All language subtitles for BBC.Mary.Beards.Ultimate.Rome.Empire.Without.Limit.2of4.720p.HDTV.x264.AAC.MVGroup.org.eng

Once you've got an empire,
what do you do with it

and what did it feel like
to be part of it?

Buona sera. Ciao. Prego.

Well, clues can often be found
in very surprising places.

I'm talking rubbish.

Ancient Roman rubbish.

I'm in the middle of
a Roman landfill site.

Millions and millions of broken pots

that once contained
the fuel of the ancient city -

olive oil.

It's trash,

but it's very valuable trash,

because it's through the leftovers
of the Roman world -

the bits and pieces and the junk

as much as the monuments
and the treasures -

that we can see how
the Roman Empire works.

What feeds it?

What connects it?

Who are the winners

and who are the losers?

The Romans never set out
to acquire an empire,

but their undistinguished little
town came to control a territory

that stretched from Britain
in the north

to Algeria in the south...

..Spain to Israel,

the Nile to the Rhine.

How did it look to the Romans?

What did they make of it all?

How did they visualise it?

We tend to joke when we say
"All roads lead to Rome,"

but actually they did.

What about the conquered?

What difference did it make to them?

Just olives, olives
and more damn olives.

There were great fortunes for some,

but at the expense of the many.

This tombstone, for me,
is a bit of a tear-jerker.

So just how did Rome transform
the landscape of our world?

For an extraordinary record

of the scale and impact
of the Roman Empire,

I've come to see what must be
one of the most remarkable

and surprising leftovers
from the Roman world.

So I'm going to show you
our freezer.

And it's not a piece of pottery
or even an inscription.

Should I shut the door? Yes.

Blimey, this must be what Greenland
feels like.

Yes.

What I'm here to see is ice

recently drilled from
the Arctic ice sheets,

preserving layers and layers
of buried history

right back to Roman times.

How far in Greenland do you actually
have to drill down to

get to the Roman bit?

I would say 400-500 metres deep
in the ice sheet.

By analysing this ice,

Celia Sapart and her team
at Utrecht University

have discovered some
striking evidence

about Rome's impact
on the environment.

So here you can see a piece of ice
from Greenland

that we have already measured.

So in fact you see
all these small air bubbles

and each air bubble represents
the composition of our atmosphere

in the past.

Gosh.

There's Roman history
melting in your hands.

And what we do, in fact, is we
measure the greenhouse gases

in those little bubbles,
especially methane.

That's our main interest.

And we had a big surprise -

around year one we had an increased
level in this methane fingerprint

showing that higher level
of biomass burning,

burning can be...
burning because of deforestation,

burning because of all kind of
other processes.

Comparing our data
with historical data,

this peak was related
to population growth

and to the Roman Empire expansion.

The data revealed a sharp spike
in the level of methane

in the Earth's atmosphere

that wouldn't be seen again
for over 1,000 years.

This is really great for me

because we know that the Romans
had all this extra increase

in productivity and industry etc,

but, you know, actually to see it
kind of trapped there for ever

in the ice,
that's truly extraordinary.

I kind of think we feel a bit
differently about it perhaps,

but I think the Romans would have
been absolutely delighted

to see their impact kind of
preserved like this.

Roman pollution captured
in the Greenland ice sheets

is dramatic evidence
of a burst of energy

as Rome transformed
the world it conquered.

In southern France is another
of the remaining traces

of that transformation -
the Via Domitia,

the ancient road
linking Italy to Spain,

because Rome built its empire
from the ground up,

connecting people and places

in a way that had never
been seen before.

For us, roads almost STAND for Rome

and, actually, Roman roads
still do lie underneath

many of our own transport routes,

but it's easy to forget quite
how revolutionary it was

to go from a system
of windy local dirt tracks

to great paved highways
striking out across the continent.

It wasn't that the speed you could
go on them was that impressive -

it still took even the fastest
Romans about a week

to go what we could cover in a day,

but the idea that you could
start out in Rome,

get on a road, stick on it

and end up in Spain or Greece,
that was entirely new.

Like sinews crossing the empire,

the Romans built a network of roads

over 80,000km long,

not only creating a new geography

but introducing an entirely
new Roman way

of thinking about the world.

This is a bit of disused signage
from a Roman road.

It's one in a series of milestones
that were set every Roman mile -

that's about 1.5km -

along all the major routes.

Most of the writing on it

is actually the emperor's name
and titles

so you know who to thank
for this lovely road.

Underneath, there's
a big number three.

That means we're three miles
from the nearest staging point.

What's important about this is that
you know exactly where you are.

For the first time, you can
place yourself in the world.

Of course, once you got off
the beaten track,

people in the countryside may hardly
have noticed the arrival of Rome.

Life would have gone on
much as before.

But where there were Roman roads,
things changed,

not necessarily for the better.

It wouldn't have been fun finding
a brand-new superhighway

going straight through your land

and Romans complained,
much as we do,

about the bad food
and exorbitant prices

at the ancient equivalent
of service stations.

For some, though, these new roads
were a cause for celebration.

These are copies of four really
strange Roman drinking goblets.

They're quite recognisably
in the shape of milestones,

but not just that,

they've got lists and lists of names
of places scratched into them.

What it says round the top is that
this is the route from Gades -

that's Cadiz in Spain -

to Roman, to Rome.

And between each place,

it's giving you the number
of Roman miles

that you have to travel.

And at the bottom,
it does a grand total

of the whole length of the road,

which is over 1,800 Roman miles.

That would take you more
than 40 days to travel.

Now, quite what they were for
is actually a bit of a mystery.

I mean, they might be
very practical.

It might be a useful travelling cup

plus your route inscribed
on the outside of it,

but I think it's rather more likely

that they're either souvenirs
of the road

or a sort of celebration

of the length and the splendour

of this great road.

The simple idea
that you could find Romans

drinking out of lookalike milestones

really shows how sort of
internalised

that sense of road culture
had become,

which is exactly
what I'm going to do.

Salut, everybody!

The goblets also point
to that other great marker

of Roman presence on the landscape -

towns.

The Romans sponsored the greatest
programme of urbanisation

in history,

and in Western Europe, their cities
still often underlie our own.

All over the empire,

towns needed infrastructure.

It's the old cliche
about the Romans,

that they built roads and bridges,

baths and drains

and aqueducts like this one,

and they ploughed an awful
lot of cash into it.

This wasn't one of the longest
or the most vital aqueducts

in the Roman world -

it channelled water
just 15km

from a mountain spring to the
small Spanish town of Segovia,

but all the same, it's hard
not to feel impressed

by the ingenuity of it

and the sheer chutzpah
of that series of arches.

This is where even I get a bit
gobsmacked by Roman engineering.

And in a way, that's the point.

It's one of the trademarks
of the Roman Empire.

It's meant to be in your face

and its message goes far beyond
any practical purpose.

This can't just be about
the water supply.

This is about Roman power,

it's about the Romans making
an impact on the landscape,

it's about the Romans making
themselves permanent.

To put it another way,

if you want to bring a water supply
to a small town,

do you really need
all this extravagance?

Aqueducts,

towns,

roads -

these are the classic stereotypes
of the Roman Empire.

They're what it did for us.

But, more than just clever
engineering projects,

the Romans could imagine them
all fitting together.

This is a map of the Roman Empire.
Oh, right.

An ancient map. It's a medieval
copy of an ancient map.

Oh, medieval.
But it's copying a Roman map

which doesn't survive.

This is the only Roman map
of the empire we have,

or, actually, it's a copy
of a 13th century copy

of an ancient Roman map.

Why this is important
is it gives us a glimpse

of how the Romans pictured
their own empire.

Some of that's pretty obvious.

You've got Rome right in the middle

and leading out from it
you can see the roads.

There's some familiar names.

There's Naples, or Neapolis,

and there's Pompeii.

And that rather squashed island
there, that's Sicily.

But then you move further
and further east.

Past Crete here.

But my favourite bit, I think,
is the Nile Delta

with the city of Alexandria
and its lighthouse here

and then all the little rivers and
tributaries in the delta there.

In some ways this looks like a very
mad representation of the world -

it's all terribly squashed
and it's not arranged north-south,

but it's making more important
points than that.

It's saying that Rome
is at the very centre

and what's important about
the empire is its cities,

its towns and its roads.

We tend to joke when we say
"All roads lead to Rome,"

but, actually, they did
and they led away from Rome, too.

What the Romans are telling us is
that theirs is a joined-up world.

It's a dramatic statement
of Roman power and control

and a network of connectivity

which joins up places
never before joined up.

And in this new, connected world,
the demands of the Roman state

and over a million consumers
in Rome itself

could be met by producers many
hundreds of kilometres away.

This is when the hills of southern
Spain became a giant olive farm

and juicing enterprise.

This kind of monoculture - just
olives, olives and more damn olives,

is one legacy of the Roman Empire.

It was then that southern Spain
first became

the world's biggest
producer of olive oil.

More than seven million
litres of the stuff

going to the city of Rome
alone every year.

It was an agricultural revolution.

Anyone who'd lived
through it would have seen

the countryside around about them
completely transformed.

The Roman Empire ran on olive oil.

It was used not only
for cooking, but lighting,

and even the ancient equivalent of
soap. You couldn't live without it.

Olive grower Francisco Nunez de
Prado is still in the business.

Is the whole economy of this area,
is it all based on olives?

Yes, olive trees with olive oil
and the whole process,

represent, in this area,

practically 70% of the income.

Some people, like you,
are growing the olives. Yes.

But then you've got your pickers,
your specialist pickers.

But you've got, presumably,
transporters,

you've got a middleman,
expert agents.

Everybody has to be
specialising in something.

It was much
the same 2,000 years ago.

Olive oil provided jobs in a highly
profitable industry.

There were lots of people who made
lots of money out of all this.

There were the growers
and the pickers and the pressers

and the packers and the
transporters and the distributors.

And don't forget, there were
the men who cashed in on it all

by making the containers
to put it in.

This was an oil economy.

BELL CHIMES

Shipping seven million litres of
olive oil

to Rome and the
wider empire each year,

required more
than just trees and presses.

It needed an entire infrastructure,

whether in the form of warehouses,
bottling plants or ports.

One of the main transport hubs
and distribution centres

was a place the Romans called
Hispalis, and we call Seville.

Built into the fabric
of the modern city,

unnoticed by most passers-by today,

is an introduction to one of the
Roman officials whose job it was

to make sure the precious oil
reached its final destination.

This is a plaque put up in honour

of a man called
Sextus Julius Possessor,

and it's ended up, I'm afraid,
in an extremely inconvenient place.

Really, what it is, is a description
of Possessor's whole career.

First of all, he seems to be
stationed in Italy itself,

looking after
the incoming supply of oil

from both Africa and Spain.

But then he moves out
to Seville to a job

which is described as procuratorial,

somebody's who's in charge of the
"ripam Baetis",

the river bank of the river Baetis.

An interesting case of how Roman
imperial administration works.

They never have very many
people on the ground,

but they do get
men into place in key areas.

And here we've got Possessor,
I think,

as a safe pair of hands in Seville,

making sure that nothing goes wrong

with the supply of oil to Rome
from this end.

Of course, ultimately, this was all
for the benefit of Rome.

But a more complex exchange
was taking place too.

As olive oil flowed to Rome,
money flowed into Spain

and there's evidence in the branding
stamped into the oil jars themselves

that this new
wealth allowed some people

access into the politics
of Rome itself.

This is a particularly
tantalising example,

because the stamp here reads
very clearly,

"Port P-A-H".

That's port, short for portus,
or probably river warehouse,

of someone called P-A-H.

One thing we know is that the
father of the Emperor Hadrian had

those initials.

Publius Aelius Hadrianus.

So it's possible that this handle
is telling us something

about the source of the wealth of
Hadrian's family in the oilfields

of Spain and that it's telling us
something about the commercial

profits that underpinned the power
structure of the Roman Empire.

Whether this was really where he'd
made his money or not,

we know that Hadrian,
the man on the Roman

throne for 20 years in the second
century AD, came from Spain.

It's a reflection of just how
joined up the empire had become

and it's not surprising

that Hadrian bankrolled big building
schemes here.

This is what's left of the town
of Italica, where the

Emperor Hadrian's family came from.

They weren't native Spanish,

they were Roman settlers
from way back,

but they obviously
thought of Spain as their home.

Hadrian ploughed an awful
lot of cash into his hometown,

tremendous showing off and, to be
honest, all a bit out of proportion.

One of the biggest things he did was

put up this huge amphitheatre.

It would have
accommodated 25,000 people.

Now, to put that in context,

the Coliseum in Rome
accommodates about 50,000 or so,

so you've got a small town
amphitheatre in Roman Spain

with half the seating
of the Coliseum.

Or to put it another way,
the population of little Italica

was only something like 8,000 people
in all.

To me, that sounds a bit
like a plutocratic benefactor giving

little Cambridge United a stadium
half the size of Wembley.

It is a little bit absurd.

We're now almost
in the century of the arena.

This is where the gladiators would
have fought, where the wild beasts

would have been slaughtered and,
right in the middle here, you've

got a sort of mini version of what
you find in the Coliseum itself.

The underground cellars,
where the gladiators

and the animals would have waited
to come up into the arena

through trap doors in the floor.

It's very easy to get a rather

overblown view of the brutality

and the extravagance of gladiatorial

and animal spectacle.

My guess is that you didn't see
gladiators here very often.

You certainly didn't see very many
exotic wild beasts.

They did put on performances,

perhaps once a year on Hadrian's
birthday, would be my guess,

because the real point of this
monument was not actually

entertainment for the locals,
of whatever sort.

The real point of this
monument was to stamp

the image of Hadrian
on his native city.

And what Hadrian's Italica really
shows is something of the wider

process by which Rome remodelled
the world in its own image.

In Spain and elsewhere,
Rome established itself for good,

not just in bricks and mortar,
but in institutions and laws

which defined a specifically Roman
urban way of life.

These bronze tablets are just
covered in columns

and columns of writing,

and what that writing is,
is a constitution

devised in Rome for a Roman
town in Spain.

Really, it's a
series of do's and don'ts,

how to be a Roman town abroad.

Here's one about what the local

officials called
the aediles should do.

They're supposed to, every year, to
put on some nice plays in the city.

They have to pay no less
than 2,000 sesterces -

that's twice a soldier's pay -
from their own money,

"de sua pecunia",
and they might just get

a grant of 1,000 sesterces
from public funds if they do that.

So here we've got our generous
local officials obliged to

give us a theatrical display.

Everything, from seating
arrangements at public events to

the speaking time allotted to
accusers and defendants at trial,

are outlined in this document,
and many have a familiar feel.

There's a great bit here
which is about...

well, in our terms,
it's about electoral expenses.

It says - if you are standing
for office, you're a candidatus.

What you mustn't do is lavish
expensive meals

on people in order to
encourage them to vote for you.

Although it is allowed to give

nine people a meal on one day.

But no more than that.

After that, it's bribery.

That's the kind of level of
micromanagement that the Romans

are trying to impose.

From roads to aqueducts, civil
servants to public performances,

in this kind of empire building,
cash was as important as armies.

In the ancient world, if you needed
cash, you had to dig for it.

Southern Spain wasn't
entirely olives.

There were plenty of riches
in the form of silver to be

unearthed here too.

Ex-miner and local archaeologist,
Saturnino Aguera, is taking me

to see evidence of the Roman
operations here.

2,000 years ago, this would have
been an industrial landscape,

heaving with people.

One Roman who actually visited
reckoned that there

were 40,000 men
working for the mines in this area.

HE SPEAKS SPANISH

Right.

So what we've got here is
a place where the later mining has

cut through to give
a cross-section of the Roman working

and you can see some little
square holes,

galleries or passageways,
and all over the rock you can,

I think, see the pockmarks where
the Roman miners have come in

and they must have followed the ore
seams and just taken

the silver ore out and not bothered
with the rest of it.

And it's the scale of the industrial
processes that

went on around here, from the mining
to the smelting, that helps us

understand those traces of methane
we can still recover

from the Arctic ice sheets.

The Romans also recognised
the problem of pollution.

They built the chimneys
of the smelting plants very high,

to get rid of the noxious smoke.

It was a terribly exploitative
system of resources,

of landscape and of people.

But there were also vast
profits to be made too.

There were people who came here from
Italy in search of their fortune.

I mean, in a way,
this was a bit like the Gold Rush,

or Spain, in a sort of way,
was Rome's Eldorado.

The first silver entrepreneurs took
full advantage of a ruthless system

in which profit was
the sole consideration.

The organisation of the Spanish
mines was a mixture of public

enterprise and private enterprise.

The Roman state owned most of them,
but didn't have the infrastructure,

so it sold the franchise to
a range of private companies.

They called them publicani.

In our terms,
that's public service providers.

The dangers of that are obvious.

The state gets the basic minimum.

The only incentive for the private
companies is to maximise their

profits, and the people who pay the
price are the poor guys down there.

We've got to imagine
hundreds of people underground,

all toiling to get the ore out,
and using pretty rudimentary tools.

This is a Roman pick and you have to
imagine that there's a wooden

handle here and you're picking at
the surface of the rock like that.

This one is really heavy. It's
a rather clever dual-use tool.

Again, it's got a wooden handle
going through there

and you can either hammer
at the rock or you can

pick at the rock,
using the other end.

You'd have to be pretty strong to
wield that effectively.

You'd have to be even stronger,
though, to manage this crowbar.

Imagine you're coming
and you're trying to pick out

the seams of the ore and you're
jabbing this

into the rock to loosen
it out with this sharp end.

This is obviously very dark, dirty,
sweaty, heavy labour.

And it's a reminder that beneath the
surface of this sparkling new empire

there were the silent underclasses
keeping the wheels in motion.

This tombstone for me
is a bit of a tear-jerker.

We read about Roman children being
used in the mines as workers,

but here we actually seem
to meet one.

He's a little boy called
Quintus Archilus

and he lived to be just
four years old.

There he is -
he's got a little tunic on,

he's got a pick in one hand
and a basket in the other.

He's all set for working the mine.

We don't actually know that
that's where he died,

although many children must have.

What we do know, is that it is as
a miner that he is being remembered.

It was on small backs like these
that the wealth of Rome was built.

The silver he helped to mine
minted into the currency of empire.

What most of this Roman silver went
into was coin, things like this.

One Roman estimates that each
year in this area, they got

nine million of these.

That's an enormous impact

on Roman economy and society.

You can buy an awful
lot of aqueducts

and armies for nine
million of these.

But what's amazing is that these
coins came to be used all over

the Roman Empire -
same denomination, same designs.

Jonathan Williams is
an expert in coins

and deputy director
of the British Museum.

These are two very similar coins

of the Emperor Hadrian.

Distinctive face there.

And Hadrianus Augustus.
That's right.

They are very similar.
They're both Roman silver denari,

the lifeblood in many
ways of the Roman currency system.

Both have that of Hadrian on,
very similar.

They're the same value,
same mount of silver,

but they were found completely

opposite ends of the Earth.

This one here was found

in Bletchley, in southern England,

and this one was
found in southern India.

Britain, of course,
inside the empire.

India, outside the empire.

But loads of trading links.

Absolutely. Does that mean that,

in a sense, what Rome has done

has created a unified, internal

economy and coinage system?

We've got monetary union, really,

in the Roman Empire.

It's a single currency union
when you're talking about gold

and silver coins particularly.
Those are the ones, as we see,

that circulate throughout
the Roman Empire and beyond.

Everybody wants good Roman gold
and good Roman silver.

But what you do have, the other way

in which the currency unifies

the Empire, is that they have all
got the head of the ruling man

and it's his head being seen and
used and noticed and counted upon,

from Britain
all the way through to India.

That's one of the key unifying
factors about the Roman Empire,

together with all those statues
and all those other things.

From its Spanish mines,

Rome maintained a constant flow
of hard cash,

trickling down to contractors,
soldiers

and traders across the Roman world,

who could hardly have forgotten
that all this wealth

was tied to Roman power.

In return,
Rome became the focal point

for all the Empire had to offer,

drawing in taxes, talent
and the raw materials

to build the imperial city
we know today.

And one of the highlights
still standing in all its glory

is the Pantheon.

For many Romans walking past
this building,

the most striking thing about it
would have been the columns

holding up the porch.

We tend not to pay them
very much attention

and if we do notice them, we really
don't know how to read them.

But they're actually one of
the loudest boasts you can make

about imperial power.

That's partly because
they are monoliths.

They're carved out of
a single piece of stone.

Just think how difficult
that would be to do

without them breaking or cracking.

But it's also the material itself.

They all come from quarries

deep in a province 3,000km
away from here - Egypt.

They've been loaded onto camels and
donkeys, dragged across the desert,

put onto ships in the Nile,
taken to the Mediterranean,

across the sea, to stand here.

It's an extraordinary statement
about the resources of empire

and about the ability of the Emperor
Hadrian, who put this building up,

to control those resources.

In a sense,
the stone is the message.

But even emperors
couldn't control everything.

If you look hard at the building,
you'll see some awkward mismatches,

some odd misalignments, which make
it look as if the architects

had been expecting columns
a few metres taller

and had to make some last-minute
adjustments

when smaller ones arrived.

Maybe the quarry just couldn't
supply what was asked for,

or maybe some poor devil
got the order wrong.

I wouldn't have liked
to have been him!

For me, the Pantheon reflects
how the empire changed Rome

just as much as Rome
changed the empire.

The capital was where stuff
from all over the Roman world

was on display and on sale.

And at the centre of this world
was the Mediterranean itself -

Rome's internal sea.

It was much quicker and cheaper
to bulk transport goods by water

than by land, and the Mediterranean
became a busy highway

with cargo ships laden with things
from grand granite columns

to humble objects of daily life.

Everywhere you went
in the Roman Empire,

you would have found people
eating and drinking

out of shiny red pots like this.

You still find them
stacked on museum shelves

everywhere from Hadrian's Wall
to north Africa.

Most of us - that's me included -

just walk past them
without a second glance.

But, actually, they are what's left
of a most extraordinary case

of Roman mass production.

Most of them are pretty plain

but this one has got a more
exciting decoration.

It's got pictures of
the goddess Diana having a bath

and being spotted by
the unfortunate Actaeon,

who gets attacked by his dogs

as punishment for having seen

the goddess with no clothes on.

It's quite hard to place exactly
the social level of this,

but I reckon it's, erm, sort of...

very, very middle-market ordinary.

That's to say there would be
some people

who would lust for just one
of these bowls for their table.

There would be others
for whom this would be

normal everyday crockery.

What's really important about
all this is the simple fact

that it just got everywhere.

When people dig us up
in 2,000 years' time,

I guess they'll find loads and loads
of fizzy drink cans

and identical trainers
across the world.

This is one of the first examples
of globalisation.

This is the Roman brand.

Through its roads and sea routes,

the Roman brand
spread throughout the empire.

This wasn't only the movement
of goods, but people too.

In the remote town of Hierapolis,
in modern Turkey,

we find the remarkable tomb of a man
who seems to have made the most

out of the opportunities of
belonging to the new Roman world.

This is a wonderful story of
an exciting life on the high seas.

It's the tombstone of a man
called Flavius Zeuxis

and he says that during his life

he has sailed around the promontory
of Cape Malea -

that's the very southern tip
of Greece -

between here in Turkey and Italy...

72...times.

So what's he doing?

Well, Hierapolis was the textile
capital of this part of Turkey

and he can only have been going
from here to Italy

to flog all the things
they were making.

But what's interesting is, what
he chooses to put on his tombstone

to sum up his life

are those dangerous 72 journeys.

Zeuxis must've been
unusually successful,

or he wouldn't have
bragged on his tomb.

But with someone like him,

the Roman Empire made the world
simultaneously bigger and smaller.

Bigger because of the
expanded horizons

and the distant markets
now open to those who dared.

Smaller because of the network
of connectivity that enabled

people and goods to get around the
world more easily than ever before.

And a key part of that
distribution were the ports -

nerve centres of Roman trade
and commerce.

One of the cities that
flourished in the commercial world

of the Roman Empire was Ephesus,

which became a hub of
import and export.

It had once been an old famous
Greek town going back centuries,

but it was transformed
by the Romans.

Everything we now see here is
the result of Roman investment.

And the reason it was so important
in the Roman world is simple -

its harbour.

Imperial trade needs more than
ships and merchants,

it needs well-functioning harbours.

The coastline around Ephesus has
long since changed,

and it's now a good way inland.

But in its heyday it was
an important maritime gateway

to the East and to rich pickings
from as far away as India.

A reminder that the Roman world was
much bigger than the Roman Empire.

And Ephesus would have felt like
the whole cosmos had descended here.

People from everywhere,
speaking as many languages

on the streets then as they do now.

A city of a quarter of a million.

Not just those that lived here,
but people coming and going.

And everyone busy, busy, busy.

The honest guys doing a
hard day's work,

the cheats and the chancers,
the go-getters and the bureaucrats,

and of course the money makers.

If you could afford a pad in
the heart of Ephesus,

then the chances are you'd profited

from the constant
flow of goods through the harbour.

These are upmarket houses
for those who'd made it.

This is all amazing,
but it's also quite confusing.

There's a series of houses,
one above the other,

running up the hillside.
And they're partly interlocking,

so it's quite hard to tell where one
house stops and the next one starts.

But what is clear is that there was
a luxurious lifestyle going on here.

That some people in Ephesus,

including the owners of
these properties,

were doing very nicely, thank you.

And it makes the point that the
benefits of empire did not

only flow to the Imperial Palace
or to people in Rome itself.

The homes of the Ephesus elite
were evidently pretty flashy -

no expense spared.

The fashions and trends of
the city of Rome itself

were imitated and reproduced.

Here we've come into a kind of
reception hall

on a really palatial scale.

Also, it must all have been faced
with marble right the way round.

And you can see the columns
of marble on the side,

and there would be panels
in between.

And this is where somebody
big entertained

and displayed his wealth and power.

This is, you know,
almost imperial scale.

It must have been
pretty terrifying, I think,

to be a guest at this house.

I'm standing on a modern walkway,

but you can see there must have
been a great big door,

and there's big door fixings
on either side.

You have to imagine that you
would have had the door opened

for you into this.

And there, the big man
would be ready

to greet and possibly
humiliate you.

The things that came from the
temples of Ephesus really live up

to that classy Roman style.

So too do the things
from the terraced houses.

One of the highlights are some
exquisite -

of to my taste,
slightly militaristic -

ivory plaques showing the Emperor
on campaign.

But across the board, the finds here

really are top of the range -

the best that money could buy.

The question is, where did
the money come from?

Where did these guys who own
these houses make their cash?

Well, trade, obviously.

But to say "trade" makes it all
sound a bit easy, a bit comfortable.

Cos one of the biggest
commodities that came through

the port of Ephesus
were human beings.

This town was a great
centre of the slave trade.

Slaves flowed through
the marketplace at Ephesus,

like olive oil through Seville.

The brutal truth was
that many Romans wouldn't have seen

much of a distinction
between the two.

As they saw it, slaves were
one of the products of empire.

Many, the victims of Roman conquest,
kidnapping or just foundlings.

If you wanted to buy a slave
this is where you'd have come.

It's uncomfortable to grasp,

but the Roman Empire depended
on slave labour and,

like every other ancient society,

the Romans took slavery
absolutely for granted.

But uncomfortable as it is,
if we want to understand,

rather than just deplore,
what went on here, we have to try to

get into the mind-set of those
who came to buy slaves.

What did they think they were doing?

My guess is they thought they were
doing their shopping.

Perhaps they were here
after a gardener,

or a tutor for their child,

or maybe a hairdresser.

How are they going to be sure
they weren't ripped off?

Could they trade in
last year's model?

Where they missing out on a
special offer next week?

Three for two.

That may seem a very callous
way of putting it,

but it is the everyday
reality of Roman life.

Slaves were the operating system
of empire.

Picking the olives, quarrying
the stone, mining the silver

and constructing the buildings.

They weren't just a perk
for the rich,

quite ordinary craftsmen or
small farmers

could have afforded at least one.

But if you were the emperor,
it would have been thousands.

In fact, it's at the
Emperor Hadrian's villa,

just outside Rome at Tivoli,
that we can see still get

one of the clearest glimpses
of the slaves' world,

and the strict social hierarchy
that underpinned the empire.

And this is where the slaves lived -

in hundreds of rooms.

How many were squashed into
each one we just don't know.

But I don't imagine we should be
thinking of individual bedsits.

Some of those slaves were
servants or labourers,

and that's how we usually
think about slavery.

But others would have been
slave doctors, accountants,

librarians and musicians.

These were the people who were
needed to power this estate.

A slave in the imperial household
would have been in a lucky position

compared to those working in the
silver mines of Southern Spain.

But the truth is we can't ever see
it from their point of view because

they haven't left any account which
gives their side of the story.

So all we can do is imagine it.

This is where some slaves spent
most of their working lives -

downstairs in a network of
dark service tunnels -

beneath the grand, airy
quarters upstairs.

But people scurrying
about down here were always meant

to be invisible,

and they've remained pretty
much invisible to us,

largely because they've left
no trace behind them.

For me, this underground world
is a powerful symbol of

one very nasty side of Roman
slavery and exploitation.

But before we feel too much
moral superiority coming on,

it might be worth reflecting
how many invisible people

there are beneath the surface
of our world, too.

This was the empire that
Hadrian kept hidden -

a labyrinth of tunnels separating
the underclasses from the elite

who inhabited the luxurious
buildings above.

This was the empire that Hadrian
wanted to present to the world,

and it was built very
deliberately to do just that.

Even after almost 2,000
years of plunder

and exposure to the elements,

it's at Tivoli that we
can still see

better than anywhere
Hadrian's own vision of the empire

in the biggest palace the
Roman world had ever seen.

If you came to visit the
Emperor Hadrian in his great villa

this is the approach
you'd have taken.

And pretty impressive it was too.

Big flight of stairs leading
up to the monumental gates,

and on each side fountains playing,

a niche for statues,

and there probably would have
been some burly guards.

In fact, "villa" is a
dreadful understatement.

Even "palace" doesn't quite get it.

This imperial residence
- Hadrian's country pad -

was the size of the town.

Once you'd passed security
and got your foot in the door,

the sheer scale of the place and
the luxury would have been dazzling.

The paths, the libraries,
the miniature theatres.

Not that you'd have found
Hadrian here very much though.

More than any other Roman ruler,

he was off for years
touring his empire.

Hadrian was always getting on the
back of his horse going somewhere.

He was one of the greatest
tourists of the Roman world,

and half of his 20-year reign
he spent on the road.

What he saw - the monuments,
the temples,

the exotic highlights of
the provinces -

he reproduced,
replicated and copied at Tivoli.

The organisation it would have
taken to construct this place

is almost unimaginable.

The builders themselves were only
a part of it.

There were the people
who sourced the material,

who placed the orders,

the architects,
the accountants and clerks,

and the dinner ladies
who catered for the whole team.

I don't know if anybody's
ever actually counted

the total number of bricks
in Hadrian's villa.

But this really is building
as a military operation.

Those bricks now do make it all
look a bit naked, but remember,

it was originally covered with
slabs of marble and works of art.

It's difficult to visualise
it today, but Tivoli's interiors

must have been amongst
the most lavish in the Roman world.

Just a few broken pieces of
marble have been unearthed,

giving us a snapshot of what
it might have looked like.

Conservationist Barbara Caponera
has the tricky task of trying

to put the jigsaw back together.

Sometimes you can get to see what
covered those bare brick walls,

and this is an
amazing image of a horse

and a charioteer or his rider.

It's the horse's tail
here and his leg there.

It's all made on the kind of
same principle as a mosaic,

but with larger pieces.

So this is marble

and the horsemen's belt
is made out of blue glass.

And it was surrounded by a frame,

so it's kind of like
a painting on the wall.

These marbles have been
brought in from all over the empire.

The horse's body is a
rich yellow marble

that we know comes from Tunisia.

And one of these other fragments
here is a great green marble

that was from Greece,
actually in the area around Sparta.

What else have you got, Barbara?

SHE SPEAKS ITALIAN

Right, so this is
porphyry from Egypt,

and it can go next to Tunisia.

And this is another
very bright, red, orange marble

that comes from Greece.

That goes next to Sparta there.

It's almost as if we've
got a map of the empire in marble

on the walls and the floors
of the villa.

Tivoli echoes Rome's
imperial possessions.

Here, statues representing Rome,
with its mythical founders,

Romulus and Remus, sit side by side
with the God of the River Nile,

representing Egypt.

A visual reminder of how far and
wide the emperor's domain stretched.

At the pantheon,

Hadrian had displayed his power
to control the resources of empire.

But here he went a step further -

trying to evoke, on his own estate,

some of the most admired monuments
and landscapes of the provinces,

including a slice of Egypt.

This was perhaps
the swankiest dining room

in the whole of the Roman world.

You have to imagine the select
few guests reclining here,

surrounded by water and picking up
the delicacies from little boats

floating in front of them.

But they weren't just
eating five-star food

in a lavish setting,

they were eating in a replica of one

of the most famous monuments
of the province of Egypt.

Because Hadrian's project
was not simply

to create a luxurious
lifestyle for himself,

it was to make the empire seem
to converge here.

Whether by sucking in its
resources to this one place,

or by literally recreating the
wonders of his world on his estate.

To tour the villa must have
been like touring the empire.

This WAS the empire in microcosm.

In its ambition, Tivoli captures
the essence of an empire that

brought together places
and people as never before.

Along its roads, in its busy
cities and ports,

the inhabitants of the Roman Empire

experienced deep changes which
still affect the world around us -

revolutions in engineering,
trade and agriculture.

These offered new opportunities
and the riches for some,

and matching inequality for others.

It's always easier to find
the winners than losers.

The destitute, the exploited,
the underdogs

have left very little behind them.

The profiteers of Ephesus,
the oil barons of Spain and the

entrepreneurs of the seas have left
the traces of their success stories,

whether in the shape of broken bits
of pottery or great grand columns.

But one thing is for sure, winners
and losers lived in a new world.

Hadrian's villa at Tivoli
offers an idealised and,

to be honest, rather sanitised
vision of the Roman Empire.

An ordered world with established
hierarchies and everything in
its place,

And here, obviously,
under the command of one man.

The reality of course was more
fluid, more fractured and messy.

But this is the emperor's
frozen vision

of how the Roman world
was and should be.

In this new joined-up world,

what did it really mean to be Roman?

You saw the toga everywhere -
"frequens toga".

How would you become one?

And what difference would
it make to your life?

"Have a good bath," it says.

And I suppose it means,

"Flip-flops only in here."