Meet the Romans with Mary Beard (1of3): All Roads Lead to Rome

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 days and the lives of many of them began or ended a long way from Rome this is just a tiny fragment of someone's to someone called East Guinness or Keyser's asked in Lusitania he was murdered in Spain this lady's Isaiah creamer a priestess of the Egyptian goddess Isis and there's her little sacred rattle she's always looking at you feel like saying keys to meet you prima they come from every walk of life and every part of the Empire and a lot of them at once been slaves these are the kind of guys we usually think of when we think of Romans these Romans all lived at the center of 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 a fiction and every year thousands of us Trek here to see its monuments up close to imagine the Emperor's and the armies the gladiators and let's be honest the Gaul but hidden all over the modern city in its walls behind that the stards even under its streets is something much harder to find but just as captivating the forgotten voices and the ordinary people they're still there if you know where to look Tala Deus erotica means mr. hot sex this is a Roman menage-a-trois this wasn't just the mugging this was mass murder the Romans didn't just carve their names and dates on their tombstones he never to be forgotten they left their thoughts their achievements even entire life stories she is all 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 of politicians and Generals the posh ones people I've most enjoyed getting to know and the ordering ones who have their own part to play in a 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 our 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 with a dirt crime sex and humour in everyday Roman life shows us what it was like to live in ancient city of a million people Barb's wine and sex he said ruin your body 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 you 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 2,000 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 bloodthirsty emperors we tend not to think by 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 and more cosmopolitan place than anywhere that ever being before or would be again hundreds of years we're always asking what did the Romans do for us I think we should be asking what did the Empire do to the Romans and who were those Romans anyway around the city there's more evidence than you think for the impact that Roman conquest had on the lives of ordinary people here all it requires is that we look from a slightly different angle one of the most famous monuments in the forum celebrates the moment when one conquering armies came home and 71 AD 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 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 devastatingly conquered the Jews and here we can see the lutes 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 be 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 for the fighting even the trees they got rooted 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 was a place to pick up a girl how would you do it well he says watch the stuff go past no doctor and say oh I think that's Euphrates there that's the Tigris over there you don't have to know he says he just sound confident and then you let your own conquest it's a good joke it also hints at the way Roman lives could be changed by the spoils coming back from the empire this girl can't have been 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 well we don't think about often enough human beings these are forgotten people but if we treat the time to listen we can still hear the voices but some of the millions who followed the Roman are meeting to the city for all sorts of different reasons this is for my brother Habibi a new from Palmyra unjam honest Regulus is mule driver this is for dire Keys champion chariot racer from Spain you've got a young slave girl aged 17 FRA knee the slave of Tortola Africana she came from africa this one is put up by a soldier his wife carnem tiller for near vienna in ancient Pannonia what's weird is that qur'an tiller isn't really a real name it comes through name of a town in Pannonia Knutson means my babe from Connaughton so my guess is he perhaps bought this girl as a slave he freed her back to Rome you married her but sadly his babe from Connaughton 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 an 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 Cabo Rica one called sabda and one called a Cuba typical Jewish names so the question is what's the story of Arica sabda 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 the judgement letters and how they're written on this stone this was carved in the 1st century AD 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 sixties AD these men truly came into Rome with Titus's army as prisoners of war it must have seemed by the worst moment of their lives sheer that cat calls people throwing things at them but perhaps worse was to come they were auctioned off as slaves and bought by man Oh Lucius 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 Lucius Valerius 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 fairytale happy ending and a classic Roman story and guys like this were freed he 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 all these new Romans live to try and make sense of it all I went to meet a colleague in Trastevere 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 over across the Tiber which the fringe of the ancient city of Rome and this is where we have the biggest evidence for immigrant communities choose Syrians I get to be such an ancient Roman where is the biggest immigrant area of the ancient city of Rome they'd have said over there a part of the answer to the question of why an area like this could be so cosmopolitan lies in a story of slaves like berrykins after and Akiba Greeks thought Romans were really weird for freeing as many slaves as they did and making a citizen yes although it's very brutal being a slave could be a kind of stage in a life like an apprenticeship you come in as a German you get a Roman name you learn Latin we 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 this is your entrance aromatisse Eisley now multiply that by hundreds of thousands of slaves being freed and you can see that the whole ethnic nature of the people who call themselves Roman citizens is it's really changing very quickly Roman is a it's kind of vocation it's a movement into 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 coming in to work on the docks builders prostitutes peasants who come into Rome because they think that they can they can eat they're good they can't eat at home so this huge sort of chaotic mix of people who arrived not knowing anybody these were journeys into the unknown 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 died on it greatly exceeds the number who are born rooms of 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 it needs to constantly top up the population Rome is swallowing people it's actually you know it's a city which consumes people's views an update perhaps we should stop thinking of Romans as a nation a master race who conquered the world I think instead of a Babel of rootless 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 epitaph written in Greek of a man who said to be always laughing always having a joke I'm really good at music you might have come as part of the band I guess but actually the stone tells us that he came to the land of Italy X as J's from Asia that's modern Turkey he says he died here when he was young but it ends up saying to them our NATO fellows in Greek no novelists it's the name no row 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 Menelaus the streets must have seemed 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 trust Oh Murray 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 and 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 you 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 Banyon 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 Monta testaccio 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 fronts with once part of an ancient Roman storage jar what is amazing about this is that 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 are these sheds of pottery have been stacked it's a mountain not 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 and furry 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 and furry I've taken off to be pickaxe 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 it's what's going to help you make perfume it's what the guys in the baths were 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 Emperor would have been her only source of light at night it's no exaggeration to say that Rome ran on olive oil in this place gives archaeologists the great opportunity to work out how it got here it came in massive quantities this must have been what originally you manage oh I don't know Matt you know they say 30 kilos when they're empty MGI suitcase when it's full yeah and what's amazing is that you can often find out exactly where the oil came from we know that is a are the a is parva is a town called this way in the shores of the world Quebec so that's linking that that's precise to chart to a site in the in southern Spain so Roman town southern Spain the guy who's making this amphora is stamping it with his town's name saying this is a project author yeah according to these trade marks 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 the region 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 oh 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 HTML uranium it arrives at the coast it's humped off the boat it's putting two barges it's brought up the Tiber to the city of Rome itself helped off the boat again put in two warehouses to count it into small containers the unfree 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 foodstuffs 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 Multi millet has been excavating here here and together we went to explore an intriguing Piazza next to the theater which we call the square of the corporation I came out in this is where I get to do the housework sweep away to pine needles there are mosaics all around here advertising companies importing goods from abroad stories makers this is the organization of fur traders an avid kalari or alig nari Yoram that's the wood traders so what we've got so far is rope pelts at 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's not big enough to support the city of Rome it is a city that's drawing in resources from 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 is with one thing the Empire did for Rome kept them alive but 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 three ration of corn that means about 35 to 40 kilos of corn which was enough to make bread for a month about two people this was an extraordinary privilege for citizens in Rome two hundred thousand of them received free rations from the state how do you at work many of them lived in one room apartments with no kitchens so they relied on the baker to turn their 40 kilos just don't think they could eat you try it yeah Jana would not bad for a first attempt it's not bad well so it's wonderful people's food and this is this is tarragon sharing bread you don't even have to own a bread knife to be able to tuck into this but for poor Romans this was a 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 like dissatisfied populace and dissatisfied populace was a dangerous one it's also the fact the distribution didn't go to the poorest in Rome they weren't only two 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 perks like the green handout help you understand why people wanted to be Roman but it also shows us in all these things the Empire the imports the new citizens are all part of a cycle the bigger Rome got and 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 because of all the best times in history to be a baker and it's a baker who left one of the strangest monuments in now hidden beneath one of the main city gates it's the tomb monument of a man called Marcus virgilius yarissa Keith 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 risk ease has done is given himself a theme to at the very top or around the monument there were scenes from the life of the bakery there's the kneading putting a bread in the oven weighing a stuff out and even these other strange circles and columns underneath will be instantly recognizable to Roman as bakery equipment the circles are almost certainly the kneading machines and the columns are the things in which the dough is kneaded what kizer's in latin is this is the two of your whiskey's the baker and contractor a parrot it's obvious what I think we'd say this is the monument of a baker get it and I really like the way that get it still speaks to us 2,000 years later have we got that this is a two minute Baker yeah us the keys could joke because things had gone pretty well for him his name sounds Greek so most likely he came from abroad but he ended up was one of a new class of people getting rich on the proceeds of empire I've got a tremendous soft spot for your Serkis but I doubt that all Romans would have felt that way my guess is but it's some old money old-fashioned Roman walk past this tomb he just thought it was all a bit tacky bit like I might feel some Premier League football player designed his own tomb in the shape of a giant football boot what Arista keys 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 but obviously 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 thought the city's walls 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 for overseas it wasn't made by local farmers and the Armed Forces that was 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 whether that was being a pearl trader a warehouse manager or even a hairstylist 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 little given their father's name or their hometown he'd ask the average Roman I bet he'd have told you what you did for a living they doing their tombstones at any rate these guys are working in the pit Barataria that's the pepper market latest warehouseman hoary Ariane and here's a bloke he's a sag arias a big overcoat maker Francie's asada is the ancient equivalent of duffle coat an Accounts Manager oh she's great she's our Pisgah tricks she's a female fishmonger she was a gold worker here is another - earn for a lady called Celia EPP RA and she was an re vest ryx she was a very very very upmarket clothes making 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 their sheer size and potential anonymity of a great Imperial metropolis in a world without ID cards without passports without birth certificate how do you know what you are who you are you know that because of your job I am failure a parade a luxury clothes maker how do you make 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 the 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 his big machine he maybe didn't know your neighbors 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 it helped 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 a 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 no 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 Vermillion lovely lustrous rate I think we have to imagine but if you came to dinner here and the generous host started showing you around he mullet of Carmen said now this lady here is whipping this one because it's a trade center but you might have said it's a really lovely red isn't it actually it's Spanish women in specially imported all the way from Spain I paid for it as an extra myself we live in a world of cheap price synthetic colors but the Romans didn't in Rome bright colors 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 vivos faked it for himself and for his family and put on it symbols the tools his trade now he worked as a Dyer in the dyeing 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 Dyess poo pious amicus pooper arias he was a DIYer 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 youth claim to be regulated by law you saw a man in a street wearing a toga with a broad purple stripe you 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 a purple is the Roman Emperor himself it's kind of colorfully thing but it's a bit like as if queen elizabeth ii is the only person in the country who is allowed to wear pink it tells you quite a lot about rome and roman empire but this one very visible marker the political and social status should have been the product something that came from the far eastern side of the Mediterraneans no wonder Dyess previous amicus was proud of being a pauper arias the story of color isn't just a story of luxury the 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 arrived from far-flung parts of the Empire you would 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 Senators 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 Rome is a sort of touchy-feely cultural melting yes if you wear the wrong clothes they make fun if you speak stranger they make fun of you they're big conformist if there's too many Greeks here that the Jews don't eat food properly on the Sabbath the poet Marshall who's going on about the poo ello Romana who hasn't experienced a mint you know Romana the Roman chick who's never had a Roman dick I mean no I mean it's crude stuff but nasty in its way the irony is come on II 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 Chinatown or a little italy in the way that we have in the great metropolitan cities today and these people are going out there ruling the world the Senators at governing ports where they govern in Egypt they govern along the Danube and they never come back and say I had this great meal the other day oh no talk of ingredients from all over the world but what you do with it the actual cuisine the cooking is 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 customs of languages of thousands of languages probably spoke hundreds of language of these spoken in the city of Rome but they only write in Greek and Latin or that's all the tiny tiny bits of Ebro 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 where we do nautical yes there's cultural diversity but what there isn't is a diversity of cultures there's 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 left 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 be amazed 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 to Rome 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 people's was dissolving all the time eventually every free adult male in the empire to call himself a Roman citizen for me is one place but captures the contradictions of Imperial Rome there was a People's Palace here it was the Colosseum it was built and paid for out of the spoils of a Jewish war as a gift to the Roman people one thing is for sure some of them had to climb a lot of stairs I'm in the only part of the Colosseum that I'd be allowed to go to women slaves other undesirables in the Roman world had to be up on the gods so was it looked 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 with all the biggest and best the Empire cloth people often compare this to a football match but if so it's not just a Premier League this is the World Cup fantastic combat weird exotic creatures animals you can only have dreamt of when its 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 he was looking at stretching what do we got we can see when Danny was like a panther oh that's too bad right adios stre to be really look at those muscles dissolved nearby sets of them they're really lovely bloke and I think this is great because it it not only gives us a spectators 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 the Colosseum when you saw them for the first time these exotic animals must have been breathtaking the same goes for the other stars of a show the human performers this is a fantastic treat for me because it's um it's a real live dad eh as help Michael darling real dead laddie ators helmet from Pompeii it's very weird and heavy pick it up it's got brick crest on it and a bust of Hercules just facing out at you just to scare the opponent I don't quite put it on but I can get a feeling of what it's like having it on but what it makes you say it's Charlie 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 grille I don't quite see how you'd know where the blocks did enemy was honestly the batter is it looks to us I'm cuffed a weird and that to the Romans to point about these gladiators is that they're not dressed in standard Roman army issue they're not the kind of fight as you'd see you went to fly the barbarians these are mad weird exotic foreign costumes they meant to exude the mysterious outside world and all the violence there might be in it another way I think what we see here is it's sort of the fantasy dress I think what you get the sense was look people come to see the costume as much as they come to see you where do I go now I like to see so what do 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 but in my mind it's kind of more like the sort of Sherrod wrestling than the real-life combat of boxing that is simply economics I got hundreds of gladiators they're extremely expensive you don't want them killed off tools despite your sides here but I'm afraid Thrax is art it's we have a victorious murillo congratulations to the Romans gladiators represented a violent fantasy of the outside world fighting in their myths but as a fascinating irony in the real origins of the men behind the masks I've got a wonderful drawing and old drawing here the original stone is long ago being lost but it's a tombstone of a man called marcus antonius ex aqus 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 man called huskiness who was a provocateur that's another sort of gladiator this tombstones in Greek and he tells us that he was an Egyptian these characters 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 well I suddenly ended up so they finished up perhaps long retired long ish life wife and kids one of the nicest ones is a man here who lived to the age of 45 he'd come from hungria it was a Belgian but the tombstone is put up to him by his wife and little Eustace his son and even exists exotic as he looks seems to have ended up life to judge from his name as a Roman citizen he presumably retired and lived up his life somewhere in suburban Italy a bit like Marcus Antonius eggs aqus of Tunbridge 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 Colosseum dramatized this frightening thrilling idea of Rome and the outside world it'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 Colosseum reserved for the gadot re people of Cadiz in Spain for an african senator and a gothic chipton in reality the fearsome barbarians had become Romans 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 was 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 Colosseum 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 a 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 our owners 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 be plenty of people who felt very far from home rootless the Sun there were profits to be made and success to be heard an exciting even if we will during mixture of new ideas different cultures and different religions whatever you being back home in Rome you can reinvent it's not hard to imagine the fears and anxieties of those ordinary Romans wherever they went from how do I fit into us who knows who I am let's go and 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 they say Hospice hang on a minute this day stop here take a look down to your left that's where my bones are buried my offer I was a good man i was a kind man misery cordis and I was a lover of the poor a mantis please traveler please we are tall I beg you don't mess with my to the name of the guy is Dyess art Ilyas you heard of the ex lave or a man called serenus you what does trans Greek to me and he tells us what he did he was a murder eat arias he was a pearl seller that's who's buried in this tomb traveler he says we are tour on your way now goodbye Wally Wally next time I'll descend into the city streets to explore their high-rise tenements 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 to Nix up togas up trousers down chatting as they went rebuilding medieval Britain that brick-by-brick here on BBC HD on Friday nights at 9:00 but back to tonight's now and there's live music coming up with Jools Holland

Channel: Melan Mendo

Views: 153,501

Rating: 4.7868614 out of 5

Keywords: Meet, the, Romans, with, Mary, Beard, (1of3):, All, Roads, Lead, to, Rome

Id: AUNe61Kyigc

Length: 49min 12sec (2952 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 26 2015