What Was The Life Of A Roman Citizen Like? | Meet The Romans | Odyssey

[Music] today when we think of ancient rome this is what we see a city of marble ruins colossal amphitheaters and imperial power a world of emperors and armies and lavish spectacle all those gladiators fighting to their death but what happens if we turn that upside down we take a look at rome from the bottom up hidden away all over the modern city you can still find evidence for a very different ancient rome the forgotten voices of its bakers and butchers it's slaves and children gosh this is a sad one he lived for just one year fix it the death of a baby here we've got a young slave girl aged 17 africana she came from africa this wasn't just a mugging this was mass murder in this series i've been exploring the lives of these ordinary romans through the extraordinary stories they tell us on their tombstones we've already seen how the empire turned rome into the world's first global city a place where a million people from three continents lived together where life was full of luxury and laughter but also disease and danger in this final film i want to delve even deeper and go behind the closed doors of the roman home to lift the lid on their personal lives and prized possessions it's a really really precious piece because it's the only cradle to survive from the roman world and take you to meet some extraordinary ordinary romans who reveal an intimate a times dark but very surprising picture of the roman family step through the front door into a roman home and you'll find a place brimming with stories from the shocking to the sweet loving couples that's for sure but also teenage pregnancies abandoned babies drunken housewives runaway slaves maynard artois and a very nasty case of domestic violence welcome to my room [Music] this house in pompeii is the perfect example of a conventional roman home you come through the front door into a grand formal hall with several rooms off it pool for collecting water opposite the front door a reception room comes study called in latin the tablinum the standard view is that this is where the master of the house presided dressed in his toga receiving his guests while at the back of the house in the private quarters is where we find the wife and kids and the cook slaving away over a hot oven the problem with that is there's a touch of the frankie howard mr mrs pompeii about it or to put it another way it's temptation for us to take a rather idealizing image of our own families dress them up in togas add a couple of slaves and say hey presto that's the roman family it's not actually entirely wrong and there's some quite strikingly familiar things about a roman house right down to some of them having beware of the dog sign at the front door but if you look a bit harder you find it isn't quite so simple [Music] so how do we start to bring back to life what really went on within the walls of a roman home and how do we get close to a real roman family [Music] well the best way is to look at what the romans themselves tell us from beyond the grave when you come into a place like this what first hits you in the eye are the statues of the rich stern emperors and ladies with expensive hairdos but if you look behind them you'll find thousands of ordinary roman voices compelling us to read their stories some have forked out on portraits others on just a few lines of text but they all give you clues about who they lived with and who they loved he has a cute little boy with his pet dog he's a dad he's commemorating his daughter julia there she is really natty hairdo she must have been quite fashion conscious i think but one of the most striking things about all these tombstones is how roman husbands and wives portray themselves in death and if you want to know why we've inherited such a traditional view of the roman family then the best place to start is with roman marriage so this is one end of a big roman marble coffin we don't know who was originally inside it but this end at least talks to us about marriage husband wife and they're holding hands that's the absolutely classic image of the roman married couple it's really such a cliched logo of roman marriage that stone carvers would have churned these things out by the dozen uh this will all be prepared and the stonemason will just put your faces onto the heads whatever it looks like it is an equal relationship though in the stereotype the husband has all the control the wife's job is to serve him every which way you even get some roman epitaphs that sum up a woman's life just by listing her service she talked nicely she walked nicely she had kids she kept house she made wool enough said and it goes right to the top of roman society too there's a lovely story about the empress olivia the scheming poisoning wife of the emperor augustus she's supposed to have taken great care that people saw her in the imperial palace itself spinning and weaving the wool for her husband's tocus that was what roman women were supposed to do [Music] on the surface then these tombstones show us a rather poised cool even cold view of roman marriage but tombstones tend to give that impression even today they trade in cliches but there's plenty of other evidence that helps us get behind these stereotyped impressions at the british museum in london is a wonderful collection of roman rings covered in the same imagery they look pretty familiar to us we know actually that what we call the wedding finger was the favorite place to put a ring some roman doctors thought there was a direct link between that finger and the heart but it's hard to get through this sort of standardized images of the clasped hands just occasionally you can and this ring here has a pretty plain ring but in the center it's got written on it in latin tay ammo parham which means literally um i love you not enough i don't love you enough it's kind of slightly odd at first sight it's particularly odd to imagine that you would give a rather expensive gold ring to somebody to say here you are i have this lovely ring well i don't care for you that much i think it's probably a bit cleverer than that and i think what the message must mean is i can't love you possibly as much as you deserve to be loved you are so fantastic and gorgeous and lovable but nobody could love you as much as you ought to be loved it's a wonderfully rare really rare glimpse of somebody's kind of personal voice sort of shouting through these rather cliched images of marriage [Music] that ring hints at some of the passion you can find in roman relationships but it's also there if you look beyond the man's voice and think about it from the woman's side scattered across rome is an amazing trio of tombstones which although still written by men give us a much more intimate and more honest portrait of their partners you have to be a bit careful about what husbands and wives say about each other on their epitaphs they do tell such terrible whoppers about their marriage we lived together for 30 years without a word i don't imagine that that could have been any more true in ancient rome than it is now but just occasionally you find someone who comes a bit off center breaks through those cliches and really conjures up the character this is a great example the tombstone of a woman called glyconus put up by her husband now glyconus is a greek name and it means sweet so she's sweetie and he says that in fact he says she's sweet by name but even sweeter by nature she didn't like to be all proper and austere he says she much preferred to be a bit wild lasky voss rather sexy swallows she liked to get a bit drenched in backus bacchus is the god of wine so what he's saying is she was a bit of a wild thing and she really liked a drink or two it's a pity he says she didn't live forever after all that affection the next one reveals a much darker side to roman marriage here's another tombstone which doesn't look very special but it's got a horrible sting in the tail it's put up by a husband and wife he's called rest tutus piscinasis and the wife is called prima ristuta and they put it up fake errant to prima florentia their dearest daughter felii karissa my dearest daughter so far so ordinary but how did she die she was thrown they kept her asked in tibery into the tiber by her husband orpheus she was just 16 and a half years old if mum and dad are right this was a case of domestic murder i'm afraid some things never change the woman in this last tombstone deserves to be a lot more famous than she is her story gives us a very different view on roman virtue and fidelity and is put up to a woman called alia potestas and she's an ex-slave she's a libertar of a man called orlis her partner starts off with some pretty standard praise for a roman woman she was always the first to get out of bed in the morning and the last to go to bed at night i.e she was doing all the housework then starts to get a bit weirder because the writer becomes a bit strangely explicit about her body um he says here she got lovely snow white breasts and small nipples and that her arms and legs were beautifully smooth and then he explains why it's because she was a very active depolator she sought out every little hair and plucked it out but it gets even weirder than that this woman had actually two lovers that she was living with one household held them all oonadomas held them all and they lived in a spirit of perfect harmony this is in other words a roman maynard attois but after she died the blokes went their separate ways and they're now growing old apart he wanted just one example of how roman relationships could be as messy as murky and as mixed up as our own it would have to be the household of alia betestas i can't help wondering though what ali our protestants version of the story about these guys would have been so if these three voices tell us how we can fill the roman home with a more unexpected set of occupants what about the house itself well if you look beyond those rather posh houses in pompeii with their grand entrance halls and expensive paintings you'll find that roman homes came in just as many shapes and sizes as their relationships [Music] this place was in multiple occupancy it had three or four separate apartments and actually the walls inside were partly made of wicker a kind of ancient equivalent of prefab but don't think dirt poor there was a really pricey little collection of bronze statuettes found in there this one is a pretty interesting one actually because it seems to be partly apartment block but also partly lodging house partly bnb just around the corner is one of my favorite roman homes the ground floor flat of what was once a quite comfortable roman apartment block anyone at home what's so surprising about this place is that it's layout basically a series of rooms off a central corridor feels like any flat that you might find in any modern city it's now called the insular of the painted ceiling for obvious reasons i almost feel i could move right in today now we don't know how many people would actually have lived here and that does make a difference to how we picture it and we certainly don't know exactly who they were but i don't find it difficult to imagine glyconus or alia protestas waking up early in a place like this point is that most romans didn't live in those grand houses that you see in pompeii they had all kinds of variety of accommodation right at the bottom there were people who lived in slum tournaments in a room over the shop or people who just bedded down under somebody else's staircase and this is comfortably in the middle this was someone's home sweet home all the same part of the difficulty we have in trying to bring spaces like these alive is that hardly any of the stuff that went into them has survived imagine trying to work out what went on in a modern house if you didn't have any of the furniture but the task is not entirely impossible [Music] hidden away in a storeroom in herculaneum as a priceless treasure trove of domestic furniture found in houses around the town carbonized when vesuvius erupted in ad79 they've been painstakingly put back together it's terribly evocative i mean here we've got a table the kind of thing that you'd have by your bed it's what you eat and drink off don't imagine that all romans lie down to eat they put their takeaways on here and sit down and have a knot this here it's two little wicker baskets could actually take the lid off this is the kind of just the stuff the bric-a-brac that you'd find just in any roman house [Music] it's as close as you can get to a roman furniture shop there are table legs with stunning ivory decoration others with strange dogs carved all over them there's what we call a sofa bed which you can still see was beautifully inlaid even a perfectly preserved cupboard that i guess once held all sorts of trinkets but it's beautiful you can see all the little bone hinges a little handle but one find is the rarest of all this is a baby's cradle it's a really really precious piece because it's absolutely the only cradle to survive from the roman world and i suppose makes you think um you know maybe we've just been unlucky in not getting the other kids cradles or maybe most babies didn't sleep in something like this but they bedded down in the ancient equivalent of a draw or actually they slept in bed with mum or nurse when it was found it actually had a tiny little skeleton in it and around the skeleton were bits of fabric textiles and a whole load of leaves and it looks as if this baby was sleeping on a mattress stuffed full of leaves covered by a blanket when the eruption of vesuvius came in 79 and put an end to that little life still touching though isn't it [Laughter] rocking the cradle that's being rocked by roman moms and nurses for me that collection of furniture is a symbol of all the things we can put back into the roman home if we try not just the clutter but husbands and wives and their messy relationships too but seeing a child's cradle up close reminds us not to forget the children in the roman household that baby of course didn't survive the eruption of vesuvius but if it had how different would its childhood have been from our own nowadays we separate childhood off from the adult world we dress kids in clothes quite different from adults we give them their own entertainment their own books we even feed them different food and in the last 50 years we've even invented the category of the teenager in ancient rome childhood is quite different [Music] we hardly ever see or hear the kids in the roman home they're usually cast out at the back of the house rarely mentioned today the only way we can hear their voices is to look at the dead ones these books hold a record of over 30 000 tombstones from the city of rome every age sex and walk of life but what hits you first is the sheer number of child tombstones there's just hundreds and hundreds of them i mean here's little titties eutychus he lived to be just four and he is titties phosphorus he made it to five [Music] and over the page titia regular she was one years old 5 months and 11 days that's only a few of the teas it all fits absolutely with what we know about child mortality in rome at least half the kids wouldn't have lived until they were 10 a third wouldn't have made it to their first birthday and i think you have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by that statistic all the same it isn't quite all gleam and doom my absolute absolute favorite is tremendous character a little girl who died when she was just five but we can really get a sense of her she was called gemini agape marta it turns out she was a bit of a tomboy i had a poo airy wall trump the face of a boy but i was a gentle soul engineer i was pretty and i got a bit spoiled venarando i had red hair cut short on top but i let it grow long down the back and then she says don't grieve too much for me have a drink and don't be too sad at the rest that my little body's having it's as it were speaking to her relatives there's also a message there i think for us because although these tombstones are kind of obviously about death for me they also reek of love of warmth actually of life so what happened if kids like little gemini did survive are we talking school or did roman parents have something else in store for them well rather predictably it depended on where you were in the pecking order [Music] in their labs on the outskirts of rome a group of italian anthropologists have analyzed over 6 000 roman skeletons dug up in and around rome over the past century alongside full adult skeletons are some rare child bones found in poorer graves for although roman kids died in vast numbers their fragile little skeletons rarely survive an individual bambino and what's extraordinary is that these bones show some very telling signs of wear and tear tibia individual so this guy has been doing hard work with his legs for many years and he's only 60. we stopped you couldn't get those kind of lesions just by playing football or skipping or this has to be hard manual work you're treating the cloth you're dying the cloth you're stamping on the cloth so what we've got is a kid doing heavy manual labor at a time when we think they should be in infant school [Music] also found by paula's team in the grave of a one-year-old girl there's a strange collection of trinkets that once formed a gorgeous little necklace they look pretty innocuous there's an amber rabbit a figurine of an egyptian god a mini phallus and some beads but hidden within them is a much darker story these are what the romans would have called crepundia they'd have been strung together and worn round the neck of a child so they're half toy half amulet or lucky charm but they also have a part to play in one aspect of roman culture that we find rather shocking and that is child exposure what that means if in rome you have a child you don't want you can just throw it away on the street on the rubbish dump and that's where the crepundia come in because some parents were supposed to have left these babies out with their crepundia round their necks as a kind of link to their birth family to their original identity it's a wonderful plot line actually in some roman comedies that the slave girl heroine is suddenly spotted and recognized by her mum and dad because they've seen the crepundia that they'd left out with her so in some roman comedies these things can bring about a very nice happy ending in real life i'm not so sure the unavoidable fact then for roman kids in poorer families is that if you weren't exposed and let's be honest we don't know how many babies really were they were put to work as soon as they were fit and able perhaps as early as five but further up the social scale things were predictably different in the centre of rome in a covered arcade just behind the forum we can still find evidence of a roman school all over its plaster walls you find writing drawing and even caricatures of a schoolmaster it reminds us just how little kids have changed here's a great picture of a bloke with a big beard full-on here we're in rome a willie what you've got here is people's letter practice abcd you've also got little snatches of latin poetry written what it looks like to me is an old-fashioned school desk and that in a way is exactly what it is schools in rome weren't schools in our sense lessons took place in arcades like this under shady trees even in the streets they were fee paying for the most part so only for the well-off and only for boys some of those lessons would have been much like asked they would have learnt to read and write they would have done a modern language in their case it would have been ancient greek no science and pse it would be public speaking and poetry an image of a roman school in action still survives the original painting in pompei is pretty faded but this 19th century copy shows exactly what's going on here are the good boys at their lessons but here is the unfortunate malefactor he's the one who must have been caught doing a caricature of the master on the wall he's been beaten he's being held down by two of his fellow pupils and he's been stripped down to his pants or best sort of pants and the master here is whacking him and he's clearly screaming this was such a well-known form of roman corporal punishment that it even had its own name as perhaps it's not surprising that one favorite nickname for a school master in rome was plugosis whacker for wealthy roman families then rote learning and discipline was the ideal boy's education but it also served as an ideal to families trying to climb the social ladder the best way to put a human faith to this story is to pay a visit to one of my favorite characters a real roman schoolboy the son of ex-slaves whose memorial can still be found overlooking a square in central rome i've come here to meet up with this little lad so picky as maximus was his name and he was something of a roman child prodigy aged just 11 he entered a grown-up poetry competition the sort of rome's got talent but stardom was not to come he died and his mum and dad put up this great memorial to him says up there that he died of too much study i can't help thinking he might have been a bit of a victim of pushy parents selpius's original memorial is now in an unloved corner of a rome museum but it's a chance to meet the boy face to face his story makes me wonder what life was really like the kids like him in families desperately trying to get on were you never naughty did you ever refuse to do your homework did you never lose your school shoes i can't help thinking that life in seoul pikis's household wasn't quite what his parents wrote it up to be but all the same there is a sense that childhood as a category that we know didn't really exist in the roman world i mean look at him if you came across this statue and you didn't know the story written round about him you'd think this was some orator haranguing the masses in the roman forum in fact it's a kid of 11 years old and you'd never know it for aspiring roman families if you wanted to educate your boy you concentrated on public life on oratory even poetry not on what we would call emotional development but how different was it for rich roman girls in the storm of the same museum is one remarkable object that helps to tell their side of the story [Music] this is the most exquisitely beautiful roman doll she's the most perfect specimen to survive from the roman world and she's so precious and fragile that although i'm just itching to pick her up i'm not allowed to she looks as if she's made of wood but in fact she's ivory she's a woman with very cleverly jointed limbs she's got a rather posh fashionable hairdo and on her hand she's got a little gold ring now there's no such thing as a toy shop in the roman world and for most kids like seoul uh they went out to play they'd be improvising with nuts and stones and playing ducks and drakes on the river this is something a bit special she's not just barbie she's empress barbie but there's another side to a toy like this it's not just about play like all toys it's helping to teach whoever owns it what their role is going to be in life roman women were made for marriage and for breeding children in fact some roman writers tell us that just before they do get married roman girls would go along to a temple and they would leave their dolls in the temple but that didn't happen to this doll because actually it was found in a big stone coffin a wound called creperia trafina to judge from the skeleton creparea was about 20 she presumably hadn't got married so she took her doll with her to her tomb that's quite extraordinary to us we wouldn't ever imagine burying a 20 year old with a barbie [Music] an awful lot of roman girls must have gone to the grave with their dolls in fact one of the most famous writers of the roman world pliny tells the story of one girl who died young minikia markella the daughter of a friend of his fundaness clinic says that she was going on 14 but she had an old head on young shoulders she was wise beyond her years she was sweet and charming and she was a spitting image of her dad the really sad thing he says that she was just about to be married by an absolutely extraordinary piece of good fortune we actually have minikia markella's tombstone here it is this rather elegant austere affair uh to the spirits of minikia markella it says the daughter of fondanus but there's a sting in the last line pliny said she was going on 14. this says she lived for 12 years 11 months and seven days so she was 12 years old and just about to be married now we don't know how many roman girls got married this young but a significant minority i think and it raises an obvious question were marriages like this consummated straight away we like to think not but the chances are that they were when you put all these children together our child workers child poets and child brides roman childhood can appear a pretty brutal phase of life but i don't think we should get too carried away to help me put it into context i met up with a colleague and father of two greg wolf well i still find it hard to get my head around roman childhood i mean was it really that brutal and not really sure it's quite as unfamiliar as that some bits were brutal and some bits were different but a lot is just the same they had a childhood even if it's a bit shorter than the childhood that our kids have but if they're not the kind of protected species that modern western kids that must be right they haven't got a kid's room full of kids stuff they don't have kids entertainment they have kids clothes maybe just a few children of the very rich with their great pedagogies taking them to school and their wet nurses but most children are just doing what adults did in the same places with them we're undergoing a huge transition from a world where lots of children are born and lots of them die where they're fully part of the world the adults to a world where not many children are born and most of them survive and their childhoods are prolonged to a point which romans would have thought was well into young adulthood yeah if you reckon that you know half of them at least half of them are going to be dead before the age of 10. what does that do to the relationship between parents and kids i think there were tragedies when you lose a child in any society any period and when romans lost their children we know sometimes they were devastated but it was a normal tragedy it was the same tragedy that the other families on your streets had it's the same tragedy your parents had and the tombstones kind of show us really don't they that that but even if it happens often it still is terribly hurtful it isn't in some ways as hard as unfamiliar as we would as we like to make it because when i was struck by the tombstone up on the wall of this bar up there it was obviously mum and dad a little kid and he's holding a dog he's holding his pet and you can sort of recognize that as mum dad and child with all the things that we think go with it the difference is the project of having that it's much more risky it's much more precarious existence yeah i mean i mean really the bottom line is roman childhood a big risk of course we mustn't forget that for a roman woman the risk was not just child rearing it was also child bearing in a world with little medical care as we know it roman pregnancy wasn't always straightforward one of the most suggestive objects to open up this world to us is an eerie looking medical instrument found in pompeii every woman will recognize exactly what this is it's an ancient roman gynecological speculum principle's pretty clear you have the prongs here and they're put into the vagina you then turn the screw which opens the prongs and so extends the vagina so you can examine the woman we all know how it works i don't need to demonstrate it so rather nice one decorated at the top um i think this was a rather pricey doctor who owned this uh with rather expensive female clients i don't think this got shoved up any poor woman but i think we shouldn't get carried away with the familiarity one of the nastiest bits of roman literature that i've ever read and there's plenty of nasty pits to choose from describes what you do when you can't get a baby out of a woman when the baby's got stuck and you want to save the mother's life you put a speculum up you get a sight of what's going on you then put a hook into the woman and try to pull the baby out you'll kill it in the process it's going through its eye it's skull i can't imagine even if it was intended to save her life that many women could have survived that process childbirth today has its dangers but in the roman world there was a battlefield i think if in the roman world men died as soldiers women died in childbirth it's hard to get a feel for such experiences in the roman home itself the rooms they used for sex and childbirth have given us a few beds they curiously know double ones and plenty of erotic pictures but just occasionally we get a glimpse of how women could transcend the traditional roles that were expected of them in a house in pompeii now known as the house of julius polybius after the man who owned it is one example of a woman who may have done just that i've come to see her with my colleague andrew wallis hadron what i'm interested in is this rather extraordinary painting it's it's actually showing a religious sacrifice going on and it's full of slightly weird religious symbolism like this snake in the altar but what i'm interested in is this couple here because this to me looks as if it's meant to be the head of the household and his wife and and it's very unusual because the standard scene is just the man in his toga doing the sacrifice and everyone always says this must be the head of household and here suddenly we have her too she's cut in on the the action the the woman because her property is completely separate from that of of her husband could be more wealthy and more powerful what's this lady doing here right bang in the middle of the picture if she isn't richer and more important than the little man at her side so in some cases it is possible to turn upside down the traditional roles in the roman household but there's still one part of the roman home that feels completely alien to us the part that actually made it function by that i mean the slaves archaeology itself has produced very little material that relates directly to slavery but tucked away in a roman museum is one rare object that speaks volumes about its dark side you'd think this was a roman dog collar a band of iron and a little metal tag on it and on the tag it's written in latin foogie teneme i've escaped catch me if you take me back to my master zoniness you'll get a solid dust a gold coin it's probably not a dog collar it's probably the color of a roman slave admittedly it's quite small but things like this have been found around the necks of human skeletons and actually the fact that we can't really be sure whether it's a slave collar or a dog collar tells us quite a lot about roman slavery and the inhumanity that it invoked there's a horribly touching story about the emperor hadrian who got crossed with one of his slaves so cross that he gouged his eye out with a stylus pen hadrian instantly felt apologetic sorry humbled by what he'd done and he said to the slave have any present from me i'm so sorry have anything that you want the slave remained quite dumb hadrian pressed him said i'll give you anything the slave said i just want my eye back so it's not hard to see why roman slaves might have wanted to escape and why roman masters might have wanted to tag their slaves as their property either this way or perhaps with branding or tattoos my hunch though is that fewer actually escaped or even tried to escape than we like to think my guess is that most slaves showed their resentment against their masters by much more kind of domestic sort of warfare they'd have pilfered things they'd have broken the precious ornaments they'd have pocketed the loose change and i expect they will spat in the masters soup today slavery is one of the nasty cliches of roman culture it's a word loaded understandably with all kinds of modern preconceptions but the fact is it was deeply embedded in roman culture in a population of a million one-third might have been slaves they weren't just for the rich poorer households had them too even some slaves had slaves of course roman slavery was brutal but relations between masters and slaves weren't anything like as black and white as we tend to imagine sure there must have been fear suspicion hatred on both sides actually there are some marvellous roman urban myths about crafty slaves running rings around their poor lung suffering masters but at the same time there was plenty of respect affection even love one of the best places to see evidence of these conflicting emotions at the heart of this relationship is actually in one of pompeii's grandest houses in a suite of rooms off the back garden is a private bath house with some pretty graphic mosaics they hint rather heavily at one part of every slave's job description we tend to forget sex so this is the entrance way to the hot room the sauna yes yes so what you've got here are some stridules and bronze things that you used for scraping the oil off it's really rather gynecological in the end and the thing is we can't really read that without looking at this guy here this strange sort of naked black figure little white panties and he's got a little white loin cloth which is completely failing to do its job because the one thing it's not covering is his genitals really which are enormous hanging down the bronze tip matches the those lamps or flasks or whatever he's carrying in his hands which they themselves look phallic so so we're being given a very strong sexual theme as we enter so this is the dinky little sauna you can hear the moment you're getting it it echoes around it it's an amazing space honest and look at this mosaic which is well it kind of says sex in the swimming pool to me it appears to be another slave doesn't it what comes out of this is something about the sexuality of bathing but also about use of slaves their total availability their bodily availability to their masters for sex i mean no one living in a big house says i know what i'll do i'll go down the local brothel they use a slave as they want when they want and that's the basic deal that's right isn't it interesting that it's not just the master of the house exploiting female slaves and male slaves it's also the female owners and dominant figures in the house exploit male and possibly female slaves that's the really nasty bit of roman slavery to be pressurized into having sex with the master or the mistress well it's an assault on your freedom but that's that's the point you've lost your freedom the freedom to control your body but you mustn't think that because sex happens between master and slave it's necessarily a bad thing for the slaves all the time what about the fact that we constantly find slaves marrying their masters sex is a way of earning money but it's also a route to freedom [Music] and that's the great paradox about roman slavery we might think it was brutal but times even amounting to rape but it was not always a life sentence and if you look at the tombstones what's striking is that the majority of those that survive from the city of rome belonged to ex-slaves they were freed in their thousands here's a lady with a really great name she's an ex-slave she tells us a liberta and her name is vetya eroticy i like that name here's a nicely complicated one it's a tombstone put up by an ex-slave a libertas to his own slave and was very dear to him carissimo this is a woman with an interesting job she's called dorcas and she's the ex-slave of julia augusta that's the empress olivia what was her job she wasn't all natrix she was the empress's hairdresser nice work if you could get it this runs a nice picture it's from a tombstone shows a husband and wife i guess having a banquet but it's a little chap on the left that i'm interested in he's serving at table and he must be a young slave boy there's thousands and thousands like him at rome i don't know exactly where they all came from but almost certainly not all of them from the slave market as we like to think probably the majority of them would actually have been born in the household and like this little guy they'd have got pretty up close and personal with their owners wait a table with nurses tutors nannies and it starts to give us a different slant on roman slavery and it helps to explain why you could get quite strong bonds of affection between owners and their slaves actually the roman word for family familia doesn't just include husband wife and a couple of kids it also includes the slaves so in rome slaves really were part of the family and that's what i find so disappointing about the standard image of the roman family the slaves were not always segregated they were the familiar as much as the master and mistress in fact the best way to see just how open it could be is to visit a roman family tomb i've come to see some in ancient austria with corey brennan from the american academy in rome this feels like a kind of back alley in the city of the dead well that's precisely what it is and here is uh a home in the city of the dad so to speak and it's uh something that marcus sinis aristo set up for himself and for his ex-slaves the liberties the male ex-slaves and the libertables the female ex-slaves it's interesting too that in the last line here he makes clear how much land he owns for this tomb isn't he it's not just a uh marking off the legal perimeter of uh his space here but it's a way of boasting precisely how much real estate he has here in the city of the dead what's important then is that masters and slaves chose to live together in death not just in life in a way these tombs are like mirrors of their own homes with separate rooms upper stories and spaces for urns that outnumber the nuclear family what strikes you when you come in is the kind of communality of it the sheer number of burials that must have been here yeah well there's there's about two dozen of these niches and each niche is a double and so you're talking 48 people or so it's interesting to see how they're they're all mixed in here you don't walk in here and say there's the master's niche in fact it's pretty hard to tell where it would have been and it's so completely different from well from what we're familiar with in say victorian england where um the idea that um mr and mrs posh and their posh kids would be buried in the same team as the cook or the tweeny or the butler is absolutely unthinkable but this is meant to be an ideal this is the image which these folks these aspirational folks wanted to convey which was that of inclusivity of the large uh family harshness was not in anyone's interest it shows us a softer side of this uh horrible institution of slavery yeah that's great you know you boast this is a tomb for me and my ex-slaves [Music] but it wasn't always happy families as the unusual tombstone of a little girl called junior procula tells us its storyline reads like a roman soap opera the stone was put up by her father a man called eufrozianus and he was putting it up for the little girl and eventually for himself and for somebody else whose name has been hacked out that's puzzling why has it been hacked out on the back of the stone the puzzle's soft because there's another text written there and what we can see has happened is that euphrates had had a slave called acti he'd freed her he'd married her they'd had the kid the kid had died and then things had gone very badly off the rails he's cursing her on the back these are the eternal marks of infamy he says on that ex-slave of mine who was a poisoner who was perfida was faithless who was dolosa who was deceitful and then he really curses her he says i'm bringing her nail and a piece of rope so that she can hang herself and i'm bringing pekem candentin burning pitch to consume her awful heart i know that happened well he then explains she had gone off with an adulteress a cuter adulterum and what is more she pinched two of his slaves a boy and a girl she left behind poor old you frozeness lying in bed robbed all alone an old man now we've got to remember that we don't know actus side of this story and that might have been very different but what is clear is that one man's domestic fluidity could be another man's domestic mess in a way that's the roman home in a nutshell for sure it was a place inhabited by the traditional roman cliches the pompous husbands in their togas and the dutiful wives weaving their wool but it was also far more intriguing especially if we put back all the clutter and the cradles and the topsy-turvy relationships and above all the extraordinary voices of the romans themselves that still talk to us after two thousand years i lived on luke crying oysters his very best life snatched away from him and then she had gone off with an adulteress the couture adulterer menopholos menophilus and i don't any longer have those awful aching feet this is the monument to the baker get it she much preferred to be a bit wild a roman menace and what they tell us is that ordinary life in ancient rome was as wonderfully mixed up as messy and as emotional as our own it's almost as if they're holding up a mirror to us and our own lives and they're speaking to anyone with the time to stop and listen to them turns out that's you and me [Music] you

Channel: Odyssey

Views: 123,765

Rating: 4.8762307 out of 5

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

Id: Q8ptqoks5qU

Length: 58min 46sec (3526 seconds)

Published: Fri May 07 2021