How Ancient Rome Shaped The Modern World | Meet The Romans with Mary Beard | Odyssey

this is the appian way one of the roads that took thousands of romans in and out of their capital city every day young and old rich and poor clean and dirty and it's where i want to start asking a question that really interests me who were the ancient romans outside the city it was lined with thousands and thousands of tombs so before you got into the city of rome you'd already met the romans dead ones that is and the lives of many of them began or ended a long way from rome this is just a tiny fragment of someone's tomb someone called iskinus orchesis asked in lucitania he was murdered in spain this lady's uzia prima a priestess of the egyptian goddess isis and there's her little sacred rattle she's almost looking at you i feel like saying pleased to meet you prima they come from every walk of life and every part of the empire and a lot of them had once been slaves these aren't the kind of guys we usually think of when we think of romans these romans all lived at the center of a vast empire that stretched from spain to syria and which dominated the western world for over 700 years like it or not ancient rome is still all around us in our roads laws and architecture we keep on recreating it in film and fiction and every year thousands of us trek here to see its monuments up close and to imagine the emperors and the armies the gladiators and let's be honest the gore but hidden all over the modern city in its walls behind the facades even under its streets is something much harder to find but just as captivating the forgotten voices of the ordinary people they're still there if you know where to look kalidius eroticus means mr hot sex this is a roman maynard artois this wasn't just a mugging this was mass murder the romans didn't just carve their names and dates on their tombstones keen never to be forgotten they left their thoughts their achievements even entire life stories chiseled into stone it's a unique record of real roman lives i've spent most of my life with the ancient romans and not just the big guys the emperors the politicians the generals the posh ones the people i've most enjoyed getting to know are the ordinary ones who had their own part to play in the story of this extraordinary city and what gets to me every time is that we can still have a conversation with them even 2 000 years later in this series i'm going to get their voices speaking again to piece together a very different story of life in ancient rome i'll step behind the doors of their homes to meet flesh and blood roman families whose lives and possessions can reflect our own in surprising ways this is something a bit special she's not just barbie she's empress barbie i'll go down into the streets where the dirt crime sex and humor in everyday roman life shows us what it was like to live in an ancient city of a million people baths wine and sex he said ruin your body true but what makes life really worth living but i'll start by telling the real story of imperial rome looking beyond the violence and spectacle to find a global city which reached for talent and treasure from the far ends of the earth a place where everything and everyone was from somewhere else these are the romans i'm interested in welcome to my room when you arrived in rome at its imperial height two thousand years ago you found yourself in a new kind of city rome had once been a small city-state but in conquest after conquest it became capital of a vast empire a place in which for the first time in history a million people from three continents managed to live together one thing we know about rome is it wasn't just a city it was an empire and for us that means marauding armies conquering generals and bloodthirsty emperors we tend not to think about the ordinary people who lived here at the very heart of it all for them the empire brought them into contact with the whole world from scotland to afghanistan and it made this city a more cosmopolitan place than anywhere had ever been before or would be again hundreds of years and we're always asking what did the romans do for us i think we should be asking what did the empire due to the romans and who were those romans anyway around the city there's more evidence than you'd think for the impact that roman conquest had on the lives of ordinary people here all it requires is we look from a slightly different angle one of the most famous monuments in the forum celebrates the moment when one conquering army came home in 71 a.d the city got a day off for the triumphal return of the emperor vespasian and his son titus who had crushed a rebellion in judea we've got here the victorious general titus driving through the streets of rome and his chariot to celebrate his victory and on the other side we've got the booty that he's brought home with him titus had devastatingly conquered the jews and here we can see the loot that he has got from the jewish temple it's a grand display but what i want to do is try and undercut the pomposity of it a bit and to ask what was it like for the people the ordinary romans who showed up to watch this left their apartments and came to see the spectacle a triumph like this would have been the first sight the roman people had of all the things the armies brought back from their distant victories the rich spoils the maps of the conquered territory the models of the fighting even the trees that they'd uprooted and brought back to rome how did people react some must have gasped others would have jeered the captives or maybe their minds run other things one roman poet recommends the triumphal procession as a place to pick up a girl how would you do it well he says watch the stuff go past nudge up to her and say oh i think that's euphrates there and that's the tigress over there you don't have to know he says you just have to sound confident and then you'll make your own conquest it's a good joke but it also hints at the way roman lives could be changed by the spoils coming back from the empire this girl can't be the only person who found all this pretty strange but also exciting so what did the roman armies bring back from the empire the import that made the biggest impact is one we don't think about often enough human beings these are forgotten people but if we take the time to listen we can still hear the voices of some of the millions who followed the roman armies into the city for all sorts of different reasons this is for my brother habibi anu from palmyra i'm jim honest regulus his mule driver this is for diocles champion chariot racer from spain here we've got a young slave girl age 17 friendy the slave of tottella africana she came from africa this one is put up by a soldier for his wife carnon tiller born near vienna in ancient pannonia what's weird is that carmen tiller isn't really a real name it comes from the name of a town in pannonia carnegie it means sort of my babe from carnegie my guess is he perhaps bought this girl as a slave he freed her he brought her back to rome he married her but sadly his babe from conanton died when she was just 19. poignant stories like this are everywhere in the city they remind us of the different ways real lives could begin abroad and end in rome but there's more to it than that these people weren't just brought in to serve the romans they were becoming romans one of the tombs on the appian way gives us the other side of the story of the arch of titus it's a tombstone of three guys one called barrica one called zabda and one called akiba typical jewish names so the question is what's the story of barika zabda and akiva how did they get here if they did start out life in judea how come they end up as roman citizens in rome it's more surprising than you think to judge in the letters and how they're written on this stone this was carved in the first century a.d and at that point we can put two and two together i'm almost certain that these three men must have been part of the jewish rebellion against the romans in the late 60s a.d these men surely came into rome with titus's army as prisoners of war it must have seemed like the worst moment of their lives jirat cat calls people throwing things at them but brat's worse was to come they were auctioned off as slaves and bought by man called lucious valerius what their life in slavery was like we don't know but he freed them and they become new roman citizens with his name lucious valerius but their jewish names still asserting their jewish sense of identity this is one of the ways that roman conquest works it does bring slaves but it also brings eventually new roman citizens it's a fairy tale happy ending and a classic roman story when guys like this were freed they didn't just go back to their old lives in judea they stayed in their new home and what's more they became romans with all the rights and privileges which came with full roman citizenship but what kept them in rome how many of them were there and where did all these new romans live to try and make sense of it all i went to meet a colleague in trast avery which literally means across the tiber from the ancient city center it's got a reputation there's a bit of an immigrant area in rome even now this area just avery across the type was the fringe of the ancient city of rome and this is where we have the biggest evidence for immigrant communities jews assyrians i guess if you said to an ancient roman where's the biggest immigrant area of the ancient city of rome they'd have said over the river over the other side yeah part of the answer to the question of why an area like this could be so cosmopolitan lies in the story of slaves like barrica zamta and akiba greeks thought romans were really weird for freeing as many slaves as they did and making them citizens yes although it's very brutal being a slave can be a kind of stage in our life like an apprenticeship you come in as a german you get a roman name you learn latin or you learn to manage in latin you learn some kind of job that's useful to your master your master sets you free and there you are you're roman citizen with a trade and a roman name and a bunch of powerful people you know and this is your entry into roman society now multiply that by hundreds and thousands of slaves being freed and you can see that the whole ethnic nature of the people who call themselves roman citizens is is really changing very quickly roman is a it's a kind of vocation it's a movement into which other people are drawn this was a completely new idea and in many ways the secret of the empire's success roman was no longer a word which described the city you came from it was something you could become almost everyone in rome was descended from someone who arrived from outside not just ex-slaves people are coming in to work on the docks builders prostitutes peasants who come into rome because they think that they can they can eat there because they can't eat at home so this huge sort of chaotic mix of people who arrive not knowing anybody yeah these were journeys into the unknown and into a place where there was no guarantee you would survive and oddly that was one reason that rome welcomed people in any city the size of rome has to have immigration because the number of people who die in it greatly exceeds the number who are born rome is a malarial city in antiquity so people come here who don't have any immunity they catch the disease they're dead within years so just to keep rome the size it is you need to constantly top up the population rome is swallowing people it's actually you know it's a city which which consumes people's views about dead perhaps we should stop thinking of romans as a nation a master race who conquered the world and think instead of a babel of ruthless people piled up together a long way from home and no doubt hoping for a brighter future because for foreigners rome wasn't all doom and gloom sometimes i guess people would have come to rome just to seek their fortunes this is an epitope written in greek of a man who's said to have been always laughing always having a joke and really good at music you might have come as part of a band i guess and actually the stone tells us that he came to the land of italy ex as yeas from asia that's modern turkey that says he died here when he was young and it ends up saying in greek menopause is the name now rome might have consumed people it might have been a dangerous place it might have been disease ridden and dirty but i guess to a man like the streets must have seen paved with gold and not all immigrants in rome were at the bottom of the heap the senate and the imperial palace were full of people from outside just like the streets of trusteery rome was international from the bottom to the very top increasingly this city belonged to the likes of monopolists as new people arrived rome's population doubled then doubled again till it reached over a million there was nowhere in europe bigger until victorian london we think of rome as a very old city but 2 000 years ago this place was brand new it must have been full of building sites new high-rise of temporary accommodation it must have felt a bit like dubai but there's a big question if you've got a mass of a million people from everywhere how do you keep them alive how do you feed them how do you keep the vast roman multicultural show on the road feeding a million people was completely unprecedented challenge bang in the center of the modern city is a site which gives you an idea of the colossal scale of consumption in ancient rome locals call it monte testacio that's broken pot mountain i think it's one of the most extraordinary archaeological sites anywhere in the world few made it this is absolutely extraordinary each of these fragments was once part of an ancient roman storage jar what is amazing about this is that you you really see here that it's it is a broken pot mountain there's no earth mixed in with the other stuff so you see how actually quite neatly these uh these shards of pottery have been stacked it's it's a mountain not a heap it's a real hill but there's nothing natural about it this is a huge ancient rubbish dump composed entirely of discarded containers amphory that held just one of the products consumed by rome it was olive oil which seeped into the jars and made them go really rancid so they were the only containers that couldn't be recycled poor old amphery had taken off to be pickaxed up and made into the mountain and the olive oil that was in them gets everywhere it's the stuff of roman life you'd find it being used in cooking is what's going to help you make perfume it's what the guys in the baths who are exercising rubbing themselves scraping themselves down would have used and in the end it's what the poor little old lady in the garret he's just got one pottery lamp what came in his amphora would have been her only source of light at night it's no exaggeration to say that rome ran on olive oil and this place gives archaeologists a great opportunity to work out how it got here it came in massive quantities that's a place this must have been what originally even largely even larger than that you know and that's very heavy they say 30 kilos when they're empty empty yes that's my suitcase when it's full is this ampere when it's empty empty yeah and what's amazing is that you can often find out exactly where the oil came from we know that is a r v a is arva is a town called this way in the shores of the welkeville so that's linking that dutch precise chart to a site in the in the southern spain so roman town southern spain the guy who's making this amphora is stamping it with his town's name saying uh this is a product to offer yeah according to these trademarks almost all the oil in this mountain was coming from spain and a bit from north africa today italy is famous for its olive oil but in ancient times they were importing most of it from somewhere else the fascinating thing about this mountain it's the way that you can start to piece together little life stories of these pots and their contents it gets down to the coast in spain gets loaded onto boats if it's lucky it makes it but there's lots of shipwrecks in the ancient mediterranean it arrives at the coast it's humped off the boat it's put into barges it's brought up the tiber to the city of rome itself humped off the boat again put into warehouses decanted into small containers the amphory end up here it might not look it at first sight but in fact it's one of the most impressive monuments to the idea of rome as an imperialist consumer city bringing in the food stuff she needs from all around the mediterranean it wasn't just olive oil a short trip down the river tiber is the seaport ostia today austria is one of rome's best kept secrets and it helps us discover what rome was importing from where martin millett has been excavating near here and together we went to explore an intriguing piazza next to the theater which we call the square of the corporation okay martin this is where i get to do the housework never live this now if you sweep away the pine needles there are mosaics all around here advertising companies importing goods from abroad makers this is the organization of fur traders the naviculari aurum lignariorum that's uh the wood traders so what we've got so far is rope pelts and wood there are at least 50 of these mosaics most of them give us a place as well as a product they add up to one conclusion rome was being supplied from all corners of the mediterranean italy is not big enough to support the city of rome it is a city that's drawing in resources from everywhere this was a new moment in western history rome had become what we now call a consumer city on a vast scale these aren't luxury products they're basic commodities wood leather oil wine and most important by far grain people talk about rome being a consumer city with a population of about a million and that implies 150 000 metric tons of grain a year i don't know how big those ships are but you need a lot of ships like that to bring in 150 000 metric tons of grain as the city grew farms in sicily libya and then egypt were given over to producing wheat for the people of rome when the grain ships arrived in italy the word would pass round rome the food had arrived this was one thing the empire did for rome it kept them alive but it did more than that i want to think about life in that consumer city who are the winners and who are the losers one really interesting thing is how they use this imported grain and that means thinking about bread not just eating it but making it i'm very much second in command okay i'm not being trusted with the action 200 000 roman citizens living in the city of rome got each month what was called a corn doll a free ration of corn that means about 35 to 40 kilos of corn which was enough to make bread for a month for about two people this was an extraordinary privilege for citizens in rome 200 000 of them received free rations from the state but how did it work many of them lived in one room apartments with no kitchens so they relied on the baker to turn their 40 kilos into something they could eat you're gonna try it yeah crabby armor good not bad for a first attempt it's not bad well so it's wonderful people's food um this is this is tearing and sharing bread you don't even have to own a bread knife to be able to tuck into this good for poor romans this was the staple food that kept them alive but they didn't distribute it in the way we would expect you've got to put out your mind i think this was some kind of proto-welfare state sure some of the poor would have benefited from the grain but charity wasn't what was uppermost in the emperor's mind when he put all that time and money into distributing this grain what he was concerned about was the idea that a hungry populace was a dissatisfied populace and a dissatisfied populace was a dangerous one also the fact that the distributions didn't go to the poorest in rome they weren't only to roman citizens themselves you had to be a citizen in order to get this grain and that made it a really important perk of being a full roman in a way what this tells us is that being a full citizen of rome was a privileged status to which outsiders could aspire and perks like the grain handout help you understand why people want it to be roman but it also shows us that all these things the empire the imports the new citizens are all part of a cycle the bigger rome got the more it consumed the bigger the empire had to be to support it so how did rome's massive consumption change life in the city well for one thing this was one of the best times in history to be a baker and it's a baker who left one of the strangest monuments in rome now hidden beneath one of the main city gates it's the two monument of a man called marcus virgilius urisakis he's almost certainly an ex-slave and he was a baker and a contractor he must have made a whole pile of money in that job otherwise he wouldn't be able to afford a tomb like this what your riskies has done is given himself a theme tomb at the very top all around the monument there were scenes from the life of the bakery there's the kneading putting the bread in the oven weighing the stuff out and even these rather strange circles and columns underneath will be instantly recognizable to roman as bakery equipment the circles or almost certainly the kneading machines and the columns are the bins in which the dough is needed what this says in latin is this is the tomb of urisakis the baker and contractor aparet it's obvious or what i think we'd say this is the monument to the baker get it and i really like the way that get it still speaks to us 2000 years later have we got that this is the tomb of the baker yeah yurisikis could joke because things have gone pretty well for him his name sounds greek so most likely he came from abroad but he ended up as one of a new class of people getting rich on the proceeds of empire i've got a tremendous soft spot for uricis but i doubt that all romans would have felt that way my guess is that if some old money old-fashioned roman walked past this tomb he'd thought it was all a bit tacky a bit like i might feel if some premier league football player designed his own tomb in the shape of a giant football boot what eurisciki's joke reminds us is that the empire had a direct effect on how people in rome made their living it was becoming a city of urban professionals one of the reasons that ancient rome still seems quite familiar to us is that people could do a whole variety of different jobs just like us but it's important not to forget that obvious as that seems it was actually one of the ways in which the city of rome was radically new and different in the traditional small ancient city the idea was that the inhabitants were all rounders the same men fought the city's wars plowed the city's fields and produced the city's food but in imperial rome because of the huge size of the city those duties were outsourced the food now came from overseas it wasn't made by local farmers and the armed forces that were stationed around the roman empire they weren't just citizens doing their military duty they were making a career out of the military the empire freed or you might say forced romans to make a living by specializing that was being a pearl trader a warehouse manager or even a hair stylist to the rich and famous what this did was create a completely new way of differentiating between people if you'd asked an egyptian or a greek who they were they don't give them their father's name or their home town you'd ask the average roman i bet he'd told you what he did for a living well they do on their tombstones at any rate these guys are working in the pipparataria that's the pepper market these are just warehouse men horiari aurum and here's a bloke he's a sagarius a big overcoat maker perhaps he's a sucker is the ancient equivalent of a duffle coat an accounts manager oh she's great she's a piscatrix she's a female fishmonger he was a gold worker and here is an urn an ash urn for a lady called celia et parray and she was an owery she was a very very very upmarket clothes maker it's very striking how each one of these people does tell you on their tombstone what they did now i think we have to relate that to the sheer size and potential anonymity of a great imperial metropolis in a world without id cards without passports without birth certificates how do you know what you are who you are you know that because of your job i am celia epere a luxury clothes maker how do you make your identity clear you say this is what i do this is where imperial rome gets really fascinating for me this is not simply a story of one city getting rich off the back of everywhere else it's a story of a place where people were trying a new way of living they arrived from across the world and became a small cog in this big machine you maybe didn't know your neighbours and they didn't know you everyone was looking for new ways to make their mark and stand out the empire didn't only help people to move up in the world but help those who did to show that they made it it created new opportunities for conspicuous consumption the empire gave most people in western europe their first experience of pepper lemons and cherries one po-faced roman complained that cooking had gone from a mere function to a high art the empire transformed the sensory experience of the city there were new smells new tastes new colors and nowhere is this clearer than in the elaborate paintings many better off romans put on their walls in pompeii is perhaps the most famous roman painting of all pretty strange scene phallus appearing some female suckling a goat but it was probably the colors that would have dazzled an ancient visitor as much as the racy subject matter now we mustn't make the mistake of thinking that the poor old romans lived in black and white until they started conquering the mediterranean of course there are all kinds of local minerals and plants that would give them pigments for paint but as time went on they got more and more interested in the special bright colors that you could get from their far-flung territories now this here is one of the best candidates there is for real red spanish vermilion lovely lustrous red i think we have to imagine that if you came to dinner here and the generous host started showing you around he might have come and said now this lady here is whipping this one because etc etc but he might have said it's a really lovely red isn't it actually it's spanish vermillion specially imported all the way from spain i paid for it as an extra myself we live in a world of cheap bright synthetic colours but the romans didn't in rome bright colours smacked a kind of luxury that only came from abroad and the desire for them created an even more niche range of jobs for ordinary romans on the make this is a guy who was really keen on what he did he put up this tombstone when he was alive vevo's fake it for himself and for his family and he put on it symbols of the tools of his trade now he worked as a dire in the dying industry and you've got here little flasks in which his die went scales in which he measured out his ingredients and the skeins of material that he died but he wasn't any old dyer at the top he tells us his name gaius pupius amicus pouporarius he was a dyer of purple in rome purple was special it came from the eastern mediterranean and it was extracted from tiny shellfish it looked spectacular and it didn't fade it was not only expensive its use came to be regulated by law you saw a man in the street wearing a toga with a broad purple stripe you'd know that he must be a senator one of the political elite and the only person later on in the roman empire who was allowed to wear clothes completely of purple was the roman emperor himself it's kind of color policing it's a bit like as if queen elizabeth ii was the only person in the country who was allowed to wear pink but it tells you quite a lot about rome and the roman empire that this one very visible marker of political and social status should have been the product something that came from the far eastern side of the mediterranean no wonder gaius pupius amicus was proud of being a purporarius the story of colour isn't just a story of luxury it's a story of identity the power that conspicuous consumption had to mark you out as someone special whether you are supplying them or consuming them all these imports helped you distinguish yourself like products and people even new gods arrive from far-flung parts of the empire you could have your own style your own taste your own beliefs but let's not get too carried away by all this exotic stuff that the empire offered up what the foreign purple on the senator's toga tells us is that you could be completely foreign and absolutely roman at the same time the romans had a way of thinking about other cultures that is quite unlike our own we really mustn't make the mistake of kind of imagining that rome is a sort of touchy feely cultural melting pot yes if you wear the wrong clothes they make fun of if you speak strangely they make fun of you they're big conformists yes there's too many greeks here that the jews don't eat food properly on the sabbath all that sort of stuff yes why don't they eat pork and how silly the poet marshall who's going on about the puelo romana who hasn't experienced a mintula romano you know the roman chick who's never had a roman dick i mean you know i mean it's crude stuff but you know nasty in his way the irony is the man who wrote this came from spain they're not laughing at other races they're laughing about people who don't do things the roman way although people come to the city from all over the world you don't end up with a china town or little italy in the way that we have in the great metropolitan cities today and these people are going out they're ruling the world the senators are governing portugal they're governing egypt they govern on the danube and they never come back and say i had this great meal the other day and they'll talk about ingredients from all over the world but what you do with it the actual cuisine the cooking it's got to end up proper roman cookery yeah they've got this city that is unlike anything that's been created before that has a much greater diversity of people of of customs of languages thousands of languages probably spent hundreds of languages at least spoken in the city of rome but they only write in greek and latin more or less all the time a tiny bit of hebrew what we're seeing here is the most culturally ethnically religiously diverse city that they've ever been in the world but the way they're doing multiculturalism is quite different from the way we do multiculturalism yes there's cultural diversity but what there isn't is a diversity of cultures there's an ironic logic here because roman culture was in itself such an amalgam they simply saw no need for alternative cultures to exist in parallel still less to respect them in rome diversity wasn't about separateness there wasn't a chinatown or even a jewish quarter in fact your average roman would have been amazed at the way we try to respect and preserve different cultures here the people were from everywhere the food came from everywhere the gods were from everywhere but it all went into the blender and it came out roman the empire was doing two things jerome they were parading all the exotic and luxurious strangeness of the outside world but at the same time the distinction between romans and the subject peoples was dissolving all the time eventually every free adult male in the empire to call himself a roman citizen for me there's one place which captures the contradictions of imperial rome there was a people's palace here it was the coliseum it was built and paid for out of the spoils of the jewish war as a gift to the roman people one thing's for sure some of them had to climb a lot of stairs i'm in the only part of a coliseum that i'd be allowed to go to women slaves and other undesirables in the roman world had to be up on the gods so what does it look like from the undesirables point of view let's not think for a moment about the blood and guts there was certainly plenty of that but let's think of it in terms of empire what you had on display in front of you was all the biggest and best the empire could offer people often compare this to a football match but if so this is not just a premier league this is the world cup fantastic combat weird exotic creatures animals you can only have dreamt of when this place opened they even had a rhinoceros running wild down there this is one place we can see the roman empire from the ordinary person's eye view this guy is looking at the show and then during the pause or what he wasn't looking at he's scratching scratching the scene that he was seeing in the arena and what do we got we can see wild animals like a panther oh there's two big bears right and right this is the best tiara so you can really look at those muscles it is oh no biceps or whatever they are really muscly bloke and i think this is great because it it not only gives us a spectator's viewpoint but it also kind of captures that moment of what it was like to be here this guy wasn't alone the romans just couldn't get enough of drawing the beasts they ogled in the coliseum when you saw them for the first time these exotic animals must have been breathtaking the same goes for the other stars of the show the human performers this is a fantastic treat for me because it's um it's a real live gladiator's helmet or a real dead gladiator's helmet from pompeii it's very weird and heavy i'm gonna pick it up it's got great crest on it and a bust of hercules which is facing out at you just to scare the opponent i can't quite put it on but i can get the feeling of what it's like having it on but what it makes you see is it's jolly heavy and you get a very very difficult view from inside because everything's kind of shaded off both by the peak and by the protective grill i mean i don't quite see i know where the blasted enemy was honestly the other thing about it is it looks to us fantastically weird and i think it would look like that to the romans too the point about these gladiators is that they're not dressed in standard roman army issue they're not the kind of fighters you'd see if you went to fight the barbarians these are mad weird exotic foreign costumes they're meant to exude the mysterious outside world and all the violence there might be in it and in a way i think what we're seeing here is it's well it's sort of a fancy dress i think what you get the sense was that people had come to see the costume as much as they'd come to see you where do i go now hard to see so when i think about gladiatorial combat i know that some of it was to the death people did get killed but more and more often it was a show it was a spectacle it was theater and in my mind it's kind of more like the sort of charade of wrestling than the real life combat of boxing and part of the reason for that was simply economics you've got hundreds of gladiators they're extremely expensive you don't want them killed off too often a bit of a disparity of size here but i'm afraid thrax is out whoops we have a victorious mermello congratulations to the romans gladiators represented a violent fantasy of the outside world fighting in their midst but there's a fascinating irony in the real origins of the men behind the masks i've got a wonderful drawing an old drawing here the original stone has long ago been lost but it's a tombstone of a man called marcus antonia's ex-orcas who tells us he came from alexandria to fight in some gladiatorial games put on by the emperor trajan and here's another text of a tombstone put up by a man called friskinus who was a provocateur that's another sort of gladiator there's tombstones in greek and he tells us that he was an egyptian these gladiators came from the same wildly different backgrounds as everyone else in rome but their real stories were much more mundane than the exotic roles they were forced to play in the arena it reveals the kind of smoke and mirrors aspect of all this because underneath all that some gladiators were pretty domestic or they certainly ended up so they finished up perhaps long retired longish life wife and kids uh one of the nicest ones is a man here who lived to the age of 45 he'd come from tungria he was a belgian but the tombstone is put up to him by his wife and little justice his son and even exacus exotic as he looks seems to have ended up life to judge from his name as a roman citizen he presumably retired and lived out his life somewhere in suburban italy a bit like marcus antonius exocus of tonbridge wells an egyptian playing the part of a thracian warrior then settling down as a roman family man to me that's imperial rome in a nutshell the coliseum dramatized this frightening thrilling idea of rome and the outside world that's all violence confrontation and strangeness the truth is that the real empire was not just fighting in the arena it was sitting in the seats there are places in the coliseum reserved for the gaditani people of cadiz in spain for an african senator and a gothic chieftain in reality the fierce and barbarians had become romans and were watching the action like everyone else so what's the colosseum doing then at one level it's showing the people of the city what they get from empire but in a deeper sense it's showing them that they fit in if the people who are killing each other in the arena were stereotypical foreigners then by implication if you were watching them you were a roman it's trying to put everything in an order that makes sense the point about the coliseum is that it was both a microcosm of the city of rome and a microcosm of the roman empire and it helps to show how the boundaries between what was roman and what was foreign increasingly broke down in rome for the first time in history people from asia africa and europe could sit together as citizens of the same state rome was the first global city and it contained in it all the contradictions that global cities have had ever since it was diverse but it wasn't tolerant foreign enemies were crucified enslaved and forced to fight in the arena but equally foreigners could rise to be emperor the point is the distinction the empire made was not between romans and foreigners but between those who resisted and those who joined in the key question in our story is what was it like to live in the world's first city where almost everyone came from somewhere else there must have been plenty of people who felt very far from home ruthless for some there were profits to be made and success to be had an exciting even if bewildering mixture of new ideas different cultures and different religions whatever you'd been back home in rome you could reinvent yourself it's not hard to imagine the fears and anxieties of those ordinary romans wherever they were from how do i fit into all this who knows who i am who's going to remember me when i'm dead perhaps that's why they were so keen to write their stories onto their tombstones they're deliberately speaking to you and me oh this guy's really having a conversation stranger he says hospice hang on a minute resist stay stop here take a look down to your left that's where my bones are buried my ossa i was a good man i was a kind man misericordis and i was a lover of the poor a mantis palparus please traveller please we artor i beg you don't mess with my two the name of the guy is gaius attilius you hodos the ex-slave or a man called serenus you hodos sounds great to me and he tells us what he did he was a margaritarius he was a pearl cellar that's who's buried in this tomb traveler he says we are tall on your way now goodbye wale wale next time i'll descend into the city streets to explore their high-rise tournaments crime-ridden slums and life in the bars and the bath houses and we'll find some very distinctive roman voices born from the earthiness of communal city life this is how we have to imagine the ancient city everyone together tunics up toga's up trousers down chatting as they went you

Channel: Odyssey

Views: 87,939

Rating: 4.8661709 out of 5

Keywords: ancient history, classical history, ancient civilisations, classical antiquity, history documentary, classical documentary, mary beard, caligula, romans, ancient rome, ancient roman documentary, bbc documentary, part 1

Id: iJwl2qX-5EA

Length: 58min 56sec (3536 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 23 2021