How Advanced Was Life In Pompeii | Pompeii with Mary Beard | Absolute History

in 79 ad this volcano exploded down below run the Bay of Naples there were farms houses luxurious villas Roman towns the best-known is Pompeii the eruption which wiped this ancient town off the Roman map is one of the world's most famous disasters but the tragedy has given historians a priceless legacy the inhabitants were overwhelmed by gas lethal gas volcanic debris and we found their bodies exactly where they died many have been cast in plaster frozen in time they've tantalized the world with their last horrific moments of death but they tell us little about their lives now in a cellar just two miles outside Pompeii of 54 well preserved skeletons lying exactly where they died they were hiding from the full force of the volcano 2,000 years later they're about to give up their secrets I'm wondering whether they can tell us something about the most interesting question in Pompeii which is not how the people died we know how they died it's about how the people in Pompeii actually lived for the 25 years I've taught classics at Cambridge I've been fascinated by what life was really like day to day in ancient Pompeii I'm hoping these skeletons will help take this understanding one step further and put my theories to the test I'll explore the opulent and the ordinary don't have to be rich to wear jewelry in a city of the refined and the rude it looks to me as if the woman is on top of him but subtly stones I'll see the hardship in dude and the pleasures savored these guys don't look too pissed yet I can't find where I left my gloss I want to see if we can probe a bit deeper and get beneath the skin of this ancient tongue you don't get closer to real Rome than being in a cesspit do you I'm hoping that the people in the cellar will help me discover what life was like before Vesuvius forced them to flee [Music] Pompeii is the most important archaeological site in the Roman world nowhere else to be come face to face with antiquity up close you've quite this personal way these perfectly preserved ruins bring millions of us here each year to see a snapshot of Roman life but that's all we see a snapshot of a society where it appears the rich enjoyed a life of luxury and everyone else the pool and the slaves lived lives of drudgery that's always seemed too simple to me it's much more interesting than that I want to bust a few myths about the rich and the poor in Pompeii this was the stretch of coastline where rich Romans are I mean really really rich Romans from the capital used to come for their holidays it was supposed to be particularly popular with the fast set they came here to gamble to have fun to have sex sort of a cross between Las Vegas and Brighton and that's what makes Pompeii so remarkable it was a turn where ordinary people live cheek-by-jowl with the hedonistic rich it had all the essentials of a Roman town with a forum at one end and at the other an amphitheater and training ground for gladiators a market temples births even a brothel perhaps 12,000 people packed into less than a square mile [Music] Pompeii lies between the Mediterranean and Vesuvius it's 17 miles along the coast from Naples not far from Herculaneum and it's in a suburb of Pompeii a plantus where the cellar of skeletons was unearthed [Music] it must have seemed a sensible place to come it's partly underground and that would have seemed safe but it's got good access from the road outside it's very hard not to be moved by this site I mean they may be 2,000 years old but they're still victims of a terrible human tragedy on the other hand I can't help wondering what these bones might tell us about the life of these people the first thing we can tell from the cellar is that these people appear to be divided into two groups on one side they were carrying money and jewels these bodies have been cataloged and tidied away into boxes the others left where they fell were found with nothing so how can we explain this divided you could come up with all kinds of theories as to why it might be but for my money the most likely thing is that we're dealing with a distinction in wealth [Music] these skeletons are important because many of the bones found at Pompeii have simply been jumbled up and the plaster casts they're very poignant but they're much less useful for forensic science because the bones inside get contaminated remains preserved like those in the cellar exactly where the people died are rare for the first time these are going to be analyzed by a forensic team led by Fabian cans so far we have found at least 54 individuals here at least and this gives us a broad cross-section of the Society of the Roman at that time the point is we have a great opportunity here because we have a snapshot of the society we might have slaves might have upper-class people and we can find out if there were have been big differences one of the most complete skeletons is a man aged about 55 apart from some dental cavities he seemed in pretty good Nick if we look at the other bones well I noticed this you know I don't know much about skeletons but that looks to me like something that's got a real big muscle attachment yeah yeah it's the right up arm and it's a muscle attachment for the brachialis and as you can see on the left side it's nearly the same and he must be a really strong man he's my age he's got about as good teeth as me but he's much stronger these are the rest of his bones but why are his bones Green yeah you were right on the whole left side he scream and greens come from metal objects which means he was wealthy there was some bronze or copper or brass object buried with him he had considerable amount of metal wealth with him yeah and the acid in the soil is reacting with the metal objects and that's mixing green nearly all of the so-called rich Sam have been at least one or two bones green so they've all been buried close to something metal whereas what we're calling the poor do any of them have this point no not at all carrying no positions at all the bones of the people on one side are unmarked but on the other side of the cellar the people with green bones were discovered with a dazzling array of objects these are now kept in a guarded vault at the Archaeological Museum in Naples for the very first time I've been allowed to get really close to this amazing stuff and actually get my hands on it no this is really exciting for me is the first time I've ever touched any jewellery from Pompeii and I can be very naughty and I get to put the bracelet on and however cynical you are have a but too boring on academic you are it's still exciting to wear the bracelet worn 2,000 years ago and nothing will never stop making kidnapped Society we think this is very attractive actually pick it up you can feel instantly it's heavy this is a solid bangle but what strikes you about it instantly is it so big it's not only women that wear bracelets this could be man's jewelry as a big honking man this really is a very very delicate piece of jewelry they told me very especially that I'm not allowed to try this one on the the links are really tiny it's very high quality workmanship very nicely done it must have been it would be very pricey now it must have been pricey then too there was a vast treasure hoard in the cellar close to the skeleton of the man with green bones was a woman in her early twenties she had with her one of the very very biggest amounts of money found with any body anywhere in Pompeii in Roman currency it was 10,000 sesterces what that means is it's about the equivalent of 10 years pay for a legionary Roman soldier and these are some of the coins somewhere in silver but a lot were in gold and she had them with her in two separate containers instantly you can see that the silver ones are very worn these have actually have been money in circulation these are actually buying things in the pumper marketplace but the gold ones are an absolutely beautiful condition so I think what that tells us is these really helping somebody's savings I think you can imagine very easily what must have happened that the people were fleeing they wanted to take their valuables with them they get the purse they stuff what's most important to them this thing these things they stuff it inside the purse put it in a pocket and off they go this is what the people in the cellar chose to take with them as they tried to escape they sought refuge from the eruption in what was probably an underground storeroom they never made it further than this cellar in our plantus the building above the cellar appears at first like a two-story residential home but if you explore a little further you see that much more what's going on there's a large building with two floors of storerooms piles of big containers and wheel ruts made by hundreds of carts this was clearly more than somebody's house this is agricultural Depot its ghostly now in Roman times it must have been absolutely of activity with people packing things up carting things wheeling them off getting them ready for dispatch whoever owned this place must have been pretty wealthy but he wasn't anything like as wealthy as one of his neighbors because just over there few yards from this place is one of the most luxurious villas ever found in all of the Roman world the seller is only a stone's throw from this stunning Roman mansion a hundred rooms decorated with sumptuous frescoes painted with pigments from the farthest corners of the Roman Empire and to top it all an olympic-sized 200 foot long swimming pool where the guests could let their hair down so all the rich frolicked at their pool parties what was life like on the streets of Pompeii [Music] Mattia Wanda knows family has lived in Pompeii for generations and he's one of the site's most experienced guides he's got a local sense of how this place might once have been what's your sense of what the ancient town was like the basics what was life like here it's Mel its main lot of people mainly over the activity of commerce authority that was here it's mainly own everywhere smelling all morning and the smell of the animals - presumably yes and just think of the smell of a [ __ ] yes awful for them was normally life to get an idea of Pompeii as the people in the cellar would have seen it I've come to Naples there it's a modern city there are some striking similarities with the ancient town nearby so you're good to feel yourself in Pompeii here yes no worse with the atmosphere the first floor and the BC town it's easy to forget that Pompeii was a 2-story town people lived above their shops and bars and stairs opened right onto the streets just as they do in Naples today I think we will often wonder where all the stuff was in a Pompeii and shop or a bar I think what this this tells you is that it you can haggle off milk you can actually hang it from the ceiling like they did 2,000 years ago as this painting shows us all around modern Naples are echoes of Pompey's past from the doors just like the ones you see in Pompeii and frescoes there are things like this in Pompeii yes yes they had that they had careful because we don't want the over taco we can get that to the images they left on their walls I think the graffiti is pretty compain the Pompeian graffiti a little better than me there Whittier which me I think now that's very pop pain isn't it oh poor people so what's clean under what Bay was cleaner than that do anything so oh yes every bus here you don't do you so we can find all kinds of clues as to how ancient Pompeii ins lived in modern Naples but what can the bones from the cellar add to the picture of their lives this looks quite ordinary to me this this is a leg bone this is the lower part of the leg bone and if you compare it to this stone it's small and you can see all these little holes and what is that is the infection of the skin and the bone a possible reason for this might be a cut this one one explanation for it so you get a cut you haven't got antiseptic yeah you maybe don't even know exactly what the relationship is between dirt and infection no and so the cut never properly heals and is a kind of lifetime infection really yeah painful or not passable very painful very painful so where could this infection have come from after all we tend to think of Romans as a rather clean lot regularly visiting the baths it's true that bathing was an important part of life as we can see at the baths near the forum in Pompeii they give us a better picture than anywhere else in the world of how Roman bathing actually worked this is where you took your clothes off I think must have been quite stunning to come in from the hot sweaty outside through the narrow corridor into this beautifully decorated room I think you have to imagine the baths as being a place where someone whose life could be a bit drab could come to bright colours twinkling lights water splashing everybody wear their clothes off the bars for the people's palace bathing was a great leveler almost everyone in ancient Rome rich and poor men and women would have gone to the baths including the people from our cellar these feats of engineering and underfloor heating a series of hot and cold rooms and in Rome itself they could even have a library attached you get all sorts of things that have come into a Roman bath you get hot and cool and you get rest but I think it's also crucial to remember you get wonderful things to look at too and the ceiling still has some traces of the kinds of over-the-top decoration that you expect in a really good Roman bath and everybody shares those things we tend to think of these luxurious baths as pristine marble palaces where people came to get clean but is that really the case here it's where I guess you just spent your time and this lovely marble pool it's a bit like a jacuzzi I think think California or perhaps think Rugby Club sit down the warm waters around your feet this is a great time to relax to talk to your friends in this lovely setting there is however a nasty surprise in store we can see ever so clearly where the water comes into this pool there's a nice little spout here bringing the water in but you can look all around and there isn't a single place where it can go out what this means is there is absolutely no circulation of water at all in this pool all the people who piss in here their sweat it all comes into a steaming hot watery mass just how healthy is that it's not at all healthy even some Roman doctors realized it wasn't healthy it's a great Roman doctor called calluses who says make sure you don't go to the bars if you've got an open wound cuz you're likely to die of gangrene if you do with other people in the cellar made that connection we don't know but the bones offer an extraordinary revelation about another area of the populations health so these are two different people there are two different people 10 to 12 year old children's they're both the same age and they have both the same abnormalities on their teeth we think most probably they have been twins so it made same chief yeah and they have a problem on closer examination of the twins teeth fabulous colleague ma che Henneberg discovered evidence of a horrible and unexpected disease they must have a massive illness illnesses and one possible explanation for it this is congenital syphilis is not I'm not joking but I thought syphilis didn't come to Europe and kill much later than this I mean yep so if this were the case yeah this would be our first Roman case of congenital syphilis yes of course well that'd be something to find in this cellar didn't it if this is true it would overturn the idea that the disease first arrived in Europe with Columbus's sailors this would be the first recorded case of syphilis by more than 1,400 years but the twins nurse seller also tell us about another aspect of ancient Roman life this must have been really bad in serious illness somebody had to took care of them very a lot of care a lot of health care a lot of effort to that they may made it what strikes me is that they were found in the so-called poor sample but still must have received years of medical care I mean it is interesting because it's going from a really nice scientific observation just to a glimpse of a family support network parents looking after them yeah the very base of their survival is about human care yeah the possibility of a sexually transmitted disease might at first sight reinforce of you many people have of ancient Rome as a society of debauchery and sexual excess there's Willie's big Willie's everywhere when one object was first found in a Pompeii and bar it was deemed too shocking to be put on public display it's a bronze lamp and all kinds of things dangle off it bells and stuff the kind of wind chimes for us the Romans would have called it a tintinnabulation of attention must have been this chap here a bronze hunchback pygmy with a huge willy which he is in the process of cutting off I like to think that this shows greater anxiety on the part of the Romans about their masculinity but who knows maybe it's a strange form of erotica maybe it's a joke on the guys who came to drink in the bar or is it in the end just a lamp whatever its function you only need to stroll around town to see the same phallic theme again and okay what do they mean what were they for everybody's had a theory and I've been some pretty mad ones do they for example point to the nearest brothel well I'm afraid not a hope if this were the case Pompeii would be littered with brothels some people think it is but I'm not so sure if you look carefully at this upmarket bathhouse you see that displays of sex can be interpreted differently the painting on the room you come into features all kinds of sexual positions from back from the front with the tongue you name it it's here not just that each one is given a number this has launched the theory that this bath establishment is not just a birth establishment but has perhaps on the upper floor a brothel attached it's a kind of massage parlor with fringe activities I'm afraid the truth about these paintings is a bit more mundane and what we've really come in to is the changing room you can see along the walls the place where the shelf to hold your clothes would have been put what these paintings are I think are not adverts for the sex that might be going on upstairs please could I have three hours of number four I think they are a clever way of helping you remember where you left your tunic or your toga on in fact if you look rather carefully at what the numbers are written on they're written on kind of wicker baskets which i think is what we imagine would be on the shelf below where you left your belongings so the idea would be hmm I left my toga near the philario it's a kind of joke but if you head across town there is one building where there is no debate about its intended function as far as I'm concerned this is the town's one and only known brothel now this is where you can see that the whole wall is covered with the graffiti of the customers they're interesting multicultural Bunch as a couple in Greek they're very hard to read Latin handwriting is absolutely dreadful but this one here is clear and pretty typical I came along here and I had a good [ __ ] which is about as clear as you can get it's pretty gloomy place and I think my heart goes out to the prostitutes you have to work here obviously the sex here still sells 2,000 years later because this is the most popular visitor attraction on the entire site this place is always packed with people because we still have a glamorous view about Roman sex and Roman brothels we also get told a lot of rubbish about it if you listen to what the tour guides are saying they look at these paintings up above the cubicles and they say oh what these are they're the menu at the brothel you know you might not be able to speak Latin very well you could always ask like in a bar or yeah can I have some of that one above that door it's rubbish doesn't add up to me I think they are fantasy images about sex this place is bad enough it's dark it's dingy the girls are working in prison cells effectively you don't have to make it worse by pretending with it you what came and chose sex like you choose a hamburger between the frescoes the fallacies and the brothel you can see how he ended up with the image of Pompeii as a society obsessed with sex but we need to think again about this ancient myth my idea is pretty simple honestly I don't really think that the Romans are any more interested in sex than we are I think it's much more to do with male power it's to say this is a very masculine culture Roman power is about male power the phallus tells you that Roman power is built on its masculinity we've been too keen to see sex in every corner of Pompeii and that may go for another image of Roman life - we picture the rich gorging themselves in gluttonous feasts while the poor and the slaves who serve them go hungry I wonder if the skeletons in the cellar can give us a different view on that - Fabian is there anything that you've been able to discover so far which won't tell us about the diet of these people from what we can see with the naked eye we didn't find any signs of malnutrition or lack of minerals there is no significant difference between the two groups so everybody here was getting enough of what they needed to keep alive and pretty healthy yeah this is remarkable we might expect to see big differences between the rich and the poor the poor perhaps smaller and showing signs of nutritional deficiency but not here so can we find out more about what these people had actually been eating Fabian I noticed when I was looking at some of the teeth that they do seem very worn they're much more worn down the modern teeth because mainly the process of mining the grain is completely different and in this time there was a lot of stones in the flour so so when are compaigns eat they're nice pompeii and bread they're also eating bits of the mill stone as well yeah and it abrades a tear [Music] bread was such a staple food that in Pompeii alone there are 30 bakeries one of the biggest is on the town's high street and it gives us a vivid picture of how Pompeii ins baked their daily bread one thing that we can be certain about all the people who ended up in our cellar rich and poor alike is that they have eaten bread from the same sort of bakery maybe even the same bakery now this is a really typical baking establishment of Pompeii I'm standing now in the area where the corn was ground mules would have driven these rotating mills the main entrance to the bakery from the street was there and this is where the dough was prepared probably by slaves flour was brought from this area round to here they formed it into loaves as yet unbaked they cut those loaves on this shelf here and they washed through to be picked up and put in the oven here [Music] and we know exactly what it looked like a painting from Pompeii shows us round loaves of bread divided into eight portions in fact 81 carbonized loathes cooked and ready to be sold have been found perfectly preserved in one of the town's many ovens and that's not all archaeologists have found pomegranates walnuts even eggs preserved for 2,000 years and now an extraordinary piece of new research means we can prove that it wasn't just rich Romans who act well in Herculaneum nine miles from Atlantis historian Andrew Wallace had role is leading the excavation project Herculaneum was buried under more than 50 feet of volcanic debris during the eruption of 79 above this street was an apartment block inhabited not by Rome super-rich but by the ordinary people of the town what went into their mouths came out 15 feet below let's come down here Mary it's not quite so scary as it looks down here the evidence of Roman diet has been perfectly preserved for two millennia to be disappearing into the bowels of the earth we're getting to the bit where you can see some very good down pipes here this whole sewer is fed from above the stuff coming down smears down the wall generations of stuff leaves a trail and it's still brown you can see very clearly how brown it is it just leaves this trail of [ __ ] it feels real I mean you don't get closer to real Rome you've got a layer of [ __ ] on the floor yep material covering it exactly finally sealing the stuff on the floor so you take out the volcanic material and get to the [ __ ] that's up to our knees roughly well it's really really precious material in archaeological terms this is gold it's precious because it literally was what had gone through these Roman down here was the story of Roman Dyer just waiting to be found this is the world's largest archeological excavation of sewers over 700 bags of human waste were collected from the sewer floor and are being systematically analyzed to tell us more about what Romans were eating in terms of diet the amazing thing about the contents down here is the variety you've got bones of all sorts a lot of fish bones we're right by the sea they had a high fish diet but also chicken and eggs but walnuts good variety of nuts so you could have a complete mixture between local stuff and imported stuff which is so difficult to the Roman Empire is it illegal to live well on the healthy on this what's important is to try and fix who the people were that we're living above this is greater than sending their cess yeah intervene yeah there are series of shops immediately above us so some of them are shopkeepers definitely and then above them are two more floors of flats and it's terribly tempting to think because they're flats these must be absolutely dirt poor then either dirt poor nor stinking rich and this is a really hard thing but you know people often think of the Roman world as being there these really posh people at the top and then everyone else is brown down and miserable yeah no sorry it's much more complicated than that there are these are not really posh people they aren't rich enough to live a life of luxury they're ordinary ordinary the excavation in the sewers supports what we found in the cellar that rich and poor shared the same basic healthy diet but let's not kid ourselves the rich took every chance to show off their wealth and where you ate with one way to do that this is a top-of-the-range Roman dining room we might imagine that some of the richest of the skeletons in our cellar even a zillion don't something like this might once or twice have eaten somewhere like this is built around the idea of running trickling trickling water water would rush down from that little niche at the back it would then feed in to this pool here it would feed out over the marble and it will end up in another pool with a fountain overlooking a garden beyond the other thing well I think is quite interesting is it reveals very sharply how dependent the rich would be for their display eating on slaves I've got to get up there to recline how do you do it and how would you do it in a toga the answer must be that you were helped by your slaves that's a very nice day-to-day indication of how the Roman elite relied on the servant class let me try and get up it's not easy whoops now I suppose but what I do is recline like this but I hope to goodness they had some cushions because it really isn't very comfortable a little bit far from where my wine might be in here certainly seems to me that this is ostentatious dining coming at the price of comfort so unlike today when having money means you can eat out if you are rich in Pompeii you are dining at home surrounded by opulence but what about ordinary Pompeii and see weren't living in luxury where were they eating fast-food joints are one of the commonest features of the Pompeian street scene there's over a hundred and fifty of them in the city there's 20 of them in this section of Street alone there's so many of them that they can't possibly have been for the rich alone they probably weren't for the rich at all they were the people who didn't have places to eat at home they were the people coming in from the countryside all the people coming in from the port who wanted to get a bite to eat you've got two choices if you're a customer at this bar either you come to the street or to the counter see what they've got on offering the dishes here choose what you want take it away fast food but if you've got more time and I guess if you've got more money because probably like modern Naples you got charged more if you want to sit down is he going to the back room when you spend time eating and drinking at a table I imagine it was pretty crowded perhaps six or eight tables with people sitting around and when you got down on the tables when he was sitting on the chairs at your eye level with his lovely old scenes of life in the bar from the storerooms of the Naples Museum a fresco found in Pompeii has been specially brought out for me to see God's in Atlanta it once decorated the walls of another bar and gives us an idea of a typical Pompeii and night out there very clever actually because it's not just paintings but the paintings have got the ancient equivalent of speech bubbles attached to them so the little dialogue a little story develops the story is not entirely unfamiliar after a good few drinks two men get into an argument about a game of dice the upshot of this we see in the sadly bash up last scene but happily the writing still survives one's saying you scumbag I won and the other is saying quite literally no you didn't you [ __ ] and just at the right hand corner it must be the landlord because his speech bubble is saying look chaps if you want to fight get outside I think it's nice actually ending this little series of scenes with the landlord because it reminds us that bars are not just places where people go in get drunk and gamble and flirt they're actually somebody's business so we're rich and poor were eating and drinking was worlds apart but what they it was for the most part very similar everybody shared the benefit of food grown in this marvelously fertile region and sourced from the plentiful Mediterranean which in those days was right on their doorstep it's easy to forget that in Roman times Pompey was absolutely of the seashore it's only the seismic activity that means that it's now Finland Pompeii itself had a port and there were other little harbours up and down this coastline goods came in from abroad and goods went out from this rich agricultural land it might have looked like a small provincial Italian town by the sea but there's plenty of evidence some of it from the skeletons in the cellar of just how far Pompey's international connections stretched what we've got here is gorgeous gorgeous necklace it was found near one of the skeletons they're likely candidate is that it was with a middle-aged woman and it is stunningly modern in its feel um it's got a narrow neck it's going to go round there's no way I think you might just go round me that is too big to be braced in it so it must have been a choker going I think a tighter on somebody's neck one of the puzzles about these things always is where exactly the the raw material for them comes from emeralds are found naturally near Pompeii the likelihood is that they come from Egypt these roughly shaped emeralds belonging to one of the skeletons aren't the only evidence we have of Rome's 2-way global traffic this is one of the most extraordinary objects ever found in Pompeii what it is is an ivory statuette and you only have to look at it to see this looks Indian and it is Indian that's where it comes from so it absolutely brings it home to you in an instant that Pompey and the Pompeian inhabitants know about what happens in the outside world or they have an awareness of Egypt and Africa and Asia and all the other places around the Mediterranean in a way that's quite different from what one imagines the the global view of an English village might be in the 18th or 19th century so Pompeii was a small town with a world view but how far do our skeletons in the cellar reflect that we know that Pompeii is in some ways a surprisingly multicultural little place there are foreign objects here foreign imports it's got a port it's looking towards the outside world what's always been much trickier to pin down is just how far the population it was multicultural have we got any evidence from these skeletons about the makeup of Pompeii in society I mean really the ethnic or racial makeup we found two skeletons we are we're quite sure that they are of African ancestry this is from the so-called rich group and there's another one it's a female lying on her belly there and she's of African origin tell me how you know it's of African origin is just the shape of the face I mean are you talking sub-saharan African not-not-not yeah like black Africans look what you're seeming to suggest and I think that's a really important point is that there are people living here who have an origin really on the other side of the Roman Empire yeah that's not the only thing interesting about the African skeleton his skull is green stained by metal objects and he's in the group found with treasure it's possible he was the slave of someone rich but he might also have been rich himself we can't assume all Africans were slaves brutal and degrading as Roman slavery certainly could be it wasn't as straightforward as that in one ancient cemetery outside Pompeii is a tomb that paints a much more complex picture of slavery what you've got here is a tomb to hold the ashes of three people and they tell you who they are there's a man called Publius felonious who is an ex-slave who tells you he's an x-ray there's a woman called with Sonya who had actually owned him and then freed him and my guess is they probably then got married and he's also putting it up for the guy on the right a friend of his the first text says the soleus put this up for this trio but the text underneath tells the sequel which isn't so happy stop and read this he says because that guy on the right who I thought was my friend turned out to be false in fact says the soleus he took me to court we quarreled and he took me to court but luckily my innocence and the gods above saved me he was a complete bastard we don't know why this man didn't just remove his ex-friends statue that's what I would have done but luckily he didn't this monument tells a fascinating story here was an ex-slave rich enough to put up this big tomb for three and then to go to court to settle the dispute with his former friend the point about Roman slavery is that it isn't always a lifetime sentence slaves get freedom them and they sometimes go on to do very well in fact my guess is the majority probably of the Pompeian population certainly some of the people in our cellar would have had slaves somewhere in their ancestry it's been calculated that more than half the population of Herculaneum were descended from slaves and slaves certainly sometimes did what we think of as high status jobs there's evidence for that in a very surprising place yeah you have the bog there's probably one seat here and then yes you can come and sit by me yep you see what's brilliant about this is that the last person to use this loo before the eruption happened has left his name it starts with an A here that's right it's what it's saying is it's his name it's Apollinaris yes made tea makers yes Apollinaris the doctor of the emperor titus then you can't read this any longer because it's got two phases but whatever it said he may make a carpet had a good [ __ ] here this name Apollinaris we can't be certain but it's very likely a slave name so the empress doctor is a slave no we tend to think the slave jobs as being very Drudge manual labour and someone certainly were but slaves also did high in our terms high status professional jobs like being doctors so that's another reason why slavery but it's more compliment all so to be a slave of the Emperor is to be really someone quite important in some ways it's better to be a slave of an emperor than an ordinary Freeborn person with a tiny little shop in in Herculaneum are either be the Emperor Titus's slave doctor a seller on the way up this guy yeah so slavery was a fact of life in Pompeii almost certainly some of the people in our cellar were slaves they died right next to their masters as they would have lived at the house of the Baker on the main street of Pompeii we find a nice illustration of that closeness in a painting on the dining room wall these guys don't look too pissed yet although I think we can imagine what might happen next but the giveaway scene is in the background well that lady is clearly about to keel over and she's been propped up by the slave behind her I imagine slaves came in pretty handy for this kind of job but it wasn't just slaves and masters living on top of each other here in the Baker's house right next to the smart dining room there's a stable and in the stable the bones of the animals the ones that used to turn the mills which ground the grain and no doubt delivered the bread around town to here we got the finest room in the Baker's residential quarters right up next to where the Mules lived and just a few yards away is the back end of a really rich house in Pompeii that was being given a complete makeover at the time of the eruption so the rich are living right next door right up against the working bakery the Baker has his Porsche strewn right next door to his animals that's how Pompeians lived cheek-by-jowl and that's how we find the people in the cellar rich and poor male and female old and young lying close to each other in death just as they would have been in life but in 79 ad that life came to an end neither they nor the others in this town had any idea that they lived in the shadow of the volcano the last major eruption had been 1,500 years before nothing could prepare the population for what happened when Vesuvius exploded the people in the cellar had just one choice to try and escape or stay and find shelter from out at sea you get a very good impression of how Vesuvius really lowers over the whole area but also you get this slightly uncomfortable sense of how very close the volcano is makes you realize how difficult it would have been to escape from it especially if you left it a little bit too late while friends and neighbors fled we know that our 54 people looked for cover and many took their most precious belongings with them [Music] why most of them stayed put we can only guess but in one case there's a strong clue I've been tell me about the remains of this person that you've got laid out here this is maybe one of the most dramatic and tragic persons we found in this in the whole sample because these are the bones of a young female and we found with the skeleton this small bone the pelvic bone of a fetus and she must have been pregnant right if you measure it you can determine it was in the last month of pregnancy and it was yeah it's quite dramatic the thought of being eight-and-a-half months pregnant and trying to flee for your life from the erupting volcano it's something just dreadful [Music] amazingly an eyewitness account of the eruption survives it describes how on that fateful day you could hear the shrieks of women the squalling of infants and the shouting of men some calling out for their parents others for their children or their wives it was so dark they could only recognize them by their voices many pleaded for the help of the gods but more thought that the gods have disappeared and that the world had been plunged into eternal darkness [Music] it must have been pitch black when the volcanic debris started to fall and our people try to escape several and certainly have brought lamps with them this one it's quite nice because the center just where the oil goes in got a lovely picture here of the goddess of Rome herself she's sadly broken in half but she's quite recognizable with her helmet on the people in the cellar were sheltering there as the eruption intensified outside plunging them further into darkness [Music] heaven knows how you could have found your way through the streets at night using just one of these it makes me realize how vulnerable the people in this cellar must have felt they fled through the darkness all trace of the Sun has been obliterated by the volcanic debris they've come in here they're huddled together for shelter and support and the only protection against the dark they've got it's half a dozen little lamps like this of course in the end these people couldn't protect themselves from the same fate as the others in Pompeii but the Romans in the cellar didn't just leave us with evidence of their tragic death but of the lives they lived - it may have been a male-dominated world where the rich dined in luxury and exploited the poor but Pompeii was also a place where slaves could earn their freedom where women could own wealth and the ordinary Rome could eat and drink well it was a place where even the poorest knew something of the world outside [Music] the people who died in this cellar helped us to understand the Roman society wasn't quite as black-and-white as we often imagined it to be sure these people would have had vastly different lifestyles but they lived cheek by jowl and they shared a lot too the smells the dark and the dirt not to mention the wine the sex the food and the fun and in the end of course they shared the same fate in the same cellar 2,000 years ago [Music]

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 845,346

Rating: 4.8442831 out of 5

Keywords: absolute history, pompeii mary beard, pompeii documentary mary beard, pompeii mary beard bbc, pompeii documentary bbc, pompeii documentary, history history documentary funny history fun history school, timeline, mary beard, documentary movies - topic, bbc documentary, full documentary, history documentary, ancient rome, ancient greece documentary, Ancient egypt documentary, Ramadan, Tarawi, Taraweeh, Iftar, Mubarak, Kareem

Id: LSw7eoBbM0U

Length: 58min 42sec (3522 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 06 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/hookuptruck]

That was really good! Thanks

[u/sloppyballerina]

That was great! I wish my professors were that interesting.

[u/ruddyirishhamface]

Tl;dw: covered in ash