The History Of Rome's Ancient Slums | Meet The Romans | Odyssey

[Music] ancient rome was once the center of a vast empire that stretched from spain to syria dominating the western world for over 700 years in many ways we still live under its shadow like it or not the romans are still all around us in our laws our architecture in our roads and we keep on recreating them in film and fiction and every year thousands of us trek here to rome to see the monuments up close but hidden all over the modern city in its walls behind its facades even under its streets is something much harder to find but just as captivating the forgotten voices of its ordinary people he's a great kid holding his little pet dog and i guess it's his mum and dad on either side and up above there's a tombstone of curatia amir and she was someone's best beloved partner concubinai amantisumai in this series i'm getting the voices of these romans speaking again to piece together a more intriguing view of ancient roman life this wasn't just a mugging this was mass murder they'll reveal a world so different from our own and yet eerily familiar she liked to get a bit drenched in backus so what he's saying is she was a bit of a wild thing and she really liked a drink or two we've already seen how the empire turned rome into the world's first global city where everyone everything was from somewhere else now i'm going down into the streets to explore its slums its bath houses and bars where the crime sex and humor in everyday roman life shows us what it was really like to live in an ancient city of a million people we think of ancient rome as all white marble columns and classical order but actually it was a chaotic place rambling and dirty it was right mess it was as much a shanty term as it was trafalgar square or washington dc welcome to my room [Music] this is a fantastically detailed model of the ancient city of rome it's got all the familiar things in it the colosseum the imperial palace the temples the gleaming marble the pleasure gardens but for my taste it's all a bit grand and it's a bit misleading because it misses out so many important things that i want to try and get back in the smell the dirt the pubs the slums and it doesn't answer the questions that we want to ask what was it like to be a kid in this city where did you go at the lavatory what did you do if you got ill what was it like to be just an ordinary roman so how do we start to answer these questions in fact there's a lot more evidence than you might think hidden away all over modern rome when you first come into a place like this what hits you in the eye is the rich romans the great and the grand but look behind them look at the wallpaper as it were and you'll hear a babble of ordinary roman voices trying to be heard in fact behind this emperor here there's the tombstone of a little girl who lived just two years 10 months and 23 days she's waving goodbye most tombstones today record just the bare essentials but the romans often told us a lot more about themselves they're asking anyone and everyone to read about their ordinary and extraordinary lives from beyond the grave and what they give us aren't just the success stories but a unique vision of life at the bottom of the social heap too this guy certainly wants us to know about his troubles in life his name is ann carinas nophus he lived for 43 years and he's the ex-slave of a woman which is what that symbol means this is what he has to say about his life and what it's like being dead it happens to everybody he says my bones are now resting sweetly dulkita and i'm no longer worried that i might die of starvation izurim and i don't any longer have those awful aching feet and i'm not contracted to my rent payments pencio nimbus it's a quite technical phrase but it really means i'm no longer in hock to the rent collector in fact i'm enjoying board and lodging hospitio gratis for free for eternity iturno the stone was put up by his wife and by his daughter to her father who she calls in dulgentissimos father who was very indulgent he spoiled her something rotten there are three things that stand out how am i going to get my next meal what shall i do if i'm ill and how shall i pay the rent and we know that the figure of the rent collector kambayliff is called extractor in latin was one that terrified the roman poor and karina's notice might have been a bit of a joker and his family might have been trying to tug on our heartstrings but the important point is that these few lines sum up the plight the grim realities of life for so many ordinary romans [Music] so where might someone like ankarinas ankarina snothus have lived with his family it's pretty clear he didn't live in the marble villas we think of when we think ancient rome one of the best places to get a glimpse of his world actually still survives in the center of town hidden in the shadow of the vittorio emanuele monument one of rome's most famous modern landmarks this humble brick building doesn't look like much from the outside most visitors walk past it without even giving it a glance but once you know what it is a very different room opens up before your eyes this building was converted into a christian church but originally it was an ancient roman high-rise apartment block the city was full of them they were called in latin insulin that means islands so think away the churchy bits an ancient rome lies underneath right down there you can still see the ancient street level and facing onto the street there are a series of shops with wide entrances and above them little mezzanine flats so these guys were literally living above the shop but up here there were six perhaps seven more floors more than survive today but to get the real authentic roman impression you have to remember that just a few feet that way there was another block like this so this wasn't so much a nice open road down there it was a narrow alley it must have felt like a canyon between two vast buildings the flats are usually locked up but i've got permission to have a look around with my colleague ed bispam who's been here many times before so we are at what's the first floor this is the first floor properly yeah yeah and this then this is the window this is the window so we're really burgling we're breaking and entering here right okay [Music] gosh the windows have since been blocked up but on the first floor there was once a spacious apartment where a reasonably well-off family might have lived with their children and slaves you wouldn't be pushed for space in here as a single family i mean you've got probably four nicely barrel vaulted rooms here but further up the building light space and fresh air was in much shorter supply up here of each dark corridor are four or five rooms just a few meters square we don't know for sure how many people lived here but to get a million people into a city the size of rome you had to pile them high and squash them in my guess is that these weren't single occupancy this looks a bit spacious but that's because the dividing walls have gone so you've got to you've got to imagine a wall here going going right the way up to the vault with maybe a little light window in it the thing that always kind of shocks me is this the sense that we might have had six people living in inverted commerce in here this is one step up one or two steps up actually from the real bottom of roman society yeah compared to sleeping in a tomb or under an aqueduct arch this is quite bijou [Music] here's another bijou apartment this is really small we've got to get well let's say we might have four or six people in here you know one question is how do they fit and i'm now going to see what it would be like now how much space does one person take up trying to get to sleep on the floor oh not much space left no and who are the guys and the women who are living in these what are they doing the guys are probably working on construction projects you need to think of a big thing like the bars of caracalla bars of diocletian we're talking six to ten thousand people on a four-year building job and then there's portraits pumping meat and free from the barges yeah to the warehouse sucks the grain yeah daily but you get it when you can you think about it i mean you've been working all day you've been humping stuff about you get back here you're soaked in sweat you stink you don't have any spare clothes there's no running water you can't have a bath and there's three other smelly guys sleeping on the floor too or there's your your partner your female partner and two kids yes i mean that's i mean one thing is to think about these as sort of male dorm accommodation which i think a lot of them must be but for some of them you know there are women having babies here yeah yeah yes you know and actually where i'm sitting some woman probably gave birth that's what's scary and that wasn't even the top of the block there were even more stories above this one the basic rule was the further you went up the worse it got there were no luxury penthouses here this was social climbing backwards in their time these tournaments must have been the tallest residential buildings on the planet but they were built poorly cheaply and fast and only a handful have survived to any height so the fact is we no longer think of ancient rome like this but that is how we should see it not just a city of marble but a city of tower blocks and the ordinary people who lived in them perhaps the best place to get a snapshot of the kind of community you might have found in a roman high rise is now hidden at the bottom of a garden in a roman suburb in this extraordinary communal tomb lie the remains of every walk of roman life there's hundreds and hundreds of them here i'm greeting you when you come in it is a little face and it's a touching story because it's valeria vitalist who was the sweetheart of hillarys i bet he made sure that he got his sweetheart into prime position this is a just fantastic kind of career directory of the ordinary roman people this was probably quite a bruiser it's simeo the bodyguard and in the corner here we've got uh the barber marcus valerie is the barber and ah hajia the midwife i'm not there and i'm not going to risk a roman uh ascent up there we've got a nice accountant all of roman life is here but this isn't just a roman job directory it's a wonderful glimpse into how the romans lived stacked up in death not just in life trying to understand ancient rome is always a bit of a post-mortem i mean they're dead the romans are dead but they can still speak to us not just the rich and powerful not just the great writers but the ordinary people like those in this tomb they send us these little tweak-size messages telling us who they were what they did and saying remember me it's one of my very favorite places in the city of rome because it gets us close to real people with real jobs and real names sineo the body god hajiya the midwife we find them here living in death just like they did in life this is a kind of burial high-rise and also i can't help thinking somewhere behind this there might have been a landlord asking the dead for their rent today modern rome isn't a world apart from the ancient one seen from the air it's still a city of rented apartment blocks in a grid of little islands but apart from that modern model how else can we get closer to the way the ancient city was actually laid out [Music] at the museum of roman civilization packed up in boxes is a tantalizing clue [Music] it's sadly not usually on display but what's inside are the remains of a precious roman map carved in stone a kind of marble a to zed that once showed a complete ground plan of the city over the last few hundred years about a thousand fragments have been discovered only ten percent of it but luckily a few bits do still fit together it's not hard on any jigsaw puzzle to recognize the colosseum and here you can see circular lines of the seating of the colosseum and above it is written what looks like although we've only got the very end of the word um the amphitheater and that was what people called the colosseum in the roman world they didn't call it coliseum what strikes me as i just look at it here actually is how big this thing was the calculation is that it's the scale of 1 to 240 that makes a whole whacking wall full of an image of the city of rome [Music] but even more intriguing than those pieces of the grand rome are the fragments of the map which show an extraordinary detail the streets houses and apartment blocks where ordinary romans lived and worked and what they show is that rome had not been laid out by city planners it had grown chaotically over time it fits so what we've got here is a really mixed area we've got the rich houses rather large ones quite posh little portico gardens at the back even these large houses have got shops or workshops opening directly onto the street in front and opposite those houses is what looks to me like i got a medium-rank high-rise building over here is what looks for all the world like a warehouse this thing's a bit more of a mystery it's got columns round about and these rather strange u-shaped things in the middle the current idea is that these are hedges so this is some sort of garden possibly private possibly public possibly religious who knows what this reminds me is that rome is not zoned in the way that many modern cities are rome was a place where the rich lived next to the shops and to the workshops and to the bar and to the not so rich and the warehouse and to the public garden the other thing is that the streets themselves are pretty narrow and this one on the plan looks like a main highway and in a way it is but if you look at its width it's only as wide as these little shops are deep and if you go around here there's a tiny little passageway that certainly wouldn't want to walk down late at night rome is not like paris it isn't full of boulevards rome was a rabbit warren it's frustrating in a way that so little of the map has survived but there are other ways to get a feel for the ancient streetscape like coming to a medieval street in the modern city ancient rome's roads were so narrow and its roof so perilously high that they were full of dangers like falling chamber pots and roman writers jokingly recommended no roman go out without writing a will we even know of one thirteen-year-old tourist papiria's proculus who was brained by a flying roof tile there are all kinds of things here that remind me of the roman streetscape this little shop opening directly onto the street the lockups how narrow it all is there's actually a story uh told by one roman writer about how he could shake hands with the guy living in the apartment across the road now you couldn't quite do that here and as you had really long arms but it's not far off and you also wonder about the kind of street community you had here funny thing is about the story of the two guys who could shake hands is that they never did in fact the writer says he never saw the guy on the other side of the street he never even heard it which makes me think that amongst all this face-to-face proximity amongst the kind of on top of each other living for some people it must have been a pretty anonymous kind of city [Music] that roman writer was a poet called juvenile a satirist who lived in rome around 100 a.d so how might his domestic arrangements compare with ours today to help me find out a very gracious italian lady living on the same street let me poke around her apartment [Music] looking at the modern setup can help us see what's distinctively different about the ancient one [Music] it may seem a bit odd just barging into someone's house like this but i've got a very simple point to make on the outside a place like this looks much like an ancient roman apartment block but come inside and it reminds you of the differences now that's not just the washing machine in the microwave we know the romans didn't have those but all the things that we take for granted as absolutely basic services here running water a lavatory heating and actually some natural light many of the people living on the upper floors of a roman high-rise wouldn't even have those now the consequence of that is absolutely obvious you simply had to go out to get almost everything that we take for granted as having at home you went out to eat and to wash to get water and if you didn't throw it out of the window to go to the lavatory grazies it's a way of life that has largely disappeared from modern cities in the west but in ancient rome life was lived outdoors rooms in a high-rise were used mostly just for sleeping and your basic facilities were spread out all over the city as one amazing archaeological site not far from rome makes clear for ordinary romans what we now do in private could be a far more public affair i just love this place if you want to understand a culture look to its lavatories is not a bad motto and this is a roman communal toilet according to one ancient guidebook that survives there are 144 public latrines in downtown rome but of course we don't know how many seats each had it's not exactly clear how this worked what about this channel here did it have running water in it or was it just to catch the drips and the bad aims and what about this hole here was that for men to pee through or was it where you put the sponge to wire at your bottom perhaps both do we think it was unisex who knows but the point is a simple one this is how we have to imagine the ancient city everyone [ __ ] together tunic's up toga's up trousers down chatting as they went and it wasn't just going to the lab that was a social activity often there was no sanitation on the upper floors of a high rise so most romans went to the public baths to wash and let it all hang out we don't often get to hear what the baths meant to ordinary people but this tombstone of an ordinary guy interestingly lists baths and associated activities as one of the great pleasures of life uh and he says here i am i'm i'm in this tomb um primus no tismus known to the world as primus or famous primus um then he goes on to say i lived on loot crying oysters it's the very best you could get and i often drank fellaini and wine it's like saying i often drank the really best claret and then it has a nice summing up balnya wina buenos baths wine and sex maycombs anywhere and those they grew old with me i enjoyed them supposed till i was old now we find that combination balls wine and sex elsewhere and in fact there's another nice tombstone of a man called tiberius claudius secundus uh and he appeals to the same threesome but in a slightly more worldly wise way baths wine and sex he said ruin your body true but that what makes life really worth living when you look at rome's baths it's not hard to see why ordinary romans were so keen on them built by various emperors the most famous were the size of small towns and their ruins still loom large in the roman cityscape by far the best preserved is actually one of the smaller sort in the town of herculaneum not far from pompeii it's an extraordinary place the only one where you can walk through roman baths pretty much as they were more turkish baths than local swimming pool they were centers of social life where locals didn't just get a place to sweat and steam they also got stalls for food and drink and booths for a massage a shave or maybe even sex on the side and although it's hard to visualize today there are vivid descriptions of the baths as rough noisy places full of grunting gym goers men getting their armpits plucked and loitering thieves where you are as likely to get your coat nicked as catch the clap the baths weren't just about hygiene they were about pleasure and about community even the rich who had their own private baths at home even the emperor might occasionally put in a celebrity appearance at the people's baths in some ways they were a great social leveler imagine everybody's here in the nude it's then that the poor man aged 20 with a great body can turn the tables on that 60 year old roman plutocrat with a porch and a hernia but in other ways they tended to reinforce the social hierarchy the poor came along with no one to carry their stuff or rub them down the rich came with a whole retinue of staff elbowing the man's way through to the pool pushing the poor aside in fact there's a lovely anecdote of the emperor hadrian who goes to the public baths one day and sees a man dropping himself down against the wall hadrian says what's that guy doing and someone replies oh he's rubbing himself down on the wall because he doesn't have a slave to do it for him so the generous emperor gives him a slave the next time hadrian shows up at the baths there's 20 or so men rubbing themselves down against the wall all hoping for little piece of imperial generosity but hadrian's a canniel bird and he says tell them to rub each other down however exotic this world might now seem for me spaces like the public baths and toilets tell us a lot about how roman communal living created those voices that feel so familiar today sure some of them have got serious messages but they're also wonderfully sardonic irreverent and so recognizably urban there's a marvelous guy from tivoli flavius agricola and he's got some great advice on his tombstone put on your party hats my friend drink down that wine and don't say no to sex with pretty girls because you won't get a chance when you're dead that's what urban living jeep by jowl bottom by bottom is all about makes you live faster talk faster and think a bit differently one of the best places to glimpse the humor and saltiness of this world is the ancient roman bar much like any modern italian city rome was awash with hundreds of taverns and eating places ranging from seedy dens and strip joints to something much more like the modern wine bar or gastropub today these places are nice lifestyle extras but if you were living at the top of an ancient high rise the streets were your living room the bath's your bathroom and this was your kitchen so who would you meet in a roman bar well the pirate juvenile counters up a really disreputable crew who he says hang out in moment bars thieves and cut throats runaways even the local coffin maker because in rome it's the poor who are eating out the rich dining at home we mustn't forget the landlord and the landlady we get a little glimpse of them in an amazing tombstone found just outside rome put up to a pair of innkeepers man and wife he's called lucius callidius eroticus and she's fannia voluptas now these have just got to be trade names because collidius eroticus means mr hot sex and she's madame gorgeous so it's the bar of hot sex and mrs gorgeous don't get the wrong idea about fannia though because it doesn't mean that in latin [Music] quite a few ancient bars have actually survived but one in particular in pompeii captures the flavour of ancient bar life on its walls here at eye level in its back saloon are wonderfully vivid images of romans eating and drinking gambling and being served wine and here one that's been sadly hacked away probably by some victorian moralist because what it showed as we can tell from an early 19th century picture of it is a couple of people bloke woman having sex with wine glasses in their hand simultaneously and balanced on a tight trope all that's left of it is the blake's feet whether life in the average roman pub was quite as raunchy as these pictures suggest i don't know but there are plenty of graffiti around pompeii saying words to the effect of i screwed the barmaid so it doesn't take much to guess what happened after closing time and certainly the roman rich were paranoid about pub culture it's here they thought that the people got above themselves planned riots got awkward got very drunk and they were hugely disdainful and the kind of vulgarity of it all of course the rich have always said that kind of thing they gamble themselves silly but take a couple of poor travellers and give them a game of dice and the rich are prophesying instant moral decline the best example of a bar that isn't bothered by any of this moralizing is in ancient austria harbour town not far from rome inside are a set of paintings that take us right into the world of roman anti-establishment bar humor the art historian john clark has come to explore it with me just come in here and you see these men and we've only got the tops of them the torsos because later on it got cut off and lost but they are sitting on a common latrine and and here the artist has given them speech lines above each of the heads so we have moulione series you are sitting on a mule driver and a mule driver was a common saying for being constipated because mule drivers were very stubborn and so this is a very stubborn evacuation procedure so he this guy's got constipation right oh that one it's quite wonderful uh it's my favorite actually amikae fugate proverbial bene kaka at irima medicos oh that's a bad word um well be something like this buddy don't you know the saying [ __ ] well and bugger the doctors in other words you don't need them higher up on the wall are images of the great thinkers of ancient greece the seven sages only three of which are left thales from miletus solon from athens kylone from sparta much loved by roman teachers they were known for their high-minded catchphrases on how best to live yet here even they are literally talking crap oh he's the best of all really isn't he with sire takitay kylon dokowitz cleverkylon taught people how to fart without making noise silent farting was a specialty apparently i think so kylon's the one who did say you shouldn't his canonical saying is you shouldn't desire the impossible oh well maybe it's possible to learn how to uh be a silent farter who knows we shouldn't get the impression from a place like this that the only thing the ordinary romans joked about was their bowels and their constipation in fact an amazing collection of roman popular jokes still survives almost 300 of them the roman joke book and that shows romans joking about almost everything one of my favorites goes like this a man's walking along the street he meets a friend and he says oh are you alive i heard you were dead guy replies oh look you can see i'm alive oh said the other for the man who told me you are dead is much more reliable than you are silly joe perhaps a slightly nasty joke but for me it opens up one of the big problems of big city living in a world without id cards or passports who are you how do you know who you are and how do you prove who you are that's a problem [Music] what jokes like these do is take us into the minds of ordinary romans but they also give us a different view on how to picture the ancient city's streets they really weren't filled with all the big guys the toffs the togas the politicians they were flooded by its ordinary people this was the people's city you wouldn't have come across many of the rich and powerful in the streets and squares of ancient rome they'd much more likely have been hurried along in a sedan chair carried by slaves curtains drawn a bit like a modern celeb in a chaper driven blacked out limo these kind of places were the people's places for doing business for grabbing a bike to eat for fighting for flirting for just hanging out and it could all get pretty packed as one tragic tombstone makes horribly clear put up to a woman called umidia and to a medius prima genius a boy of 13 years old and is put up by emilia sanoptese probably her partner he explains oona dies one day carried them both off they met the final day of their destiny together how did they die compressy examine a tour by they were crushed on the swarm of a crowd now you don't know what was going on in rome that day but it sure gives you a very clear idea of just how crowded the city could get so if this gives us a clue on how to repeal the streets of ancient rome what happens when you look at its most famous public space through this lens that space is known as the forum it's now a picturesque but sad wreck of what it once was and honestly it's hard for almost anyone to make head or tail off but this was once the location of some of the city's main law courts political meeting places and grandest temples let's forget for a bit the forum of the great speech makers the politicians the celebrity lawyers the friends romans countrymen types of course all that stuff happened here but my forum isn't the forum of those bigwigs in their white togas my forums their forum the poor people the middling people the ordinary people in their tunics even in their trousers in fact one roman comic writer has left as a guide to the types of the forum a satirical guide to who you might find where and i'm off to follow him this writer was a man called plortus the author of boy meets girl farces and what he gives us is not the official guide to the forum as the big guys might want us to see it but a down and dirty rough guide this doesn't look great now but it used to be a big public hall what does plorter say he says this is where you find the bargain hunters and the claptoid prostitutes elsewhere plorters talks about the wide boys the sort you might have found playing for profit at one of the gaming boards you can still see scratched all over the steps of one of the main law courts this is the board and it's got loads of dips in it now actually someone has spent quite a long time making those great pockets it's always hard to reconstruct the rules of these games it's like having a monopoly board and a house and a get out of jail free card and trying to reconstruct what earth you're supposed to do well i'm going to give this game a try [Music] first off the marbles [Music] losing my marbles perhaps what you did actually was tiddly wings [Music] oh look at that [Music] so my conclusion from this academic experiment is that this is a tiddlywink board so what about the forums temples of the roman gods what does plotters have to say about those this is one place where all those different levels of life in the forum come very nicely together it's the temple of the god castor and those three columns are one of the most iconic images of the whole forum but around the corner we find a really different kind of temple underneath built actually into the temple itself there's a row of little shops you walk a bit further on and you look to the back of the temple go back to plortus what does he say rentboys and we don't just have to rely on a comic writer for evidence of ordinary life in the forum modern archaeology has succeeded in backing him up when a group of scandinavian archaeologists excavated one of the temple shops they unearthed some extraordinary ordinary objects including evidence of what looks like a roman dentist's siri tell me about these teeth because they're one of the most amazing archaeological discoveries ever made there's 86 of them where exactly were they found they were found in the drain of one of the shops in the podium of the temple of caster and pollux and they were probably meant to be flushed down into the big clock maxima which runs by the side of the temple but for some reason they got stuck and they've all been actually extracted haven't they because their roots are still pretty much whole no anesthetic apart from a quick glass of wine they must have screamed during these operations this is just somebody's agony yes and they didn't just find rotten roman teeth it was something like a beauty powder i think we have these fine glasses you see her for oils and creams and this is a drinking cup they could also gamble you see these spices so yeah these are very nice does you perhaps you're playing dice while you're waiting instead of reading magazines yes indeed and this looks all the world like a tongue depressed second open wide yes putting all this stuff together it's a really wonderful glimpse of the kind of other side of the floor so this is the people's place as much as it is the rich people yeah and this is the kind of stuff that the people are doing there they're playing dice and having their pulling teeth yes the roman forum is a great example of how our traditional images of rome are so skewed sure rome was a society where the rich dominated the poor but it was also an incredibly mixed place where even its most sacred spaces were shared but just occasionally we can see some aggressive attempts to divide the toughs from the poor most people come here to look at this vast temple put up by the emperor augustus nobody pays much attention though to that massive wall behind it and in a way that wall can tell us more about life in ancient rome than the marble can on the other side of it was an area known as the subura not exactly slums but mention sabura to your average roman and they'd think crime prostitution something pretty seedy this was an ideological barrier it's saying to anyone who lived in the suburb this is posh territory keep out there's another story too the sabura was full of rickety wooden jerry built high-rise blocks constantly falling down there's a real fire trap actually this wall is a vast fire wall unsurprisingly the buildings of the subura have largely disappeared but some of the voices from the tenements and from that dangerous side of the city have survived one was found in the foundations of a modern office block in a rather grey part of suburban rome [Music] [Music] this is the tombstone of a little girl called doris she was in phila kissima terribly unlucky why was she unlucky because she died in a fire a sudden fire of incredible violence she'd only just had her seventh birthday she was seven years and 22 days this was put up to her by one of her friends or family a woman called liekinia haydeny and she ends rather touchingly may your bones rest quietly and may the earth lie lightly on you [Music] doris can't have been the only kid to die this way fires were so common that large parts of the city burned to the ground on numerous occasions the point is it wasn't just easy to start a fire it's very hard to put one out once it had started and there was no efficient effective public fire brigade in the terms that we know there was it's true a kind of paramilitary organization of watchmen of legalese who did keep an eye open for fires starting but they hadn't got much effective equipment to deal with them if they did a few poles to pull buildings down to make a fire break some pails of water and vinegar and some blankets just try and stifle the flame some of them were probably pretty brave but others were corrupt and on the make one story is that in the great fire of rome under the emperor nero the watch instead of trying to put the flames out they joined in looting the buildings that were already ablaze i wonder if anyone came to try and rescue doris and that's the big difference with our modern cities when you look around them it's easy to see all the things we take for granted everything from litter bins to friendly or unfriendly cops on the corner but in ancient rome there were none of these services there was hardly a fire brigade there was no police force no prisons and the only real security forces were in the pay of the rich to flesh out the picture i went to meet corey brennan from the american academy in rome [Music] they asked for me why they didn't provide services did the poor want services oh i'm sure they did because when that guy ignatius rufus uh in the reign of the emperor augustus starts his own fire brigade the emperor augustus instead of saying well done ignatius you know congratulations thank you very much for helping the people of rome i mean actually he's executed yes precisely it goes to show the competition amongst the ruling class amongst elites because each one of them knew if they were to step forward and effectively provide these types of social services that were really needed and that people really wanted the type of political cachet that they could build just from that that that act really would make it unbeatable so they really worked to cancel each other out i mean and and the people who suffered were in fact the romans themselves but the lack of social services weren't the only problems on the city streets they might have been filled with real life but real life as in any modern city could be hard to control violence was an ever-present danger as one nastily familiar story tells us i'm about to reveal a nasty bit of roman street crime kind of roman cold case it needs a bit of cleaning up first it's very dusty it's a tombstone and it's put up by a lady called ottar kilia narkita to her darling husband conyugi dulcissimo and his name was julius thai mothaos and he lived she said p.m plus or minus 28 years that means autokilia wasn't entirely certain how old the husband was and he had his blameless life snatched away from him alatronibus by robbers not just him he was with his seven alumni that can mean foster kids dependents sometimes even pupils they are all killed too that's what it really means this wasn't just a mugging this was mass murder if the streets were never completely safe by day then by night we know they were lawless places the poet juvenile writes graphically of having to pick his way home in the dark dodging the violent gangs and drunken bullies on the prowl for fights preserved under the foundations of a church in central rome is one place that helps us get close to this atmosphere here are the mean streets of a real roman neighborhood we're a few hundred meters from the coliseum and this is the backyard well this feels like a roman street well it's because it is a romance shape of roman street uh all you have to do you know when we if you're trying to reconstruct this you've got to think dirt because it's a lot of it this is very clean you've got to think smell a lot of it but it's also it feels kind of a bit scary it's a mugger's paradise i mean there's no doubt about it i mean street crime's one thing but you know apartment blocks directly on the street you know it's a it's a burglars you know cat burglars paradise precisely when uh the emperor augustus really wanted to get people to come to his games what he did was he distributed armed guards throughout the city because he otherwise people would be reluctant to leave their their houses because it was known that when it's a big game day so to speak that's precisely it's like new year's eve uh basically that is the prime day to go robin i mean when there's a question of a serious breach of public order then the officials get interested [Music] so if the authorities had little interest in the day-to-day welfare of their ordinary citizens what happened if you got murdered in streets like this how could your family pursue justice the romans had the system of public courts and the name is is misleading because what it was was courts that saw two breaches of the social order so you get uh murder but really when there's a political um exactly they looked at conspiracy setting fires in order to come in the purview of roman law you either have to go after someone who's rich well connected and powerful or you have to be making a very big uh tear in the social fabric yeah so if somebody murders my brother unless he's important that's the only person who's going to do anything about it really is me yes the self-help [Music] today when we look at rome's impressive marble monuments it's hard to imagine the dirty dangerous chaotic city in which ordinary romans lived their lives so little of it has survived above ground but if you know where to look it is still possible to get glimpses of their world the high-rise tenement blocks where tenants lived in fear of fires and the rent collector the grunts of gamblers and gym goers in its bars and bath houses and the hustle of life on its mean streets where there was no safety nets when things went wrong these streets must have been a tough place to live your life all the same i can't help feeling that they had a spontaneity and a fun about them that many our streets have lost and just listen to those voices what they're saying is that despite all the dangers rome was an exhilarating a life-affirming place to be and that's why it still speaks to us after 2 000 years [Music] next week i'll meet the romans at home where i'll discover some familiar objects of domestic family life it's a really really precious piece because it's the only cradle to survive from the roman world and where i'll piece together a surprising view of roman marriage childhood slavery and sex this is a roman [Music] manager

Channel: Odyssey - Ancient History Documentaries

Views: 387,376

Keywords: ancient history, classical history, ancient civilisations, classical antiquity, history documentary, classical documentary

Id: 3IJ2ZwaCvE8

Length: 58min 46sec (3526 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 30 2021