The Rise And Fall Of Ancient Rome | Empire Without Limit (Full Series) | All Out History

this channel is part of the history hit Network [Music] with a fairy tale once upon a time not far from here princess gave birth to Twin Sons a king a wicked Uncle fearing that the boys would one day become his Rivals ordered his Faithful Servants to throw them into the river as it was in flood they just left them in a basket at the water's edge from where they floated Downstream rescued on the bank by a mother wolf who suckled them they were later found by a local Shepherd who reared them as his own their names were Romulus and Remus they went on to found Rome ordinary town in the middle of Italy became the center of an Empire stretching from the fringes of the Sahara to The Damp more lands of Northern Britain from Spain to Israel the Nile to the Rhine framed the geography of modern Europe and defined the way we think of Empire now transforming the Western world through Revolutions in trade this is one of the first examples of globalization agriculture just olives olives and more damn olives art law and architecture this is where even I get a bit gobsmacked by Roman engineering there are plenty of conquests and defeats to battles and Butchery but there are also bigger questions what did it work and what difference did it make why did The Empire eventually fall it all come about in the first place was it ambition was it just luck we really want to answer that question we have to go back to what the Romans themselves said about it to their doubts their debates and their conversations because they wandered just as much as we do about what set them apart [Music] [Music] it's on the Appian Way one of the main roads out of Rome going south deep into Italy that we first get a clear glimpse into the lives of the early Romans a period long before the marble columns and the Coliseum and one that's often overlooked this tomb was built 500 years after the city was founded it's a very long way from Romulus but what's written here tells us for the first time what some Romans felt and thought what their mindset was in a way what we really know about the Romans starts here [Applause] this isn't Rome as we now imagine it but it is the grandest thing they could do at the time and back then it was new this is the tombstone of the first man to be buried here Scipio Barb artist that means beardy Scipio and it tells us a bit about his excellent qualities he is Fortis rear and sapiens he's a strong Brave man but he's clever he's wise this is quite strange it says his appearance was equal to his were tooth so his appearance was as good as his virtue he really looked the part he cut a dash and it ends with his conquests he swag it on the lucanum he suppressed the whole of leukemia which is a region in South Italy uh obsidence and he took hostages so it's very easy to see what these people's priorities were kind of more than that because in some ways this is just a few lines of an epitaph but in another way this is the first short surviving historical narrative from any Roman that we have I mean this is the beginning of Roman history writing it might be 500 years after the age of the founders but this is actually the first place where we can really see the Romans we get a very Vivid picture of a people committed to Conquest unto the glory that came with military Victory but that's actually like everyone else around them so what set the Romans apart so little direct evidence the best place to look for the answer is in the stories that they told and their own elaborate speculations on the city's Origins and in particular in the mythical story of Romulus and Remus the brothers suckled by a wolf it was continually told and retold and it contained a message about Rome's conquests and internal Wars there's actually a little more Roman history in the myth it'll be easy to dismiss the story of Romulus and Remus as if it was just a fairy tale just a myth and it certainly isn't history in our terms but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have a lot to tell us about how the Romans thought about themselves what their cultural priorities and anxieties were why a wolf the story wouldn't have been the same if it had been a cow or a sheep it was the fact that they were rescued by a ferocious Predator that revealed the destiny of the twins some Romans questioned the detail the Latin for Wolf Looper also means prostitute so was it actually a prostitute who came to the rescue but in Broad terms they believed that the tale was true in fact when later they came to inscribe in the Forum a list of the names of all those generals who had scored the biggest or bloodiest victories for Rome people like the scipio's who did they start the list with Romulus one person who's not on the list is romulus's twin brother Remus because it said they had a massive row of aware exactly to establish the new town it ended up with Romulus murdering his twin an act which reflected the bloody civil wars that would later blight the politics of Rome [Music] foreign of the oddest Foundation stories in the whole history of the world not only does it involve a pair of twins not a single founder but then one of the twins goes and kills the other that's to say fratricide lay at the very beginning of the Roman story brother killing brother hardwired into Rome [Music] establishing his new settlement on the Palatine Hill Romulus became its sole ruler romulus's first problem was that he had hardly any citizens for his new city so he declared it an asylum and he welcomed criminals runaway slaves that dispossessed and the down and out for the whole of Italy it's another strange aspect to the tale whereas the average ancient city like to imagine that its original inhabitants had sprung miraculously from the soil of the Homeland the Romans imagined that their city had originally been a city of Asylum Seekers it was an attempt to give a Mythic Dimension to one of Rome's later most distinctive characteristics that it not only welcomed Outsiders but that eventually it spread Roman citizenship throughout the empire romulus's next problem was that he had no women and therefore his City had no future but none of the people in the neighboring towns were prepared to give their daughters to be Roman wives they were actually gnostily insulting and made no secret of the fact that they didn't think a band of runaways was great husband material so Romulus had to resort to a trick [Music] so The Story Goes Romulus invited his neighbors the sabines to a religious Festival [Music] in the middle of the proceedings he gave a signal for his men to abduct all young women among the visitors and to carry them off as their wives this is the famous rape of the Sabine women and it's an almost uncomfortably Frank image this woman here has been captured and she's trying to get away but she's not going to make it this one was already collapsed and another is trying to flee but it's hopeless the rape might have been a response to a terrible Roman humiliation but it was still a violent assault these women are not willing they're victims it's an instant that the Romans discussed and debated and displayed Ever After summer Rome's enemies said that this was absolutely typical Roman Behavior if they wanted something just went out and grabbed it Story the families of the Sabine women as you'd expect hit the Romans in what would be Rome's first war and first victory which was commemorated in a rather strange monument at the Heart of the City most people walk straight past here but it's where the Romans were convinced that the heart of that battle took place in what became the Forum but what was then not much more than a swamp and they marked the spot where one of Rome's first enemies fell to his death this was just one of a series of monuments imprinted the origins of Rome onto the face of the latest City if you wanted you could go up into the Palatine Hill and see what was supposed to be the hotter Romulus himself still a tourist attraction in the 4th Century A.D the myths of Rome were there for all to see with them the problems of being Roman fratricide rape violence I constant conflict [Music] Rome at the beginning was ruled by Kings Romulus and six others to follow but the citizens eventually rejected what they'd come to see as a tyranny and established a kind of democracy in which every year the people elected officials to govern the city and fight its Wars and soon after that there were signs that Rome was beginning to grow why is it that an ordinary little town by the Tiber became something much much bigger than that the honest truth is we don't know why it happened but we do know when we can almost touch it almost [Laughter] because in the early fourth Century BC the Romans built this massive City wall around their town now there's more to this than just defense this is a big statement that Rome has arrived and even more interesting a lot of the stone they used to build it came from the territory of a little town a few miles up the road that they'd just taken over this is one of the first hints of Roman expansion [Music] thank you Rome's growth didn't stop at its walls it expanded Beyond them deep into the Italian peninsula imagine Romans crowding around Maps plotting world domination for start they didn't have Maps and in any case they weren't any more militaristic than their neighbors early Italy was a violent place so the question isn't why they went to war but why they went on winning on the traditional pattern of warfare to put it a bit crudely every year the lads of one place go out and do over a neighboring town and if they hit lucky they'd come back with slaves and Cattle wasn't really organized Warfare it was glorified raiding what the Romans did was establish permanent relationships with the people they beat of course they came back with slaves and Cattle but they demanded for the future that the defeated towns should provide troops for the Roman army and that cumulatively gave them a huge Advantage because in the ancient world it wasn't high-tech military hardware that counted it was how many boots you could get on the ground as a city on its own Rome could never have dominated the whole of Italy what's crucial is the relationship they formed with other people Rome not only conquered but it Incorporated its enemies and that's what's unique by the 3rd Century BC Rome could call upon more than 700 000 soldiers and how they secured that Manpower can be seen on the city's first gold coins Jonathan Williams is the deputy director of the British museum what is going on here and I can read Roma Rome underneath there's a very complicated scene above but I can't quite okay so what we've got here is we've got a couple of men here standing um either side of another man who seems to be kneeling down holding something in his arms and what he's holding is a pig an upturned Pig now this is a pretty strange scene to us but any Roman would have known what this was meant to represent it's a scene of oath taking promises being given and accepted between two sides and this is how the Romans did it strange to us but it's clearly a kind of meaningful ceremony for for you Romans some people uh think that this might be a mythological scene um the oath being taken by Romulus the first king of the Romans together with the sabones one of the earliest alliances the Romans made with one of their allies but it could more generally just be a reference to that whole system of alliances between the Romans and all the other peoples of Italy that were so important and there the foundation of the ways in which the Romans came to dominate and rule the whole of the Italian Peninsula and so what this coin is doing in a sense is kind of it's broadcasting or sort of creating an image of Rome as the the center of these alliances with other peoples absolutely yes it's broadcasting messages to the Allies but also to the Romans themselves about how faithful we are we're good solid loyal allies but you better stick with us because you don't want to know what happens if you splittle us more with Mortal land from the small wall Town through a patchwork of alliances with friends and conquered foes Rome controlled most of Italy from that the Romans soon came into conflict with the other great superpower of the day the city of Carthage because there was actually another Empire out there to rival Rome the Roman network of alliances put pressure on them to intervene in support of friends and allies further and further afield it's a bit like what happened to Modern superpowers one particular request for help had defining consequences during a dispute between two Sicilian towns different groups appealed to Rome and to Carthage after intense debate in Rome between those spoiling for a fight and those who thought Rome was far better off out of it the Romans decided to go in and that was how Rome and Carthage first came face to face in conflict strip of water the island of Sicily more Greek than Italian became the setting of Rome's first overseas War a naval war against the Western mediterranean's most powerful seafaring State the Romans hadn't had or needed fighting ships before Story Goes that what they did is find a carthaginian ship and copy it over and over again it was a big turning point and in 241 BC these Waters were crowded with the dreadnoughts of the ancient world fighting it out in a final messy battle hey George we actually found it all right another M for him the wreckage from this battle that Marine archaeologist Jeff Royal and his team have been discovering and raising from the seabird it's really quite difficult to make sense of this I've been looking at it so hard and I keep thinking Every Little Rock on the on the bed of the singers there's some bit of Roman or carthaginian military equipment but when you actually come across one of these I'm free just lying there in a detritus of the battle it really hits you in the face you're seeing it literally as it fell as it were with your own eyes it's quite extraordinary what's the most memorable thing you've come across like this the Rams are always very memorable because it's uh it's a really big deal to have found them and it was one of the objectives of the of the survey and of course yeah we you know when we see them it's it's always exciting built into the ships bows these these Rams did pixels well what we've seen from the evidence is obviously there was a lot of Destruction at sea level or sea surface level so all of that is spread out the helmets the Rams the Rams themselves all have frontal damage now you got 11 Rams so that 10 from this side so they're actually going or hitting something basically you just run into each other it's just yeah you know it's like kind of the dungeons without the Dodge yeah your sight lines at Sea and the speeds that they would have been going had an hour and a half hour and 45 nearly two hours see that this is going to happen you've got time to change your mind yeah and if you don't change your mind and you lose everyone on the shipstate yeah and it's thanks to Jeff's work that I can get my hands on some of the actual remains of this battle this extraordinary object is one of the bronze Rams that would have been fitted to the front of the ships underneath the water line this one clearly did Pierce an enemy ship because part of a carthaginian plank is still fixed to it it's quite nicely decorated there's a a helmet here kind of helmet logo with feather plumes and all down here is a wonderful trace of Roman official Dom it says Lucius the quistor that's the quality control agent approved this Ram uh sort of marvelous Roman administrative efficiency actually a wonderful contrast with the one carthaginian ram that's been discovered which has on it uh instead Omega God ball um you know strike your ships and make a hole in them in some ways the most interesting and most moving objects have been discovered is this helmet a Roman helmet and it came complete with its cheek pieces which would have protected the Fighter's face and it brings you about as close as you can ever get to the individuals who thought and in this case I imagine died in that great battle I suspect I might be the first person to put this helmet on since 241 BC however wore it was like ahead than me or else there was a lot of padding in it [Music] the end result of all this was that the carthaginians were pushed out of Sicily altogether the island became the first overseas territory under Roman control in a way you might say that the Roman Empire began here Rome defeated Carthage twice more first was the famous occasion when Hannibal pulled off the stunt of crossing the Alps with his elephants only to lose out eventually on all fronts the Romans finished the job years later in 146 BC whether they were really anxious about carthaginian recovery well simply wanted to show their muscle they launched an expedition to North Africa under one of the scipios and they raised the city to the ground it's one hard-line Senator had repeatedly insisted cartago de lender EST Carthage must be destroyed we don't know what actually drove Rome to annihilate the city of Carthage they'd taken over most of the carthaginian Empire when they defeated Hannibal so maybe it was a devastating display of Imperial self-confidence the 146 would also be remembered for another City's destruction this was the year that Rome sacked Corinth the wealthiest city in Greece foreign [Music] sex would become ingrained in the minds of every Roman the year when Rome became so powerful that it no longer had any serious challenges left [Music] the destruction of two of the most famous cities in the Mediterranean changed the rules of the game forever there was still no sign of a Roman master plan or that they really wanted actually to govern anywhere but they now had more power than anyone else even if they didn't really know how to use it basically the Roman priority was to get their own way but 146 was also an ambivalent year some people certainly celebrated but others already saw it as the beginning of the end so there's a logic in the history of Empires when you get to the top you can only come down [Music] Carthage was wiped from the Earth but crease was very different and it gave Rome something more precious than economic profit it's culture Conquest didn't just change the people that Rome conquered it changed Rome too and it was thanks to Greece that Rome started to become full of marble columns elegant statues and object da this was the very beginning of the Rome we know and also the beginning of a flourishing Art Market this was once a great piece of art it's a statue of Hercules he was part of the cargo of a shipwreck that's been recovered from the seabed not just him there were more than 30 other marble statues some bronze ones some exquisite jewelry glassware scientific instruments they say they found the pits the very last olives the crew at before the disaster but from our point of view what's important is that this was a cargo of stuff one out of many thousands that was making its way from the Greek world on a one-way ticket to Rome [Music] the Greek world that Rome conquered had a long history of Art Theater and literature foreign and many Romans felt the cultural traditions of Greece at classed their own [Music] but Rome not only bought plundered and emulated Greek culture Romans wrote themselves into the Greek story tracing their own Origins back to the mythical war between Greeks and Trojans and to the most famous work of Greek literature of all the Iliad one crucial character for the Romans was Aeneas who played a rather minor part on the losing Trojan side in home as Iliad the Romans took the story of veneers and ran with it making him flee from Troy and come to Italy to found the Roman race as a kind of ancestor of Romulus and Remus it's almost as if they're saying that they didn't just belong in the great world but they actually came from here [Music] story of Aeneas gave the Romans a stake in the traditions of Greece but exactly how Greek to be was the topic of the day with some conservative hardliners arguing that soft Greek culture was destroying old Roman values there's more to Conquest than conquest by sword there's conquest by book by word and by culture one Roman poet later claimed that it wasn't actually the Romans who'd conquered Greece but the Greeks who conquered Rome what he meant by that was the Greeks were really the winners because Rome owed them such a vast cultural debt that went back centuries before the conquest of Corinth but at the same time it was Rome's interesting Greek culture their study their preservation and their replication of it that's played a big part in keeping that culture alive for us in a way I like to think Rome has kind of given us Greece the Romans had now gained effective control over the entire Mediterranean the only people ever to have done that not always by annexing territory but simply by being able to get their own way we think of this Empire as the land around the sea but actually a lot of it there's the Mediterranean itself stand what's going on across this huge liquid territory we aren't talking just about some nice little boats transporting sculptures the problems of controlling this sea were as important as the ones of controlling Carthage or Corinth the Mediterranean was the Empire's internal sea a main Highway nostrum they called it RC it was far cheaper and quicker to travel on the water than by land but it was dangerous too that's not just because all you'd need was one storm and you'd have lost everything there are also Bandits and hijackers wanting to get their hands on anything that was sailing Not Just Goods but people too it's a bit like a Motorway swarming with human traffickers Rome's overseas conquests had turned thousands and thousands of prisoners into slaves and that created a demand for more there are big profits to be made out of the slave trade delos was a huge Mercantile community and people made loads of money here one Roman writer called it the biggest Market in the whole planet all sorts of goods must have passed through perfumes and spices sculpture and Furniture but delos was most famous for being the world capital of the slave trade and one of the main suppliers of that trade were those Bandits and hijackers that the Romans called Pirates for the Romans a pirate was anyone you didn't like in a ship from Small Time chances to Big Time criminals more like the mafia it was not an easy relationship and those tough guys in ships proved pretty difficult to control one day they were stocking your Market the next day they turned on you and that's exactly what we see here this is a wonderful pair a very distinctively Roman faces sunken cheeks and wrinkly both of them looking a bit Sinister it's kind of tempting to imagine that they were involved in a rather nasty form of business they're also in a pretty ropey State they've been smashed and they look a bit burnt the reason for that actually stems from a key moment in the history of this place in 69 BC the Pirates came here torched the place there was a vast fire and delos was destroyed [Music] Pirates had their impact at Rome itself too fear of pirates provided a reason or excuse for the Romans to take a decision that would set the scene for big political changes that would undermine their democracy and Herald one-man rule we're certainly a nuisance and sometimes dangerous but the threat could always be manipulated to justify military action the war on Pirates was a bit like the war on terror and then 67 BC the Roman people voted almost unlimited powers to one man to clear the Sea of pirates Batman was Pompey the great as he was known got rid of the Pirates in just three months and then turned his Firepower onto some fabulously wealthy Eastern Kings returning to Rome with a bang a spectacular two-day parade and a massive Carnival parade was one of the biggest street parties the Romans ever celebrated there was a general processing through the streets in his Chariot it was all the booty and spoils and riches he brought back home out in front of him and his prisoners walking there too the idea was that the people in the city should be able to see what the generals and armies been getting up to abroad and what they brought back some people thought the display was terribly vulgar and on occasions people cried in the audience as they watched the poor prisoners go past but for most Romans this was a chance to let their hair down but you're Tony Queen [Music] not bad and to indulge in the riches that had been one for them T long gone not much trace of pompey's Triumph is left behind but tucked away in a corner of a museum we can see one member of that spectacle's Supporting Cast it's not often that you can actually track down an individual object that was trundled through the streets of Rome in a triumphal procession in fact this is probably the only one it's great bronze urn it's probably used for mixing up wine and water and honey and it's actually got the name of one of the Kings who Pompey defeated scratched into its rim this makes me pretty certain that this was one of the treasures one of thousands upon thousands that the people of Rome watched go by in pompous parade in 61. foreign had been traditionally funded formed and governed by Democratic officials serving for one year sharing power the idea had always been to stop anyone becoming a king again but with Pompey the Romans began to Shell their rejection of individual power if you needed to defend or extend the Empire perhaps you had to hand over control to just one man yet for a man who revolutionized Rome he's left very few visible traces this is a wonderful bit of Roman Street archeology you might miss it to start with but the layout of these buildings this sweeping curve facade actually matches ancient Roman foundations underneath are those foundations belong to a huge semicircular Auditorium of a theater these are the traces of the theater that Pompey put up with the prophets of his Eastern campaigns and they're the first time ever that Roman buildings begin to match the Rome of our imaginations huge Monumental magnificent designed to impress [Applause] [Music] home piece set the Benchmark for what an Imperial Building should look like and one that later Emperors would follow [Applause] foreign [Music] name he's always been overshadowed in the Quest for Glory and the competition for personal power the one person that forever after stole the Limelight was his great rival Julius Caesar bloody off we go never done this before going in the opposite direction to Pompey sees a headed west when poppy had been so stunningly and bloodly successful out east and come back such a load of cash spoils Caesar if he wanted to rival him had only one option which was to have a great conquestive soul but in one important way Caesar really outdoes Pompey Pompey has big victories Caesar has big victories and writes about them and the reason why we could go to Elysia the site of one of Caesar's last victories there is because we actually have Caesar's own account of it atalesia the army of Gauls had set up camp on a hill in Caesar's own description he seems in complete control camps were constructed at strategic points he writes Picketts were stationed day and night there was hard fighting on both sides I had two trenches dug I erected a rampart and a palisade when you see the scale of it all is that despite what he claims when he writes the story up Caesar couldn't possibly have had his eye on all the areas of this battlefield in the end winning an ancient battle comes down to strength of numbers starving the enemy out surprising them from behind across most of all the truth is it comes down to luck [Music] or not I'm sure that Caesar himself will be delighted to know we still read his own version of these campaigns however he won the battle the real point is that his story has lasted for centuries and in terms of Imperial propaganda it's a nice proof that the pen really can be mightier or at least more enduring than the sword the leader of the Gauls in their doomed Last Stand was bursting gatoris since then he's become a hero of modern France a freedom fighter standing up for the French Nation the irony is that everything we know about versing etrix goes back to what Caesar wrote about him in a way our verse in getterex is a Roman creation whatever he was really like the point was that Caesar needed to show that he had defeated a dangerous Brave and ultimately worthy opponent the Romans would never have thought that there was any kudos to be gained in beating a city Caesar also boasted about the number of Galls that his army had killed during his campaign modern estimates come to around a million his figures may have been sexed up to impressed back home but there's little doubt that Caesar's ambition to surpass pompey's glories had been achieved through nothing short of genocide excavations of the battlefield have Unearthed some of the weapons that one Caesar his victory including the ancient version of landmines these things aren't exactly high tech but they're very very nasty this one in particular you have to imagine standing on it in your leather sandal the point goes right through and into your foot and you can't pull it out because of that little Barb there your foot's bleeding you can't get your sandal off you're in agony you can't move makes my toes curl just to think about it there were people in Rome who got anxious about what was going on in ghoul and at the level of the killing and some of Caesar's enemies even went so far as to suggest that he teached on trial for war crimes and that the judge and jury should be all goals Roman Empire was a it was a brutal thing but there were some levels of brutality that even the Romans couldn't stand [Music] Julius Caesar would never have made it without the loyal support of his troops they were far from the cattle Raiders of the early City the soldiers were now professionals bound to their General as he was to then even more than to the state and unlike Pompey Caesar was prepared to use that Army to seize control of Rome [Music] for his part Caesar was well aware that his enemies in Rome were conspiring against him that they were trying to back him into a corner and as he put it to undermine his dignitas that distinctive Roman combination of prestige and clout so we took a chance and with one of his Legions he set out to march on Rome when he got to the river Rubicon which marked the border between Gaul and Italy he said let's throw the dice in the air then in other words God only knows what will happen next some Romans saw this as the legacy of Romulus and Remus the twins whose quarrels resulted in the death of one now a Roman fought Roman for ultimate power Caesar's return to Rome triggered a chaotic Civil War that engulfed not just Italy but most of the empire [Music] Pompey himself ended up dead on the coast of Egypt decapitated head presented to Caesar who so we're told burst into tears at the sight of it Caesar won the war and was made officially dictator sole ruler of Rome but he didn't last much longer if there's just one Roman that everyone knows it's Julius Caesar not because of what he did but because he died his assassination has been blown up into a heroic scene that we all know think we know from films paintings and plays and from those Famous Last Words add to brute which he definitely didn't say what we know for sure is that he was ambushed by a group of his friends in a meeting in a senate house that ironically had been built by his great rival Pompey it all happened just over there where that tree now is it was another Echo back to Rome's Foundation story now it was Caesar who took the part of the murdered Remus [Music] it's the most famous political assassination ever carried out in the name of Liberty just a few weeks after Caesar had been made dictator for life too soon to know whether he'd succeeded or failed but the fact was that the Assassins may have got rid of a man they thought of as a tyrant they didn't get rid of tyranny it was all too little too late by now it was inevitable that the Empire would be ruled by one man the question was what shape would that one-man rule take that was defined by the man who established autocratic power long term who we call first emperor of Rome Gaius Julius Octavius or has he later called himself Augustus that name actually doesn't mean very much the closest you can get is revered one but he worked out the do's and don'ts of being a one-man ruler in the early 3rd Century BC Scipio barbartus on his tomb could have his career summed up in just a few lines 300 years later the Emperor Augustus wrote his own Epitaph to be displayed outside his two in hundreds of lives foreign [Applause] [Music] overblown account of what I did but it also offers a blueprint of how to be an emperor in the future there are three things he stresses first of all you have to be massively generous to the Roman people you have to give them handouts and entertainments and services and that's what he lists here all the cash he spent on that then you've got to build build build and that's really the model of Pompey and Augustus tells us about the temples that he constructed and the theaters but most important of all and this is what the biggest part of the document is about you have to invest in Conquest and Augustus explains how he extended the boundaries of the Roman Empire how he pacified the provinces of Gaul and Spain how he pacified the Alps the message he's hammering home is clear you want to be a Roman Emperor you have to look like a conqueror however much the Romans tried to avoid the pompeys and the Caesars of this world the problems of governing policing and ever-expanding Empire proved that decisions taken by committee didn't work [Music] it wasn't the emperor that created the Roman Empire it was the Empire that created Roman emperors augustus's account of what he did is a practical tool kit for how to be a Roman Emperor but the ideology behind it all is best represented on another Monument he put up celebrating Pax peace so this is an altar of peace it's celebrating the security and the prosperity that the Roman Empire can bring but it isn't really peace in our sense of the word this isn't about the absence of fighting it's about peace that is the result of fighting this is peace that has been won by victory really this is an altar of pacification foreign it's also more than that built out of marble are the best artists in town you couldn't miss the messages here the walls around it are covered with freezes some depicting Augustus with his family carving the Imperial Dynasty into stone and some of the images spread the idea of his Divine Birthright projecting his lineage all the way back to the mythical founders of Rome on either side of the main steps there are two different versions of Rome's ancestry on one side the wolf with Romulus and Remus and on the other side Aeneas who's just arrived in Italy from Troy there's a special resonance for the emperor here because Augustus claimed to be directly descended from Aeneas but there's an even bigger point if you take these two scenes together on the one side there's Romulus who welcomed into his new city outcasts and Runaways on the other side Aeneas who really did come from abroad the message about Rome's Origins is clear Rome was always foreign this made perfect Roman sense the stories they told of their own Origins reflected the growing diversity expansion and openness of their world and there was one corner of the Empire that had a particular resonance I'm in the place that many Romans thought the whole story of their City began it's more than a thousand miles away from Rome it's the city of Troy the city of the Trojan War that most famous most defining war in the whole history and myth of the classical world it's the war of Helen Achilles Hector and the Trojan Horse so the birthplace of innius for the new Augustine age the Roman poet Virgil elaborately reimagined and rewrote aeneas's Journey from Troy to Italy in his epic poem they are needed he was using myth to explore the complexities of the Rise of Rome and of its Empire [Music] there are all kinds of themes in this poem love honor heroism and Empire Virgil also points to some of the much more disconcerting sides of Imperial power at the end of the story and it's really the last thing we see Aeneas doing our hero cruelly and gratuitously Slaughters an enemy soldier who has surrendered to him it's as if in Virgil's hands story of Aeneas both celebrates Rome's Empire and exposes its potential brutality and yet Virgil could also present the Roman Empire as a gift from the gods themselves [Music] at the very beginning Jupiter the king of the Gods prophesies Rome's future power I have given his Earth I have given the Romans Imperium sinephine I have given them Empire without limit [Music] it hasn't really started that way a completely unremarkable City had expanded far beyond its walls becoming the power center of a vast Empire twins to the empress Emperor to organized armies from the early victories of Scipio barbatus to the crushing destruction of Corinth in the East or the bloody Killing Fields of Gaul in the West through a combination of improvisation good luck greed and ambition Rome has imprinted on our minds what it means to be an Empire [Music] the idea of Empire without limit is something that Scipio barbarters could never have understood he knew all about conquest and Military glory and the prophets that came with them but Rome having territorial control over swathes of the outside world thought of as Limitless would have been absolutely incomprehensible to him two and a half centuries later Virgil zeneid claims that Jupiter himself had planned it that way it's as if Virgil looking back is reinterpreting the messy the improvised history of Roman Conquest into some Grand Design of manifest destiny once you've got an Empire what do you do with it and what did he feel like to be part of it well Clues can often be found in very surprising places foreign 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 from the treasures that we can see how the Roman Empire Works what feeds it connects it who are the winners I know 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 how did it look to the Romans what do they make of it all how did they visualize it we tend to joke we say all roads lead to Rome but actually they did and what about the conquered what difference did it make to them just olives olives and all damn olives thank you there were great fortunes for some but at the expense of the many Tombstone for me is a bit of a tear jerker so just how did Rome transformed the landscape of our world [Music] 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 because 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 but where there were 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 we've got lists and lists 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 Salim 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 but all the same it not to feel impressed reservo 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] it's just 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 Demons 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 it's kind of monoculture just olives olives and more damn olives is one Legacy of the Roman Empire it was then 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 this is the whole economy of this area is it all based on olives yes um olive trees and with olive oil and on 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 middle men 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 bites an interesting case of how Roman Imperial Administration Works they never have very many people on the ground but they do get uh 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 stumped 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 but 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 Lodi 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 if 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 hadrion 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 of the most extraordinary case of Roman mass production most of them are a 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 harapolis 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 one of the cities 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 during 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 highlights are some Exquisite 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 this is 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 the people scurrying about down here were always meant to be invisible and they've remained pretty much invisible to us largely because they've let me 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 he'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 bars 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 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 foreign [Music] 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 it's 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 kind of like a painting on the wall these marbles have been brought in from all over the Empire the horse the horse 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 porphyrie 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 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 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've been like touring the empire it was the empire in microcosm [Music] in its ambition Tivoli captures the essence of an Empire that brought together places and people as never before along its roads in its busy citizen ports the inhabitants of the Roman Empire experience deep changes which still affect the world around us Revolutions in engineering trade and agriculture is offered new tears and Rich for some and matching inequality for others 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 relatively offers an idealized and to be honest rather sanitized vision of the Roman Empire ordered world with established hierarchies and 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 [Music] this is the skull of a Roman when we say Romans we tend to think of men from Italy dressed up in Togos a rating in the Forum tramping over the fields in armor Building Bridges and probably overeating this Roman lived in New York and this Roman was a woman all we know about her comes from her bones and what was found with them she can't have been more than about 20 when she died and she must have been pretty well off to judge from the nice jewelry that was found with her it's a lovely little blue necklace a jet a bracelet an ivory bangle a nice blue glass vase and a pair of little glass earrings there's actually more tour than that I can tell from the shape of the skull that she was certainly of mixed race either she came from North Africa or maybe her parents or perhaps her grandparents so she really makes us think who were the Romans and what did it mean to be Roman [Music] of all the ingredients that help the Romans build their empire none was so successful or surprising that the one you can't see citizenship and their ability to turn people not born in Rome into fully fledged Romans he saw the toga everywhere frequents togger a Roman could be all sorts of different people rich or poor black or white from the fringes of the Sahara to The Damp Frontier of Northern Britain the britons were really tough it was True Grit difference did it make it made a Roman become one [Music] buried behind a modern industrial estate in southern Spain other ruins of a small Roman settlement you have to be pretty determined to find this site I don't think it's on the main tourist beat really this is the beginning of the entrance to the side beginning to look a bit more hopefully Roman [Music] this one looks fairly ordinary but for me this place is one of the most important places in the whole history of the Roman Empire story goes back to 171 BC a delegation from Spain turned up in Rome representing more than 4 000 men who were the sons of Roman soldiers and Spanish women and as such they had no political rights they were effectively stateless and they were looking for a home it was one of the unintended consequences of Conquest uh and interestingly the historian Livi calls these people a new species and the Romans characteristically improvised a new solution for start they gave them Carter to be their home but the Romans did more than that they didn't just give them a home they gave them a status they made them Latins which was the kind of halfway house between being full Roman citizens and not citizens at all now that may not sound very much but it was actually revolutionary because it established the principle that you could be a Roman citizen of some sort without having anything to do with Rome and Italy itself and it kick-started a process that ended up hundreds of years later with every free inhabitant of the Roman empire being a Roman citizen [Music] throughout history citizenship has come in many forms but the idea that Outsiders in large numbers could pick become Roman citizens was entirely new in the ancient world radical startling and the unique ingredient of Empire to see what being Roman looked like thousands of kilometers from Rome itself I've come to what is now Algeria on the Empire's Southern edges when the Romans conquered a place they didn't set about imposing their Norms they didn't make people learn Latin they didn't make people worship Roman gods they didn't even make people use the Roman Calendar they exercise their power through incorporation now I'm not talking about the poor Sovereign peasants here but they managed to get the local elites on site and one of the main ways they manage that was by extending full Roman citizenship Roman citizenship was always a gift you didn't have to pass a citizenship test or pay a fee you didn't have to learn Latin and you didn't have to salute the flag not that Romans had Flags but you know what I mean so why would you want to be a Roman citizen well there are all kinds of particular legal rights it gave you to make contracts marriage rights and it meant you could never be crucified doubt that that's what's driving most people the important thing about Roman citizenship was that it gave you a stake in one it's a bit like the American dream you know it doesn't work for most people but the dream still matters [Music] we don't know how far the extension of citizenship was a carefully planned strategy or one of History's lucky accidents the Roman Empire worked better by bringing people in and not by keeping them down now we shouldn't exaggerate the effect I bet many locals here wouldn't have been keen on becoming Roman citizens or wouldn't have cared either way [Music] but in any case imperialism is never cozily consensual [Music] Algeria is no stranger to the conflicts of Empire to put it mildly from the ancient Phoenicians through the Arabs and Ottomans to the French and that's not to mention the Romans in fact it's in Algeria that some of the most impressive Roman remains in the whole world are to be found and they have really important stories to tell the story of Roman Algeria began as most stories of the Empire began with the brutal oppression of the native population I'm driving through what were once The Killing Fields of Africa it's where the Romans fought for decades and even after the conquest proper there were thousands of soldiers stationed here policing and nudging the frontier South even in parts of the Empire where there had been no towns before the Romans sponsored encouraged and bankrolled the building of cities Roman Style Tim guard was originally built for retired Roman soldiers serving nearby to settle and it reveals a lot about how Rome put down Roots far from Italy and how its identity and culture flourished at the fringes of the empire foreign to get my bearings now this must have been one of the main gateways into the town when you first walk in it looks a terrible jumble actually but almost instantly you come to a cross street you can see another paved Street or an absolute grid pattern this must be one of the best surviving examples of Roman town planning anywhere in the Empire it's a pretty aggressive statement of romanness in the middle of the desert which means it's not that hard for me to find my way around and I guess I'm now in a little house and a rather Splendid door [Music] this is a truly Regal set of Roman lews it's on the standard multi-seater pattern you get a little bit of privacy from these rather Natty Dolphins here it's a nice thought I think that one of the poshest sets of loose anywhere in the Roman world still to be found in Algeria [Music] I've got my sites now is a rather Grand building coming up the grandest we've seen really with a whole load of columns which is worth exploring I think rather Posh entrance Courtyard and what on Earth is it this is really interesting it's a biblioteca it's a library if that's the case it must be uh this is a very very rare example of a surviving public presumably library from the Roman world it's very smart sort of uh it's quite interesting that we've come into this town and the first Monument we really met is indeed a monument to culture the public library I think if I'd been a citizen of Tim God this is where I would have spent my time if I'd been allowed my guess is that this library was a pretty blockish community it might have started off as a Roman soldier's retirement home but within just a few generations of its birth Tim God had expanded well beyond its original foundations home to over ten thousand reasonably peaceful inhabitants of Roman African and Berber descent you might expect to see a very filtered down version of romanness here and yet we find quite the opposite this is the main Square The Forum the center of business life Commerce law and local government what's striking is it actually looks so standard anyone visiting here from Roman Italy would have instantly recognize this as the Forum and yet we're just on the edge of the Sahara whoever designed this must have been working from some kind of kit for Roman forums or actually a kit for a whole Roman town [Music] you really do get the feeling that the people of Tim God are investing unusually heavily in high culture and in their Roman identity uh All Around The Forum all around town there are thousands of inscriptions proclaiming the romanness of the inhabitants but the man who really kept it all for culture is this man vacantius and it's actually written not in the usual capital letters that you see on inscriptions but in the lower case that you get in manuscript so it's as if you're reading a book now instead of the usual CV that you'd expect under his statue you get an elaborate hymn of praise to the contius's culture the order the local Council has put this up to him it's the Council of the town that lives next to a spring a spring that brings it water but vacantius is a spring they say that brings them something more he's their other source well he's a sauce or it's not water it's culture literature and eloquence [Music] here on the margins of the Empire the people of Tim God are as committed as anyone else to showing they are Romans [Music] all these mosaics come from the floors of buildings in timgard and they give you some idea of what the original color of the place must have been like and also the richness [Music] might call this Roman soft power most of the people who lived in Tim God would never actually have seen Rome but they're using their romance as a badge of honor a way of showing they belong that must come from a little bath building have a good bath it says and I suppose it means flip-flops only in here and here we've got some of the classic scenes of Roman mythology there's the goddess Venus up there rising from the ocean and balanced a bit awkwardly on the bum of a sea monster and there is the god Neptune rowing his Trident he's the god of the sea what's interesting is that there are artists around here who can produce this kind of stuff and the people of Tim God are literally at home with it they're really unmistakably doing the Roman thing [Music] I'm sure there must have been awful quarrels going on here but on the surface Tim God looks a pretty happy little place and that summed up by this bit of pavement art what it is is a gaming board with words written across in fact you move your piece from letter to letter and the words make a slogan are lawari hunting and bathing gaming and laughing orchest we were a that's living kind of makes you realize how far this place and its inhabitants have come they started out as a bunch of topics squadies a few Generations later they're not just hunting and bathing they're bookworms in the local library and they're visiting a rather Posh local lavatory with Dolphin fittings [Music] in some ways it didn't matter how far from the center of the Empire you were being Roman meant belonging if you had lots of money by allowing the local Elite into the club Rome secured their support in return the local Rich felt part of a bigger world and it's here in Algeria that we have one of the most extraordinary cases of how one could climb the greasy pole of Roman political power this is a really proud boast of success it's a standout Memorial designed to show just how far you could go even if you were brought up on the margins of the empire in what's now rural Algeria it's put up by a man called quintus lollius erbicus two his dad's mom his brothers and his uncle most of all it's put up to himself we know precious little about urbercus's Roots whether he was a Roman or Berber descent or perhaps both do know is that he grew up just a few kilometers away from the family mausoleum in the small remote Roman town of tidis and his family were Roman citizens [Music] you can tell it's Roman because of all these winged Willies [Music] even at its Heyday to this is unlikely to have had more than a thousand inhabitants it's more of a village than a town and I doubt that it was particularly well known in Algeria no one else in the Roman world would even have heard of it this really must take the prize for being the smallest Forum in the whole of the Roman Empire local offices there loads of plinth that once carried statues of Emperors and local bigwigs this one was actually the statue of a rather important local Roman lady here was the statue to the biggest local bigwig of them all quintus lollius erbocus statues lost but you can see where his feet would have been perhaps in Marble maybe even in bronze and it's underneath that on this plinth that you find his CV written out terribly abraded now but you can just about feel the letters name here lollius erbicus and you can see that well you can feel that he was console course and underneath you get loads of the other things that he did in his life the offices he held we learned that he was a bit of a war hero he served in the Expedition against Judea with the emperor Hadrian and he seems to have won military decorations that's an honorific Spear and a Golden Crown that's a bit like a purple heart or an MC here's the biggest thing that ever came out of tidis he's the local boy who really made good and no one made good around here he would have been absolutely exceptional what we've got to remember though is that there were thousands of people like lolius erbocus in the Roman Empire going from provincial towns to make it big in the city itself and in the Army um in some ways for me that's what's exceptional about the Roman Empire [Music] story of Abacus doesn't end here if we follow his Trail irbycus takes us about as far away from Africa as you could possibly get in the Roman Empire [Music] the Empire's Northern Frontier it's in Britain that a pluck was discovered put up by a unit of the Roman army recording some new building they just erected this unit says they're working underneath Quinto lolio urbico quintus lollies erbocus who was leg out he was the legatus augusti he was the emperor's representative that's to say he was the governor of the province so our man from Africa has ended up with the top job in Britain so what we have here is one provincial turned Roman now governing other provincials on the other side of the Roman world and that was part of a regular pattern what lolius erbocus from North Africa made of his time in Britain we can only guess but in the Roman imagination this island had particular significance by expanding beyond the Mediterranean world and conquering a place across different Seas they were venturing into the unknown for the Romans this wasn't just the sea it was the ocean it was part of that vast waterway that went round the inhabited world it went really that Britain was in another world that made it hugely attractive to conquer and explore but it was almost as if they were going into space in our terms and of course they told loads of tall and not so tall stories about what you might find in Britain when you got here it was cold it was wet it was foggy and the sun didn't shine very much but the natives had weird habits they grew very tall because it was so cold and they lived to a vast age 120 years old you find people here some people even said it didn't exist but there were others he thought that actually Britain was where you found real weren't you the Romans have become corrupted by decadence and luxury the britons however were really tough it was True Grit Britain was certainly the perfect Target for the dodgery emperor Claudius who needed a decisive military conquest to bolster his own military reputation yet like anywhere even here with a cultural Gap was perhaps at its widest an outsider could become Roman if you served for 20 odd years in the Roman army clever mechanism that turned the Concord into the conquerors these pieces of bronze must want to be in someone's most precious possession they belong to a man called reburus and what they do is they document the fact that when he completed his years of Army service the emperor had then given him Roman citizenship think what we have to imagine is that there would be some very big document on public display in Rome naming loads of people who were given citizenship but individuals could get their own personalized little copy like this does a bit more than just give him citizenship that's very clear about that he him it also gives citizenship to his children to his descendants and if it is living with someone as man and wife the wife gets citizenship too but if he's a bachelor then anybody he subsequently marries will get those same rights provided it says there's no polygamy going on singularly singulars as long as it's kind of one each which I think is probably an attempt to stop any sham marriages for immigration purposes [Music] reburus was Spanish in origin but he'd done his military service in Britain and almost certainly settled here on retirement he was one of very many because long after the emperor Claudius had celebrated his British Conquest guerrilla warfare raged on and there were thousands of Roman soldiers based in Barracks across the country like this one tucked away amongst modern terraced houses in South Shields this all looks very Roman and very military but we shouldn't imagine that this was a world in which Roman soldiers were cooped up in their barracks and the native British were somewhere outside there were all kinds of things going on here and all sorts of people as Traders and money makers slaves and women and children it was a small community but a very mixed one and we certainly shouldn't imagine that all the Roman soldiers came from Sunny Italy just itching to get back home to better weather and better food most of the men actually came from places much like this in other parts of the Empire from Belgium Germany or northern France and for a real glimpse into into cultural complexity that you find on the Northern Frontier I think this Tombstone is absolutely extraordinary it's the tombstone to a woman called Regina and she is an ex-slave a liberta and she's the wife konyuga of a man called baratis and baratis wants us to know that he is from a long way away he's Palmyra she says very proudly across the middle he is a man of Palmyra that's in Syria she came from down south she's natione catwalona she's a member originally of the cataloni tribe somewhere around Saint Albans now interestingly underneath we've got another text written this time in Palmyra now my palmarine's a bit Rusty but I'm assured it says Regina the ex-slave of baratis alas how much I miss her but that's not all there is to it the image too um has that kind of cultural mishmash to it and in partly she looks here like many Roman women are represented in death obedient they're doing they're spinning you've got her wool down here got a little Treasure Chest here but it's not quite as simple as it seems because various bits of the image seem to be drawn almost directly from palmarine or Syrian examples sadly someone's bashed off her face but what you can still see of her hairstyle is a kind of a hairstyle that you find in tombs in Syria and this little idea of having the spindle held in her hand and put across her lap that's also found very often in Palmyra so you've got Palmyra Roman British identity being paraded both by the writing and by the image now for me this raises any number of questions I mean I wonder for example how you know a poor girl from the katavaloni tribe ended up being a slave of a palmyra and eventually marrying him and ending up here on Hadrian's Wall but I wonder even more really did did this couple stick out in second Century A.D style Shields did people sort of think that their relationship was noticeable or did they just blend in with a lot of other people who were um enjoying very kind of mixed relationships and what language do we think they spoke at home [Music] and I guess overall this looks to me as if it's you know absolutely perfect example of the kind of clashes of cultural identity the merging of cultures you know if you're like a sort of cultural mess that you find when you look carefully at the kind of communities you have here this is about mobility of people this was a world where people moved around freely all kinds of migrants traveled the empire in search of a career opportunity or simply Dreaming Of Fortune or we can see what this Mobility meant by looking at their skeletons changing our view of the communities of Roman Britain they weren't static little places but full of people born elsewhere archaeologist hella Eckhart from the University of reading has been investigating the identity of individuals discovered in ancient burial sites throughout the country how do you actually go about working out where the guy or woman came from we usually start with the grave goods and here you can see an array of fines from catarick and they're quite unusual so there are crossbow brooches here like this and they are thought to be worn as Badges of office so soldiers and administrators wear them and the object itself might not be unusual but the idea of placing it in the grave is so this is hinging foreignness it is then watches you to the school so what we do is the skull is we will test the teeth so we will look at the molar and we will test the chemical signature preserved in the tooth enamel and it will tell us what was the geology like where this person grew up so when my teeth were forming when I was kind of three four five what I was eating and drinking it kind of gets locked inside the tooth enamel that's absolutely right it's like a chemical fingerprint the water relates to the climate so if you grow up in a hot Coastal North African climate that will look different chemically into a continental cool climate like Germany or or Poland and for this one for this one we think that this individual and a whole group of most of these men come from somewhere colder and more Continental be somewhere like Germany or Poland something like that so polish migration to Britain isn't as new as we think Salvatore asked you to just guess what rough proportion of the people in Roman Britain do you reckon didn't grow up here if we look at the countryside for example we simply don't know we haven't tested and we assume that people didn't move very much in the in the countryside but for the cities which is where our work has been we think 20 to 30 percent of the ones we've sampled may be incomers from outside of Britain so a quite a significant proportion of migrants doing what the cities are very mixed and diverse and what they seem to be doing a lot of these individuals are in quite High status roles so the lady from York has very rich grave Goods these individuals they all have these Cross by broaches and the belt fittings so they're probably soldiers and administrators they're running Roman Empire so our picture of Roman in Britain has to be it's not just that there are cities it's that there are cities with a very different sort of community than you could ever possibly have found you know a couple of hundred years before the Roman Invasion yeah these migrants polls and Germans people like the Yorkshire lady with roots in North Africa or varieties from Syria made the Roman Empire just as much as the Emperors and the politicians did and it isn't just a question of moving around the empire also people from the provinces making it to Rome and getting to hold the highest positions of power in the capital itself in our terms the Roman ruling class was strikingly ethnically diverse but we but we shouldn't conclude from that that the Romans were all sugar-coated liberals when they felt like it they could be just as xenophobic as anyone or we can see that from an extraordinary survival in the French city of Lyon that's to say in Gaul it's all related to a proposal of the emperor Claudius the same man who took Britain as his trophy he stirred up a real Hornet's Nest in Rome when he suggested that goals should be allowed into the heart of Roman government Claudius run into all kinds of objections some people complained that the Gauls had only recently been vicious enemies of Rome and others said they didn't much fancy cow Towing to a load of Nouveau rich men from the backwoods it's amazing is that we still have a word for word transcript of claudius's reply later in scribed on bronze and put up in your interesting thing is that Claudius Justified by going right back back the very beginning of Roman time when he says aliens foreigners and some Outsiders already came to Rome and that's going back to the time on Romulus now to be honest God is his speech is a bit nerdy and he grindingly goes through every example he can think of of foreigners coming into the political structure of Rome people who Roman me grow it the people who came as migrants to Rome objections will not Claudius got his way and the goals were incorporated into the power structure of Rome and that was really the standard pattern one vouchable exception was Britain we don't know of any native Brit who made it big at Rome if the Brits never dominated Rome the Roman way dominated Britain whether that was spending their afternoons like we imagine every Roman did going to the baths or whatever the weather dressing up in a sheet some locals probably just didn't get all this bathing stuff will take to wearing the toga but some must have relished the fun you could have here and some probably got a bit too hooked in the kind of is that a toga version 5 or a version six you're wearing and that's exactly what one Roman writer referring to Britain has to say he says you saw the toga everywhere frequents toga and they took to baths and to elegant dining and they called it culture but it was really parr's servitutists part of their enslavement [Music] partly mocking the people for their Roman pretensions and at the same time acknowledging that it played into the hands of Rome but the cultural interactions are more complicated than that [Music] here in Roman bath long before the Roman Invasion the local population had worshiped the goddess sulis at these Hot Springs after the conquest the Romans saw her as the equivalent of their own goddess Minerva and addressed her by that name [Music] began to be called Minerva a hybrid God combining both identities but was she really native or was she Roman what's left of the facade of the temple tells us a lot about the world of Roman bath some of it is really very very Roman but not all it looks as if in the middle of the Gable the sculpture has been asked to do an image of the shield of the Goddess Minerva which in Roman mythology had as its middle a sneaky headed female figure for Gorgon looking out that's fine except what we've got here is a bloke with a mustache now so the question is has the sculptor just got it wrong you know has he failed to be properly Roman or has he perhaps refused to be entirely Roman and is this soulless you know creeping in or is it actually something a bit more interesting than that is this really a new hybrid culture for a New Britain in the merging of Roman and pre-roman images in art in the worship of dual gods and in the cultural mix of its towns and cities what we're beginning to see is the emergence of a new identity in Britain perhaps we shouldn't think of these people either Roman Roman here meant something new altogether that is British when the Romans invaded this island it was home to thousands and thousands of people lots of different groups each one thinking a little bit of it was their own it wasn't a political unity in any sense that's what the Romans tried to make it and in that sense they didn't just find Britain they didn't just conquer it they created it and it's thanks to the Romans that we have London London was a brand new Roman City basically There Was An Open Country here before and it's actually thanks to the Romans that London became the capital city stuck down here in the Southeast with all the disadvantages and advantages that brings and what's amazing is If You Dig Down underneath the later buildings that we now see you find all kinds of elements still surviving of the Roman city itself for us that's the Guild Hall but it's where the Roman Amphitheater once was and underneath here is the Roman forum the city center supposed to be one of the largest public buildings north of the Alps most people here are looking at the Tower of London behind them they'd see part of the Roman wall a thousand years older can't ignore all this was bought at the price of violent conquest and that not everyone in Britain and the other provinces of the empire were busy happily embracing their new identity in fact Rebel and resistance fighter against the Roman occupation she's Boudicca the wife of a local King who'd actually got on rather well with the Romans and had left his kingdom to them the trouble was that the Romans took over their inheritance with terrible brutality they flogged Boudicca and they raped her daughters Boudicca seized her chance and led a revolt storming London and other Roman towns and burning them to the ground on one occasion boudicca's forces are supposed to have cut off the breasts of the Roman women and sowed them into their mouths when they killed them in the end however Roman Firepower won out it always did and Boudicca killed herself strange thing is the couple of hundred years ago Boudicca that virulent opponent to the Roman Empire was reinvented as an ancestor of the British Empire the words on the base of her statue say it all basically don't worry Boudicca your descendants Will Conquer more territory than those Romans ever did I have to say that for different reasons a bit of my heart's invested in Boudicca the tough woman who stood up to the might of the Roman Empire but my head says a bit different ashamed to say it but I'm kind of glad she didn't win even if the Romans were exaggerating about her crimes she was a brutal terrorist and what sort of place would this have been if she'd got her way I often find it hard to decide which side I'm on Romans or Rebels but one thing's for sure Romans had to fight to maintain a hold over Britain and the island was always something of an awkward and exotic possession foreign on the other side going east things are very different the Greek World which also included what we call turkey and much of the near East cities Urban living and long-standing relations with Rome that existed for centuries becoming Roman here took a very different form yeah all the same there was still a desire to make sense of the Brave New World to which they now belonged I'm in a place that I haven't been for almost 40 years it's aphrodisias the city of the goddess Aphrodite it's very special because it's probably the place in the whole of the Roman Empire where you can see better than anywhere else how it was the people outside Rome represented the power of Rome to themselves [Music] civilizations of Greece and Rome came together and what the Empire looked like from the Greek side [Music] people in the eastern part of the Empire went on speaking and writing Greek like the had for centuries the Romans didn't make them change to Latin they went on being Greek under own they went to Greek plays they read Greek books they worshiped Greek gods in Greek temples and they did something the Romans rather disapproved of naked Athletics instadia like this one [Music] this is the 30 000 seater Stadium of aphrodisias in contrast to the new towns and cities that sprung up in Britain and Algeria here there are at First Sight few clear signs of specifically Roman culture but if we dig beneath the surface Another Story begins to emerge it takes a bit of a leap of the imagination to imagine the scene of Greek Athletics going on underneath all this long grass but that's what happened here but it wasn't the only thing that happened here it's always worth looking very hard at the details on these big lumps of stone we can see some strong hints of a very Roman kind of use all along the front row of the seats there are these little fixings there's a hole here which must have taken rope and there's some kind of wedge here which presumably took a post what these are part of a structure of ropes and posts and Nets which keep the audience safe from something dangerous going on in the stadium now that's not Athletics that's animals what we've got to imagine is that sometimes the people of aphrodisias were showing up here to watch the very Greek sport of Athletics sometimes they showed up for the characteristic Roman entertainment of gladiatorial combat and wild beast hunts [Music] so this stadium is kind of dual use and it shows just how much this Greek culture is incorporating bits of Rome [Music] and there's another even more obvious way that the people of aphrodisias Incorporated Rome into their own cultural world that is in the worship of the Roman emperors and in a brand new Sanctuary sponsored by some local Grandes for exactly that purpose this is one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the last 50 even 100 years it's a temple complex dedicated to the honor and worship of the Roman Emperor and I'm sitting on the temple steps you have to be a bit careful about what we mean by worship I think there's no chance that the people of aphrodisias thought the Roman Emperor was just the same as Zeus or Aphrodite or any of those traditional gods what they did think is that the power of the Roman Emperor was very like the power of a God and they worshiped him in those terms [Music] temples dedicated to the Roman emperors have been found all over the empire [Music] but what made this discovery so special was that it was loaded with sculptures represented the emperors their families images of the traditional gods and myths and the conquered provinces imagined in human form [Music] this wasn't simple flattery of the central power though there was no doubt a bit of that this was a local initiative designed for a local audience setting in stone their own interpretation of the Roman world and their place in it and here's an almost naked Emperor having a go at a province what's quite interesting about all the ways that provinces and conquered territories are represented in this series is that they're all female so there's a wonderful bit of gender or a horrible bit of gender politics going on with the heroic masculine Emperor slaughtering or raping the helpless woman a woman trying not to to reveal her naked body and is putting her hand up probably to ask for Mercy he's got his hand tugging on her hair captioning is wonderfully revealing the emperor is Tiberius Claudius Kaiser that is the Emperor Claudius but the province is a bit of a surprise because she's britanya it's about the easiest bit of Greek you could ever see this actually is the very very first image of Britannia ever to appear in World art and I think it's a bit of a shock to discover that she's not appearing as a proud warrior woman on the back of a coin but she's here as a rather sad victim of what is to all intents and purposes rape by Roman but it's funny that once you get down to look at the uh look at the captions you start to see these sculptures in a bit of a Different Light because they were really meant to be seen very high up from below and they look quite different from this angle and the lower you get actually the better this one works and so if you actually lie down what you find is you're looking straight up into the rather pathetic face of Britannia and that must be the view of her that the aphrodisians walking down the porticos must have had we can only wonder what they would have thought as they looked my guess is that a few of them might have been on britannia's side but many of them being in awe of the Godlike power of Claudius and many would have seen Rome's Glory as their own not so much subjects as partners in the Empire foreign [Music] with no contradiction for me the really important thing that comes out of all this is that there was no single way to be Roman we've been all over the Roman Empire we found Romans in togas in tunics in trousers probably we found them speaking Latin Greek Celtic there wasn't a rule book for how to be Roman in fact it was the sheer diversity and the acceptance of diversity that actually underpinned the Roman Empire [Music] whether you came from the margins of the empire in the east Northern Frontiers fringes of the Sahara in the south if you were a Roman citizen you had the same rights and privileges as a citizen in Rome and that radical and new an idea still worth cherishing Rome's extension of citizenship was one factor that gave its Empire Unity [Music] something few Empires before or since have managed [Music] but one man would put that Unity on an entirely new footing spoon here in Liam and he's gone down in history as an awful brute he started his Reign by murdering his brother a bit like Romulus but in this case the poor Ladd was Sheltering on his mother's lap things went on from there but in 212 he changed the world he gave full Roman citizenship to every free inhabitant of the Roman Empire about 30 million people became Roman citizens at a stroke why he did it we haven't a clue but the look of him I don't imagine it was simple generosity all the same it was the culmination of the Roman project of incorporating Outsiders extending citizenship and making the Roman way of doing things seem Universal even natural after a thousand years in a way this was the triumphant finale of that project is that when they became all the same the Romans soon found new ways to divide and exclude this is the main gate of a great Roman City on the Empire's Northern Frontier in Germany it advertises the presence and the impact to Rome and it's still here two thousand years later Rome was built to last [Music] one of the biggest puzzles about the Roman Empire has always been what caused its Decline and fall historians have been debating that one since the 5th Century A.D and we still haven't agreed an answer there are all kinds of theories that are sensible to the silly was it the invasion of Barbarian hordes or was it Galloping inflation is it corruption public and private too much sex or maybe two little sex or was it bled in the water pipes gradually sending them all mad happily this isn't a multiple choice test and one thing's for sure it's all intriguingly complicated so bear with me thank you from its mythical Origins to the reality of Empire stretching from Britain in the North to the fringes of the Sahara in the south Spain to Israel the Nile to the Rhine the Roman world was more culturally diverse productive and connected than anything that had gone before we tend to joke we say all roads lead to Rome but actually they did it seemed like Rome had discovered the art of Imperial longevity thriving not only by exploitation but by creating citizens and at the very top of the pile was the emperor we'll probably have to kiss his feet but the Roman Empire was more vulnerable than it looked conflict and there was resistance both from the outside and within this was Romans attacking Romans [Music] so why did the Roman Empire come to an end or did it [Music] no one's ever going to know for sure what cause Rome's decline it's not the kind of question that you can ever answer once and for all but I'm going to unpick a story that makes sense to me and I'm starting at one of the most recognizable and puzzling monuments in the Roman world [Music] the 115 kilometer long Hadrian's Wall that spans Northern Britain built in the second Century A.D when the empire was at its widest what its construction hints to me is a shift in the way the Romans saw the Empire and what happened at its boundaries foreign in some ways Britain was Rome's Afghanistan the Romans always found it terribly hard to get the upper hand particularly in the north of the country it wasn't that there were loads of pitched battles between Romans and barbarians but there were Decades of terrorism and guerrilla warfare the wall must have been something to do with controlling that but it was never a straightforward defense against the enemy it was more a Roman statement this really is an aggressive structure plowing through the country from one side of it to the other three there's two things going on here first of all it is a major symbol of Roman power and it's speaking to those people out there to the north under those down there to the South but there's also a new idea of what an Empire is that stake here they're starting to say the Empire has an edge it has a boundary when they're doing that here and in other places in the Empire this is the start of the empire being mapped and that made a big difference as we know now the moment there's a physical barrier whether it's a wall a fence or a river it doesn't just keep people out it also entices them in and there was an extra urgency to that when almost everyone inside the Empire was a full Roman citizen almost everyone outside not it wasn't a simple standoff between insiders and Outsiders Romans and barbarians frontiers of the empire were always pretty porous in our terms and we find so-called barbarians serving in the Roman army the same there was a whole series of flashpoints that put the Empire on the defensive Invaders against waves of refugees and against economic migrants and to be honest it was quite difficult to tell the difference between those three the effect of all that was somehow to turn the Empire inside out the center of things was now on the margins that's where more and more Roman cash was spent it's a more and more Roman resources were eaten up and it's worth the decisions that really mattered were taken in a way the Romans on the Frontiers the soldiers and the generals became the key power Brokers the change was dramatic in the 3rd Century A.D Emperors were usually raised to Power by the legions with little or no reference to the authorities in Rome itself and it didn't last long either most of them barely had time to issue some coins and put up some statues before they were gone often assassinated by the supporters of the next guy on the throne one of this lot was Ella gabbales parachuted onto the throne by his granny and an army Legion if you believe the stories he was a nasty piece of work making Nero or Caligula look like Pussycats [Music] clearly well known for his flamboyant banquets a meal with him was an experienced to die for and literally food was about as far out as you could get Nightingales tongs and ostrich brains particular favorites but it was Artful too it was particularly keen on color-coded Banquets all the food in blue or in green [Music] but there were risks if you're at the bottom of the pecking order you didn't get real food at all you just got model food in wood or plaster all he could do was look at it and on one occasion he showered so many rose petals on his lucky guests that they smothered and didn't get out alive [Music] the emperor was a complete fashion freak he never wore the same pair of shoes twice he had his mum in the Senate and he loved being pulled along in a wheelbarrow by naked ladies even went so far as to change sex and he had a vagina surgically constructed now this is this isn't all literally true for a start hella goblet was only 14 when he came to the throne at best it's a fantasy about what it might be like having a very difficult teenager as emperor at worst it's black propaganda invented after he'd been deposed but there's a logic to it it's a fantasy about a system under threat the idea that the man on the throne was completely Bonkers was saying more about the way the system was imploding than about the man or boy himself but the Romans didn't just sit and watch it all happen [Music] and the best way to explain how they tried to restore order it's with another meal this is called Pizza Romana and one thing's for sure no Roma never read it because we start they didn't have tomatoes but if you suspend disbelief for a bit it's quite a good way of visualizing the problems the Roman Empire's facing the pizza Empire Rome Marta in the middle problem number one the empath's very big Communications across it very slow but Rome's here it's really weeks away from getting its commands out to the Frontiers what do they do about it well as usual the Romans improvise they decided okay cut the Empire it's quite difficult cutting an empire into and even go further you can say divide the empire into three with three joint empress you can even divide it even cut it you can even divide it into four with four giant emperors advantages of s are obvious you get manageable chunks to administer uh one Emperor for that one for that one for that one for that the disadvantages are obvious too this guy decides he wants to have the distance share to get conflict and what looked as if it was kind of devolution turns out to be disintegration the other problem they deal with is what to do about Rome and here we get another kind of devolution get a series of mini capitals and these are the olives uh but different parts of the Empire that one let's say is in the East that's nice see ya Trier in Germany Ravenna or Milan in Italy and those cities can be administrative centers for the different bits and that makes all the kind of problems of communication and so forth much easier what to do about Rome in the middle when all the decisions really are being made in these other capitals well the answer is that Rome stays looking lovely it stays being a grand symbolic Center but but is he doing anything no way it's Paul tomato it's become a bit of a white elephant City of Romulus no longer controls the Roman world Bullock some Emperors ruled their slice of territory without ever even going to Rome one-man rule established by the first Emperor Augustus was for a Time devolved to multiple Emperors in a divided Empire and this is the grand Imperial throne room of the mini Capital at Trier in Germany it's a building with some powerful messages it's telling us for one thing that Rome was no longer the center of Roman power but in its modern reincarnation there's a clue to an even bigger Revolution that was taking place within the empire it was later converted into a church and as we'll see that was no accident [Music] bigger happening than any of those problems on the Frontiers mad Emperors and rivalrous Legions the entire Roman belief system was being challenged and to understand that we have to go further back into Roman history to see how the relationship between the gods and the Roman state had traditionally worked this is a Roman Temple you wouldn't come here for services or to be preached at you wouldn't come to get married or to be part of a congregation the chances are it'll be locked up most of the Year anyway guarded by some grumpy custodian but if you did get inside one thing you certainly would have seen is a statue of the Gods that's the basic function of a Roman Temple to house the Divine image that's what temples were often called in Latin eye days houses temples were everywhere [Music] so why do they need so many well this one was put up to the gold Hercules in the middle of the second century BC almost certainly with the prophets of Roman Conquest in the east and that was a common pattern a general in the middle of battle would vow a temple to the God if that God would Grant him Victory and when the general returns to Rome successful he uses part of the spoils to finance the building in a way temples are public reminders of the God's support for the Roman State and they underline the Axiom that Rome can only be successful if it keeps the Gods on its side and gods is of course plural it might seem obvious but there were loads of them and to us the interaction between them and the Romans can look a bit contractual even mechanistic the Romans didn't believe in their gods they didn't have internal faith in our sense they simply took it for granted that the gods existed and would help them out so long as they fulfilled their side of the bargain by erecting temples or above all by sacrificing to them usually animals whether Bulls pigs or sheep and we can Glimpse how important that was in this one Splendid sculpture now a bit stranded in a Roman Backstreet [Music] here we've got a scene of sacrifice to the Gods on the lower panel there's a ball actually being slaughtered and above the emperor is pouring some kind of libation onto an altar you can find hundreds of scenes like this across the Roman Empire and the point they're making is that one of the functions of the emperor was to manage the relationship between humans and the gods religion and politics were bound up together [Music] foreign [Music] ly public a decidedly matter of fact side to all this but that doesn't mean the gods didn't also have a personal impact on the contrary they permeated the lives of the Romans it was a world full of gods this collection of miniature gods and goddesses takes us right into the world of personal religion these are private objects there are thousands of them across the Roman Empire in people's pockets on their mantle pieces at home in temples and in shrines they're kind of like everything from well fridge magnets to objects of devotion all rolled into one this was an incredibly complicated religious World we're not dealing here with 12 gods and goddesses sitting up on Mount Olympus each with their own job to do Venus the goddess of love Mars the God of War that's what I learned at school but it's very misleading this is much more a question of a whole range of different Divine Powers which control the world in different ways and help us make sense of it that might be questions of where did human life begin or much more practical things like will I get across the sea safely in that case you might have decided to turn to the god Neptune the god of the sea but equally you might have approached Minerva who had to do with the craft of seafaring or Hercules who protected Humanity in their struggles against adversity or you might equally have turned to Mercury The God Who helped you get places and helped you make a profit this was an extraordinarily flexible religious system in which people made their own religious choices and they created their own religious world [Music] religion was fundamental for the success of the Empire and the Romans made sure their gratitude was on full display but the growth of the Empire brought new and different gods into Rome just as the Romans Incorporated new citizens from new conquered territories they Incorporated Divine citizens too one of these new religions thought to originate in what is now Iran didn't have grand temples at least not above ground foreign this is a wonderfully preserved Temple of the God mithras on an absolutely standard pattern all across the Roman Empire they look a bit like this dark enclosed and it was almost as hidden away then as it is now it's actually all been done a bit on the cheap this marble floor looks impressive enough but it's obviously come for Roman skip and up here they've even made their little steps by cannibalizing some old inscription using whatever they could lay their hands on they created an underground religious World a cave which was thought to be an image for the cosmos itself this was a place where people came together to worship the worshipers would have reclined here um just as if they were dining and presumably whatever ritual went on went on in the middle to judge from the image of mithras himself usually shown killing a bull animal sacrifice was Central even if other details are pretty mysterious what we do know is that it was entirely men this was about the most blokest religion in the Roman Empire which is saying something it was also a religion of initiation you you went through a series of stages or grades of initiation and getting closer all the time to a vision of the Divine truth the best Clues to The Strange World of mythrust comes from the imagery Salvage from several of his temples you've got mithras himself plunging his dagger into the side of the sacrificial Bull and he's wearing a very distinctively shaped Persian hat signaling that he comes from the margins or outside of the Roman world and there's something I think about the exoticism of all this which must have been part of its attraction but exotic or not it's still fitted comfortably enough in the Roman world of polytheism real problems began when monotheistic religions came into contact with Rome the worship of just one God and the exclusion of all others who was something that went against basic Roman assumptions [Music] Judea was made a province of the empire in 6 A.D people here have their own way of life under distinctive relationship to one God so when the Romans took over with a very different set of assumptions a clash was almost inevitable a mixture of politics local infighting and religious conflict ended when the Romans destroyed the temple in Jerusalem and that triggered a six-year-long full-scale Jewish revolt foreign [Music] the end of that war came at a desert Outpost called Masada [Music] in this remote sport King Herod one of Rome's earlier allies or collaborators in Judea had built an extravagant Palace where he could dine and bathe in true Roman Style he would be disappointed to know that the place is now famous for much bloodier reasons final showdown between the Jews and the Romans happened hours away from Jerusalem here in the middle of a desert there was a breakaway group of about a thousand Jewish extremists they were terrorists in the eyes of some Jews as well as the Romans and they'd seized asada and they were holding out there years after the temple in Jerusalem had fallen [Music] the Jewish Rebels made this rock their base and eventually met their deaths when the Romans caught up with them to understand what happened next I'm meeting historian Greg Wolff in the ruins of the old Palace these forts look very impressive laid out as they are below but the time they were built Jerusalem had fallen the temple was destroyed there's no opposition anywhere else there's still a small group of people holding out here for years they're almost forgotten until a Roman Governor decides he really ought to sort it out and he sends the legions here and so this is what we see here it's a trace of a cleaning up operation make out with a Forts and The Siege wall are and there's a weak point in the cliffs a ramp was built for a battering ram and the Romans broke through the rebels defenses one Jewish Rebel turned traitor then Roman historian recorded what happened next although his version of events has long been disputed we have this extraordinary story told by a very very unreliable source who says that when the Romans got up here when they built their ramp their seizure and they came in what they found was no living person nearly a thousand people who've been up here had in some kind of mixture of suicide pacts and cell Slaughter had just gone and there was no there was nobody left it for piles of bodies and enough food to show they could have held out forever but if this is true who knows it it's become a powerful modern myth so it's up to the story of heroic self-sacrifice for the cause self-sacrifice and and no surrender and that's what Masada means now no surrender only a handful of bodies have ever been found here and who they were is unclear but the story of rebels who preferred suicide to enslavement lives on and Masada remains a symbol of Jewish resistance the conflict behind all this is often framed in religious terms but the truth is more complex [Music] you'd expect some kind of clash wouldn't you because you've got a culture in Judaism which insists that there's only one God dealing with a Roman Imperial power that insists there's lots of gods and that appears irreconcilable yes although there are things about what the Jews do that looks very familiar to a Roman eye they perform animal sacrifice they have a huge Temple at the center and perhaps most of all it's a religion grounded in one ritual landscape one sense of place it's a religion of somewhere which they can always manage that can't they they that you can have a religion pretty much this is weird to them as you can imagine so long as it sort of belongs to somebody so they're sort of happy with the Goddess Isis because she's the Egyptians God yes the Romans didn't expect those they conquered to abandon their own Gods part of the point of polytheism is that it can accept and incorporate new and different Divine powers but they did expect them to recognize the relationship between the Roman State and religion for the Jews it's much more difficult to accommodate the Romans because their own history by now is a history of being subjected to one Empire after another and being subjected to persecutions of different kinds and so it's much more difficult for the Jews to fit the Romans into the system rather than the room which fit the Jews into their system and that's where things broke down [Music] over the next 200 years there were more bloody chapters in the history of Jews and Romans but to see it from the Roman point of view what's just as remarkable is how far they managed to accommodate Judaism within the Empire they used taxation as a means of control Roman emperors received delegations and complaints from Jewish communities individual Jews progressed high up in the Roman Administration and in many ways Judea was a prosperous little Roman province but for one offshoot of Judaism and that's Christianity it was to be a very different story in the turmoil of conflict between Rome and Judea one Jewish rabbi had developed new ideas his name was Jesus sayings of Jesus as they were called were only written down later but it's clear enough that for the Jews he was preaching blasphemy and at the beginning at least for the Romans he was just another troublemaker however exactly the story went he was arrested put to trial and sentenced to death Roman Style by crucifixion Romans must have thought problem solved but it was only the start it was near here that Jesus came to be crucified probably on some charge of civil disobedience very hard to know exactly what was going on because the story has been Rewritten and reinterpreted and embroidered ever since but we can be fairly certain that the real Jesus was the leader of some small Jewish splinter group and that in the decades after his crucifixion he became he was almost reinvented as the founding symbol of a new religion which attracted followers more widely across the Empire they were to start with actually all that many of them and they believed a variety of different things that we wouldn't recognize now as Christian but at the core of it all there was a new ideology that was challenging from within the Empire itself old Roman certainties about how the world worked today Christian Pilgrims from all over the world flock to Jerusalem to visit the spot where Jesus was buried in the appropriately named Church of the Holy Sepulcher [Music] thank you [Music] although the court is the church is an understatement Under One Roof a bewildering array of Christian sects fight to be heard [Music] foreign [Music] s and curious tourists is by the shrine that surrounds Jesus's tomb this is the holiest site in Christendom [Music] the idea that Jesus rose from the dead would have been the least puzzling part of Christian teaching for most Romans there was a combination of far more radical ideas than that wasn't just that there was only one God those who followed Jesus could take no part in sacrifice and they were to prepare themselves for the kingdom of God which transcended the Earthly power of Rome which might be coming soon to that the very strange notion that poverty was a virtue not a misfortune and some pretty hard line views about sex and it's not difficult to see how some Romans might have been curious even attracted to Christian teaching many others would have been baffled or affronted by what must have seemed like an assault on their world order [Music] face of what Romans had traditionally thought religion was all about and that contradiction may be one reason why Christianity was initially slow to take off but when it did it exploited the very network of communications that linked the Roman Empire one of the key figures in spreading the word was a small time Roman salesman from Turkey better known as some Paul Jesus himself wasn't a big traveler but Paul not only got everywhere across the Eastern Mediterranean he also used the long-distance mail as a way of broadcasting to far-flung Christian communities and the letters he wrote are still part of the Bible Corinthians that's the letter he wrote to the Christian church at Corinth and he's writing to the people of Thessaloniki to the people at Ephesus the Ephesians and the Christian church in Rome that part pep talk part instruction and not all of it is entirely to my taste man is the head of woman he says it's never going to be my motto but what does strike me of the geographical Horizons that these letters display he talks about being in Macedonia and going to travel to Ephesus and then move on to Corinth it's the connectivity of the Roman Empire that these Christians are exploiting Christianity was born within the Roman Empire and the people who became its followers rode on its connectivity in Port Towns like Corinth and Thessaloniki you could find Goods work and a new spiritual guide the Empire's trade routes became Christianity's Broadcasting Service [Music] foreign 200 years after Jesus's crucifixion there were small groups calling themselves Christian across the Empire and in Rome itself though there were not many in total perhaps 200 000 out of an Empire of 50 million and there were very different shades of Christian too this is a tombstone that really parades its Christianity and the key word is this written in Greek it's excuse which means fish it's not just a fish because the letters of that word or also the first letters of a famous Christian slogan reading Jesus Christ the Son of God our savior now why they use that slogan absolutely clear they might have been wanting a bit of secrecy but if so excuse isn't a terribly clever disguise it's much more likely that this is an attempt to represent God and to wonder how God should be represented the thinking about encoding God in language and in visual symbol but there's more to this and there's more gods in this Tombstone up here these two letters DM stand for dismarnibus to the gods of The Departed Spirits the absolutely classic traditional pagan gods of the Dead so here we've got both Christianity and paganism on the same Stone and it's a wonderful encapsulation of just that blurry boundary between Christianity and paganism in the first Christian centuries [Music] thank you most Christians in the Roman Empire probably inhabited that blurry boundary but a few were much more hard line overachievers extremists you might almost call them who came into conflict with Roman authorities and went to their deaths for refusing to sacrifice to the traditional gods foreign day in 203 A.D a young Roman woman the mother of a small baby was thrown to the wild beasts in our Amphitheater not unlike this one haunted whipped and maimed by The Animals but not killed Gladiator came to finish her off after one painful Miss hit she calmly took his blade in her hands and guided it to her throat her name was Vivia perpetua her only crime was to be a Christian this was Romans attacking Romans [Music] we tend to assume that Romans loved the spectacle of Christians thrown to the lions in the amphitheater but it really wasn't quite that simple the amphi theater was a highly ordered microcosm of Roman society The Spectators sat in a rigid hierarchy according to their social place you couldn't just choose to Shell out for a good seat on the front row like you can now and the victims in the center the slaves and The Condemned criminals were by definition Outsiders they were never intended to be young Roman mothers like perpetua one of their own [Music] it's hardly surprising that her prosecutor tried to get her to think of her young baby and to recount her faith and it's hardly surprising that the crowd as they watched perpetua die both jeered and shuddered perpetuous story of Pious resistance and brutal execution has become part of the Christian Narrative of good against evil where many non-christians must have seen stubborn self-willed self-destruction Christians saw in martyrdom a powerful advertisement for their faith [Music] long after their moment in the arena stories of the killing the torture and the excruciating suffering were told and retold in meticulous and sometimes lurary detail bravery of the martyrs in the face of sadistic cruelty seemed to validate the faith for which they died and to offer other Christians an example they might glorify though not follow quite why the Roman authorities chose to send them to their death remains something of a puzzle that's largely because almost all the evidence we have comes from the Christian Romans themselves it's an extreme example of History being written by the winners [Music] we try to see it from the side of the Roman authorities the fact that the Christians refused to sacrifice threatened to disrupt the good relationship between the state and the Divine Powers which ensured the success of the Empire it was pure treachery [Music] in the middle of the third Century less than 50 years after perpetua's death one Emperor decided to bring things back into line and to restore order with a piece of paper these are scraps of Papyrus from ruined Waste Paper Basket in the province of Egypt and they're some of the most important things ever to have been found in a waste paper basket and it's also a wonderful example of Roman bureaucracies they are personal certificates proving that their owner has sacrificed to the traditional Gods the gist of the message is up here saying so and so has sacrificed it's been witnessed here and then one of the witnesses has signed his name was hermas and this guy's actually signed several of these certificates the reason why he's done that is because the empressus had ordered that everybody in the Empire should prove they'd sacrificed to the Gods this is often treated as a centralized persecution of the Christians because of course true Christians couldn't sacrifice to the traditional gods and we know in fact that some of them didn't and supposedly went to their deaths but even Christian writers tell us that many of them and this is I think where I would have been either sacrificed anyway or just kept their heads down what's going on in the emperor's mind is also rather different I think I'm sure he's not planning more bloody spectacles of Christians versus Lions what he's wanting to do is to ensure that every single one of his subjects signs up publicly to the institution of sacrifice which is the ritual that ensures that proper relationship between the Roman state and its gods and ensures Roman's success I mean in a way this is a clumsy and all the heavy-handed attempt to restore political and religious order to the Roman world [Music] his project didn't last long and neither did he decius wasn't dealing only with the Christians but between the invasion of the barbarians and internal Rivals his Reign only lasted two years and he ended up killed on the battlefield it would have been beyond the wildest dreams of perpetua and those who died like her that in less than a hundred years Rome would turn in exactly the opposite direction after a century of chaos one emperor made a pact with the very religion that looked as if it was undermining the empire his name was Constantine and eventually he became once more the sole Emperor and aligned his power with that to the soul God the Christian God that is these fragments are what's left of a colossal statue of the emperor Constantine can't all have been in Marble it could never have stood up if it was we have to imagine a brick and a bronze core and these bits sort of stuck on the end it's an entirely New Vision of Imperial power of course there have been colossal statues of Emperors before but just look at that face superhuman staring almost abstract this isn't an emperor who could conceivably be one of us this is an emperor we have to worship we probably have to kiss his feet Constantine is a striking mixture of the old and the new he comes to power in Civil War he celebrates a Triumph he acknowledges Divine assistance and he has a big building program in the city of Rome all that's very traditional what's new is that the god whose help he acknowledges is the Christian God and what he builds in the city is not temples but it's churches don't have a clue why Constantine became a Christian it might have been a sincere spiritual conversion it might have been a calculated decision to back what looked like The Winning Side the political logic of this whatever's going on inside Constantine's head is that the circle has been squared the universal Empire instead of fighting The Universal Church has done a deal with it from now on Empire and church are going to walk side by side one way of seeing this is as a revolution fundamental aspects of being a Roman have changed hierarchy Faith morality sex but in another way Constantine has reinvented the original model of Roman power around a new God foreign [Music] by building a new capital which eventually became the new Rome Constantine city was Constantinople we now know it as Istanbul [Music] here that he ordered his own versions of some of the major buildings of Rome a sight of Constantine's Hippodrome his circus Maximus has been preserved complete with a few of The Monuments that he and later Emperors placed along its Center Robin cormack my tour guide and husband knows more than me about the art and culture of the Eastern Empire [Music] I think this is the really impressive Monument they're really proud of it the amazing achievement is is to get that Obelisk from Luxor onto this stand and they were so proud of what they've done that they have two inscriptions saying how difficult it was and they have the pictures of the putting up of this you can see the ropes here to winch it up this is Roman technology as it as it ever was but why did Constantine choose to build his City here it only happened because he'd won his last battle against his rival Roman emperors and it's a victory City he looked around he chose a city near to where the battle was the city of Byzantium and he turned it into a massive powerful new city named after him Constantinople so it shows he is now the single Roman Emperor so did it feel like a specifically Christian city did it feel different no it looked like it looked like a Roman city with all the trappings and what he did do was bring lots of pagan statues here so that you've got those in the Hippodrome and elsewhere so much so that there's the the famous saying that this city was built up by denuding all the other cities of the Roman Empire we must have been a bit odd to see a an emperor who's sponsoring Christianity decorating his City with pagan gods great works of art that he's sucked in to decorate it from all the other bits of the Empire he's a powerful Emperor isn't he he's this is a display of power he made this a traditional Roman city with all the features that the biggest city he knew Rome had they didn't call themselves byzantines they called themselves Romans and they're absolutely convinced that they were the Roman Emperor in fact here in the East the Christian Roman Empire lasted right up to 1453 when the Ottomans conquered Byzantium in the west it was a different story Rome was still Rome but it was more a Showcase of architecture and culture than the capital of power but the northern Frontiers were more porous than ever Outsiders pushed in and even if it was now a hollow symbol the city of Rome was still a prize driven by the Huns various tribes like the Visigoths the ostrogoths and the vandals moved towards the Western Empire the legendary sack of Rome didn't happen once but three times Roman armies were defeated citizens were killed and the city itself was looted and pillaged the very words Barbarian and Vandal now conjure up a picture of wanton destruction of all that civilized but that popular image powerful as it is is quite unfair this is a wonderfully Vivid 19th century attempt the picture the Barbarian hordes in action destroying the city of Rome long hair funny Top Knots plaits and mustaches and a couple of them are trying to topple one of the symbols of Imperial power Knights are getting their torches ready to set the place Ablaze actually the world of the new West was nothing like this it's true the political Unity had collapsed and there was plenty of destructive military conflict but what emerged was a series of rival Powers who were in effect many roams who were trying to buy Into The Prestige of Rome and romanness rather than trying to buy out of it they sponsored poetry they developed traditions of Roman law and they were more likely to be restoring The Monuments of the Roman past not trying to pull them down the empire in a political sense had gone but the cultural hegemony of Rome remained even in the West these people were not Romans but they were imitating Rome much like many modern empires have done ever since was these barbarians imitating the Romans so closely can we really call it the fall of the Roman Empire how do you decide how or when an Empire starts or ends what counts is it territorial control is it law or culture is it the Roman brand there has been an enormous transformation and in many ways this is no longer the Empire that looked back to Romulus with his definition of what it meant to be a Roman transformation a revolution almost that I see clearly here in what was once Rome's mini capital of Trier in Germany in the grand Imperial throne room that later became a church foreign [Music] I come to is that the real heir of the Roman Empire was Christendom not an Empire of political domination or not only that but an Empire of the Mind and in its own Ambitions at least still an Empire without limit foreign [Music] s of Romulus and Remus to the political and Military systems that enabled expansion it's the image of Rome that For Better or Worse has acted as a benchmark for so many later Empires Britain Russia America even Nazi Germany have all tried to recreate what they saw as the glory of ancient Rome and they haven't avoided some of the same problems dilemmas and conflicts of Imperial rule today in the west we still wonder where our boundaries lie and what limits should be placed on inclusion the Romans ambivalence too questioning whether the ends ever justify the means the tears alongside the victory parades foreign [Music] years ago the Roman historian tacitus offered one image of the Fallout Roman Conquest they make a desert he wrote and they call it peace I first read that when I was a bit of an awkward teenager and I still remember the moment because it was the first time that the Romans actually seemed to speak to me it was a brutal Clarity of it that we're so striking and I guess that ever since however much I've admired the Romans however much I've been repelled by them they've always held my attention for me it's the conversation that we can still have with the Romans that's so important the conversation that makes us think harder about ourselves and about the ideas and problems that we have in common with them it's a little bit of the Romans in the head of every one of us that's why Rome still matters

Channel: All Out History - Premium History Documentaries

Views: 533,670

Keywords: mary beard, mary beard documentary, mary beard rome, all out history, All Out History, History Documentary, Ancient Rome, Rome, Roman Empire, Gladiator, Pompeii, ancient civilizations

Id: Wb_aruwUan8

Length: 232min 39sec (13959 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 02 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/Mananimalism]

Cool! Watching now!!!!

[u/Reddituser12334789]

Amazing! Will be watching soon..

[u/Individual-Hunt9547]

I love this series. Mary Beard is awesome. She translates on the spot and is incredibly knowledgeable.