Original subtitles

(birds chirping)

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ISABELLA ROSSELLINI There is a place where queens and gods made love.

Where warriors slew gruesome creatures.

Where mortals could become legends.

A place where past and present still merge.

Pompeii was a city driven by violent passions.

A city shaped by love, revenge, sex, power,

violence, lust, ambition, sin and superstition.

All still visible in the mosaics and frescoes

adorning its villas, temples and brothels.

(gentle dramatic music)

The line between myth and reality were often blurred

and superstition reigned supreme.

Even today, while walking in the city,

one can't help being utterly overwhelmed

by its myths and legends.

This was a place where the tales of heroes and heroines,

gods and goddesses intertwined with the lives of mortals,

with all their desires and divines aspirations.

When we step into Pompeii,

we're actually going to something that truly is unique,

kind of the queen of all sites of antiquity.

Because of that level of preservation,

we really feel that we're walking back in time

in the days of the Pompeiians.

What you have to remember about Pompeii

is that Italy is different from Greece.

Italy doesn't belong to the Greek mythological tradition.

They take it from the Greeks.

The mythology that we can see on the walls of Pompeii

comes really quite late to Pompeii.

It comes under the Empire

at the end of the first century BC.

And it's a wonderful new fashion that sweeps through the city.

And they find, because of this way,

that you can use myths to tell your story.

Mythology gets back to original concepts,

gets back to the heart of human beings,

their ideals, their dreams,

and really their relationship with the immortal.

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Everyone can pick it up,

vary it, give it a new twist,

a new interpretation.

That's what they did in antiquity,

That seems to me their wonderful richness,

and it's why they can survive today.

The mythological scenes painted on the walls of Pompeii

are the mirror of a pagan society.

Far from being true, but not entirely made up,

they represented political struggles

and unspeakable desires.

They may seem sinful, perverse, even sinister

in their depiction of vengeful gods, sex and bestiality.

As is the case with one of the myths most depicted in Pompeii,

the story of 'Leda and the Swan'.

A tale represented countless times in Pompeii

in a myriad of different ways,

each giving a new interpretation

of the ambiguous relationship

between Zeus, King of the Gods,

and Leda, Queen of Sparta,

as testified by the most recently discovered fresco.

In this other image,

the same myth, you get a really different depiction.

You get violence, you get Leda,

she's throttling this swan by the neck.

This is not, passionate love-making.

Sometimes she is even depicted with something in her hand,

that she's gonna smash the swan in the head.

So, it's curious to have this well-known story,

this well-known myth,

this union being depicted in two contrasting ways.

"A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

"Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed

"By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,

"He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

"How can these terrified vague fingers push

"The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?

"And how can body, laid in that white rush,

"But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?"

This is how the poet Yeats

describe one of Pompeii's

most ambivalent and ambiguous myths,

the story of Leda, the Queen of Sparta,

and the god Zeus disguised as a swan.

Some sees the story as a consenting sexual relationship,

others instead read it as a rape.

(gentle dramatic music)

# We talked about the drugs and we #

# Decided to abstain but still we #

# Locked ourselves inside and then #

# My fingers locked behind your head #

# You hold your pinkies on my cheeks #

# I'm 28 and your 19 #

# Compassion #

# Compassion #

(dramatic music)

# The innocent found soon to be #

# Will start to feel like currency #

# As we try to get it on in bed #

# You've given me your home and ted #

# You put on the queenest hat #

# I just want to talk instead #

# Compassion #

# Compassion #

(romantic music)

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I think violence, sex and power

are very closely intermingled in this myth.

There are so many stories about Zeus turning himself

into different forms

to have his way with different human women.

I think the way that the story

in some versions is a story of seduction,

and others a story of violence...

Because we know so little about Leda,

because Leda's voice never gets heard

in any of these stories,

we end up in that horrible central question

around an act of sexual violence.

Is it an act of sexual violence

or was there willing consent on the part of the victim?

If you get the offer to make love to the king of the gods,

is that an offer you want to refuse?

It's certainly not an offer you can refuse

because the king of the gods is almighty.

(birds chirping)

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Leda has four children.

She has two sons, Castor and Pollux,

but what I'm really interested in is her two daughters,

first of whom was Helen.

This is Helen of Troy,

one of the most important people in Greek mythology.

She's the one that led to the grand, apocalyptic Trojan War.

Helen, irrespective of the fact that she marries

the most powerful king in the Peloponnese,

she is seduced by a visitor,

a visitor from the east, a visitor from Troy,

the handsome Paris, who, of course,

has to be an exceptionally handsome man.

The ordinary human seduction, elopement, adultery

creates the biggest war

that Greece had ever experienced, a 10-year war!

Helen, who was held responsible

for the greatest massacre of men in all antiquity,

may have been just following Venus's orders.

The fate of Leda's other daughter, Clytemnestra, on the other hand

leaves no room for interpretation.

It's important, when looking at the story of Leda,

to consider that both her daughters are both immortalised

as unleashing terrible revenge on men.

Agamemnon comes back from Troy triumphant

expecting a great welcome home,

and Clytemnestra is ready for him.

But she's also plotting revenge,

revenge because Agamemnon,

in order to get a fair wind to sail to Troy,

sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia.

We have a fresco that actually depicts the very scene

in which Agamemnon is sacrificing his daughter Iphigenia.

So the gods demanded a sacrifice,

in order for there to be wind for his ships to depart,

to go on this great quest, this war against the Trojans,

he had to make the ultimate sacrifice,

he had to kill his daughter.

And that's something Clytemnestra does not forget.

Clytemnestra has to be the scariest woman you could imagine

So, she doesn't murder him simply.

She runs a lovely warm bath for him,

and then she takes a great axe,

a great two-headed axe and slaughters him,

beheads him in his own bath,

so that the water turns to blood.

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The legends of Leda and her daughters

were marked by lust, cruelty and deception,

common traits of Pompeiian frescoes

that bear witness to a darker side of the city,

some so graphic that they are still censored today.

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Pompeiians were refined, cultured people

who enjoyed art and architecture

just as much as the pleasure of the flesh.

Yet behind their sophistication,

behind the magnificence of their statues,

their villa, their spectacular amphitheatre

hid a different city,

one engulfed in debauchery, transgression,

eroticism and superstition.

At the time of the discovery of Pompeii...

Gotta think about the context.

So you have the Bourbon kingdom, of course they're fervent Catholics.

When you start to discover Pompeii,

these incredibly, blatantly,

graphic, erotic scenes, what you do with it?

You could destroy it. There's some overpainting.

But for the most part you're taking them

and you're putting them away for safekeeping.

They're not for public consumption.

And they're putting them on certain places

like the Secret Cabinet,

where you'd need special permission to get access

to look at these really kind of raunchy scenes.

Visiting the Secret Cabinet

in Naples' National Archaeological Museum wasn't easy.

The frescoes was considered so scandalous

that three different keys were required

in order to open its doors.

The censorship of the Secret Cabinet ended only in 1967,

and today, even still today,

if you wanna go inside you have to be at least 14 years old.

But in a city like Pompeii,

not all representations of nudity were considered erotic.

Here, the human form was seen

as a measure of perfection and beauty,

a hymn to life and happiness.

In the entrance of the House of Vettii

there's a figure who would, I think, strike any modern visitor,

as really quite extraordinary.

This is a figure of a man with a really enormous phallus

coming out from beneath his tunic

which he's weighing in a set of scales

with bags money on the other side

and there's also very ample basket of fruit.

In Pompeii, a sight of a phallus is really very common.

There are penises everywhere you look really.

There are amulets. There are frescoes showing penises.

There are enormous number of signs

of prostitution in Pompeii.

Is it because Pompeii was something special?

Was it because it was a port city, visited by lots of sailors?

A commercial city with lots of people coming and going?

All these things are true.

But prostitution was extraordinarily common

in the Roman world.

Roman prostitutes operated under the arches.

Think of the arches of an aqueduct.

They leave lots of spaces

that are easily accessible to the public.

And the Latin for an arch is 'fornix'.

And that's how we have the word fornication,

these are the people who fornicate.

There's been a lot of debate

about exactly which premises in Pompeii

might have been used for prostitution.

And how many brothels did Pompeii have, for instance.

And some has suggested that the property of Julia Felix

was used for that kind of activity.

Included in Julia Felix's property is this rather lovely set of baths

including a lovely outside bath and a sauna.

So they're quite luxurious.

Julia Felix is taking advantage of an opportunity

to make money, the way that many Pompeiian men

will have done.

There's nothing unusual about her projects

except that she's a woman

and we know that it's a woman who's responsible for it.

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In the Porta Marina suburban baths

you actually have a whole layer of frescoes

that depict various sexual acts.

So you could literally just point to the Roman numeral

for that sexual act,

go up to the room and that will be performed upon you.

One thing that Pompeii gives us is this extraordinary brothel,

that is a brothel for a dozen people operating at the same time.

It's custom built.

It could serve no other purpose than a brothel

because it's a series of cells that are as wide as a bed.

So you don't just go to the brothel,

you don't just go to the bath complex,

but also even bars, 'thermopoliums'.

One example we have

is that it seems from the artistic decoration

that's in that particular bar,

it seems that there's a back room

where you can, again, go to a prostitute.

The idea is that there's no cookie cutter kind of situation

which you're engaging in sex, you're engaging in prostitutes.

Roman society is no paradise.

Roman society is shot through with violence,

with sex, with greed, with everything.

Pompeiians loved carnal pleasures

and sex in all its forms -

mercenary, chaste, homosexual and heterosexual.

Not surprising then that the Catholic church

branded the city as sinful and obscene,

even though Pompeii existed before the idea

of Christian sin.

One of the extraordinary things

is that they actually perform such relationships

on the stage, on a very peculiar stage of the amphitheatre.

Pasiphae being raped by a bull on stage,

being raped to death.

And this for the Romans is a form of entertainment.

In order to stage the unthinkable,

Pompeiians built one of the most beautiful amphitheatre's

of southern Italy,

where human lives were merely used as theatrical props.

Pompeiians were sophisticated people with a voracious appetite for sex

and an unquenchable thirst

for bloody, violent gladiatorial games.

Graffiti and electoral posters

demonstrate the importance of the games

were for the cultural life of the city.

As a society steeped in superstition and myth,

gladiators became the real life heroes.

Regarded as good omens,

Pompeiians decorated their homes with gladiatorial relief.

And in 70 BC,

two rich merchants built a magnificent amphitheatre.

And it's there that the Pompeiians thirst for violence

would lead to one of the most gruesome riots

the ancient world had ever seen.

These fearless fighters became objects of desire

with devoted fan clubs.

Small wonder that the Latin word 'gladius' or sword

is the source of the word gladiator

and also the slang for penis.

Gladiators were real sex symbols throughout the Roman world

and we see evidence of that strongly in Pompeii.

There's graffiti, for instance, in the barracks,

in the gladiatorial barracks,

where the gladiators themselves stayed.

"Celadus, the heartthrob of all the girls."

"Crescens and his enormous penis."

There's very kind of unsubtle association of gladiators

with sexual potency.

There are stories

that people collected the sweat of gladiators

to serve as an aphrodisiac.

A satire of Juvenal that kind of mocks

the great devotion of some aristocratic women to gladiators.

He talks about this woman Eppia.

She's a senator's wife but she runs off with the gladiator.

Doesn't matter that he's absolutely hideously ugly

after all his kind of scars.

But you know he's all sword.

He's really sexy.

In 59 you have a gladiatorial games held in the amphitheatre of Pompeii.

The people from nearby Nocera came to participate as well.

You can think of it like a soccer match

or football game or something like that.

But then literally all hell broke loose.

So violent was the fighting that in an unprecedented move

the Senate in Rome imposed a 10-year ban

on holding any further games in Pompeii.

What's preserved from Pompeii and transmitted to us

is lust, power, eroticism,

and violence in the gladiatorial arena.

We're still fascinated with this lust for violence

that the Pompeiians actually had,

in the arena and throughout the city.

Gladiators have captured the imagination

of every generation.

Those iconic characters made legendary

by their courage and bravery

exude the magnificent elegance of mythological representations.

They appeal to our primordial fascination

with watching violence as a spectacle.

Their magnetism is so strong

that it was able to enthral a genius 19 centuries later.

(birds chirping)

A little over 100 years ago,

on 11 March 1917,

Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau came to Pompeii.

I wish I was here with them.

They were dressed in beautiful black suit,

a handsome pipe.

They admired the beautiful archaeological site.

They must have looked at the frescoes, the villas, the mosaics.

The erotic art, of course.

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Picasso changed his style completely after visiting Pompeii.

Among the places that mesmerised the father of Cubism

is one of city's most famous sites - the Villa of the Mysteries.

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The Greek word for 'rite' means to grow up,

and the breathtaking frescoes in the Villa of the Mysteries

allow us to witness the secret initiation of a young woman

to the mystery cult of Bacchus, or Dionysus.

He represents many dualities.

He's effeminate in appearance and yet he appeals to women.

Most of his worshipers are women.

He's the god of wine

and therefore he's associated both with fertility

and with drunkenness.

And he's also the god of wild places.

So when you worship Bacchus,

you process in a ritual way out of the city

and then you go up into the mountains.

And so he's the god of ecstatic ritual,

ecstatic ritual, which is the opposite of civic ritual.

It's a great mystery, I think,

why most of Bacchus's followers are female.

One possibility is that in a heavily male-dominated world,

and what world is not heavily male-dominated,

it gave them a certain freedom.

This female-led cult became so popular

that it threatened the Roman senate.

The frescoes are the only existing testimony

of the initiation rituals

often acted out as dramas,

which served to prepare girls for married life.

Ariadne is an interesting figure because her myth falls into two halves

and she appears as two very different people.

When she's a young woman, that part of her myth,

she's associated with Theseus.

And she helps Theseus slay the Minotaur.

She helps him through the Labyrinth in Crete.

Theseus has this impossible task,

not just to kill the Minotaur, scary enough already,

but to get out of the Labyrinth again.

And Ariadne has the answer.

As we can see in the fresco, Ariadne gives him the thread

that he can follow through the Labyrinth.

And of course it is a very typical women's thing.

Women spin, women make thread.

So it's a woman's answer to a man's problem.

And she goes off with him into the blue.

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One would think

that a romance like that would last for ever.

But Theseus, who had just survived

one of the scariest monsters in the world,

felt too afraid to commit to someone else

for the rest of his days

and reacted like any coward would do.

He fled.

(dramatic music)

Ariadne helped Theseus defeat the Minotaur,

got him out of the Labyrinth,

they go sailing off together to live happily ever after...

Theseus dumps her on an island.

(gentle ethereal music)

And who better to empower the rejected Ariadne

then the god of wine and pleasure himself...

..Bacchus?

It's love at first sight.

Their story is one of pure, unconditional passion.

A relationship where he initiates her

into the secret of ecstasy and wine,

turning her from a girl into woman.

(upbeat lively music)

The story of Bacchus and Ariadne of course

has not just a happy ending,

the happiest ending you can possibly imagine.

This is wonderfully represented in the House of Fronto.

In the tablinum,

in the main reception room of the house,

an enormous beautiful painted wall

showing the triumph of Bacchus with Ariadne.

Not a triumph over foreign enemies,

no, a triumph that... the liberation of getting out

of human woes and Ariadne is there with him.

(upbeat lively music)

Roman myths can seem terribly misogynistic today.

Yet among them is one of the most adored divinities in Pompeii -

a woman,

a foreign goddess that came from the land of the Nile...

Isis.

Above all by definition,

was, for the Romans, a foreign goddess.

Isis is an Egyptian goddess.

She's not part of the Roman Pantheon.

The cult of Isis was almost by definition different.

It was exotic. It wasn't like normal Roman religion.

Mozart, among many other visitors, came to Pompeii,

came to Herculaneum.

He saw something in its grandest form,

and he saw a complete vision, really,

of the temple, and the decorations,

and the pageantry, and the figures,

all of the Temple of Isis.

So it had recently been restored. It was in great condition.

I think he was stepping back in time

when he went through that doorway

into the complex of the Theatre of Isis.

In 1770, while touring across Italy, he came to Pompeii.

It was here that he first encountered the goddess Isis.

21 years later his fascination

with the mythology surrounding this Egyptian goddess

led him to the creation of one of his most important operas...

'The Magic Flute.'

This was arguably

the most significant foreign cult in Pompeii

and perhaps in the Roman world.

Isis was considered by many to be the feminine archetype,

worshipped right in the centre

of the most important part of the city.

It's very hard to tell what exactly social-status-wise

the worshipers of Isis were in Pompeii.

But you do find shrines of Isis in very rich houses,

people with a lot of money.

One idea is that it's connected with trade.

So it's quite likely that worshipers of Isis

were tradesmen, sailors and so on.

But I don't think it's limited to that.

You could be in an initiate without being a wealthy person.

You just had to commit to the initiation ceremony

and then commit to ongoing service to the goddess.

So it would have been very attractive

to a wide range of people.

The cult of Isis had its own distinctive rituals.

Her followers sang and danced

to the sound of the sistra in her name,

while a high priest read the sacred texts

during masked processions.

(gentle ethereal music)

The relationship between Isis, the cult of Isis, and the Romans,

the Roman senate, was very, very complex.

And many times the actual government of Rome

kicked out the cult of Isis,

reducing her to, outside the pomerium,

the magic boundary line around the city centre.

So there's this push and pull all the time,

We don't really accept you. You're not one of the Pantheon."

Isis is the Egyptian goddess.

She is from the country of Cleopatra.

Augustus' power is based on the defeat of Cleopatra

and the way that the poets represent the victory of Augustus

is the victory of the traditional Roman gods

against these awful Egyptian gods that are like animals,

barking Anubis, the God with a dog's head.

So Isis is, in some senses, horrific.

And yet it's precisely under Augustus

that it becomes extraordinarily popular in the Roman empire.

She's also the goddess of Fortune.

She holds the cornucopia, the sign of abundance.

She holds the rudder that steers the ship,

that steers the world.

And it brought luck.

You worship Isis because she will bring fortune

to your household.

The pagan heart of Pompeii was filled with secret cults,

many woman-centric.

The Senate understood the power of Isis,

so they transformed her into the Roman goddess of luck, Fortuna.

In this particular manifestation we see her as Isis and Fortuna,

it's something that's going to be acceptable to everybody.

It won't be banned by the Senate or something like this.

It's part and parcel of what a Roman citizen

throughout the empire is gonna be used to.

It's acceptable and it's normalised.

There was another divinity

that traded her Greek name for a Roman one

and was worshipped in Pompeii long before the Roman conquest,

Venus,

who brought her followers luck, beauty and wealth, and above all,

the friendship of the emperor.

(gentle dramatic music)

Small wonder that the patron deity of the city filled with erotic art

was the goddess of love, Venus.

But seeing Venus just as the love deity

would be totally reductive.

She was the founder goddess of the City of Rome

and the most prominent deity of the Pantheon,

associated with victory, power and luck.

A long list of generals, politicians and emperors

were associated with her cult,

as well as some of the most powerful women in Pompeii.

Venus is a hugely important goddess in Pompeii.

More than one temple to Venus we know of,

and we can imagine that Venus as the goddess

of beauty and fertility perhaps attracts,

has a particular value for female citizens.

Venus is always present in Pompeii...

..Oscan Pompeii, Greek Pompeii, Roman Pompeii.

And you're gonna see over time different manifestations of her,

but I'd say it picks up tempo,

and she becomes more prominent with the passing of time.

For example, you can see her prominently

along the 'decumanus',

represented as a goddess being drawn in her chariot,

pulled by elephants.

I mean, she is a protagonist throughout the daily lives

of the Pompeiians.

They see her. They depend upon her.

(gentle piano music)

Julius Cesar takes it up a notch.

He says his family, like many noble families,

he was descended from a deity.

Which deity? Venus, through Aeneas.

And Octavian, or Augustus,

maintained that same story pushing the agenda of his family,

so that it eventually becomes the entire national religious idea

that Venus favours

not just the family of Julius Cesar and Augustus,

but of all the Romans.

Roman society has a range of divinities

and Venus is important amongst them

partly because of her association with the imperial family.

And I think we can also see that as reflecting

the power of women in Roman society.

It looks as though the cult of Venus in Pompeii

was associated particularly with more influential women,

wealthier women of political influence.

Eumachia is an extraordinary example of a powerful woman.

The biggest building in the forum on Pompeii,

the Eumachia building, is built by a woman.

It's clear that her father...

We know quite a lot about her father, he produced tiles for roofs.

So, Eumachia, however the wealth comes,

she has a lot, because you don't build

a major public building without enormous financial resource.

So she's manifesting her wealth, her greatness.

She does a great, beautiful building,

that ultimately is so large

we can't really quite put our finger on

exactly what was going on here.

There are many theories but the main thing is

it's pretty much the largest building in the forum area,

and this is done by a woman.

To me that underlines how much power and prominence

that women can have in society.

In a sense, anyone who pays for a public building,

who gives their money to the public is expecting a return.

It's what we call euergetism,

that is to say the benefactor gives

and in exchange the benefactor expects social status

Not only a brilliant entrepreneur

and a generous benefactor,

Eumachia was an astute political manipulator

able to use the strategic importance

of the cult of Venus to her advantage.

One of the ways in which female power can be expressed

is through priesthood,

just as the elite,

the male elite, they become priests of the gods,

the female elite become priestesses of the gods.

And Eumachia, we know, was a priestess of Venus.

The full title of Pompeii is the 'Colonia Veneriana',

the Venus colony.

Venus is the ancestress of the Julii.

She is thus very important for Augustus.

Eumachia can plug in to all that imperial power.

(gentle music)

Eumachia was also involved in the economic life of the city,

being the patron of the 'fullones'.

The fullers are people who are engaged

in the processing of wool.

This is a messy industry that uses large quantities of urine

in order to produce those lovely shiny white togas.

I should imagine that the 'fullones',

perhaps not the highest rank in Pompeiian society,

would see an advantage in having support

from a wealthy and influential woman like Eumachia.

And that might well be why they chose to club together

to pay for the statue of her that adorns the building.

The fullers, the 'fullones',

I'm sure, they would've been an important source of votes

for Eumachia's son Fronto in his election campaign.

(upbeat violin music)

(melancholy music)

(birds chirping)

Although subjected to male political power,

often women, regardless of class,

were able to become financially independent

and influential in their own right.

Something that would not occur again until the 20th century.

But in Pompeii not all powerful women were virtuous.

After all this was the city of sin.

(birds chirping) (gentle music)

"There was in the city a woman called Poppaea Sabina,

"and this woman possessed every quality

"except an honest soul.

"She had affable ways and a lively intelligence,

"and paraded her modesty while practising lust.

"She was never a slave to any sentiment,

"neither her own nor of others;

"where she saw profit, there she took her lust."

This is how the historian Tacitus described Poppaea.

A Machiavellian, lustful woman,

adored by her lovers and detested by all others.

Poppaea is a model of how seduction gives you power.

Sex is power.

And "Sex is power" is a message

in a hell of a lot of the frescoes in Pompeii.

One way of thinking of Poppaea is, you know, is local girl made good.

She is a local girl.

It's pretty certain that the name Poppaea

is a typical Campanian name.

Beautiful and cruel.

Calculating and passionate.

When talking about Poppaea Sabina,

the line between the truth and legend is blurred.

Hers is a story of sex, power,

hedonism and tragedy.

She wanted to be remembered and become immortal.

Poppaea Sabina, who was very much attracted

to the Emperor Nero, or so the story goes.

And he was very attracted to her.

Unfortunately, he was at that time married to Octavia,

who was the daughter of the previous emperor, Claudius.

Now nevertheless he embarked on an affair with Poppaea

and sent her husband away

to be Governor of the Province of Lusitania,

which is very... So he was conveniently disposed of.

And Nero and Poppaea conducted this affair.

And Tacitus reports that Poppaea persuaded Nero

to get rid of his own mother because Poppaea thought

that Agrippina would be an impediment

to her actually getting married to Nero.

So allegedly prompted by Poppaea, Nero has his own mother murdered.

(brooding music)

The attraction to being the wife of an emperor

is that the women of the imperial circle

would be themselves patrons of many people.

They themselves could be priestesses in the imperial cult.

And quite frequently the imperial women

were priestesses in the cult of the Emperor Augustus,

who was at this point established as a god.

So that was the sort of life that Poppaea Sabina

was aiming at, and that she achieved to a certain degree.

She did successfully get transferred

from her existing husband to the Emperor Nero,

and she had a child with him who didn't last very long.

The child died and was immediately deified, turned into god.

And this provides the sense of what Poppaea

was aiming to achieve.

The frescoes adorning the villas in Pompeii

give us unique insight into their owners.

Poppaea's luxurious villa of Oplontis

is the apotheosis of her desire for magnificence.

The clearest sign of her ambition

is in a fresco that tells the story of a hero,

seeking immortality just like her.

Traditionally this fresco is seen as representing

the 11th Labour of Hercules

when he is given the task of getting hold of

the golden apples of the Hesperides

from this garden in the far, far distant region

and bringing them back and this was a very difficult labour.

The tree was guarded by this fearsome snake Ladon

and so it was thought to be impossible

to get these apples but Hercules managed to do it

and bring them back.

Hercules is very deliberately placed in there to show us

that it is a mythical landscape

and that it is the landscape associated

with a very specific labour,

and that labour is very specifically associated with immortality.

Although Hercules and Poppaea may seem like two characters

so different, the way in which they are situated

in different relations to different kinds of immortality

would certainly be something

that people would be reflecting on and thinking about.

The kind of immortality

that we see people like Poppaea achieving,

and it is the one we can achieve,

is to propagate your name.

It seems that Poppaea has achieved her goal

to become the most important woman in the empire.

She gives her emperor a daughter, Claudia.

But as in any good mythological tragedy,

it only takes a moment for everything to unravel.

Claudia dies at four months of age

and her second child will meet an even worse fate.

She becomes pregnant by Nero and Nero kills her.

He actually jumps on her when she's pregnant,

causing not only miscarriage but her death.

So, Poppaea comes to a pretty gruesome end.

But the moral of the story is

you don't want to get too close to imperial power.

It's very, very destructive.

For every woman who is successful, there is always going to be

somebody who feels that it was done at their expense

and resents it in some way.

With Poppaea, we've been given mostly the negative press

because of Tacitus's very damning portrait of her.

In 79 AD Vesuvius erupts,

bringing down a cloud of death and ash on the city.

In one day, countless lives are lost.

It is one of the greatest tragedies in ancient history.

Some may describe it as a window into the past,

but Pompeii is so much more.

A living, breathing representation

of a long-lost world and its inhabitants,

the thousands of men, women, children and animals

killed by a merciless volcano,

entrapped in the hardening magma.

Their bodies have been burned away,

but the voids they have left inside the lava

give us a stunning testimony of the moment of the eruption.

So at a certain point the idea was

why don't we pour in plaster into this voids

versus just digging up, you know, empty space,

and see what shape we can get out of them.

And ultimately what turned out was these are the remains,

the imprints left from the deceased Pompeiians,

men, women, children, pets,

oftentimes in very dramatic painful poses.

When tourists come to Pompeii

and they see these casts of Pompeiians they think,

"Oh, those are the people that got carbonised right on site."

But actually, it's the opposite.

(sombre music)

(birds chirping)

(bright music)

(dog barking)

(gentle dramatic music)

(gentle serene music)

This magnificent city may have thrived on lust,

violence and superstition,

but at its heart lived a sophisticated civilisation

inspired by beauty.

A civilisation that flourished,

balancing on the thin, invisible line

separating fact from fiction.

Pompeii was a city that had to die in the flame and ashes

of a ruthless volcano in order to reach immortality.

(gentle serene music)

(bright music)

Captions (c) SBS Australia 2021