How Did The Ancient Roman World Work? | Mary Beard's Rome: Empire Without Limit | Odyssey

this channel is part of the history hit Network [Music] once you've got an Empire what do you do with it and what did it feel like to be part of it oh well Clues found in very surprising places I'm talking rubbish ancient Roman rubbish I'm in the middle of a Roman landfill site millions and millions of broken pots that once contained the fuel of the ancient city olive oil it's trash but it's very valuable trash because it's through the leftovers of the Roman world the bits and pieces and the junk as much as The Monuments and the treasures that we can see how the Roman Empire works feeds it what connects it who are the winners and who are The Losers the Romans never set out to acquire an Empire but their undistinguished little town came to control a territory that stretched from Britain in the North to Algeria in the south Bane to Israel the Nile to the Rhine it looked to the Romans make of it all visualize it we tend to joke we say all roads lead to Rome but actually they did what about the conquered what difference did it make to them just olives olives and all damn olives [Music] there were great fortunes for some but an expense of the many this Tombstone for me is a bit of a tear jerker so just how did drone transform the landscape of our world [Music] history hit is a streaming platform that is just for history fans with fantastic documentaries covering fascinating figures and moments in history from all over the world our extensive catalog of documentaries covers everything from the rise of Hannibal Barker to the illustrious Treasures of King Tut so sign up today for broadcast quality documentaries uncovering the mysteries of the ancient world and it's not just documentaries either we have a network of incredible history podcasts bringing you new episodes every day a sign up now for a free trial and odyssey fans get 50 off their first three months just be sure to use the code Odyssey at checkout for an extraordinary record of the scale and impact of the Roman Empire I've come to see what must be one of the most remarkable and surprising leftovers from the Roman world so I'm going to show you our freezer and it's not a piece of pottery or even an inscription I shut the door yes what Greenland feels like yes what I'm here to see is ice recently drilled from the Arctic Ice Sheets preserving layers and layers of buried history right back to Roman times how far in Greenland you actually have to drill down to get to the Roman bed I would say four or five hundred meters deep in the ice sheets [Music] by analyzing this ice Celia step out in her team at Utrecht University have discovered some striking evidence about Rome's impact on the environment so here you can see a piece of ice from Greenland that we have already measured so in fact you see all this small air bubbles and each air bubbles represents the composition of our atmosphere in the past [Music] this Roman history melting in your hands and what we do in fact is that we measure the greenhouse gases in those little bubbles especially methane that's our main interest and we had a big surprise that around year one we had a increased level in this in the in the smithing fingerprint showing that higher level of biomass burning so burning can be burning because of deforestation burning because of all kind of other processes comparing our data with historical data this peak was related to population growth and to the Roman Empire expansion the data revealed a sharp spike in the level of methane in the Earth's atmosphere that wouldn't be seen again for over a thousand years this is really great for me because we know that the Romans had all this extra increasing productivity and Industry Etc but you know actually to see it kind of trapped there forever in the eyes that's truly extraordinary and I can't think we feel a bit differently about it perhaps but I think the Romans would have been absolutely delighted to seize their impact kind of preserved like this yes Roman pollution captured in the Greenland ice sheets is dramatic evidence of a burst of energy as Rome transformed the world it conquered foreign France is another of the remaining traces of that transformation the Veer dementia the ancient Road linking Italy to Spain as Rome built its Empire from the ground up connecting people and places in a way that had never been seen before for us roads almost stand for Rome and actually Roman roads still do lie underneath many of our own transport routes but it's easy to forget quite how revolutionary it was to go from a system of windy local dirt tracks to Great paved highways striking out across the continent isn't that the speed you could go on them was that impressive still took even the fastest Romans about a week to go what we could cover in a day but the idea that you could start out in Rome get on a road stick on it and end up in Spain or Greece that was entirely new like sinews crossing the Empire the Romans built a network of roads over 80 000 kilometers long not only creating a new geography but introducing an entirely New Roman way of thinking about the world signage from a Roman Road it's a little series of milestones that were set every room a mile it's about one and a half kilometers along all the major routes most of the writing on it is actually the emperor's name and titles so you know who to thank for this lovely road underneath is a big number three that means we're three miles from the nearest staging Point what's important about this is that you know exactly exactly where you are for the first time you can place yourself in the world [Music] of course once you got off the Beaten Track people in the countryside May hardly have noticed the arrival of Rome life would have gone on much as before Roman roads things changed not necessarily for the better it wouldn't have been fun finding a brand new super highway going straight through your land and Romans complained much as we do about the bad food and exorbitant prices at the ancient equivalent of service stations for some though these new roads were a cause for celebration these are copies of four trained Roman drinking goblins that quite recognizably in the shape of Milestones but just that they've got lists and lists of means of places scratched into them what it says around the top is this is the route from guardes that's Cadiz in Spain to Roman to Rome and between each place it's giving you the number of Roman miles that you have to travel and at the bottom it does a grand total of the whole length of the road which is over 1800 Roman miles that would take you more than 40 days to travel no quite well they were four there's actually a bit of a mystery I mean they might be very practical it might be a useful traveling cup uh plus your route inscribed on the outside of it but I think it's rather more likely that they're either Souvenirs of the road or inspiration of the length uh and the Splendor of this great Road simple idea that you could find Romans drinking out of lookalike milestones really shows some sort of internalized that sense of Road culture had become which is exactly what I'm going to do Saloon everybody [Music] [Music] the goblets also point to that other great marker of Roman presence on the landscape towns the Romans sponsored the greatest program of urbanization in history and in Western Europe their cities still often underlie our own all over the Empire towns needed infrastructure it's the old cliche about the Romans that they built roads and bridges baths and drains and aqueducts like this one and they plowed an awful lot of cash into it [Music] this wasn't one of the longest or the most vital aqueducts in the Roman World it channeled water just 15 kilometers from a mountain spring to the small Spanish Town of Segovia it's all the same it's ought not to feel impressed here is of arches this is where even I get a bit gobsmacked by Roman engineering and in a way that's the point it's one of the trademarks of the Roman Empire it's meant to be in your face and its message goes far beyond any practical purpose [Music] this can't just be about the water supply this is about Roman power it's about the Romans making an impact on the landscape it's about the Romans making themselves permanent put it another way I want to bring a water supply to a small town do you really need all this extravagance [Music] aqueducts towns roads these are the classic stereotypes of the Roman Empire that what it did for us but more than just clever engineering projects the Romans could imagine they were all fitting together [Music] this is the only Roman map of the Empire we have or actually it's a copy of a 13th century copy of an ancient Roman man why this is important is it gives us a glimpse of how the Romans pictured their own Empire some of that's pretty obvious you've got Rome right in the middle and leading out from it you can see the roads there's some familiar names there's Naples or neapolis and there's Pompeii and that rather squashed Island there that's Sicily then you move further and further east uh past Crete here but my favorite bit I think is the Nile Delta with the city of Alexandria in its Lighthouse here and then all the little rivers and tributaries in the Delta there in some ways this looks like a very mad representation of the world it's all terribly squashed and it's not arranged north south but is making more important points than that it's saying that Rome is at the very center and what's important about the Empire is its cities its towns and its roads we tend to joke we say all roads lead to Rome but actually they did and they LED away from Rome too what the Romans are telling us is that theirs is a joined up world [Music] it's a dramatic statement to Roman power and control and a network of connectivity which joins up places never before joined up and in this new connected world the demands of the Roman State and over a million consumers in Rome itself could be met by producers many hundreds of kilometers away this is when the hills of southern Spain became a giant Olive farm and juicing Enterprise this kind of monoculture just olives olives and more damn olives it's one Legacy of the Roman Empire it was then at southern Spain first became the world's biggest producer of olive oil more than seven million liters of the stuff going to the city of Rome alone every year it was an Agricultural Revolution anyone who'd lived through it would have seen the countryside round about them completely transformed the Roman Empire ran on olive oil it was used not only for cooking but lighting and even the ancient equivalent of soap you couldn't live without it Olive grower Francisco is still in the business is the whole economy of this area is it all based on olives yes um olive trees and with olive oil and the whole process represent in this area practically in between us 70 percent of the income I mean some people like you are growing the olives yes but then and then you've got your Pickers your specialist Pickers but you've got presumably Transporters you've got middlemen you've got export agents everybody have to be a specialist in something it was much the same 2000 years ago olive oil provided jobs in a highly profitable industry there were lots of people who made lots of money out of all this there were the Growers and the pickers and the pressers and the Packers the Transporters and the distributors and don't forget they were The Men Who cashed in on it all by making the containers to put it in this was an oil economy foreign [Music] shipping 7 million liters of olive oil to Rome and The Wider Empire each year required more than just trees and presses you needed an entire infrastructure whether in the form of warehouses bottling plants or ports foreign sport hubs and distribution centers was a place the Romans called hispalis and we call Seville built into the fabric of the modern city unnoticed by most passes by today is an introduction to one of the Roman officials whose job it was to make sure the precious oil reached its final destination this is a puck put up in honor of a man called sextus Julius possessor and it's ended up I'm afraid an extremely inconvenient place really what it is is a description of possessor's whole career first of all he seems to be stationed in Italy itself looking after the incoming supply of oil from both Africa and Spain but then he moves out to Seville to a job which is described as procureato somebody who's in charge of the repambitis the riverbank of the river bite is an interesting case of how Roman Imperial Administration Works they never have very many people on the ground but they do get a men into place in key areas and here we've got possessor I think as a safe Pair of Hands in Seville making sure that nothing goes wrong with the supply of oil to Rome from this end of course ultimately this was all for the benefit of Rome but a more complex exchange was taking place too olive oil flowed to Rome money flowed into Spain and there's evidence in The Branding stamped into the oil jars themselves that this new wealth allowed some people access into the politics of Rome itself this is a particularly tantalizing example because stamp here reads very clearly Port p a h that's Port short for portus or probably River Warehouse of someone called p a h and one thing we know is that the father of the emperor Hadrian had those initials Publius alias hadrianas so it's possible that this handle is telling us something about the source of the wealth of Hadrian's family in the oil fields of Spain and it's telling us something about the commercial profits that underpinned the power structure of the Roman Empire whether this was really where he'd made his money or not we know that Hadrian the man on the Roman throne for 20 years in the second Century A.D came from Spain reflection of just how joined up the Empire had become and it's not surprising that Hadrian bankrolled big building schemes here [Music] this is what's left of the town of italica where the emperor Hadrian's family came from they weren't native Spanish they were Roman settlers from way back but they obviously thought of Spain as their home Hadrian plowed an awful lot of cash into his hometown tremendous showing off and to be honest all a bit out of proportion one of the biggest things he did was put up this huge Amphitheater it would have accommodated 25 000 people now to put that in context the Coliseum in Rome accommodates about 50 000 or so so you've got a small town Amphitheater in Roman Spain with half the seating of the Coliseum to put it another way the population of little italica was only something like 8 000 people in all to me that sounds a bit like a plutocratic benefactor giving little Cambridge United a stadium half the size of Wembley it is a little bit absurd [Music] we're now you know almost in the center of the Arena this is where um the Gladiators would have thought Where the wild beast would have been slaughtered and right in the middle here you've got a sort of mini version of what you find in the Coliseum itself the underground sellers were the Gladiators and the animals would have waited to come up into the arena through trap doors in the floor very easy to get rather overblown view of the brutality and the extravagance of gladiatorial and animal spectacle my guess is that you didn't see Gladiators here very often you certainly didn't see very many exotic wild beasts they did put on performances uh perhaps once a year on Hadrian's birthday be my guess because the real point of this Monument um was not actually entertainment for the locals or whatever sort the real point of this Monument was to stamp the image of Hadrian on his native City [Music] and what Hadrian's italicate really shows is something of The Wider process by which Rome remodeled the world in its own image in Spain and elsewhere Rome established itself for good not just in bricks and mortar but in institutions and laws which defined a specifically Roman Urban way of life these bronze tablets are just covered in columns and Columns of writing and what that writing is is a constitution devised in Rome for a Roman town in Spain I mean really it's a series of do's and don'ts for how to be a Roman town abroad here's one about what the local officials call the edials should do now they're supposed every year to put on some nice plays in the city Ludi Sky Nicky they have to pay no less than 2 000 sestasies that's twice a soldier's pay from their own money desua pecunia and they might just get a grant of 1 000 cestices from public funds if they do that so here we've got our generous local officials obliged to give us a theatrical display everything from seating arrangements at public events to the speaking time allotted to accusers and defendants at trial are outlined in this document and many have a familiar feel there's a great bit here which is uh about well in our terms it's about electrical expenses it says if you are standing for office you're a candid artist um what what you mustn't do is lavish expensive meals on people in order to encourage them to vote for you although it is allowed to give nine people a meal on one day but no more than that after that it's bribery that's the kind of level of micromanagement that the Romans are trying to impose from roads to aqueducts civil servants to public performances in this kind of Empire Building cash was as important as armies in the ancient world if you needed cash you had to dig for it southern Spain wasn't entirely olives there were plenty of riches in the form of silver to be Unearthed here too X minor and local archaeologist saturnino Aguero he's taking me to see evidence of the Roman operations here two thousand years ago this would have been an industrial landscape heaving with people one road when you actually visited reckoned that there were 40 000 men working for the mines in this area right so what we've got here is a place where the later mining has cut through to give a cross-section of the Roman working and you can see some little square holes galleries or passageways and all over the rock you can I think see the pock marks where the Roman miners have come in and they must have followed the ore scenes and just taken the silver ore out and not bothered with the rest of it and it's the scale of the industrial processes that went on around here from the mining to the smelting that helps us understand those traces of methane we can still recover from the arctic ice sheets and the Romans also recognize the problem of pollution they built the chimneys of the smelting plants very high to get rid of the noxious smoke it was a terribly exploitative system of resources of landscape and of people but there are also vast profits to be made too there are people who came here from Italy in search of their Fortune I mean in a way this was a bit like the gold rush or Spain in the sort of way was Rome's Eldorado first silver entrepreneurs took full advantage of a ruthless system in which profit was the sole consideration the organization of the Spanish mines was a mixture of public Enterprise and private Enterprise the Roman state owned most of them but didn't have the infrastructure to manage them so it sold the franchise to arrange a private companies they called them publicani in our terms that's public service providers the dangers of that are obvious state gets the basic minimum the only incentive for the private companies is to maximize their profits the people who pay the price are the poor guys down there we've got to imagine hundreds of people underground all toiling to get the ore out and using pretty rudimentary tools this is a Roman pick and you have to imagine that there's a a wooden handle here and you're picking at the surface of the rock like that this one is really heavy it's a rather clever dual use tool again it's got a a wooden handle going through there and you can either Hammer at the Rock or you can pick at the rock using the other end you'd have to be pretty strong to wield that effectively you'd have to be even stronger though to manage this crowbar and imagine you're coming and you're trying to pick out uh the seams of the ore and you're jabbing this into the Rock to loosen it out with a sharp end this is obviously very dark dirty sweaty heavy labor and it's a reminder that beneath the surface of this sparkling new Empire there was a silent underclasses keeping the wheels in motion this Tombstone for me is a bit of a tear-jerker we read about Roman children being used in the minds as workers but here we actually seem to meet one he's a little boy called quintus archulus and he lived to be just four years old there he is he's got a little tunic on he's got a pick in one hand and a a basket in the other he's all set for working the mine [Music] we don't actually know that that's where he died although many children must have what we do know is that it is as a minor that he's being remembered [Music] it was on small backs like these that the wealth of Rome was built the silver he helped to mine minted into the currency of Empire what most of this Roman silver went into was coin things like this one Roman estimates that each year in this area they got nine million of these that's an enormous impact on Roman economy and Society you can buy an awful lot of aqueducts and armies for nine million of these what's amazing is that these coins came to be used all over the Roman Empire same denomination same designs Jonathan Williams is an expert in coins and deputy director of the British museum these are two very similar coins of the emperor Hadrian distinctive face there in Adriana's Augustus that's right they're they are very very similar they're both Roman silver dinari the lifeblood in many ways of the Roman currency system both of that have Hadrian on very similar they're the same values same amount of silver but they were found completely opposite ends of the Earth um this one here was found in Bletchley in Southern England and this one was found in Southern India Britain of course inside the Empire India outside the Empire but loads of trading links absolutely does that mean that in a sense what Rome has done has created a unified internal economy and coinage them if we've got monetary Union really in the Roman Empire it's a single currency Union uh when you talk about the gold and the silver coins particularly those are the ones as we see here that circulate throughout the Roman Empire and Beyond everybody wants good Roman gold and good Roman silver but what you do have of course the other way in which the currency unifies the Empire is that is that they've all got the head of the ruling man and it's his head being seen and used and noticed and comforted upon from Britain all the way through to India that's one of the key unifying factors about the Roman Empire together with all those statues and all those other things [Music] from its Spanish Minds Rome maintained a constant flow of Hard Cash trickling down to contractors soldiers and Traders across the Roman world who could hardly have forgotten that all this wealth was tied to Roman power in return Rome became the focal point for all the Empire had to offer drawing in taxes talent and the raw materials to build the Imperial City we know today and one of the highlights still standing in all its glory is the pantheon for many Romans walking past this building the most striking thing about it would have been the columns holding up the porch we tend not to pay them very much attention and if we do notice them we really don't know how to read them but they're actually one of the loudest boasts you could make about Imperial power that's partly because they're monoliths they're carved out of a single piece of stone and just think how difficult that would be to do without them breaking or cracking but it's also the material itself they all come from quarries deep in a province 3 000 kilometers away from here Egypt they've been loaded onto camels and donkeys dragged across the desert put onto ships in the Nile taken to the Mediterranean across the sea to stand here it's an extraordinary statement about the resources of Empire and about the ability of the emperor Hadrian who put this building up to control those resources in a sense the stone is the message [Music] but even Emperors couldn't control everything he looked hard at the building you'll see some awkward mismatches some odd misalignments to make it look as if the Architects had been expecting columns a few meters taller and had to make some last minute adjustments when smaller ones arrived maybe the Quarry just couldn't Supply what was asked for maybe some Paul devil got the order wrong I wouldn't have liked to have been him for me the pantheon reflects how The Empire changed Rome just as much as Rome changed the Empire the capital was where stuff from all over the Roman world was on display and on sale and at the center of this world was the Mediterranean itself Rome's internal sea it was much quicker and cheaper to bulk transport Goods by water than by land and the Mediterranean became a busy highway with cargo ships Laden with things from Grand Granite columns to Humble objects of daily life everywhere you went in the Roman Empire you'd have found people eating and drinking out of shiny red pots like this and you still find them stacked on museum shelves everywhere from Hadrian's Wall to North Africa most of us and that's me included just walk past them without a Second Glance but actually they're what's left the most extraordinary case of Roman mass production most of them are pretty plain but this one's got a more exciting decoration it's got pictures of the Goddess Diana having a bath and being spotted by the unfortunate action um who gets um attacked by his dogs as punishment for having seen the goddess with no clothes on quite hard to place exactly the social level of this but I reckon it's um sort of very very Middle Market ordinary that's to say there'll be some people who would you know lust for just one of these bulls for their table there'd be others for whom this would be normal everyday Crockery what's really important about all this it's a simple fact that it just got everywhere when people dig us up in 2000 years time I guess they'll find loads and loads of fizzy drink cans and identical trainers across the world this is one of the first examples of globalization this is the Roman brand through its roads and sea routes the Roman brand spread throughout the empire wasn't only the movement of goods but people too in the remote town of hierapolis in modern turkey we find the remarkable tomb of a man who seems to have made the most out of the opportunities of belonging to the new Roman world this is a wonderful story of an exciting life on the high seas it's the tombstone of a man called flavius xuxus and he says that during his life he has sailed around the Promontory of Cape Malia at the very southern tip of Greece between here in turkey and Italy seventy two times so what's he doing well heropolis was the textile capital of this part of Turkey and he can only have been going from here to Italy to flog all the things they were making but what's interesting is what he chooses to put on his Tombstone to sum up his life are those dangerous 72 Journeys [Music] duxes must have been unusually successful or he wouldn't have bragged on his tomb but for someone like him the Roman Empire made the world simultaneously bigger and smaller bigger because of the expanded Horizons and the distant markets now open to those who dared smaller because of the network of connectivity that enabled people and goods to get around the world more easily than ever before and a key part of that distribution were the ports nerve centers of Roman trade and commerce foreign that flourished in the commercial world of the Roman Empire was Ephesus it became a hub of input and export it had once been an old famous Greek Town going back centuries but it was transformed by the Romans everything we now see here is the result of Roman investment and the reason it was so important in the Roman world is simple it's Harbor Imperial trade needs more than ships and Merchants it needs well-functioning harbors [Music] the coastline around Ephesus has long since changed and it's now a good way in land but in its Heyday it was an important Maritime gateway to the East and to Rich pickings from as far away as India a reminder that the Roman world was much bigger than the Roman Empire and Ephesus would have felt like the whole cosmos had descended here people from everywhere speaking as many languages on the streets then as they do now city of the court of a million not just those that lived here but people coming and going and everyone busy busy busy the honest guys doing the Hard Day's Work the cheats and the chances the go-getters and the bureaucrats and of course the money makers [Music] if you could afford a pad in the heart of Ephesus the chances are you'd profited from the constant flow of goods through the harbor these are up Market houses for those who'd made it this is all amazing but it's also quite confusing there's a series of houses one above the other running up the Hillside and they're partly interlocking so it's quite hard to tell where one house stops and the next one starts but what is clear is that there was a luxurious lifestyle going on here that some people in Ephesus including the owners of these properties were doing very nicely thank you and it makes the point that the benefits of Empire did not only flow to the Imperial Palace or to people in Rome itself this Elite were evidently pretty flashy no expense spared the Fashions and trends of the City Rome itself were imitated and reproduced here we've come into a kind of reception hall on a really palatial scale also it must all have been faced with marble right the way around and you can see The Columns of marble on the side and there'll be panels in between and this is where somebody big entertained and displayed his wealth and power this is you know almost Imperial scale um must be pretty terrifying I think to be a guest at this house and I'm standing on a modern walkway that you can see there must have been a great big door and there's big door fixings on either side I have to imagine that you would have had the door opened for you into this and there the big man would be ready to greet and possibly humiliate you and [Music] foreign the things that came from the temples of Ephesus really live up to that classy Roman Style so too do the things from the terraced houses one of the highlights are some Exquisite with to my taste slightly militaristic Ivory plaques showing the emperor on campaign to across the board the fines here really are top of the range the best that money could buy question is where did the money come from now where did these guys who own these houses make their cash well trade obviously but to say trade makes it all sound a bit easy a bit comfortable it's one of the biggest Commodities that came through the port of Ephesus were human beings this town was a great center of the slave trade slaves flowed through the marketplace at Ephesus like olive oil through Seville the brutal truth was that many Romans wouldn't have seen much of a distinction between the two as they saw it slaves were one of the products of Empire many victims of Roman conquest or kidnapping or just foundlings if you wanted to buy a sleeve this is where you'd have come it's uncomfortable to grasp but the Roman Empire depended on slave labor and like every other ancient Society the Romans took slavery absolutely for granted but uncomfortable as it is if you want to understand rather than just deplore what went on here we have to try to get into the mindset of those who came to buy slaves what did they think they were doing my guess is they thought they were doing their shopping so we're here after a gardener or a tutor for their child or maybe a hairdresser how are they going to be sure they weren't ripped off could they trade in last year's model and were they missing out on a special offer next week three for two that may seem a very callous way of putting it but it is the everyday reality of Roman Life slaves with the operating system of Empire picking the olives quarrying the stone mining the silver and constructing the buildings they weren't just a perk for the rich quite ordinary Craftsmen or small farmers could have afforded at least one but if you were the emperor it would have been thousands in fact it's the emperor Hadrian's Villa just outside Rome at Tivoli that we can still get one of the clearest glimpses of the slaves world and the strict social hierarchy that underpinned the empire and this is where the slaves lived in hundreds of rooms how many were squashed into each one we just don't know but I don't imagine we should be thinking of individual bed sets some of those slaves servants or laborers and that's how we usually think about slavery but others would have been slave doctors accountants Librarians and musicians these were the people who were needed to power this estate in the Imperial household would have been in a lucky position compared to those working in the Silver Mines of southern Spain pieces can't ever see it from their point of view because they haven't left any account which gives their side the story so all we can do is imagine it this is where some slaves spent most of their working lives downstairs in a network of dark service tunnels beneath the grand Airy quarters upstairs people scurrying about down here were always meant to be invisible and they've remained pretty much invisible to us largely because they've left their Trace behind them for me this underground world is a powerful symbol of one very nasty side of Roman slavery and exploitation but before we feel too much moral superiority coming on it might be worth reflecting how many invisible people there are beneath the surface of our world too [Music] this was the Empire that Hadrian kept hidden a Labyrinth of tunnels separating the underclasses from the elite who inhabited the luxurious buildings above this was the Empire that Hadrian wanted to present to the world and it was built very deliberately to do just that even after almost 2 000 years of plunder and exposure to the elements it's at Tivoli that we can still see better than anywhere Hadrian's own vision of the empire in the biggest Palace the Roman world had ever seen if you came to visit the emperor Hadrian in his great Villa this is the approach you'd have taken pretty impressive it was too big flight of stairs leading up to the Monumental Gates and on each side fountains playing a niche for statues they've probably been some Burly guards in fact Villa is a dreadful understatement even Palace doesn't quite get it this Imperial residence Hadrian's country pad was the size of a town oh once it passed security and got your foot in the door the sheer scale of the place and the luxury would have been dazzling balls the libraries the miniature theaters not that you'd have found Hadrian here very much though more than any other Roman ruler he was off for years touring his Empire [Music] Hadrian was always getting on the back of his horse going somewhere he was one of the greatest tourists of the Roman world and half of his 20-year Reign he spent on the road what he saw The Monuments the temples the Exotic highlights of the provinces he reproduced replicated and copied at Tivoli the organization it would have taken to construct this place is almost unimaginable the builders themselves were only a part of it they were the people who sourced the material who is the orders The Architects the accountants and clerks and the dinner ladies who catered For the whole team I don't know if anybody's ever actually counted the total number of bricks in Hadrian's Villa but this really is building as a military operation those Bricks now do make it all look a bit naked but remember it was originally covered with slabs of marble and works of art [Music] difficult to visualize it today but tivoli's Interiors must have been amongst the most lavish in the Roman world just a few broken pieces of marble have been Unearthed giving us a snapshot what it might have looked like conservationist Barbara caponera has the tricky task of trying to put the jigsaw back together sometimes you can get to see what covered those bare brick walls and this is an amazing image of a horse and a charioteer or his rider as the horse's tail here and his leg there it's all made on the kind of same Principle as a mosaic but with larger pieces so this is marble and the Horseman's belt is is made out of blue glass and it was surrounded by a frame so it's kind of like a painting on the wall these marbles have been brought in from all over the Empire the whole body is a rich yellow marble that we know comes from Tunisia and one of these other fragments here is a great green marble that was from Greece actually in the area around Sparta what else have you got Barbara uh listello is right so this is porphery from Egypt and it can go next to Tunisia and this is another very bright red orange marble that comes from Greece that goes next to Sparta there it's almost as if we've got a map of the empire in Marble on the walls and the floors of the villa [Music] cos Rome's Imperial possessions here statues representing Rome with its mythical Founders Romulus and Remus so it side by side with the god of the River Nile representing Egypt a visual reminder of how far and wide the emperor's domain stretched at the pantheon Hadrian had displayed his power to control the resources of Empire but here he went a step further trying to evoke on his own estate some of the most admired monuments and Landscapes of the provinces including a a slice of Egypt this was perhaps the swankiest dining room in the whole of the Roman world have to imagine the select few guests climbing here surrounded by water making up the Delicacies from little boats floating in front of them they weren't just eating five-star food in a lavish setting they were eating in a replica of one of the most famous monuments of the province of Egypt because Hadrian's project was not simply to create a luxurious lifestyle for himself it was to make the Empire seem to converge here whether by sucking in its resources to this one place or by literally recreating the wonders of his world on his estate tour the villa I mean like touring the empire this was the empire in microcosm [Music] laughs [Music] in its ambition Tivoli captures the essence of an Empire that brought together places and people as never before [Music] along its roads in its busy citizen ports the inhabitants of the Roman Empire experienced deep changes which still affect the world around us Revolutions in engineering trade and agriculture these offered New Opportunities and riches for some and matching inequality for others it's always easier to find the winners than the losers the destitute the exploited The Underdogs have left very little behind them the profiteers of Ephesus the Oil Barons of Spain and the entrepreneurs of the Seas have left the traces of their success stories whether in the shape of broken bits of pottery or great grand columns but one thing's for sure winners and losers lived in a new world Hadrian's villarot Tivoli offers an idealized and to be honest rather sanitized vision of the Roman Empire ordered world with established hierarchies everything in its place and here obviously under the command of one man the reality of course was more fluid more fractured and messy but this is the emperor's Frozen vision of how the Roman world was and should be

Channel: Odyssey - Ancient History Documentaries

Views: 224,764

Keywords: ancient history, classical history, ancient civilisations, classical antiquity, history documentary, classical documentary, mary beard, ancient rome, bbc documentary, roman empire, full documentary, ancient rome documentary, ancient rome history, ancient rome didnt exist, mary beard meet the romans episode 1, mary beard boris johnson, Odyssey, odyssey

Id: HQvRZSGKcOU

Length: 58min 53sec (3533 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 23 2022