BBC Mary Beards Ultimate Rome Empire Without Limit 3of4 720p HDTV x264 AAC MVGroup org
This is the skull of a Roman.
When we say “Romans”, we tend tothink of men from Italy dressed up in togas,
orating inthe Forum, trampling over the fields in armour, buildingbridges and probably overeating.
This Roman lived in York.
And this Roman was a woman.
All we know about her comes from herbones and what was found with them.
She can't have been more than about20 when she died and she must have been prettywell-off, to judge from the nice jewellerythat was found with her.
It's a lovely little bluenecklace.
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.
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a jet bracelet, an ivory bangle, a nice blue glass vase and a pair oflittle glass earrings.
There's actually more toher than that.
We can tell from the shape of theskull that she was certainly of mixedrace.
Either she came from North Africaor maybe her parents or perhaps her grandparents.
So she really makes us think – who were the Romans? And what did it mean to be Roman? Of all the ingredients that helpedthe Romans build their empire, none was so successful or surprisingas the one you can't see.
Citizenship.
And their ability to turn people notborn in Rome into fully fledged Romans.
He saw the toga everywhere.
“Frequens toga.
” A Roman could be all sorts ofdifferent people.
Rich or poor, black or white, fromthe fringes of the Sahara to the damp frontier of northernBritain.
The Britons were really tough.
It was true grit! So what difference did itmake to be a Roman? And how did you become one? Buried behind a modern industrialestate in southern Spain are the ruins of a small Romansettlement.
You have to be pretty determined tofind this site.
I don't think it's on the maintourist beat, really.
This is the beginning and theentrance to the site.
It's beginning to look a bit morehopefully Roman.
Right.
This one looks fairly ordinary, but for me, this place is one of the most important places in thewhole history of the Roman Empire.
The story goes back to 171 BC.
A delegation from Spain turned up inRome, representing more than 4, 000 men whowere the sons of Roman soldiers and Spanish women, and as such, they had no political rights.
They were effectively stateless andthey were looking for a home.
It was one of the unintendedconsequences of conquest and, interestingly, the historian Livy calls thesepeople “a new species”.
And the Romans, characteristically, improvised a new solution.
For a start, they gave them Carteiato be their home.
But the Romans did more than that.
They didn't just give them a home, they gave them a status.
They made them Latins, which wasthe kind of halfway house between being full Roman citizensand not citizens at all.
And that may not sound very much, but it was actually revolutionary, because it established the principlethat you could be a Roman citizen of some sort without having anythingto do with Rome and Italy itself.
And it kick-started a process thatended up, hundreds of years later, with every free inhabitant of theRoman Empire being a Roman citizen.
CALL TO PRAYER Throughout history, citizenship hascome in many forms.
But the idea that outsiders in largenumbers could become Roman citizens was entirely new in the ancientworld.
Radical, startling and the uniqueingredient of empire.
To see what being Roman looked likethousands of kilometres from Romeitself, I've come to what is now Algeria, onthe Empire's southern edges.
When the Romans conquered a place, they didn't set about imposing their norms, they didn't make people learn Latin, they didn't make peopleworship Roman gods, they didn't even make people usethe Roman calendar.
They exercised their powerthrough incorporation.
Now, I'm not talking about the poorsuffering peasants here, but they managed to getthe local elites onside.
And one of the main waysthey managed that was by extending full Roman citizenship.
Salud! Roman citizenship was always a gift.
You didn't have to passa citizenship test, or pay a fee, you didn't have to learn Latin, andyou didn't have to salute the flag.
Not that Romans had flags, but you know what I mean.
So, why would you want to bea Roman citizen? Well, there were allkinds of particular legal rights it gave you – to make contracts, marriage rights, and it meant you could neverbe crucified.
I doubt that that's what'sdriving most people.
The important thing about Romancitizenship was that it gave you a stake in Rome.
It's a bit like the American Dream.
You know it doesn't work for mostpeople, but the dream still matters.
We don't know how farthe extension of citizenship was a carefully planned strategy, or one of history's lucky accidents, but the Roman Empire workedbetter by bringing people in and not by keeping them down.
Now, we shouldn't exaggerate the effect.
I bet many locals here wouldn't havebeen keen on becoming Roman citizens or wouldn't havecared either way.
And in any case, imperialismis never cosily consensual.
Algeria is no stranger tothe conflicts of empire, to put it mildly.
From the Ancient Phoenicians, through the Arabs and Ottomans, to the French, andthat's not to mention the Romans.
In fact, it's in Algeria thatsome of the most impressive Roman remains in the wholeworld are to be found.
And they have really importantstories to tell.
The story of Roman Algeria began, as most stories of the empire began, with the brutaloppression of the native population.
I'm driving through what were oncethe killing fields of Africa.
It's where the Romans fought fordecades and even after the conquest proper, there were thousandsof soldiers stationed here, policingand nudging the frontier sand.
Even in parts of the empire wherethere had been no towns before, the Romans sponsored, encouraged and bankrolled the building of cities, Roman style.
Timgad was originallybuilt for retired Roman soldiers, serving nearby, to settle.
And it reveals a lot about how Romeput down roots far from Italy and how its identity and culture flourishedat the fringes of the empire.
I'm beginning toget my bearings now.
This must have been one of themain gateways into the town.
When you first walk in, it looksa terrible jumble, actually, but almost instantly, you come to a cross street, you can see another paved street, an absolute grid pattern.
This must be one of the bestsurviving examples of Roman town planninganywhere in the empire.
It's a pretty aggressive statementof Roman-ness in the middle of the desert, which means it's not thathard for me to find my way around.
And I guess I'm now in a littlehouse, and a rather splendid door.
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This is a truly regalset of Roman loos.
It's on the standardmulti-seater pattern.
You get a little bit of privacy fromthese rather natty dolphins here.
It's a nice thought, I think, that one of the poshest sets of loos anywhere in the Roman worldis still to be found in Algeria.
Ooh! What I've got in my sights now isa rather grand building coming up, the grandest we've seen really, with a whole load of columns, which is worth exploring, I think.
A rather posh entrance courtyard.
What on earth is it? This is really interesting.
It'sa bibliotheca.
It's a library.
If that's the case, it must be, this is a very, very rare example of a surviving public, presumably, library from the Roman world.
It's very smart.
Sort of.
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It's quite interesting thatwe've come into this town and the first monument we really metis indeed a monument to culture.
The public library.
I think if I'd beena citizen of Timgad, this is where I would havespent my time, if I'd been allowed.
My guess is that this library wasa pretty blokeish community.
It might have started off as a Romansoldiers' retirement home, but within just a fewgenerations of its birth, Timgad had expanded wellbeyond its original foundations, home to over 10, 000reasonably peaceful inhabitants of Roman, Africanand Berber descent.
You might expect to see a veryfiltered down version of Roman-ness here, and yet, we find quite the opposite.
This is the main square, the forum, the centre of business life, commerce, law and local government.
What is striking is it actuallylooks so standard.
Anyone visiting herefrom Roman Italy would instantly recognise this as the forum.
recognise this as the forum.
And yet, we'rejust on the edge of the Sahara.
Whoever designed this must havebeen working from some kind of kit for Roman forums.
Or actually, a kit for a whole Roman town.
You really do get the feelingthat the people of Timgad are investing unusually heavily in highculture and in their Roman identity.
All around the forum, all around town, there are thousandsof inscriptions proclaiming the Roman-ness of the inhabitants, but the man who really capped it allfor culture is this man, Vocontius.
And it's actually written, not inthe usual capital letters that you see on inscriptions, but in thelower case that you get in manuscripts, so it's as if you'rereading a book here.
Now, instead of the usual CV thatyou'd expect under his statue, you get an elaborate hymn of praise to Vocontius's culture.
The ordo, the local council, has put this up to him.
It's the council of the townthat lives next to a spring, a spring that brings it water.
But Vocontius is a spring, they say, that brings them something more.
He's their “other source”.
What he's a source of is not water, it's culture, literature and eloquence.
Here, on the margins of the empire, the people of Timgad are as committed as anyone elseto showing they are Romans.
All these mosaics come from thefloors of buildings in Timgad and they give you someidea of what the original colour of the place musthave been like.
And also, the richness.
We might call this Roman soft power.
Most of the people wholived in Timgad would never actually have seen Rome, but they'reusing their Roman-ness as a badge of honour, a way of showing they belong.
That must come from alittle bath building – “Have a good bath, ” it says.
And I suppose it means -flip-flops only in here.
And here, we've got some of theclassic scenes of Roman mythology.
There's the goddess Venus up there, rising from the ocean and balanced a bit awkwardlyon the bum of a sea monster.
And there is the god Neptune, rowing his trident.
He's the god of the sea.
What's interesting is that thereare artists round here who can produce this kind of stuff and the people of Timgadare literally at home with it.
They're really unmistakablydoing the Roman thing.
I'm sure there must have been awfulquarrels going on here, but on the surface, Timgad looksa pretty happy little place.
And that's summed up by thisbit of pavement art.
What it is is a gaming board, with words written across.
In fact, you move your piecefrom letter to letter.
And the words make a slogan.
“Venari, lavari.
” Hunting and bathing.
“Ludere, ridere.
“Gaming and laughing.
“Occ est vivere.
” That's living.
Kind of makes you realisehow far this place and its inhabitants have come.
They started out as a bunchof top ex-squaddies.
A few generations later, they're notjust hunting and bathing, they're bookworms in the locallibrary, and they're visiting a rather posh local lavatorywith dolphin fittings.
In some ways, it didn't matter how far from thecentre of the empire you were.
Being Roman meant belonging.
If you had lots of money.
By allowing the local elite into theclub, Rome secured their support.
In return, the local rich feltpart of a bigger world and it's here in Algeria that wehave one of the most extraordinary cases of how one couldclimb the greasy pole of Roman political power.
This is a really proudboast of success.
It's a standout memorial, designed to show just how far youcould go, even if you were brought up on the margins of theempire, in what's now rural Algeria.
It's put up by a man calledQuintus Lollius Urbicus to his dad, to his mum, his brothersand his uncle.
But most of all, it's put up to himself.
We know preciouslittle about Urbicus's roots, whether he was of Roman or Berberdescent, or perhaps both.
What we do know is that he grew upjust a few kilometres away from the family mausoleum, in the small remote Roman town of Tiddisand his family were Roman citizens.
And you can tell it's Romanbecause of all these winged willies.
Even in its heyday, Tiddis is unlikely to have had morethan 1, 000 inhabitants.
It's more of a village than a town.
And I doubt that it was particularlywell known in Algeria.
No-one else in the Roman worldwould even have heard of it.
This really must takethe prize for being the smallest forum in the wholeof the Roman Empire.
Local offices there, loads of plinths that once carried statues of emperorsand local bigwigs.
This one was actually the statue of a rather important local Roman lady.
But here was the statue to the biggest local bigwig of them all, Quintus Lollius Urbicus.
The statue's lost, but you can seewhere his feet would have been, perhaps in marble, maybe even in bronze.
And it's underneath that, on this plinth, that you find his CV written out.
It's terribly abraded now, butyou can just about feel the letters.
You can see his name here, Lollius Urbicus.
You can see that.
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Well, you can feel that he wasconsul and underneath, you get loads of the other things that he didin his life, the offices he held.
We learn that he wasa bit of a war hero, he served in the expedition againstJudea with the Emperor Hadrian and he seems to have won militarydecorations, a sort of honorific spear and a golden crown, a bit like a purple heart or an MC.
He's the biggest thing that evercame out of Tiddis.
He's the local boy who really madegood and no-one made gooder and round here, he would have beenabsolutely exceptional.
What we've got to remember, though, is that there were thousands of peoplelike Lollius Urbicus in the Roman Empire, goingfrom provincial towns to make it big in the city itselfand in the army.
In some ways, for me, that's what'sexceptional about the Roman Empire.
The story of Urbicusdoesn't end here.
If we follow his trail, Urbicus takes us about as far away from Africa as you couldpossibly get in the Roman Empire.
To the empire's northern frontier.
It's in Britain that a plaque wasdiscovered, put up by a unit of the Roman army, recording somenew building they'd just erected.
This unit says they'reworking underneath Quinto Lollio Urbico, QuintusLollius Urbicus, who was “leg aug”, he was the Legatus Augusti, he was the emperor's representative.
That's to say he wasthe governor of the province.
So, our man from Africa has ended upwith the top job in Britain.
So, what we have here is oneprovincial turned Roman now governing other provincialson the other side of the Roman world and that was part ofa regular pattern.
What Lollius Urbicusfrom North Africa made of his time in Britain, we can only guess, but in the Roman imagination, thisisland had particular significance.
By expanding beyond theMediterranean world, and conquering a place across different seas, theywere venturing into the unknown.
For the Romans, this wasn't justthe sea, it was the ocean.
It was part of that vast waterway that went round the inhabited world.
It meant, really, that Britain was in another world.
That made it hugely attractiveto conquer and explore, but it was almost as if they weregoing into space, in our terms.
And of course, they told loads of tall and not so tall stories about what you mightfind in Britain when you got here.
It was cold, it was wet, it was foggy, and the sun didn't shine very much, but the natives had weird habits.
They grew very tallcos it was so cold and they lived to a vast age, 120years old, you'd find people here.
Some people even said itdidn't exist.
But there were others who thoughtthat, actually, Britain was where you found real virtue.
The Romans had becomecorrupted by decadence and luxury, the Britons however werereally tough.
It was true grit! Britain was certainly the perfecttarget for the doddery Emperor Claudius, who neededa decisive military conquest to bolster his unmilitary reputation.
Yet like anywhere, even here, where the cultural gap was perhapsat its widest, an outsider could become Roman, if he servedfor 20-odd years in the Roman army, a clever mechanism that turnedthe conquered into the conquerors.
These pieces of bronze must oncehave been someone's most precious possession.
They belonged to a man calledReburrus, and what they do isthey document the fact that when he'd completed his yearsof army service, the emperor had then given himRoman citizenship.
I think what we have to imagineis that there would be some very big document on publicdisplay in Rome, naming a load of peoplewho were given citizenship, but individuals could get their ownpersonalised little copy, like this.
It does a bit more than justgive him citizenship.
It's very clear about that, “civitatem”.
It also gives citizenship to hischildren, to his descendents, and if he's living with someone as man andwife, the wife gets citizenship too.
But if he's a bachelor, then anybody he subsequently marrieswill get those same rights, provided, it says, there isno polygamy going on.
“Dumtaxat singuli singulas.
” As long as it's kind of one each, which I think is probably an attempt to stop any shammarriages for immigration purposes.
Reburrus was Spanish in origin, but he'd done his military service in Britain and almostcertainly settled here on retirement.
He was one of very many.
Because long afterthe Emperor Claudius had celebrated his British conquest, guerrilla warfare raged onand there were thousands of Roman soldiers based in barracksacross the country, like this one, tucked away amongst modern terracedhouses in South Shields.
This all looks very Romanand very military, but we shouldn't imagine that thiswas a world in which Roman soldiers were coopedup in their barracks and the native British weresomewhere outside.
There were all kinds of things goingon here and all sorts of people – traders and money makers, slaves and women and children.
It was a small community, but a very mixed one.
And we certainly shouldn't imaginethat all the Roman soldiers came from sunny Italy, just itching to get back home tobetter weather and better food.
Most of the men actually camefrom places much like this in other parts of the empire – from Belgium, Germany, or northern France.
And for a real glimpse into thecultural complexity that you find on the northern frontier, I think this tombstone is absolutelyextraordinary.
It's the tombstone to a woman called Regina and she is an ex-slave, a “liberta”.
And she's the wife, “coniuge, ” of a man called Barates.
And Barates wants us to know thathe is from a long way away.
He's Palmyrenus, he says veryproudly across the middle.
He is a man of Palmyra, that'sin Syria.
She came from down south.
She's “Natione Catuallauna”.
She's a member, originally, of the Catuvellauni tribe, somewhere around St Albans now.
Interestingly, underneath, we've got another text, written this time in Palmyrene.
Now, my Palmyrene's a bit rusty, but I'm assured it says, “Regina, the ex-slave of Barates, alas.
” How much I miss her.
But that's not all there is to it.
The image, too, has thatkind of cultural mishmash to it.
Partly, she looks here like many Roman women are represented in death.
They're obedient, they'redoing their spinning, we've got her wool down here, got a little treasure chest here.
But it's notquite as simple as it seems because various bits of the imageseem to be drawn almost directly from Palmyreneor Syrian examples.
Sadly, someone's bashed off her face, but what you can stillsee of her hairstyle is a kind of hairstyle that youfind in tombs in Syria and this little idea of having thisspindle held in her hand and put across her lap, that's also foundvery often in Palmyra, so you've gotPalmyrene, Roman, British identity, being paraded both by the writingand by the image.
Now, for me, this raises any number of questions.
I mean, I wonder, for example, how a poor girl from theCatuvellauni tribe ended up being the slave of a Palmyreneand eventually marrying him and ending up here onHadrian's Wall, but I wonder even more, really, did this couple stick outin 2nd century AD, South Shields? Did people sort of think thattheir relationship was noticeable or did they just blend in witha lot of other people who were enjoying very kind of mixedrelationships? And what language do we thinkthey spoke at home? And I guess overall, this looks to me as if it'san absolutely perfect example of the kind of clashes of culturalidentity, the merging of cultures.
If you like, the sort of culturalmess that you find when you look carefully at the kindof communities that you have here.
This is about mobility of people.
This was a world where peoplemoved around freely.
All kinds of migrants travelledthe empire in search of a career opportunity, or simply dreaming of fortune.
We can see what this mobilitymeant by looking at their skeletons.
It's changing our viewof the communities of Roman Britain.
They weren't static little places, but full of people born elsewhere.
Archaeologist Hella Eckardt, from the University of Reading, has been investigatingthe identity of individuals discovered in ancient burial sitesthroughout the country.
How do you actually go about workingout where the guy or woman came from? We usually start with the gravegoods and here you can see an array of finds from Catterickand they're quite unusual.
So, there are crossbowbrooches here, like this.
And they are thought to beworn as badges of office, so soldiersand administrators wear them.
And the object itself mightnot be unusual, but the idea of placingit in the grave is.
So this is hinting foreignness.
It is.
Then what do you do with the skull? So what we do with the skull iswe will test the teeth, so we will look at the molar andwe will test the chemical signature, preserved in the tooth's enamel, and it will tell us what was the geology like wherethis person grew up.
So, when my teeth were forming, when I was kind of three, four, five, what I was eating and drinking kind of getslocked inside the tooth enamel.
That's absolutely right.
It's like a chemical fingerprint.
The water relates to the climate, so if you grow up in a hot coastalNorth African climate, that will look different chemicallyto a continental cool climate, like Germany or Poland.
Right.
And for this one? For this one, we think that thisindividual and a whole group of.
.
.
Most of these mencome from somewhere colder and more continental.
Be somewhere like Germany or Poland, something like that.
Right.
'So Polish migration to Britainisn't as new as we think.
' If I were to ask you to just guess -what rough proportion of the people in Roman Britain doyou reckon didn't grow up here? If we look at the countryside, for example, we simply don't know.
We haven't tested and we assume that people didn'tmove very much in the countryside.
But for the cities, which is whereour work has been, we think 20 to 30% of the ones we've sampled may beincomers, from outside of Britain.
So quite a significantproportion of migrants, doing what? The cities are very mixedand diverse and what they seem to be doing, a lot of these individualsare in quite high-status roles, so the lady from York has veryrich grave goods, these individuals, they have thesecrossbow brooches and the belt fittings, so they're probablysoldiers and administrators.
They're running the Roman Empire.
So our picture of Roman Britainhas to be, it's not just that there are cities, it's that there are citieswith a very different sort of community than you couldever possibly have found, you know, a couple of hundredyears before the Roman invasion.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
These migrants, Poles and Germans, people like the Yorkshire ladywith roots in North Africa, or Barates from Syria, made the Roman Empire, just as much as the emperorsand the politicians did.
And it isn't just a questionof moving around the empire.
It's also people from the provincesmaking it to Rome, getting to hold the highest positions of powerin the capital itself.
In our terms, the Roman ruling class was strikingly ethnically diverse, but we shouldn't conclude from that that the Romanswere all sugar coated liberals.
When they felt like it, they couldbe just as xenophobic as anyone.
And we can seethat from an extraordinary survival in the French city of Lyon.
That's to say, in Gaul.
It's all related toa proposal of the Emperor Claudius – the same man who tookBritain as his trophy.
He stirred up a real hornet'snest in Rome when he suggested that Gauls should be allowedinto the heart of Roman government.
Claudius ran in to allkinds of objections.
Some people complained that theGauls had only recently been vicious enemies of Rome and otherssaid they didn't much fancy kowtowing to a load of nouveau richemen from the backwoods.
What's amazing is that we still have a word-for-word transcript of Claudius's reply, later inscribed on bronze and put upin Gaul.
The interesting thingis that Claudius justifies his policy by goingright back to the very beginning of Roman time, when he says – “aileni et quidem exter ni.
” Aliens, foreigners, and someoutsiders already came to Rome, and that's goingback to the time of Romulus.
Now, to be honest, Claudius's speech is a bit nerdy and he grindingly goesthrough every example he can think of of foreignerscoming in to the political structure of Rome, people who – “Romam migravit” – the people whocame as migrants to Rome.
But objections or not, Claudius got his way.
And the Gauls were incorporatedinto the power structure of Rome.
And that was reallythe standard pattern.
One notable exception was Britain.
We don't know of any native Britwho made it big at Rome.
If the Brits never dominated Rome, the Roman way dominated Britain.
Whether that wasspending their afternoons, like we imagine every Roman did, going to the baths, or whatever the weather, dressing up in a sheet.
Some locals probably justdidn't get all this bathing stuff.
Or take to wearing the toga.
But some must have relishedthe fun you could have here.
And some probably gota bit too hooked in the kind of, “Is that a toga version 5 “or a version 6 you're wearing?” And that's exactly what one Romanwriter, referring to Britain, has to say.
He says he saw the toga everywhere.
“Frequens toga.
” And they took to bathsand to elegant dining and they called it culture.
But it was really”pars servitutis” – part of their enslavement.
This was partly mocking the peoplefor their Roman pretensions.
And at the same time acknowledging that it played intothe hands of Rome.
But the cultural interactionsare more complicated than that.
Here in Roman Bath, long before the Roman invasion, the local population hadworshipped the goddess Sulis at these hot springs.
After the conquest, the Romanssaw her as the equivalent of their own goddess Minervaand addressed her by that name.
She began to be calledSulis Minerva, a hybrid god combining both identities.
But was she really native, or was she Roman? What's left of the facadeof the temple tells us a lot about the world of Roman Bath.
Some of it is reallyvery, very Roman.
But not all.
It looks as if, in the middle of the gable, the sculptor's been asked to do an image of the shieldof the goddess Minerva.
Which in Roman mythologyhad at its middle a snaky-headed female figure.
The gorgon looking out.
That's fine, except what we've gothere is a bloke with a moustache.
Now, the question is, has the sculptor just got it wrong? You know, has he failedto be properly Roman? Or has he perhaps refusedto be entirely Roman? And is this Sulis, you know, creeping in? Or is it actually somethinga bit more interesting than that? Is this really a new hybridculture for a new Britain? In the merging of Romanand pre-Roman images in art, in the worship of dual gods, and in the cultural mixof its towns and cities, what we're beginningto see is the emergence of a new identity in Britain.
Perhaps we shouldn't thinkof these people as being either native or Roman, perhaps being Roman here meantsomething new altogether.
That is – British.
When the Romans invaded this island, it was home to thousandsand thousands of people.
Lots of different groups, each one thinking a littlebit of it was their own.
It wasn't a politicalunity in any sense.
That's what the Romanstried to make it.
And in that sense, they didn't just find Britain, they didn't just conquer it, they created it.
And it's thanks to theRomans that we have London.
London was a brand-new Roman city.
Basically, there wasjust open country here before.
And it's actuallythanks to the Romans that London became the capital city, stuck down here in the South East with all the disadvantagesand advantages that brings.
And what's amazingis if you dig down underneath the laterbuildings that we now see, you find all kinds ofelements still surviving of the Roman city itself.
For us, that's the Guildhall.
But it's where the Romanamphitheatre once was.
And underneath herewas the Roman forum.
The city centre.
Supposed to be one of the largestpublic buildings north of the Alps.
Most people here are lookingat the Tower Of London.
Behind them, they'd see part of theRoman wall, 1, 000 years older.
But we can't ignore that all this was bought at the priceof violent conquest and that not everyone in Britain and the other provincesof the empire were busy happily embracingtheir new identity.
In fact, one of the heroinesof British national culture is a rebel and resistance fighteragainst the Roman occupation.
She's Boudicca, the wife of a local king, who'd actually got onrather well with the Romans and had left his kingdom to them.
The trouble was, that the Romanstook over their inheritance with terrible brutality.
They flogged Boudiccaand they raped her daughters.
Boudicca seized herchance and led a revolt.
Storming London and other Romantowns, burning them to the ground.
On one occasion, Boudicca's forces are supposedto have cut off the breasts of the Roman women andsewed them into their mouths when they killed them.
In the end, however, Romanfirepower won out, as it always did.
And Boudicca killed herself.
The strange thing is, that a couple of hundred years ago, Boudicca, that virulentopponent to the Roman Empire, was reinvented as an ancestorof the British Empire.
The words on the baseof her statue say it all.
Basically, don't worry, Boudicca, your descendants will conquer more territory thanthose Romans ever did.
I have to saythat for different reasons, a bit of my heart'sinvested in Boudicca.
The tough woman who stood upto the might of the Roman Empire.
But my head says a bit different.
I'm sort of ashamed to say it, but I'm kind of glad she didn't win.
Even if the Romans wereexaggerating about her crimes, she was a brutal terrorist.
And what sort of place would thishave been if she'd got her way? I often find it hard todecide which side I'm on.
Romans or rebels.
But one thing's for sure, Romans had to fight tomaintain a hold over Britain.
And the island was always somethingof an awkward and exotic possession.
On the other side, going east, things are very different.
The Greek world, that alsoincluded what we call Turkey and much of the Near East, cities, urban living andlong-standing relations with Rome had existed for centuries.
MAN SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE Becoming Roman here tooka very different form.
All the same, there wasstill a desire to make sense of the brave new worldto which they now belonged.
I'm in a place thatI haven't been for almost 40 years.
It's Aphrodisias, the city of the goddess Aphrodite.
And it's very special because it's probably the placein the whole of the Roman Empire where you can seebetter than anywhere else how it was that people outside Rome represented the powerof Rome to themselves.
'And we can see how the twocivilisations of Greece and Rome 'came together and what the empirelooked like from the Greek side.
' People in the easternpart of the empire went on speaking and writing Greeklike they had for centuries.
The Romans didn'tmake them change to Latin, they went on being Greek, under Rome.
They went to Greek plays, they read Greek books, they worshipped Greek godsin Greek temples.
And they did something theRomans rather disapproved of.
Naked athletics.
In stadia like this one.
This is the 30, 000-seaterstadium of Aphrodisias.
In contrast to the new townsand cities that sprung up in Britain and Algeria, here there are at first sightfew clear signs of specifically Roman culture.
But if we dig beneath the surface, another story begins to emerge.
It takes a bit of aleap of the imagination to imagine the scene ofGreek athletics going on underneath all this long grass.
But that's what happened here.
But it wasn't the onlything that happened here.
It's always worth lookingvery hard at the details on these big lumps of stone.
We can see some strong hintsof a very Roman kind of use.
All along the frontrow of the seats, there are these little fixings.
There's a hole herewhich must have taken rope.
There's some kind of wedge herewhich presumably took a post.
What these are, are part of a structure of ropes and posts and nets which keep the audiencesafe from something dangerous going on in the stadium.
Now, that's not athletics.
That's animals.
What we've got to imagine is thatsometimes the people of Aphrodisias were showing up here to watchthe very Greek sport of athletics.
Sometimes, they showed up for thecharacteristic Roman entertainment of gladiatorial combatand wild-beast hunts.
So, this stadium iskind of dual use.
And it shows just how much thisGreek culture is incorporating bits of Rome.
And there's anothereven more obvious way that the people ofAphrodisias incorporated Rome into their own cultural world.
That is in the worshipof the Roman emperors.
And in a brand-new sanctuary, sponsored by some local grandees, for exactly that purpose.
This is one of the most importantarchaeological discoveries of the last 50, even 100, years.
It's a temple complex dedicatedto the honour and worship of the Roman emperor.
And I'm sitting on the temple steps.
We have to be a bit carefulabout what we mean by worship.
I think there's no chance thatthe people of Aphrodisias thought the Roman emperorwas just the same as Zeus, or Aphrodite, or any of those traditional gods.
What they did think is thatthe power of the Roman emperor was very like the power of a god.
And they worshippedhim in those terms.
Temples dedicatedto the Roman emperors have been found all over the empire.
But what made this discovery so special was that itwas loaded with sculptures.
Represented are theemperors, their families, images of the traditionalgods and myths and the conquered provincesimagined in human form.
This wasn't simpleflattery of the central power, though there wasno doubt a bit of that, this was a local initiativedesigned for a local audience.
Setting in stonetheir own interpretation of the Roman worldand their place in it.
And here's an almost-naked emperorhaving a go at a province.
What's quite interestingabout all the ways that provinces and conqueredterritories are represented in this series isthat they're all female.
So, there's a wonderfulbit of gender.
.
.
Or a horrible bit ofgender politics going on, with the heroic, masculine emperor slaughtering, or raping the helpless woman.
A woman trying notto reveal her naked body.
And is putting her hand up, probably to ask for mercy.
He's got his handtugging on her hair.
The caption iswonderfully revealing.
The emperor isTiberius Claudius Kaisar.
That is the Emperor Claudius.
But the province isa bit of a surprise.
Because she's “Bretannia”.
It's about the easiest bitof Greek you could ever see.
This actually is the very, veryfirst image of Britannia ever to appear in world art.
And I think it's a bit of a shockto discover that she's not appearing as a proud warrior womanon the back of a coin, but she's here as arather sad victim of what is, to all intents and purposes, rape by a Roman.
It's funny that once you getdown to look at the captions, you start to see these sculpturesin a bit of a different light.
Because they were really meantto be seen very high up from below.
And they look quitedifferent from this angle.
And the lower you get, actually, the better this one works.
And so if you actually lie down, what you find is you're looking straight up into the ratherpathetic face of Britannia.
And that must be the viewof her that the Aphrodisians walking down the porticoesmust have had.
We can only wonder what theywould have thought as they looked.
My guess is that a few of themmight have been on Britannia's side.
But many of themwould have been in awe of the god-like power of Claudius.
And many would have seenRome's glory as their own.
Not so much subjects, as partners in the empire.
Here, you could be Greekand Roman with no contradiction.
For me, the really importantthing that comes out of all this is that there was nosingle way to be Roman.
We've been all overthe Roman Empire, we've found Romans in togas, in tunics, in trousers, probably.
We found them speakingLatin, Greek, Celtic.
There wasn't a rule bookfor how to be Roman.
In fact, it was the sheer diversity and the acceptance of diversity that actually underpinnedthe Roman Empire.
Whether you came from the marginsof the empire in the east, its northern frontiers, or thefringes of the Sahara in the south, if you were a Roman citizen, you had the same rights andprivileges as a citizen in Rome.
And that was radical and new.
An idea still worth cherishing.
Rome's extension ofcitizenship was one factor that gave its empire unity.
Something few empires beforeor since have managed.
But one man would put thatunity on an entirely new footing.
The Emperor Caracallawas born here, in Lille.
And he's gone down in historyas an awful brute.
He started his reignby murdering his brother.
A bit like Romulus.
But in this case, the poor ladwas sheltering on his mother's lap.
Things went on from there.
But in 212, he changed the world.
He gave full Roman citizenshipto every free inhabitant of the Roman Empire.
About 30 million people becameRoman citizens at a stroke.
Why he did it? We haven't a clue.
By the look of him, I don'timagine it was simple generosity.
All the same, it was theculmination of the Roman project of incorporating outsiders, extending citizenship and making the Roman wayof doing things seem universal.
Even natural.
After 1, 000 years, in a way, this was the triumphantfinale of that project.
But the truth is that whenthey became all the same, the Romans soon foundnew ways to divide and exclude.
'Now, the Roman Empirewould come under pressure 'both from the outside.
.
.
' The wall must have been somethingto do with controlling that.
'.
.
and from a new threat within.
' This was Romans attacking Romans.
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