call it Monte Testaccio.
19:38That's Broken Pot Mountain.
19:41I think it's one of the most extraordinary archaeological sites
19:45anywhere in the world.
19:47Phew! Made it.
19:52This is absolutely extraordinary.
19:57One of these fragments was once part of an ancient Roman storage jar.
20:03What is amazing about this is that you really see here
20:07that it is a broken pot mountain.
20:10There's no earth mixed in with the other stuff.
20:13So you see how actually quite neatly
20:17these sherds of pottery have been stacked.
20:22It's a mountain, not a heap.
20:25It's a real hill, but there's nothing natural about it.
20:29This is a huge ancient rubbish dump,
20:32composed entirely of discarded containers, amphorae,
20:36that held just one of the products consumed by Rome.
20:41It was olive oil which seeped into the jars and made them go really rancid,
20:46so they were the only containers that couldn't be recycled.
20:51Poor old amphorae are taken off to be pickaxed up
20:55and made into the mountain,
20:57and the olive oil that was in them gets everywhere.
21:00It's the stuff of Roman life.
21:03You'd find it being used in cooking.
21:05It's what's going to help you make perfume.
21:08It's what the guys in the baths who were exercising,
21:11rubbing themselves, scraping themselves down, would have used.
21:15And in the end, it's what the poor little old lady in the garret,
21:18who's just got one pottery lamp,
21:22what came in his amphora would have been her only source of light at night.
21:30It's no exaggeration to say that Rome ran on olive oil,
21:34and this place gives archaeologists a great opportunity
21:38to work out how it got here.
21:41It came in massive quantities.
21:44This must have been, what, originally...
21:47Even larger. Even larger than that.
21:49And that's, they say, 30 kilos when they're...
21:52Empty. Empty?
21:54That's my suitcase when it's full.
21:56Is this amphora when it's empty? Empty, yeah.
21:59And what's amazing is that you can often find out
22:02exactly where the oil came from.
22:05We know that it's A-R-V-A.
22:08It's Arva, it's a town called this way,
22:11on the shores of the Well Alcubierre.
22:13So that's linking that precise chart to a site in southern Spain.
22:19So, Roman town, southern Spain,
22:22the guy who's making this amphora is stamping it with his town's name,
22:26saying, this is a product of Arva. Yeah.
22:31According to these trademarks,
22:33almost all the oil in this mountain was coming from Spain,
22:36and a bit from North Africa.
22:38Today, Italy is famous for its olive oil,
22:41but in ancient times they were importing most of it from somewhere else.
22:47The fascinating thing about this mountain
22:50is the way that you can start to piece together little life stories
22:55of these pots and their contents.
22:59It gets down to the coast in Spain, gets loaded onto boats.
23:03If it's lucky, it makes it,
23:05but there's lots of shipwrecks in the ancient Mediterranean.
23:07It arrives at the coast, it's humped off the boat,
23:10it's put into barges,
23:12it's brought up the Tiber to the city of Rome itself,
23:15humped off the boat again, put into warehouses,
23:18decanted into small containers.
23:21The amphorae end up here.
23:23It might not look it at first sight,
23:25but in fact it's one of the most impressive monuments
23:28to the idea of Rome as an imperialist consumer city,
23:32bringing in the foodstuff she needs from all around the Mediterranean.
23:38It wasn't just olive oil.
23:42A short trip down the River Tiber is the seaport Ostia.
23:52Today, Ostia is one of Rome's best-kept secrets
23:56and it helps us discover what Rome was importing from where.
24:02Martin Millet has been excavating near here
24:05and together we went to explore an intriguing piazza next to the theatre,
24:10which we call the Square of the Corporation.
24:14OK, Martin, this is where I get to do the housework.
24:18Never live this down!
24:20If you sweep away the pine needles, there are mosaics all around here
24:24advertising companies importing from here.
24:28There are mosaics all around here
24:31advertising companies importing goods from abroad.
24:35Stupatores.
24:38Rope makers.
24:41This is the organisation of fur traders.
24:45Naviculariorum, Lignariorum.
24:49That's the wood traders.
24:51So, what we've got so far is...
24:54Rope, pelts and wood.
24:57There are 50 of these mosaics.
24:59Most of them give us a place as well as a product.
25:02They add up to one conclusion.
25:04Rome was being supplied from all corners of the Mediterranean.
25:08Italy's not big enough to support the city of Rome.
25:13It is a city that's drawing in resources from everywhere.
25:17This was a new moment in Western history.
25:20Rome had become what we now call a consumer city on a vast scale.
25:25Its luxury products, their basic commodities,
25:28wood, leather, oil, wine and, most important by far, grain.
25:34People talk about Rome being a consumer city
25:37with a population of about a million
25:40and that implies 150,000 metric tonnes of grain a year.
25:45I don't know how big those ships are,
25:47but you need a lot of ships like that to bring in 150,000 metric tonnes of grain.
25:53As the city grew, farms in Sicily, Libya and then Egypt
25:57were given over to producing wheat for the people of Rome.
26:03When the grain ships arrived in Italy, the word would pass round Rome.
26:07The food had arrived.
26:09This was one thing the Empire did for Rome.
26:12It kept them alive.
26:17But it did more than that.
26:19I want to think about life in that consumer city.
26:22Who were the winners and who were the losers?
26:25One really interesting thing is how they used this imported grain
26:30and that means thinking about bread.
26:32Not just eating it, but making it.
26:35I'm very much second in command.
26:42Right, good.
26:43OK, so I'm now being trusted with the action.
26:49200,000 Roman citizens living in the city of Rome
26:54got each month what was called a corndoll,
26:58a free ration of corn.
27:01That means about 35 to 40 kilos of corn,
27:05which was enough to make bread for a month for about two people.
27:12This was an extraordinary privilege for citizens in Rome.
27:17200,000 of them received free rations from the state.
27:22But how did it work?
27:24Many of them lived in one-room apartments with no kitchens,
27:27so they relied on the baker to turn their 40 kilos
27:31into something they could eat.
27:35Are you going to try it? Yeah.
27:37Proviamo.
27:41Good. Not bad for a first attempt.
27:45It's not bad.
27:47I also...
27:49It's wonderful people's food.
27:52This is...
27:54This is tearing and sharing bread.
27:57You don't even have to own a bread knife to be able to tuck into this.
28:01It's good.
28:02For poor Romans, this was the staple food that kept them alive,
28:06but they didn't distribute it in the way we would expect.
28:11You've got to put out of your mind, I think,
28:13this was some kind of proto-welfare state.
28:16Sure, some of the poor would have benefited from the grain,
28:20but charity wasn't what was uppermost in the emperor's mind
28:24when he put all that time and money into distributing this grain.
28:29What he was concerned about was the idea that a hungry populace
28:34was a dissatisfied populace,
28:36and a dissatisfied populace was a dangerous one.
28:40It's also the fact that the distributions didn't go
28:44to the poorest in Rome.
28:47They went only to Roman citizens themselves.
28:50You had to be a citizen in order to get this grain.
28:53And that made it a really important perk of being a full Roman.
29:00In a way, what this tells us is that being a full citizen of Rome
29:04was a privileged status to which outsiders could aspire,
29:08and perks like the grain handout help you understand
29:11why people wanted to be Roman.
29:13But it also shows us that all these things, the empire, the imports,
29:18the new citizens, were all part of a cycle.
29:21The bigger Rome got and the more it consumed,
29:24the bigger the empire had to be to support it.
29:29So how did Rome's massive consumption change life in the city?
29:33Well, for one thing, this was one of the best times in history
29:37to be a baker.
29:39And it's a baker who left one of the strangest monuments in Rome,
29:44now hidden beneath one of the main city gates.
29:47It's the tomb monument of a man called Marcus Vigilius Eurysaces.
29:54He's almost certainly an ex-slave,
29:58and he was a baker and a contractor.
30:03He must have made a whole pile of money in that job,
30:06otherwise he wouldn't be able to afford a tomb like this.
30:15What Eurysaces has done is given himself a theme tomb.
30:20At the very top, all around the monument,
30:23there were scenes from the life of the bakery.
30:26There's the kneading, putting the bread in the oven, weighing the stuff out.
30:33And even these rather strange circles and columns underneath
30:37would be instantly recognisable to a Roman as bakery equipment.
30:41The circles are almost certainly the kneading machines,
30:45and the columns are the bins in which the dough is kneaded.
30:51What this says in Latin is,
30:53this is the tomb of Eurysaces, the baker and contractor.
30:57Aparet. It's obvious.
31:00What does it say?
31:02This is the monument of the baker. Get it?
31:05And I really like the way that get it still speaks to us 2,000 years later.
31:10Have we got that this is the tomb of the baker? Yeah.
31:14Eurysaces could joke because things had gone pretty well for him.
31:19His name sounds Greek, so most likely he came from abroad,
31:23but he ended up as one of a new class of people,
31:26getting rich on the proceeds of empire.
31:28This might have meant a soft spot for Eurysaces,
31:31but I doubt that all Romans would have felt that way.
31:34My guess is that if some old-money, old-fashioned Roman
31:39walked past this tomb, he'd have thought it was all a bit tacky.
31:44A bit like I might feel if some Premier League football player
31:48designed his own tomb in the shape of a giant football boot.
31:55What Eurysaces' joke reminds us
31:57is that the Roman Empire had a direct effect
32:00on how people in Rome made their living.
32:02It was becoming a city of urban professionals.
32:07One of the reasons that ancient Rome still seems quite familiar to us
32:12is that people could do a whole variety of different jobs, just like us.
32:17But it's important not to forget that, obvious as that seems,
32:23there were certain other ways in which the city of Rome
32:26was radically new and different.
32:29In the traditional, small, ancient city,
32:33the idea was that the inhabitants were, well, all-rounders.
32:39The same men fought the city's wars,
32:43ploughed the city's fields and produced the city's food.
32:47But in Imperial Rome, because of the huge size of the city,
32:51those duties were outsourced.
32:54The food now came from overseas.
32:58It wasn't made by local farmers.
33:01And the armed forces that were stationed around the Roman Empire,
33:06they weren't just citizens doing their military duty,
33:09they were making a career out of the military.
33:12The Empire freed, or you might say forced,
33:15Romans to make a living by specialising.
33:19Whether that was being a pole trader, a warehouse manager,
33:24or even a hair stylist to the rich and famous.
33:28What this did was create a completely new way
33:32of differentiating between people.
33:36If you'd asked an Egyptian or a Greek who they were,
33:39they'd have given their father's name or their hometown.
33:43If you'd asked the average Roman,
33:45I bet he'd have told you what he did for a living.
33:48Well, they do on their tombstones, at any rate.
33:54These guys are working in the piperataria.
33:59That's the pepper market.
34:04These are just warehouse men.
34:06Hori oriorum.
34:08And here's a bloke. He's a sagarius.
34:11A big overcoat maker.
34:13Perhaps a saga is the ancient equivalent of a duffle coat.
34:17An accounts manager.
34:22Oh, she's great. She's a piscatrix.
34:25She's a female fishmonger.
34:28He was a gold worker.
34:32And here is an urn, an ash urn,
34:36for a lady called Celia Epare.
34:40And she was an aury vestrix.
34:46She was a very, very, very upmarket clothesmaker.
34:52It's very striking how each one of these people
34:55does tell you on their tombstone what they did.
35:00Now, I think we have to relate that
35:03to the sheer size and potential anonymity
35:07of a great imperial metropolis.
35:10In a world without ID cards, without passports,
35:14without certificates,
35:16how do you know what you are, who you are?
35:20You know that because of your job.
35:23I am Celia Epare,
35:27a luxury clothesmaker.
35:30How do you make your identity clear?
35:32You say, this is what I do.
35:37This is where imperial Rome gets really fascinating for me.
35:41This is not simply a story of one city
35:43getting rich off the back of everywhere else.
35:47It's a story of a place where people were trying a new way of living.
35:52They arrived from across the world
35:54and became a small cog in this big machine.
35:58You maybe didn't know your neighbours and they didn't know you.
36:01Everyone was looking for new ways to make their mark and stand out.
36:06The empire didn't only help people to move up in the world,
36:09it helped those who did to show that they made it.
36:15It created new opportunities for conspicuous consumption.
36:27The empire gave most people in Western Europe
36:29their first experience of pepper, lemons and cherries.
36:33One po-faced Roman complained that cooking
36:37had gone from a mere function to a high art.
36:44The empire transformed the sensory experience of the city.
36:48There were new smells, new tastes, new colours.
36:55And nowhere is this clearer than in the elaborate paintings
36:58many better-off Romans put on their walls.
37:02In Pompeii is perhaps the most famous Roman painting of all.
37:06Pretty strange scene, phallus appearing and some female suckling a goat.
37:12But it was probably the colours that would have dazzled an ancient visitor
37:15as much as the racy subject matter.
37:18Now, we mustn't make the mistake of thinking that the poor old Romans
37:22lived in black and white until they started conquering the Mediterranean.
37:26Of course, there were all kinds of local minerals and plants
37:29that would give them pigments for paint.
37:32But as time went on, they got more and more interested
37:36in the special and bright colours that you could get
37:39from their far-flung territories.
37:42Now, this here is one of the best candidates there is
37:47for real red Spanish vermilion.
37:51Lovely, lustrous red.
37:54I think we have to imagine that if you came to dinner here
37:58and the generous host started showing you round,
38:01he might have come and said,
38:03now, this lady here is whipping this one because, etc, etc.
38:07But he might have said, it's a really lovely red, isn't it?
38:12Actually, it's Spanish vermilion,
38:15specially imported all the way from Spain.
38:19I paid for it as an extra myself.
38:24We live in a world of cheap, bright, synthetic colours,
38:27but the Romans didn't.
38:29In Rome, bright colours smacked of a kind of luxury
38:33that only came from abroad.
38:35And the desire for them created an even more niche range of jobs
38:39for ordinary Romans on the make.
38:42This is a guy who was really keen on what he did.
38:47He put up this tombstone when he was alive,
38:50Vivos Fecet, for himself and for his family.
38:54And he put on it symbols of the tools of his trade.
38:58Now, he worked as a dyer in the dyeing industry.
39:02And you've got here little flasks in which his dye went,
39:06scales in which he measured out his ingredients
39:10and the skeins of material that he dyed.
39:15But he wasn't any old dyer.
39:18At the top, he tells us his name, Gaius Pupius Amicus.
39:24Pupurarius, he was a dyer of purple.
39:30In Rome, purple was special.
39:33It came from the eastern Mediterranean
39:35and it was extracted from tiny shellfish.
39:38It looked spectacular and it didn't fade.
39:42It was not only expensive, its use came to be regulated by law.
39:47If you saw a man in a street wearing a toga with a broad purple stripe,
39:53you'd know that he must be a senator.
39:57One of the political elite.
39:59And the only person later on in the Roman Empire
40:02who was allowed to wear clothes completely of purple
40:06was the Roman emperor himself.
40:09It's a kind of colour policing.
40:12It's a bit like as if Queen Elizabeth II
40:15was the only person in the country who was allowed to wear pink.
40:20But it tells you quite a lot about Rome and the Roman Empire.
40:26That this one very visible marker of political and social status
40:31should have been the product of something that came
40:35from the far eastern side of the Mediterranean.
40:39No wonder Gaius Pupius Amicus was proud of being a purpurarius.
40:50The story of colour isn't just a story of luxury.
40:54It's a story of identity.
40:56The power that conspicuous consumption had
40:59to mark you out as someone special.
41:02Whether you were supplying them or consuming them.
41:06All these imports helped you distinguish yourself.
41:10Like products and people.
41:13Even new gods arrived from far-flung parts of the Empire.
41:18You could have your own style, your own taste, your own beliefs.
41:24But let's not get too carried away
41:26by all this exotic stuff that the Empire offered up.
41:30What the foreign purple on the senator's toga tells us
41:33is that you could be completely foreign
41:36and absolutely Roman at the same time.
41:39The Romans had a way of thinking about other cultures
41:43that is quite unlike our own.
41:47It's like the mistake of kind of imagining that Rome
41:51is a sort of touchy-feely cultural melting pot.
41:56Yes, if you wear the wrong clothes, they make fun of you.
41:59If you speak strangely, they make fun of you.
42:01They're big conformists.
42:03There's too many Greeks here.
42:05The Jews don't eat food properly on the Sabbath.
42:07All that sort of stuff.
42:09Yes, why don't they eat pork?
42:11How silly.
42:12The poet Marshall, who's going on about the Puello Romana,
42:16hasn't experienced a mentula romana,
42:19the Roman chick who's never had a Roman dick.
42:22I mean, you know, it's crude stuff, but, you know, nasty in its way.
42:27The irony is, the man who wrote this came from Spain.
42:31They're not laughing at other races,
42:33they're laughing about people who don't do things the Roman way.
42:37Although people come to this city from all over the world,
42:40you don't end up with a Chinatown or a little Italy
42:43in the way that we have in the great metropolitan cities today.
42:47And these people are going out, they're ruling the world,
42:50the senators are governing Portugal, they're governing Egypt,
42:53they're governing on the Danube, and they never come back and say,
42:56I had this great meal the other day.
42:58And they'll talk about ingredients from all over the world,
43:01but what you do with it, the actual cuisine, the cooking,
43:04it's got to end up proper Roman cookery.
43:06But they've got this city that is unlike anything
43:09that's been created before.
43:11There's much greater diversity of people, of customs, of languages,
43:17thousands of languages probably, hundreds of languages at least,
43:21spoken in the city of Rome, but they only write in Greek and Latin
43:25more or less all the time, a tiny bit of Hebrew.
43:28What we're seeing here is the most culturally,
43:33ethnically, religiously diversity that there's ever been in the world,
43:39but the way they're doing multiculturalism is quite different
43:44from the way we do multiculturalism.
43:46Yes, there's cultural diversity,
43:48but what there isn't is a diversity of cultures.
43:54There's an ironic logic here.
43:56Because Roman culture was in itself such an amalgam,
43:59they simply saw no need for alternative cultures to exist in parallel,
44:04still less to respect them.
44:06In Rome, diversity wasn't about separateness.
44:10There wasn't a Chinatown or even a Jewish quarter.
44:13In fact, your average Roman would have been amazed
44:17at the way we try to respect and preserve different cultures.
44:22Here, the people were from everywhere, the food came from everywhere,
44:27the gods were from everywhere,
44:29but it all went into the blender and it came out Roman.
44:37The Empire was doing two things to Rome.
44:41They were parading all the exotic and luxurious strangeness
44:45of the outside world.
44:47But at the same time, the distinction between Romans
44:51and the subject peoples was dissolving all the time.
44:55Eventually, every free adult male in the Empire
44:59could call himself a Roman citizen.
45:03For me, there's one place
45:05which captures the contradictions of Imperial Rome.
45:18There was a people's palace here.
45:20It was the Colosseum.
45:23It was built and paid for out of the spoils of the Jewish war
45:27as a gift to the Roman people.
45:30One thing's for sure, some of them had to climb a lot of stairs.
45:41I'm in the only part of the Colosseum that I'd be allowed to go to.
45:47Women, slaves and other undesirables in the Roman world
45:52had to be up on the gods.
46:00So what does it look like from the undesirables' point of view?
46:05Let's not think for a moment about the blood and guts.
46:08There was certainly plenty of that.
46:10But let's think of it in terms of Empire.
46:14What you had on display in front of you
46:18was all the biggest and best the Empire could offer.
46:24People often compare this to a football match,
46:27but if so, this is not just a Premier League.
46:30This is the World Cup.
46:33Fantastic combat.
46:35Weird, exotic creatures.
46:38Animals you could only have dreamt of.
46:43When this place opened,
46:46they even had a rhinoceros running wild down there.
46:51This is one place we can see the Roman Empire
46:54from the ordinary person's eye view.
46:58This guy is looking at the show and then...
47:01During a pause, or while he wasn't looking at...
47:04He's...
47:05..scratching... Scratching the...
47:07..the scene that he was seeing in the arena.
47:10And what have we got?
47:11We can see wild animals like a panther.
47:14A panther.
47:15A panther.
47:16Oh, there's two bears.
47:18Right.
47:19And a bestiarius.
47:20A bestiarius.
47:21We can really...
47:22Look at those muscles in his arm, you know, biceps or whatever.
47:25They are really muscly bloke.
47:27And I think this is great because it...
47:29It not only gives us a spectator's viewpoint,
47:33but it also kind of captures that moment
47:36of what it was like to be here.
47:39This guy wasn't alone.
47:41The Romans just couldn't get enough
47:43of drawing the beasts they ogled in the Colosseum.
47:48When you saw them for the first time,
47:50these exotic animals must have been breathtaking.
47:55And the same goes for the other stars of the show,
47:59the human performers.
48:02This is a fantastic treat for me because it's...
48:06It's a great treat.
48:08It's a fantastic treat for me because it's...
48:12It's a real live gladiator's helmet,
48:14or a real dead gladiator's helmet from Pompeii.
48:19It's very weird and heavy.
48:22I'm going to pick it up.
48:24It's got a great crest on it
48:27and a bust of Hercules,
48:30which is facing out at you just to scare the opponent.
48:35I can't quite put it on,
48:37but I can get the feeling of what it's like having it on.
48:41But what it makes you see is it's jolly heavy
48:45and you get a very, very difficult view from inside
48:51because everything's kind of shaded off,
48:55both by the peak and by the protective grill.
48:59I mean, I don't quite see it.
49:02I don't know what a blasted enemy was, honestly.
49:07The other thing about it is it looks to us fantastically weird.
49:11And I think it would have looked like that to the Romans too.
49:14The point about these gladiators
49:16is that they're not dressed in standard Roman army issue.
49:20They're not the kind of fighters you'd see
49:22if you went to fight the barbarians.
49:24These are mad, weird, exotic, foreign costumes.
49:30They're designed to exude the mysterious outside world
49:34and all the violence that there might be in it.
49:37And in a way, I think, what we're seeing here
49:40is, well, it's sort of a fancy dress.
49:44I think what you get the sense was
49:46that people come to see the costume
49:49as much as they come to see you.
49:55Where do I go now? Hard to see.
49:59So, when I think about gladiatorial combat,
50:03I know that some of it was to the death.
50:05People did get killed.
50:07But more and more often,
50:11it was a show, it was a spectacle.
50:14It was theatre.
50:16And in my mind, it's kind of more like
50:19the sort of charade of wrestling
50:22than the real-life combat of boxing.
50:26And part of the reason for that was simply economics.
50:30You've got hundreds of gladiators.
50:32They're extremely expensive.
50:34You don't want them killed off.
50:39A bit of a disparity of sides here, but I'm afraid Thrax is out.
50:46Whoops.
50:48We have a victorious Murmillo.
50:52Congratulations.
50:56To the Romans, gladiators represented a violent fantasy
51:00of the outside world fighting in their midst.
51:05But there's a fascinating irony
51:07in the real origins of the men behind the masks.
51:12I've got a wonderful drawing, an old drawing here.
51:16The original stone has long ago been lost,
51:19but it's a tombstone of a man called Marcus Antonius Exocus
51:24who tells us he came from Alexandria
51:28to fight in some gladiatorial games put on by the Emperor Trajan.
51:34And here's another text of a tombstone
51:38put up by a man called Fuscinus,
51:42who was a provocateur, that's another sort of gladiator.
51:47This tombstone's in Greek
51:49and he tells us that he was an Egyptian.
51:54These gladiators came from the same wildly different backgrounds
51:58as everyone else in Rome,
52:00but their real stories were much more mundane
52:03than the exotic roles they were forced to play in the arena.
52:08It reveals the kind of smoke-and-mirrors aspect of all this,
52:12because underneath all that,
52:14some gladiators were pretty domestic, or they certainly ended up so.
52:19They finished up perhaps long retired, longish life, wife and kids.
52:27One of the nicest ones is a man here who lived to the age of 45.
52:33He'd come from Tungria. He was a Belgian.
52:36But the tombstone is put up to him by his wife and little Justus, his son.
52:45And even Exocus, exotic as he looks,
52:50seems to have ended up life, to judge from his name, as a Roman citizen.
52:56He presumably retired and lived out his life somewhere in suburban Italy,
53:03a bit like Marcus Antonius Exocus of Tunbridge Wells.
53:09An Egyptian playing the part of a Thracian warrior,
53:13then settling down as a Roman family man,
53:16to me, that's Imperial Rome in a nutshell.
53:21The Colosseum dramatised this frightening, thrilling idea
53:26of Rome and the outside world.
53:28It's all violence, confrontation and strangeness.
53:32The truth is that the real empire was not just fighting in the arena,
53:37it was sitting in the seats.
53:41There are places in the Colosseum reserved for the Gaditani,
53:45people of Cadiz in Spain, for an African senator and a Gothic chieftain.
53:51In reality, the fearsome barbarians had become Romans
53:56and were watching the action like everyone else.
54:00So, what's the Colosseum doing, then?
54:03At one level, it's showing the people of the city what they get from empire,
54:08but in a deeper sense, it's showing them that they fit in.
54:13If the people who are killing each other in the arena were stereotypical foreigners,
54:19then, by implication, if you were a Roman citizen,
54:23you would be the one to be killed.
54:27It's trying to put everything in an order that makes sense.
54:35The point about the Colosseum is that it was both a microcosm
54:40of the city of Rome and a microcosm of the Roman Empire,
54:45and it helps to show how the boundaries between what was Roman
54:51and what was foreign increasingly broke down.
54:57In Rome, for the first time in history, people from Asia, Africa and Europe
55:03could sit together as citizens of the same state.
55:12Rome was the first global city, and it contained in it all the cultures
55:17Rome was the first global city, and it contained in it all the contradictions
55:22that global cities have had ever since.
55:25It was diverse, but it wasn't tolerant.
55:28Foreign enemies were crucified, enslaved and forced to fight in the arena.
55:33But equally, foreigners could rise to be emperor.
55:36The point is, the distinction the empire made was not between Romans and foreigners,
55:42but between those who resisted and those who joined in.
55:47The key question in our story is, what was it like to live in the world's first city
55:55where almost everyone came from somewhere else?
55:59There must have been plenty of people who felt very far from home and rootless.
56:04For some, there were profits to be made and success to be had,
56:08and an exciting, even if bewildering, mixture of new ideas, different cultures and different religions.
56:16Whatever you'd been back home, in Rome, you could reinvent yourself.
56:21It's not hard to imagine the fears and anxieties of those ordinary Romans,
56:27wherever they were from.
56:29How do I fit into all this?
56:32Who knows who I am?
56:34Who's going to remember me when I'm dead?
56:37Perhaps that's why they were so keen to write their stories onto their tombstones.
56:44They're deliberately speaking to you and me.
56:51Oh, this guy's really having a conversation.
56:55Stranger, he says. Hospice.
56:59Hang on a minute. Resiste. Stop here.
57:03Take a look down to your left.
57:06That's where my bones are buried.
57:09My ossa.
57:11I was a good man.
57:13I was a kind man.
57:15Misericordius.
57:17And I was a lover of the poor.
57:20A mantis pauperus.
57:23Please, traveller, please, we are two.
57:26I beg you, don't mess with my tomb.
57:30And the name of the guy is Gaius Attilius Euhodos,
57:37the ex-slave of a man called Serenus.
57:41Euhodos sounds Greek to me and he tells us what he did.
57:45He was a margaritarius.
57:47He was a pearl seller.
57:49That's who's buried in this tomb.
57:52Traveller, he says, we are two.
57:56On your way now. Goodbye.
57:59Vale.
58:01Vale.
58:08Next time, I'll descend into the city streets
58:11to explore their high-rise tenements, crime-ridden slums,
58:16and life in the bars and the bathhouses,
58:19and we'll find some very distinctive Roman voices
58:23born from the earthiness of communal city life.
58:27This is how we have to imagine the ancient city.
58:31Everyone shitting together.
58:34Tunics up, togas up, trousers down, chatting as they went.
58:46Rebuilding medieval Britain brick by brick
58:49here on BBC HD on Friday nights at nine.
58:52But back to tonight now,
58:54and there's live music coming up with Jules Holland.
59:04.