Meet the Romans with Mary Beard 1_3 - HD (720p).mp4

This is the Appian Way, one of the roads that took thousands of Romans in and out of their capital city every day. Young and old, rich and poor, clean and dirty. And it's where I want to start, asking a question that really interests me. Who were the ancient Romans? Outside the city, it was lined with thousands and thousands of tombs. So before you got into the city of Rome, you'd already met the Romans. Dead ones, that is. And the lives of many of them began or ended a long way from Rome. This is just a tiny fragment of someone's tomb. Someone called Ischinus. Orchizus est in Lusitania. He was murdered in Spain. This lady's Uzziah Prima, a priestess of the Egyptian goddess Isis. And there's her little sacred rattle. She's almost looking at you. I feel like saying, pleased to meet you, Prima. They come from every walk of life and every part of the empire. And a lot of them had once been slaves. These aren't the kind of guides we usually think of when we think of Romans. These Romans all lived at the centre of a vast empire that stretched from Spain to Syria and which dominated the Western world for over 700 years. Like it or not, ancient Rome is still all around us, in our roads, laws and architecture. We keep on recreating it in film and fiction, and every year thousands of us trek here to see its monuments up close and to imagine the emperors and the armies, the gladiators, and let's be honest, the gore. But hidden all over the modern city, in its walls, behind the facades, even under its streets, is something much harder to find, but just as captivating. The forgotten voices of the ordinary people. They're still there, if you know where to look. Callidius Eroticus means Mr Hot Sex. This is a Roman ménage à trois. This wasn't just a mugging. This was mass murder. The Romans didn't just carve their names and dates on their tombstones. Keen never to be forgotten, they left their thoughts, their achievements, even entire life stories, chiselled into stone. It's a unique record of real Roman lives. I've spent most of my life with the ancient Romans, and not just the big guys, the emperors, the politicians, the generals, the posh ones. The people I've most enjoyed getting to know are the ordinary ones, who had their own part to play in the story of this extraordinary city. And what gets to me every time is that we can still have a conversation with them, even 2,000 years later. In this series, I'm going to get their voices speaking again, to piece together a very different story of life in ancient Rome. I'll step behind the doors of their homes to meet flesh and blood Roman families, whose lives and possessions can reflect our own in surprising ways. This is something a bit special. She's not just Barbie, she's Empress Barbie. I'll go down into the streets, where the dirt, crime, sex and humour in everyday Roman life shows us what it was like to live in an ancient city of a million people. Barbs, wine and sex, he said, ruin your body. True. But they're what makes life really worth living. But I'll start by telling the real story of Imperial Rome, looking beyond the violence and spectacle to find a global city which reached for talent and treasure from the far ends of the earth. A place where everything and everyone was from somewhere else. These are the Romans I'm interested in. Welcome to my Rome. When you arrived in Rome at its imperial height 2,000 years ago, you found yourself in a new kind of city. Rome had once been a small city-state, but in conquest after conquest, it became capital of a vast empire. A place in which, for the first time in history, a million people from three continents managed to live together. One thing we know about Rome is it wasn't just a city, it was an empire. And for us, that means marauding armies, conquering generals and bloodthirsty emperors. Pretend not to think about the ordinary people who lived here at the very heart of it all. For them, the empire brought them into contact with the whole world, from Scotland to Afghanistan. And it made this city a more cosmopolitan place than anywhere had ever been before or would be again for hundreds of years. And we're always asking, what did the Romans do for us? I think we should be asking, what did the empire do to the Romans? And who were those Romans, anyway? Around the city, there's more evidence than you'd think for the impact that Roman conquest had on the lives of ordinary people here. All it requires is that we look from a slightly different angle. One of the most famous monuments in the Forum celebrates the moment when one conquering army came home. In 71 AD, the city got a day off for the triumphal return of the Emperor Vespasian and his son Titus, who had crushed a rebellion in Judea. We've got here the victorious general, Titus. Driving through the streets of Rome in his chariot to celebrate his victory. And on the other side, we've got the booty that he's brought home with him. Titus had devastatingly conquered the Jews, and here we can see the loot that he has got from the Jewish temple. It's a grand display. But what I want to do is try and undercut the pomposity of it a bit and to ask, what was it like for the people, the ordinary Romans, who showed up to watch this, left their apartments and came to see the spectacle? A triumph like this would have been the first sight the Roman people had of all the things the armies brought back from their distant victories. The rich spoils, the maps of the conquered territory, the models of the fighting, even the trees that they'd uprooted and brought back to Rome. How did people react? Some must have gasped, others would have jeered the captives, or maybe their minds were on other things. One Roman poet recommends the triumphal procession as a place to pick up a girl. How would you do it? Well, he says, watch the stuff go past, nudge up to her and say, oh, I think that's the Euphrates there and that's the Tigris over there. You don't have to know, he says, you just have to sound confident. And then you'll make your own conquest. It's a good joke, but it also hints at the way Roman lives could be changed by the spoils coming back from the Empire. This girl can't have been the only person who found all this pretty strange, but also exciting. So what did the Roman armies bring back from the Empire? The import that made the biggest impact is one we don't think about often enough, human beings. These are forgotten people. But if we take the time to listen, we can still hear the voices of some of the millions who followed the Roman armies into the city for all sorts of different reasons. This is for much of the history of the Roman Empire. This is my brother, Habibi Anu, from Palmyra. I'm Germanus, Regulus's mule driver. This is for Diocles, champion chariot racer from Spain. Here we've got a young slave girl, aged 17, Phryne, the slave of Tortola, Africana. She came from Africa. This one is put up by a soldier for his wife, Canuntilla, born near Vienna in ancient Pannonia. What's weird is that Canuntilla isn't really a real name. It comes from the name of a town in Pannonia, Carnuntum. It means, sort of, my babe from Carnuntum. So my guess is he perhaps bought this girl as a slave. He freed her. He brought her back to Rome. He married her. But, sadly, his babe from Carnuntum died when she was just 19. Poignant stories like this are everywhere in the city. They remind us of the different ways real lives could begin abroad and end in Rome. But there's more to it than that. These people weren't just brought in to serve the Romans. They were becoming Romans. One of the tombs on the Appian Way gives us the other side of the story of the Arch of Titus. It's a tombstone of three guys. One called Barica, one called Zabda and one called Akiba. Typical Jewish names. So the question is, what's the story of Barica, Zabda and Akiba? How did they get here? If they did start out life in Judea, how come they end up as Roman citizens in Rome? It's more surprising than you think. To judge from the letters and how they're written on this stone, this was carved in the 1st century AD. And at that point, we can put two and two together. I'm almost certain that these three men must have been part of the Jewish rebellion against the Romans in the late 60s AD. These men surely came into Rome with Titus' army as prisoners of war. It must have seemed like the worst moment of their lives. Jirat, cat calls, people throwing things at them. But perhaps worse was to come. They were auctioned off as slaves and bought by a man called Lucius Valerius. What their life in slavery was like, we don't know. But he freed them and they become new Roman citizens. With his name, Lucius Valerius, their Jewish names still asserting their Jewish sense of identity. This is one of the ways that Roman conquest works. It does bring slaves, but it also brings, eventually, new Roman citizens. It's a fairy-tale happy ending and a classic Roman story. When guys like this were freed, they didn't just go back to their old lives in Judea, they stayed in their new home and, what's more, they became Romans, with all the rights and privileges which came with full Roman citizenship. But what kept them in Rome? How many of them were there? And where did all these new Romans live? To try and make sense of it all, I went to meet a colleague in Trastevere, which literally means across the Tiber from the ancient city centre. It's got a reputation as a bit of an immigrant area in Rome even now. This area, Trastevere, across the Tiber, was the fringe of the ancient city of Rome and this is where we have the biggest evidence for immigrant communities, Jews, Assyrians. I guess if you said to an ancient Roman, where's the biggest immigrant area of the ancient city of Rome, they'd have said... Over the river, on the other side, yeah. Part of the answer to the question of why an area like this could be so cosmopolitan lies in the story of slaves like Barica, Zabda and Akiba. Greeks thought Romans were really weird for freeing as many slaves as they did. And making them citizens. Yes. Although it's very brutal, being a slave can be a stage in a life, like an apprenticeship. You come in as a German, you get a Roman name, you learn Latin, or you learn to manage in Latin, you learn some kind of job that's useful to your master, your master sets you free and there you are, you're a Roman citizen with a trade and a Roman name and a bunch of powerful people you know. This is your entry into Roman society. Now, multiply that by hundreds of thousands of slaves being freed and you can see that the whole ethnic nature of the people who call themselves Roman citizens is really changing very quickly. Roman is a kind of vocation, it's a movement into which other people are drawn. This was a completely new idea and in many ways the secret of the empire's success. Roman was no longer a word which described the city you came from, it was something you could become. Almost everyone in Rome was descended from someone who arrived from outside, not just ex-slaves. People coming in to work on the docks, builders, prostitutes, peasants who come into Rome because they think they can eat there because they can't eat at home. So this huge sort of chaotic mix of people who arrived not knowing anybody. These were journeys into the unknown and into a place where there was no guarantee you would survive. And, oddly, that was one reason that Rome welcomed people in. Any city the size of Rome has to have immigration because the number of people who die in it greatly exceeds the number who are born. Rome's a malarial city in antiquity. So people come here who don't have any immunity, they catch the disease, they're dead within years. So just to keep Rome the size it is, you need to constantly top up the population. Rome is swallowing people. It's actually, you know, it's a city which consumes people, spews them out dead. Perhaps we should stop thinking of Romans as a nation, a master race who conquered the world, and think instead of a babel of rootless people piled up together a long way from home. And no doubt hoping for a brighter future. Because for foreigners, Rome wasn't all doom and gloom. Sometimes, I guess, people would have come to Rome just to seek their fortunes. This is an epitaph, written in Greek, of a man who's said to have been always laughing, always having a joke, and really good at music. He might have come as part of a band, I guess. And actually, the stone tells us that he came to the land of Italy ex-Azies, from Asia. That's modern Turkey. It says he died here when he was young, and it ends up saying, Tounema Menopholos in Greek. Menopholos is the name. Now, Rome might have consumed people. It might have been a dangerous place. It might have been disease-ridden and dirty. But I guess, to a man like Menopholos, the streets must have seemed paved with gold. And not all immigrants in Rome were at the bottom of the heap. The Senate and the Imperial Palace were full of people from outside, just like the streets of Trastevere. Rome was international, from the bottom to the very top. Increasingly, this city belonged to the likes of Menopholos. As new people arrived, Rome's population doubled, then doubled again, till it reached over a million. There was nowhere in Europe bigger until Victorian London. We think of Rome as a very old city. But 2,000 years ago, this place was brand new. It must have been full of building sites, new high-rise, of temporary accommodation. It must have felt a bit like Dubai. But there's a big question. If you've got a mass of a million people from everywhere, how do you keep them alive? How do you feed them? How do you keep the vast Roman multicultural show on the road? Feeding a million people was a completely unprecedented challenge. Bang in the centre of the modern city is a site which gives you an idea of the colossal scale of consumption in ancient Rome. Locals call it Monte Testaccio. That's Broken Pot Mountain. I think it's one of the most extraordinary archaeological sites anywhere in the world. Phew! Made it. This is absolutely extraordinary. Each of these fragments was once part of an ancient Roman storage jar. What is amazing about this is that you really see here that it is a broken pot mountain. There's no earth mixed in with the other stuff. So you see how actually quite neatly these sherds of pottery have been stacked. It's a mountain, not a heap. It's a real hill, but there's nothing natural about it. This is a huge ancient rubbish dump, composed entirely of discarded containers, amphorae, that held just one of the products consumed by Rome. It was olive oil, which seeped into the jars and made them go really rancid, so they were the only containers that couldn't be recycled. Poor old amphorae are taken off to be pickaxed up and made into the mountain, and the olive oil that was in them gets everywhere. It's the stuff of Roman life. You'd find it being used in cooking, it's what's going to help you make perfume, it's what the guys in the baths who were exercising, rubbing themselves, scraping themselves down, would have used, and in the end, it's what the poor little old lady in the garret, who's just got one pottery lamp, what came in his amphorae would have been her only source of light at night. It's no exaggeration to say that Rome ran on olive oil, and this place gives archaeologists a great opportunity to work out how it got here. It came in massive quantities. That's a place. This must have been, what, originally... Even larger than that. Even larger than that. And that's, they say, 30 kilos when they're... Empty. Empty? That's my suitcase when it's full. Is this amphorae when it's empty? Empty, yeah. And what's amazing is that you can often find out exactly where the oil came from. We know that it's A-R-V-A. It's Arva, it's a town called this way, in the shores of the Well Alcubierre. So that's linking that precise chart to a site in southern Spain. So, Roman town, southern Spain, the guy who's making this amphorae is stamping it with his town's name, saying, this is a product of Arva. Yeah. According to these trademarks, almost all the oil in this mountain was coming from Spain and a bit from North Africa. Today, Italy is famous for its olive oil, but in ancient times, they were importing most of it from somewhere else. The fascinating thing about this mountain is the way that you can start to piece together... ..little life stories of these pots and their contents. It gets down to the coast in Spain, gets loaded onto boats. If it's lucky, it makes it, but there's lots of shipwrecks in the ancient Mediterranean. It arrives at the coast, it's humped off the boat, it's put into barges, it's brought up the Tiber to the city of Rome itself, humped off the boat again, put into warehouses, decanted into small containers. The amphorae end up here. It might not look it at first sight, but, in fact, it's one of the most impressive monuments to the idea of Rome as an imperialist consumer city, bringing in the foodstuff she needs from all around the Mediterranean. It wasn't just olive oil. A short trip down the River Tiber is the seaport Ostia. Today, Ostia is one of Rome's best-kept secrets, and it helps us discover what Rome was importing from where. Martin Millet has been excavating near here, and together we went to explore an intriguing piazza next to the theatre, which we call the Square of the Corporation. OK, Martin, this is where I get to do the housework. LAUGHTER Now live this down. If you sweep away the pine needles, there are mosaics all around here advertising companies importing goods from abroad. Stupa Taures. Mote-makers. This is the organisation of fur traders. Naviculariorum, Lignariorum. That's the wood traders. So, what we've got so far is... Rope, pelts and wood. There are at least 50 of these mosaics. Most of them give us a place as well as a product. They add up to one conclusion. Rome was being supplied from all corners of the Mediterranean. Italy's not big enough to support the city of Rome. It is a city that's drawing in resources from everywhere. This was a new moment in Western history. Rome had become what we now call a consumer city on a vast scale. These aren't luxury products, they're basic commodities. Wood, leather, oil, wine, and most important by far, grain. People talk about Rome being a consumer city with a population of about a million. And that implies 150,000 metric tonnes of grain a year. I don't know how big those ships are, but you need a lot of ships like that to bring in 150,000 metric tonnes of grain. As the city grew, farms in Sicily, Libya and then Egypt were given over to producing wheat for the people of Rome. When the grain ships arrived in Italy, the word would pass round Rome. The food had arrived. This was one thing the Empire did for Rome. It kept them alive. But it did more than that. I want to think about life in that consumer city. Who were the winners and who were the losers? One really interesting thing is how they used this imported grain. And that means thinking about bread, not just eating it, but making it. I'm very much second in command. Wait, because... OK. Right. I'm now being trusted with the action. 200,000 Roman citizens living in the city of Rome got each month what was called a corn dole. A free ration of corn. That means about 35 to 40 kilos of corn. Which was enough to make bread for a month for about two people. This was an extraordinary privilege for citizens in Rome. 200,000 of them received free rations from the state. But how did it work? Many of them lived in one-room apartments with no kitchens, so they relied on the baker to turn their 40 kilos into something they could eat. Are you going to try it? Yeah. Proviamo. Good. Not bad for a first attempt. It's not bad. And also... ..it's wonderful people's food. This is... ..this is tearing and sharing bread. You don't even have to own a bread knife to be able to tuck into this. It's good. For poor Romans, this was the staple food that kept them alive. But they didn't distribute it in the way we would expect. You've got to put out of your mind, I think, this was some kind of proto-welfare state. Sure, some of the poor would have benefited from the grain, but charity wasn't what was uppermost in the emperor's mind when he put all that time and money into distributing this grain. What he was concerned about was the idea that a hungry populace was a dissatisfied populace, and a dissatisfied populace was a dangerous one. It's also the fact that the distributions didn't go to the poorest in Rome. They went only to Roman citizens themselves. You had to be a citizen in order to get this grain. And that made it a really important perk of being a full Roman. In a way, what this tells us is that being a full citizen of Rome was a privileged status to which outsiders could aspire. And perks like the grain handout help you understand why people wanted to be Roman. But it also shows us that all these things, the empire, the imports, the new citizens, were all part of a cycle. The bigger Rome got and the more it consumed, the bigger the empire had to be to support it. So how did Rome's massive consumption change life in the city? Well, for one thing, this was one of the best times in history to be a baker. And it's a baker who left one of the strangest monuments in Rome, now hidden beneath one of the main city gates. It's the tomb monument of a man called Marcus Vigilius Eurysaces. He's almost certainly an ex-slave, and he was a baker and a contractor. He must have made a whole pile of money in that job, otherwise he wouldn't be able to afford a tomb like this. What Eurysaces has done is given himself a theme tomb. At the very top, all around the monument, there were scenes from the life of the bakery. There's the kneading, putting the bread in the oven, weighing the stuff out. And even these rather strange circles and columns underneath would be instantly recognisable to a Roman as bakery equipment. The circles are almost certainly the kneading machines, and the columns are the bins in which the dough is kneaded. What this says in Latin is, this is the tomb of Eurysaces, the baker and contractor. Apparet. It's obvious. Or what I think we'd say, this is the monument of the baker. Get it? And I really like the way that get it still speaks to us 2,000 years later. Have we got that this is the tomb of the baker? Yeah. Eurysaces could joke because things had gone pretty well for him. His name sounds Greek, so most likely he came from abroad, but he ended up as one of a new class of people, getting rich on the proceeds of empire. I've got a tremendous soft spot for Eurysaces, but I doubt that all Romans would have felt that way. My guess is that if some old-money, old-fashioned Roman walked past this tomb, he'd have thought it was all a bit tacky. A bit like I might feel if some Premier League football player designed his own tomb in the shape of a giant football boot. What Eurysaces' joke reminds us is that the empire had a direct effect on how people in Rome made their living. It was becoming a city of urban professionals. One of the reasons that ancient Rome still seems quite familiar to us is that people could do a whole variety of different jobs, just like us. But it's important not to forget that, obvious as that seems, it was actually one of the ways in which the city of Rome was radically new and different. In the traditional, small, ancient city, the idea was that the inhabitants were, well, all rounders. The same men fought the city's wars, ploughed the city's fields and produced the city's food. But in imperial Rome, because of the huge size of the city, those duties were outsourced. The food now came from overseas. It wasn't made by local farmers. And the armed forces that were stationed around the Roman Empire, they weren't just citizens doing their military duty, they were making a career out of the military. The empire freed, or you might say forced, Romans to make a living by specialising. Whether that was being a pole trader, a warehouse manager, or even a hairstylist to the rich and famous. What this did was create a completely new way of differentiating between people. If you'd asked an Egyptian or a Greek who they were, they'd have given their father's name or their home town. If you'd asked the average Roman, I bet he'd have told you what he did for a living. Well, they do on their tombstones, at any rate. These guys are working in the piperataria. That's the pepper market. These are just warehouse men, hori oriorum. And here's a bloke, he's a sagarius, a big overcoat maker. Perhaps a saga is the ancient equivalent of a duffle coat. An accounts manager. Oh, she's great. She's a piscatrix. She's a female fishmonger. He was a gold worker. And here is an urn, an ash urn, for a lady called Celia Epare. And she was an auri vestrix. She was a very, very, very upmarket clothes maker. It's very striking how each one of these people does tell you on their tombstone what they did. Now, I think we have to relate that to the sheer size and potential anonymity of a great imperial metropolis. In a world without ID cards, without passports, without birth certificates, how do you know what you are, who you are? You know that because of your job. I am Celia Epare, a luxury clothes maker. How do you make your identity clear? You say, this is what I do. This is where imperial Rome gets really fascinating for me. This is not simply a story of one city getting rich off the back of everywhere else. It's a story of a place where people were trying a new way of living. They arrived from across the world and became a small cog in this big machine. You maybe didn't know your neighbours and they didn't know you. Everyone was looking for new ways to make their mark and stand out. The empire didn't only help people to move up in the world, it helped those who did to show that they'd made it. It created new opportunities for conspicuous consumption. The empire gave most people in Western Europe their first experience of pepper, lemons and cherries. One po-faced Roman complained that cooking had gone from a mere function to a high art. The empire transformed the sensory experience of the city. There were new smells, new tastes, new colours. And nowhere is this clearer than in the elaborate paintings many better-off Romans put on their walls. In Pompeii, it's perhaps the most famous Roman painting of all. Pretty strange scene, phallus appearing and some female suckling a goat. But it was probably the colours that would have dazzled an ancient visitor as much as the racy subject matter. Now, we mustn't make the mistake of thinking that the poor old Romans lived in black and white until they started conquering the Mediterranean. Of course, there were all kinds of local minerals and plants that would give them pigments for paint. But as time went on, they got more and more interested in the special, bright colours that you could get from their far-flung territories. Now, this here is one of the best candidates there is for real red Spanish vermilion, lovely, lustrous red. I think we have to imagine that if you came to dinner here and the generous host started showing you round, he might have come and said, now, this lady here is whipping this one because, et cetera, et cetera. But he might have said, it's a really lovely red, isn't it? Actually, it's Spanish vermilion, specially imported, all the way from Spain. I paid for it as an extra myself. We live in a world of cheap, bright, synthetic colours. But the Romans didn't. In Rome, bright colours smacked of a kind of luxury that only came from abroad. And the desire for them created an even more niche range of jobs for ordinary Romans on the make. This is a guy who was really keen on what he did. He put up this tombstone when he was alive, vivos fecet, for himself and for his family. And he put on it symbols of the tools of his trade. Now, he worked as a dyer in the dyeing industry. And you've got here little flasks in which his dye went, scales in which he measured out his ingredients and the skeins of material that he dyed. But he wasn't any old dyer. At the top, he tells us his name. Dyus Pupius Amicus. Pupurarius, he was a dyer of purple. In Rome, purple was special. It came from the eastern Mediterranean and it was extracted from tiny shellfish. It looked spectacular and it didn't fade. It was not only expensive, its use came to be regulated by law. If you saw a man in a street wearing a toga with a broad purple stripe, you'd know that he must be a senator. One of the political elite. And the only person later on in the Roman Empire who was allowed to wear clothes completely of purple was the Roman emperor himself. It's a kind of colour policing. It's a bit like as if Queen Elizabeth II was the only person in the country who was allowed to wear pink. But it tells you quite a lot about Rome and the Roman Empire. But this one very visible marker of political and social status should have been the product of something that came from the far eastern side of the Mediterranean. No wonder Gaius Pupius Amicus was proud of being a purpurarius. The story of colour isn't just a story of luxury. It's a story of identity. The power that conspicuous consumption had to mark you out as someone special, whether you were supplying them or consuming them. All these imports helped you distinguish yourself, like products and people. Even new gods arrived from far-flung parts of the Empire. You could have your own style, your own taste, your own beliefs. But let's not get too carried away by all this exotic stuff that the Empire offered up. What the foreign purple on the senator's toga tells us is that you could be completely foreign and absolutely Roman at the same time. The Romans had a way of thinking about other cultures that is quite unlike our own. We really mustn't make the mistake of kind of imagining that Rome is a sort of touchy-feely cultural melting pot. Yes, and if you wear the wrong clothes, they make fun of you. If you speak strangely, they make fun of you. They're big conformists. There's too many Greeks here. The Jews don't eat food properly on the Sabbath. All that sort of stuff. Yes, and why don't they eat pork? How silly the poet Marshall, who's going on about the Puella Romana, who hasn't experienced a Menchula Romana. The Roman chick who's never had a Roman dick. I mean, you know, it's crude stuff, but, you know, nasty in its way. The irony is, the man who wrote this came from Spain. They're not laughing at other races, they're laughing about people who don't do things the Roman way. Although people come to this city from all over the world, you don't end up with a Chinatown or a little Italy in the way that we have in the great metropolitan cities today. And these people are going out, they're ruling the world, the senators are governing Portugal, they're governing Egypt, they're governing London and Danube, and they never come back and say, I had this great meal the other day. And they'll talk about ingredients from all over the world, but what you do with it, the actual cuisine, the cooking, it's got to end up proper Roman cookery. Yeah. But they've got this city that is unlike anything that's been created before. It has a much greater diversity of people, of customs, of languages, thousands of languages probably, hundreds of languages at least, spoken in the city of Rome, but they only write in Greek and Latin more or less all the time, a tiny bit of Hebrew. What we're seeing here is the most culturally, ethnically, religiously diversity that there's ever been in the world, but the way they're doing multiculturalism is quite different from the way we do multiculturalism. Yes, there's cultural diversity, but what there isn't is a diversity of cultures. There's an ironic logic here. Because Roman culture was in itself such an amalgam, they simply saw no need for alternative cultures to exist in parallel. Still less to respect them. In Rome, diversity wasn't about separateness. There wasn't a Chinatown or even a Jewish quarter. In fact, your average Roman would have been amazed at the way we try to respect and preserve different cultures. Here, the people were from everywhere, the food came from everywhere, the gods were from everywhere, but it all went into the blender and it came out Roman. The Empire was doing two things to Rome. They were parading all the exotic and luxurious strangeness of the outside world, but at the same time, the distinction between Romans and the subject peoples was dissolving all the time. Eventually, every free adult male in the Empire could call himself a Roman citizen. For me, there's one place which captures the contradictions of Imperial Rome. There was a people's palace here. It was the Colosseum. It was built and paid for out of the spoils of the Jewish war, as a gift to the Roman people. But one thing's for sure, some of them had to climb a lot of stairs. I'm in the only part of the Colosseum that I'd be allowed to go to. Women, slaves and other undesirables in the Roman world had to be up on the gods. So, what does it look like from the undesirables' point of view? Let's not think for a moment about the blood and guts. There was certainly plenty of that. But let's think of it in terms of Empire. What you had on display in front of you was all the biggest and best the Empire could offer. People often compare this to a football match, but if so, it's not just a Premier League, this is the World Cup. Fantastic combat, weird, exotic creatures. Animals you could only have dreamt of. When this place opened, they even had a rhinoceros running wild down there. This is one place we can see the Roman Empire from the ordinary person's eye view. This guy is looking at the show and then... During a pause, or while he was looking at... He's scratching the scene. Yeah. That he was seeing in the arena. And what have we got? We can see wild animals, like a panther. Oh, there's two bears. And a couple of bears, right? And bestiaries. The bestiaries. Look at those muscles in his arm, you know, biceps and whatever. They are really muscly bloke. And I think this is great because it not only gives us a spectator's viewpoint, but it also kind of captures that moment of what it was like to be here. This guy wasn't alone. The Romans just couldn't get enough of drawing the beasts they ogled in the Colosseum. When you saw them for the first time, these exotic animals must have been breathtaking. And the same goes for the other stars of the show. The human performers. This is a fantastic treat for me because it's... It's a real live gladiator's helmet, or a real dead gladiator's helmet, from Pompeii. It's very weird and heavy. I'm going to pick it up. It's got a great crest on it and a bust of Hercules. Which is facing out at you just to scare the opponent. I can't quite put it on, but I can get the feeling of what it's like having it on. But what it makes you see is it's jolly heavy and you get a very, very difficult view from inside because everything's kind of shaded off, both by the peak and by the protective grill. I mean, I don't quite see how you'd know where the blasted enemy was, honestly. The other thing about it is it looks to us fantastically weird. And I think it would look like that to the Romans too. The point about these gladiators is that they're not dressed in standard Roman army issue. They're not the kind of fighters you'd see if you went to fight the barbarians. These are mad, weird, exotic, foreign costumes. They're meant to exude the mysterious outside world and all the violence that there might be in it. And in a way, I think, what we're seeing here is... Well, it's sort of a fancy dress. I think what you'd get the sense was that people had come to see the costume as much as they'd come to see you. No. Where do I go now? Hard to see. Ha-ha! So, when I think about gladiatorial combat, I know that some of it was to the death. People did get killed. But more and more often, it was a show. It was a spectacle. It was theatre. And in my mind, it's kind of more like the sort of charade of wrestling than the real-life combat of boxing. And part of the reason for that was simply economics. You've got hundreds of gladiators. They're extremely expensive. You don't want them killed off. Tooth. A bit of a disparity of sides here, but I'm afraid Thrax is out. Whoops. We have a victorious murmur, though. Congratulations. To the Romans, gladiators represented a violent fantasy of the outside world fighting in their midst. But there's a fascinating irony in the real origins of the men behind the masks. I've got a wonderful drawing, an old drawing here. The original stone has long ago been lost, but it's a tombstone of a man called Marcus Antonius Exocus, who tells us he came from Alexandria to fight in some gladiatorial games put on by the Emperor Trajan. And here's another text of a tombstone put up by a man called Fuscinus, who was a provocateur. That's another sort of gladiator. This tombstone's in Greek, and he tells us that he was an Egyptian. These gladiators came from the same wildly different backgrounds as everyone else in Rome, but their real stories were much more mundane than the exotic roles they were forced to play in the arena. It reveals the kind of smoke and mirrors aspect of all this, because underneath all that, some gladiators were pretty domestic, or they certainly ended up so. They finished up perhaps long-retired, longish life, wife and kids. One of the nicest ones is a man here who lived to the age of 45. He'd come from Tungria. He was a Belgian. But the tombstone is put up to him by his wife and little Justus, his son. And even Exocus, exotic as he looks, seems to have ended up life, to judge from his name, as a Roman citizen. He presumably retired and lived out his life somewhere in suburban Italy, a bit like Marcus Antonius Exocus of Tunbridge Wells. An Egyptian playing the part of a Thracian warrior, then settling down as a Roman family man, to me, that's imperial Rome in a nutshell. The Colosseum dramatised this frightening, thrilling idea of Rome and the outside world. It's all violence, confrontation and strangeness. The truth is that the real empire was not just fighting in the arena, it was sitting in the seats. There are places in the Colosseum reserved for the Gaditani, people of Cadiz in Spain, for an African senator and a Gothic chieftain. In reality, the fearsome barbarians had become Romans and were watching the action like everyone else. So, what's the Colosseum doing then? At one level, it's showing the people of the city what they get from empire. But in a deeper sense, it's showing them that they fit in. If the people who were killing each other in the arena were stereotypical foreigners, then, by implication, if you were watching them, you were a Roman. So, it's trying to put everything in an order that makes sense. The point about the Colosseum is that it was both a microcosm of the city of Rome and a microcosm of the Roman Empire, and it helps to show how the boundaries between what was Roman and what was foreign increasingly broke down. In Rome, for the first time in history, people from Asia, Africa and Europe could sit together as citizens of the same state. Rome was the first global city and it contained in it all the contradictions that global cities have had ever since. It was diverse, but it wasn't tolerant. Foreign enemies were crucified, enslaved and forced to fight in the arena. But, equally, foreigners could rise to be emperor. The point is, the distinction the empire made was not between Romans and foreigners, but between those who resisted and those who joined in. The key question in our story is, what was it like to live in the world's first city where almost everyone came from somewhere else? There must have been plenty of people who felt very far from home and rootless. For some, there were profits to be made and success to be had and an exciting, even if bewildering, mixture of new ideas, different cultures and different religions. Whatever you'd been back home, in Rome, you could reinvent yourself. It's not hard to imagine the fears and anxieties of those ordinary Romans, wherever they were from. How do I fit into all this? Who knows who I am? Who's going to remember me when I'm dead? Perhaps that's why they were so keen to write their stories onto their tombstones. They're deliberately speaking to you and me. Oh, this guy's really having a conversation. Stranger, he says. Hospice. Hang on a minute. Resiste. Stop here. Take a look down to your left. That's where my bones are buried. My ossa. I was a good man. I was a kind man. Misericordius. And I was a lover of the poor. A mantis pauperus. Please, traveller, please, we are to. I beg you, don't mess with my tomb. And the name of the guy is Gaius Attilius Euhodos, the ex-slave of a man called Serenus. Euhodos sounds Greek to me and he tells us what he did. He was a margaritarius. He was a pearl seller. That's who's buried in this tomb. Traveller, he says, we are to. On your way now. Goodbye. Walle. Next time, I'll descend into the city streets to explore their high-rise tenements, crime-ridden slums, and life in the bars and the bathhouses. And we'll find some very distinctive Roman voices born from the earthiness of communal city life. This is how we have to imagine the ancient city. Everyone shitting together. Tunics up, togas up, trousers down, chatting as they went. Rebuilding medieval Britain brick by brick here on BBC HD on Friday nights at nine. But back to tonight now, and there's live music coming up with Jules Holland.