BBC - Meet the Romans with Mary BeardEpisode 3 Behind Closed Doors
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00:00Today, when we think of ancient Rome, this is what we see.
00:10A city of marble ruins, colossal amphitheatres and imperial power.
00:16A world of emperors and armies and lavish spectacle.
00:21All those gladiators fighting to their death.
00:24But what happens if we turn that upside down?
00:28Take a look at Rome from the bottom up.
00:33Hidden away all over the modern city,
00:36you can still find evidence for a very different ancient Rome.
00:40The forgotten voices of its bakers and butchers, its slaves and children.
00:45Gosh, this is a sad one. He lived for just one year.
00:48Fix it. Annum, unum. The death of a baby.
00:52Here we've got a young slave girl, aged 17.
00:55Africana. She came from Africa.
00:58This wasn't just a mugging, this was mass murder.
01:02In this series, I've been exploring the lives of these ordinary Romans
01:06through the extraordinary stories they tell us on their tombstones.
01:13We've already seen how the Empire turned Rome into the world's first global city.
01:18A place where a million people from three continents lived together.
01:22Where life was full of luxury and laughter, but also disease and danger.
01:27In this final film, I want to delve even deeper
01:31and go behind the closed doors of the Roman home
01:34to lift the lid on their personal lives and prized possessions.
01:38It's a really, really precious piece because it's the only cradle
01:43to survive from the Roman world.
01:46And take you to meet some extraordinary ordinary Romans
01:50who will reveal an intimate, at times dark,
01:53but very surprising picture of the Roman family.
01:56Step through the front door into a Roman home
01:59and you'll find a place brimming with stories,
02:02from the shocking to the sweet.
02:04Loving couples, that's for sure,
02:07but also teenage pregnancies, abandoned babies,
02:11drunken housewives, runaway slaves,
02:14ménage à trois and a very nasty case of domestic violence.
02:19Welcome to my Rome.
02:50This house in Pompeii is the perfect example
02:54of a conventional Roman home.
02:56You come through the front door into a grand formal hall
03:00with several rooms off it.
03:02Pool for collecting water and opposite the front door,
03:05a reception room comes study, called in Latin the tablinum.
03:10The standard view is that this is where the master of the house presided,
03:15dressed in his toga, receiving his guests.
03:19While at the back of the house, in the private quarters,
03:22is where we find the wives and kids and the cook,
03:25slaving away over a hot oven.
03:27The problem with that is there's a touch of the Frankie Howard
03:31Mr and Mrs Pompeii about it.
03:34Or, to put it another way,
03:37it's a temptation for us to take a rather idealising image
03:42of our own families, dress them up in togas,
03:46add a couple of slaves and say,
03:48hey, presto, that's the Roman family.
03:51And it's not actually entirely wrong
03:54and there's some quite strikingly familiar things about a Roman house,
03:59right down to some of them having a beware of the dog sign at the front door.
04:05But if you look a bit harder, you find it isn't quite so simple.
04:11So how do we start to bring back to life
04:14what really went on within the walls of a Roman home?
04:18And how do we get close to a real Roman family?
04:34Well, the best way is to look at what the Romans themselves tell us
04:39from beyond the grave.
04:41When you come into a place like this,
04:43what first hits you in the eye are the statues of the rich,
04:47stern emperors and ladies with expensive hairdos.
04:50But if you look behind them, you'll find thousands of ordinary Roman voices,
04:55compelling us to read their stories.
04:58Some have forked out on portraits, others on just a few lines of text,
05:04but they all give you clues about who they lived with and who they loved.
05:09Here's a cute little boy with his pet dog.
05:12Here's a dad. He's commemorating his daughter, Julia.
05:16There she is, really natty hairdo.
05:19She must have been quite fashion-conscious, I think.
05:22But one of the most striking things about all these tombstones
05:25is how Roman husbands and wives portray themselves in death.
05:29And if you want to know why we've inherited such a traditional view
05:33of the Roman family, then the best place to start is with Roman marriage.
05:38So this is one end of a big Roman marble coffin.
05:44We don't know who was originally inside it,
05:47but this end, at least, talks to us about marriage.
05:51You've got a husband, wife, and they're holding hands.
05:55That's the absolutely classic image of the Roman married couple.
06:01It's really such a clichéd logo of Roman marriage
06:06that stone carvers would have churned these things out by the dozen.
06:11This will all be prepared and the stonemason will just put your faces onto the heads.
06:19Whatever it looks like, it isn't an equal relationship, though.
06:23In the stereotype, the husband has all the control,
06:27the wife's job is to serve him every which way.
06:31You even get some Roman epitaphs that sum up a woman's life
06:36just by listing her service.
06:39She talked nicely, she walked nicely, she had kids,
06:43she kept house, she made wool, enough said.
06:47And it goes right to the top of Roman society, too.
06:51There's a lovely story about the Empress Livia,
06:54the scheming, poisoning wife of the Emperor Augustus.
06:57She's supposed to have taken great care that people saw her
07:02in the Imperial Palace itself,
07:04spinning and weaving the wool for her husband's togas.
07:08That was what Roman women were supposed to do.
07:15On the surface, then, these tombstones show us a rather poised,
07:20cool, even cold view of Roman marriage.
07:23But tombstones tend to give that impression.
07:26Even today, they trade in cliches.
07:29But there's plenty of other evidence that helps us get behind
07:32these stereotyped impressions.
07:35At the British Museum in London is a wonderful collection
07:38of Roman rings covered in the same imagery.
07:42They look pretty familiar to us.
07:45We know, actually, that what we call the wedding finger
07:49was the favourite place to put a ring.
07:52Some Roman doctors thought it was a direct link
07:55between that finger and the heart.
07:58But it's hard to get through these sort of standardised images
08:02of the clasped hands.
08:04Just occasionally, you can.
08:06This ring here...
08:10..is a pretty plain ring.
08:12But in the centre, it's got, written on it in Latin,
08:16Te Amo Parum.
08:21Which means, literally,
08:23I love you not enough, I don't love you enough.
08:28It's kind of slightly odd at first sight,
08:30but then you get used to it.
08:33It's particularly odd to imagine that you would give
08:36a rather expensive gold ring to somebody to say,
08:39here you are, have this lovely ring,
08:41but I don't care for you that much.
08:43I think it's probably a bit cleverer than that.
08:45And I think what the message must mean is,
08:49I can't love you possibly as much as you deserve to be loved.
08:54You are so fantastic and gorgeous and lovable,
08:57but nobody could love you as much as you deserve to be loved.
09:01Nobody could love you as much as you ought to be loved.
09:04It's a wonderfully rare, really rare glimpse
09:07of somebody's kind of personal voice shouting through
09:12these rather clichéd images of marriage.
09:23That ring hints at some of the passion
09:25you can find in Roman relationships.
09:27But it's also there if you look beyond the man's voice
09:30and think about it from the woman's side.
09:34Scattered across Rome is an amazing trio of tombstones,
09:37which, although still written by men,
09:39give us a much more intimate and more honest portrait of their partners.
09:44You have to be a bit careful about what husbands and wives
09:47say about each other on their epitaphs.
09:50They do tell such terrible whoppers about their marriage.
09:55We lived together for 30 years without a crossword.
09:58I don't imagine that that could have been any more true
10:01in ancient Rome than it is now.
10:04But just occasionally, you find someone who comes a bit off-centre,
10:09breaks through those clichés and really conjures up a character.
10:13This is a great example.
10:15It's a tombstone of a woman called Glykonis, put up by her husband.
10:21Now, Glykonis is a Greek name and it means sweet.
10:25So she's sweety.
10:27And he says that, in fact.
10:29He says she's sweet by name, but even sweeter by nature.
10:36She didn't like to be all proper and austere, he says.
10:40She much preferred to be a bit wild,
10:44flasky-voiced, rather sexy, suave.
10:48Glykonis, she liked to get a bit drenched in Bacchus.
10:54Now, Bacchus is the god of wine.
10:58So what he's saying is she was a bit of a wild thing
11:02and she really liked a drink or two.
11:05It's a pity, he says, she didn't live forever.
11:10After all that affection,
11:12the next one reveals a much darker side to Roman marriage.
11:16This is a tombstone which doesn't look very special,
11:19but it's got a horrible sting in the tail.
11:24It's put up by a husband and wife.
11:28He's called Restutus Piscinasus
11:32and the wife is called Prima Restuta.
11:38And they put it up, say carent, to Prima Florentia,
11:44her dearest daughter, Phileae Charissimae.
11:48Dearest daughter.
11:50So far, so ordinary.
11:53But how did she die?
11:55She was thrown de capta est
11:59in Tiberi, into the Tiber,
12:02by her husband, Orpheus.
12:05She was just 16½ years old.
12:09If Mum and Dad are right, this was a case of domestic murder.
12:15I'm afraid some things never change.
12:20The woman in this last tombstone
12:22deserves to be a lot more famous than she is.
12:25Her story gives us a very different view on Roman virtue and fidelity.
12:29And it's put up to a woman called Alia Potestas.
12:34And she's an ex-slave.
12:36She's a liberta of a man called Aulus, her partner.
12:42Starts off with some pretty standard praise for a Roman woman.
12:47She was always the first to get out of bed in the morning
12:52and the last to go to bed at night,
12:54i.e. she was doing all the housework.
12:57Then starts to get a bit weirder.
13:02Because the writer becomes...
13:06..a bit strangely explicit about her body.
13:09He says here she'd got lovely snow-white breasts and small nipples
13:17and that her arms and legs were beautifully smooth.
13:23And then he explains why.
13:25It's because she was a very active depilator.
13:28She sawed out every little hair and plucked it out.
13:32But it gets even weirder than that.
13:35This woman had actually two lovers that she was living with.
13:43One household held them all.
13:46Una Domus held them all.
13:48And they lived in a spirit of perfect harmony.
13:52This is, in other words, a Roman ménage à trois.
13:57But after she died, the blokes went their separate ways
14:02and they're now growing old apart.
14:06He wanted just one example of how Roman relationships
14:12could be as messy, as murky and as mixed up as our own.
14:17It would have to be the household of Alia Potestas.
14:21I can't help wondering, though,
14:25what Alia Potestas's version of the story
14:28about these guys would have been.
14:33So if these three voices tell us how we can fill the Roman home
14:37with a more unexpected set of occupants,
14:40what about the house itself?
14:42Well, if you look beyond those rather posh houses in Pompeii
14:46with their grand entrance halls and expensive paintings,
14:50you'll find that Roman homes came in just as many shapes
14:53and sizes as their relationships.
15:02This place was in multiple occupancy.
15:05It had three or four separate apartments.
15:08And, actually, the walls inside were partly made of wicker,
15:12a kind of ancient equivalent of prefab.
15:16But don't think dirt poor.
15:18There was a really pricey little collection of bronze statuettes
15:22found in there.
15:26This one is a pretty interesting one, actually,
15:29because it seems to be partly apartment block,
15:33but also partly lodging house, partly B&B.
15:39Just around the corner is one of my favourite Roman homes,
15:43a four-floor flat of what was once
15:45a quite comfortable Roman apartment block.
15:48KNOCK AT DOOR
15:49Anyone at home?
15:51What's so surprising about this place is that its layout,
15:54basically a series of rooms off a central corridor,
15:57feels like any flat that you might find in any modern city.
16:01It's now called the Insular of the Painted Ceiling,
16:04for obvious reasons.
16:05I almost feel I could move right in today.
16:08Now, we don't know how many people would actually have lived here,
16:11but that does make a difference to how we picture it,
16:14and we certainly don't know exactly who they were.
16:17But I don't find it difficult to imagine Glyconis
16:22or Alia Potestas waking up early in a place like this.
16:27The point is that most Romans didn't live in those grand houses
16:33that you see in Pompeii.
16:36They had all kinds of variety of accommodation.
16:39Right at the bottom, there were people who lived in slum tenements,
16:43in a room over the shop,
16:45or people who just bedded down under somebody else's staircase.
16:50And this is comfortably in the middle.
16:54This was someone's home sweet home.
16:58All the same, part of the difficulty we have
17:01in trying to bring spaces like these alive
17:03is that hardly any of the stuff that went into them has survived.
17:07Imagine trying to work out what went on in a modern house
17:11if you didn't have any of the furniture.
17:16But the task is not entirely impossible.
17:23Hidden away in a storeroom in Herculaneum
17:26is a priceless treasure trove of domestic furniture
17:30found in houses around the town.
17:33Carbonised when Vesuvius erupted in AD 79,
17:36they've been painstakingly put back together.
17:39It's terribly evocative.
17:41I mean, here we've got a table,
17:43the kind of thing that you'd have by your bed.
17:47It's what you eat and drink off.
17:49Don't imagine that all Romans lie down to eat.
17:51They put their takeaways on here and sit down and have a nosh.
17:56And here...
17:59..there's two little wicker baskets.
18:02You could actually take the lid off.
18:09It's just the stuff, the bric-a-brac,
18:12that you'd find just in any Roman house.
18:21It's as close as you can get to a Roman furniture shop
18:24There are table legs with stunning ivory decoration,
18:28others with strange dogs carved all over them.
18:31There's what we'd call a sofa bed,
18:33which you can still see was beautifully inlaid.
18:36Even a perfectly preserved cupboard
18:38that I guess once held all sorts of trinkets.
18:41But it's beautiful.
18:43You can see all the little bone hinges.
18:46And the little handle.
18:49But one find is the rarest of all.
18:53This...
18:55..is a baby's cradle.
18:58It's a really, really precious piece
19:01because it's absolutely the only cradle
19:06to survive from the Roman world.
19:09And that, I suppose, makes you think,
19:11you know, maybe we've just been unlucky
19:13in not getting the other kids' cradles,
19:15or maybe most babies didn't sleep in the cradle.
19:19Maybe most babies didn't sleep in something like this,
19:23but they bedded down in the ancient equivalent of a drawer,
19:27or, actually, they slept in bed with mum or nurse.
19:32When it was found, it actually had a tiny little skeleton in it,
19:37and around the skeleton were bits of fabric, textiles
19:43and a whole load of leaves.
19:45And it looks as if this baby was sleeping on a mattress,
19:50stuffed full of leaves, covered by a blanket,
19:53when the eruption of Vesuvius came in 79
19:57and put an end to that little life.
20:00Still touching, though, isn't it?
20:04Rocking the cradle that's been rocked by Roman mums and nurses.
20:10For me, that collection of furniture is a symbol of all the things
20:14we can put back into the Roman home if we try.
20:18Not just the clutter, but husbands and wives
20:21and their messy relationships, too.
20:23But seeing a child's cradle up close
20:26reminds us not to forget the children in the Roman household.
20:30That baby, of course, didn't survive the eruption of Vesuvius,
20:34but if it had, how different would its child look
20:37if it had, how different would its childhood have been from our own?
20:41Nowadays, we separate childhood off from the adult world.
20:46We dress kids in clothes quite different from adults.
20:50We give them their own entertainment, their own books.
20:54We even feed them different food.
20:56And in the last 50 years, we've even invented the category of the teenager.
21:02In ancient Rome, childhood was quite different.
21:08We hardly ever see or hear the kids in the Roman home.
21:12They're usually cast out at the back of the house, rarely mentioned.
21:16Today, the only way we can hear their voices is to look at the dead ones.
21:22These books hold a record of over 30,000 tombstones from the city of Rome
21:27every age, sex and walk of life.
21:29But what hits you first is the sheer number of child tombstones.
21:34There's just hundreds and hundreds of them.
21:37I mean, here's little Titius Eutychus.
21:40He lived to be just four.
21:42And here's Titius Phosphorus.
21:45He made it to five.
21:48And over the page of Titia Regilla,
21:51she was one years old, five months and 11 days.
21:54That's only a few of the Ts.
21:57It all fits absolutely with what we know about child mortality in Rome.
22:03At least half the kids wouldn't have lived till they were ten.
22:07A third wouldn't have made it to their first birthday.
22:13And I think you have to have a heart of stone
22:16not to be moved by that statistic.
22:19All the same, it isn't quite all gloom and doom.
22:24My absolute, absolute favourite...
22:28..is tremendous character.
22:31A little girl who died when she was just five.
22:35But we can really get a sense of her.
22:37She was called Gaminea Agathae Marte.
22:41It turns out she was a bit of a tomboy.
22:44I had a Pueri Waltrum, the face of a boy.
22:48But I was a gentle soul, ingenio docile.
22:52I was pretty.
22:54And I got a bit spoiled, veneranda.
22:58I had red hair, cut short on top,
23:01but I let it grow long down the back.
23:05And then she says...
23:08..don't grieve too much for me.
23:11Have a drink.
23:13And don't be too sad at the rest that my little body's having.
23:18It's, as it were, speaking to her relatives.
23:22There's also a message there, I think, for us.
23:26Because, although these tombstones are kind of obviously about death,
23:32for me, they're also a week of love,
23:37of warmth, actually, of life.
23:44So what happened if kids like little Gemini Marte did survive?
23:47Are we talking school,
23:49or did Roman parents have something else in store for them?
23:52Well, rather predictably,
23:54it depended on where you were in the pecking order.
23:58In their labs on the outskirts of Rome,
24:00a group of Italian anthropologists
24:02have analysed over 6,000 Roman skeletons
24:05dug up in and around Rome over the past century.
24:09Alongside full adult skeletons are some rare child bones
24:13found in poorer graves.
24:15For although Roman kids died in vast numbers,
24:18their fragile little skeletons rarely survived.
24:24These are the bones of a very small individual, a child,
24:28about six years old when he died,
24:32while this individual is a teenager,
24:36probably a boy,
24:39about 16, 17 years old when he died.
24:43And what's extraordinary is that these bones
24:46show some very telling signs of wear and tear.
24:49The tibia is of a 16-year-old individual
24:54and from the type of alteration present,
24:58we can hypothesise that the legs of this teenager
25:04were subjected to very severe forces.
25:09It is an alteration that is extremely evident
25:16despite the individual being of a very young age.
25:23So, this guy has been doing hard work with his legs
25:28for many years and he's only 60.
25:32Even earlier, this poor boy,
25:35who, even though he died at such a young age,
25:40he was a child, about six years old,
25:44he managed, poor boy, in his bones,
25:48to already have the signs of heavy activity.
25:54You couldn't get those kind of lesions just by playing football
25:59or skipping or...
26:02This has to be hard manual work.
26:05Both for the site where these individuals were found,
26:11and for the type of lesion
26:15that this individual could have worked with.
26:20And in fullonica, you're treating the cloth,
26:25you're dyeing the cloth, you're stamping on the cloth.
26:29So, what we've got is a kid doing heavy manual labour
26:34at a time when we think they should be in infant school.
26:41Also found by Paola's team, in the grave of a one-year-old girl,
26:46was a strange collection of trinkets
26:49that once formed a gorgeous little necklace.
26:52They look pretty innocuous.
26:54There's an amber rabbit, a figurine of an Egyptian god,
26:57a mini phallus and some beads.
26:59But hidden within them is a much darker story.
27:03These are what the Romans would have called crepundia.
27:07They'd been strung together and worn round the neck of a child,
27:12so they're half toy, half amulet or lucky charm.
27:16But they also have a part to play
27:19in one aspect of Roman culture that we find rather shocking,
27:24and that is child exposure.
27:27What that means, if in Rome you have a child you don't want,
27:33you can just throw it away.
27:35On the street, on the rubbish dump.
27:38And that's where the crepundia come in.
27:42Because some parents were supposed to have left these babies out
27:46with their crepundia round their necks
27:49as a kind of link to their birth family, to their original identity.
27:54It's a wonderful plot line, actually, in some Roman comedies,
27:58that the slave girl heroine is suddenly spotted
28:02and recognised by her mum and dad
28:05because they've seen the crepundia that they'd left out with her.
28:10So, in some Roman comedies,
28:12these things can bring about a very nice, happy ending.
28:16In real life...
28:18..I'm not so sure.
28:25The unavoidable fact, then, for Roman kids in poorer families
28:29is that if you weren't exposed,
28:31and let's be honest, we don't know how many babies really were,
28:35they were put to work as soon as they were fit and able,
28:38perhaps as early as five.
28:40But further up the social scale, things were predictably different.
28:45In the centre of Rome, in a covered arcade just behind the Forum,
28:49we can still find evidence of a Roman school.
28:52All over its plaster walls, you find writing, drawing
28:56and even caricatures of a schoolmaster,
28:58which reminds us just how little kids have changed.
29:01Here's a great picture of a bloke with a big beard, full on.
29:06Here, we're in Rome, a willy.
29:08What you've got here is people's letter practice, A, B, C, D.
29:14You've also got little snatches of Latin poetry written.
29:19What it looks like to me is an old-fashioned school desk.
29:25And that, in a way, is exactly what it is.
29:28Schools in Rome weren't schools in our sense.
29:31Lessons took place in arcades like this, under shady trees,
29:34even in the streets.
29:36They were fee-paying for the most part,
29:38so only for the well-off and only for boys.
29:41Some of those lessons would have been much like ours.
29:43They would have learnt to read and write.
29:45They would have done a modern language.
29:47In their case, it would have been ancient Greek.
29:50No science and PSE.
29:52It would be public speaking and poetry.
29:57An image of a Roman school in action still survives.
30:01The original painting in Pompeii is pretty faded,
30:04but this 19th-century copy shows exactly what's going on.
30:08Here are the good boys at their lessons,
30:12but here is the unfortunate malefactor.
30:16He's the one who must have been caught
30:18doing a caricature of the master on the wall.
30:22He's been beaten.
30:24He's been held down by two of his fellow pupils
30:28and he's been stripped down to his pants,
30:31or their sort of pants,
30:33and the master here is whacking him.
30:36And he's clearly screaming.
30:39This was such a well-known form of Roman corporal punishment
30:43that it even had its own name, Catomus.
30:46Perhaps it's not surprising that one favourite nickname
30:50for a schoolmaster in Rome was Plagosus.
30:54Whacker.
30:58For wealthy Roman families then,
31:00rote learning and discipline was the ideal boy's education,
31:04but it also served as an ideal to families
31:07trying to climb the social ladder.
31:09The best way to put a human face to this story
31:12is to pay a visit to one of my favourite characters,
31:15a Roman schoolboy, the son of ex-slaves,
31:18whose memorial can still be found overlooking a square in central Rome.
31:23I've come here to meet up with this little lad.
31:26Sulpicius Maximus was his name
31:29and he was something of a Roman child prodigy.
31:32Aged just 11, he entered a grown-up poetry competition,
31:36a sort of Rome's Got Talent.
31:39But stardom was not to come.
31:41He died and his mum and dad put up this great memorial to him.
31:46It says up there that he died of too much study.
31:50I can't help thinking he might have been a bit of a victim of pushy parents.
31:57Sulpicius's original memorial is now in an unloved corner of a Rome museum,
32:02but it's a chance to meet the boy face to face.
32:05His story makes me wonder what life was really like
32:09for him in families desperately trying to get on.
32:12Were you never naughty?
32:14Did you ever refuse to do your homework?
32:16Did you never lose your school shoes?
32:20I can't help thinking that life in Sulpicius's household
32:25wasn't quite what his parents wrote it up to be.
32:29But all the same, there is a sense that childhood,
32:33as a category that we know, didn't really exist in the Roman world.
32:38Look at him.
32:40If you came across this statue
32:42and you didn't know the story written round about him,
32:45you'd think this was some orator haranguing the masses in the Roman Forum.
32:50In fact, it's a kid of 11 years old and you'd never know it.
32:56For aspiring Roman families, if you wanted to educate your boy,
33:00you concentrated on public life, on oratory, even poetry,
33:04not on what we would call emotional development.
33:07How different was it for rich Roman girls?
33:10In the storeroom of the same museum is one remarkable object
33:14that helps to tell their side of the story.
33:20This is the most exquisitely beautiful Roman doll.
33:27She's the most perfect specimen to survive from the Roman world
33:31and she's so precious and fragile that,
33:33just itching to pick her up, I'm not allowed to.
33:37She looks as if she's made of wood, but in fact she's ivory.
33:41She's a woman with very cleverly jointed limbs.
33:46She's got a rather posh fashionable hairdo
33:50and on her hand she's got a little gold ring.
33:54Now, there's no such thing as a toy shop in the Roman world
33:58and for most kids, life's so pickiest.
34:01If they went out to play, they'd be improvising with nuts and stones
34:05and playing ducks and drakes on the river.
34:07This is something a bit special.
34:09She's not just Barbie, she's Empress Barbie.
34:13But there's another side to a toy like this.
34:18It's not just about play.
34:20Like all toys, it's helping to teach whoever owns it
34:25what their role is going to be in life.
34:29Roman women were made for marriage and for breeding children.
34:35In fact, some Roman writers tell us that just before they do get married,
34:39Roman girls would go along to a temple
34:42and they would leave their dolls in the temple.
34:45But that didn't happen to this doll
34:49because, actually, it was found in a big stone coffin
34:55of a woman called Creperea Trevina.
34:59To judge from the skeleton, Creperea was about 20.
35:04She presumably hadn't got married,
35:07so she took her doll with her to her tomb.
35:11That's quite extraordinary to us.
35:13We wouldn't ever imagine burying a 20-year-old with her Barbie.
35:19An awful lot of Roman girls must have gone to the grave with their dolls.
35:25In fact, one of the most famous writers of the Roman world, Pliny,
35:30tells the story of one girl who died young, Minicia Marcella,
35:35the daughter of a friend of his, Thundanus.
35:39Pliny says that she was going on 14,
35:42but she had an old head on young shoulders.
35:46She was wise beyond her years, she was sweet and charming
35:50and she was a spitting image of her dad.
35:53The really sad thing, he says, is that she was just about to be married.
35:58By an absolutely extraordinary piece of good fortune,
36:02we actually have Minicia Marcella's tombstone.
36:07Here it is, this rather elegant, austere affair,
36:12to the spirits of Minicia Marcella, it says,
36:17the daughter of Thundanus.
36:20But there's a sting in the last line.
36:23Pliny said she was going on 14.
36:27This says she lived for 12 years,
36:3211 months and seven days.
36:37So she was 12 years old and just about to be married.
36:43Now, we don't know how many Roman girls got married this young,
36:48but a significant minority, I think.
36:53And it raises an obvious question.
36:56Were marriages like this consummated straight away?
37:01We like to think not, but the chances are that they were.
37:08When you put all these children together,
37:11our child workers, child poets and child brides,
37:15Roman childhood can appear a pretty brutal phase of life.
37:19But I don't think we should get too carried away.
37:23To help me put it into context,
37:25I met up with a colleague and father of two, Greg Wolf.
37:29I mean, I still find it hard to get my head around Roman childhood.
37:33I mean, was it really that brutal?
37:36I'm not really sure that it's quite as unfamiliar as that.
37:41Some bits were brutal and some bits were different,
37:43but a lot is just the same.
37:45They had a childhood, even if it's a bit shorter than the childhood that our kids have.
37:50But they're not the kind of protected species that modern Western kids are.
37:55That must be right. They haven't got a kids' room full of kids' stuff.
37:59They don't have kids' entertainment, they don't have kids' clothes.
38:03Maybe just a few children of the very rich,
38:06with their great pedigogos slaves taking them to school and their wet nurses.
38:11But most children are just doing what adults did in the same places with them.
38:15We're undergoing a huge transition from a world where lots of children are born
38:20and lots of them die, where they're fully part of the world with the adults,
38:24to a world where not many children are born and most of them survive
38:29and their childhoods are prolonged to a point which
38:32Romans would have thought was well into young adulthood.
38:36If you reckon that half of them, at least half of them,
38:40are going to be dead before the age of ten,
38:43what does that do to the relationship between parents and kids?
38:47I think they were tragedies when you lose a child in any society, any period.
38:51When Romans lost their children, we know sometimes they were devastated.
38:56It was a normal tragedy.
38:58It was the same tragedy that the other families on your streets had.
39:01It's the same tragedy your parents had.
39:04The tombstones kind of show us, really, don't they,
39:08that even if it happens often, it still is terribly hurtful.
39:12It isn't in some ways half as unfamiliar as we like to make it.
39:17I was struck by the tombstone up on the wall of this bar up there.
39:22It was obviously mum and dad, a little kid,
39:25and he's holding a dog, he's holding his pet.
39:28And you can sort of recognise that as mum, dad and child,
39:32with all the things that we think go with it.
39:34The difference is the project of having that.
39:37It's much more risky. It's a much more precarious existence.
39:40Yeah, I mean, really, the bottom line is Roman childhood, a big risk.
39:49Of course, we mustn't forget that for a Roman woman,
39:52the risk was not just child-rearing, it was also child-bearing.
39:56In a world with little medical care as we know it,
39:59Roman pregnancy wasn't always straightforward.
40:03One of the most suggestive objects to open up this world to us
40:07is an eerie-looking medical instrument found in Pompeii.
40:12Every woman will recognise exactly what this is.
40:17It's an ancient Roman gynaecological speculum.
40:22The principle's pretty clear.
40:24You have the prongs here, and they're put into the vagina.
40:28You then turn the screw...
40:33..which opens the prongs,
40:35and you can see what's inside.
40:39Which opens the prongs and so extends the vagina,
40:43so you can examine the woman.
40:45We all know how it works. I don't need to demonstrate it.
40:48It's a rather nice one, decorated at the top.
40:51I think this was a rather pricey doctor who owned this,
40:54with rather expensive female clients.
40:57I don't think this got shoved up by any poor woman.
41:00But I think we shouldn't get carried away with the familiarity.
41:03One of the nastiest bits of Roman literature that I've ever read
41:07and there's plenty of nasty bits to choose from,
41:10describes what you do when you can't get a baby out of a woman,
41:15when the baby's got stuck and you want to save the mother's life.
41:19You put a speculum up, you get a sight of what's going on.
41:23You then put a hook into the woman and try to pull the baby out.
41:28You'll kill it in the process. It's going through its eye, its skull.
41:31I can't imagine, even if it was intended to save her life,
41:35that many women could have survived that process.
41:38Childbirth today has its dangers.
41:41But in the Roman world, it was a battlefield.
41:45I think if, in the Roman world, men died as soldiers,
41:50women died in childbirth.
41:57It's hard to get a feel for such experiences in the Roman home itself.
42:02The rooms they used for sex and childbirth have given us a few beds,
42:06though curiously no double ones, and plenty of erotic pictures.
42:11But just occasionally, we get a glimpse of how women could transcend
42:15the traditional roles that were expected of them.
42:18In a house in Pompeii, now known as the House of Julius Polybius,
42:23after the man who owned it,
42:25is one example of a woman who may have done just that.
42:29I've come to see her with my colleague, Andrew Wallace-Hedrell.
42:33What I'm interested in is this rather extraordinary painting.
42:37It's actually showing a religious sacrifice going on
42:41and it's full of slightly weird religious symbolism,
42:44like this snake in the altar.
42:46But what I'm interested in is this couple here,
42:50because this, to me, looks as if it's meant to be
42:54the head of a household and his wife.
42:58And it's very unusual because the standard scene
43:02is just the man in his toga doing the sacrifice
43:05and everyone always says, this must be the head of household.
43:08And here, suddenly, we have her too.
43:11She's cut in on the action.
43:13The woman, because her property is completely separate
43:16from that of her husband, could be more wealthy and more powerful.
43:21What's this lady doing here, right bang in the middle of the picture,
43:25if she isn't richer and more important than the little man at her side?
43:34So, in some cases, it is possible to turn upside down
43:38the traditional roles in the Roman household.
43:41But there's still one part of the Roman home
43:44that feels completely alien to us,
43:46the part that actually made it function.
43:48And by that, I mean the slaves.
43:51Archaeology itself has produced very little material
43:54that relates directly to slavery.
43:56But tucked away in a Roman museum
43:58is one rare object that speaks volumes about its dark side.
44:02You'd think this was a Roman dog collar,
44:05a band of iron and a little metal tag on it.
44:08And on the tag, it's written in Latin,
44:11Fugi, teneme.
44:14I've escaped. Catch me.
44:17If you take me back to my master, Zoninus,
44:20you'll get a solidus, a gold coin.
44:23It's probably not a dog collar.
44:25It's probably the collar of a Roman slave.
44:29Admittedly, it's quite small,
44:32but things like this have been found around the necks of human skeletons.
44:37And actually, the fact that we can't really be sure
44:41whether it's a slave collar or a dog collar
44:45tells us quite a lot about Roman slavery
44:49and the inhumanity that it invoked.
44:52There's a horribly touching story about the Emperor Hadrian
44:56who got cross with one of his slaves,
44:59so cross that he gouged his eye out with a stylus pen.
45:04Hadrian instantly felt apologetic, sorry, humbled by what he'd done,
45:09and he said to the slave,
45:11''Have any present from me. I'm so sorry. Have anything that you want.''
45:14The slave remained quite dumb.
45:17Hadrian pressed him, said, ''I'll give you anything.''
45:20And the slave said, ''I just want my eye back.''
45:23So it's not hard to see why Roman slaves might have wanted to escape
45:28and why Roman masters might have wanted to tag their slaves as their property,
45:33either this way or perhaps with branding or tattoos.
45:37My hunch, though, is that fewer actually escaped
45:42or even tried to escape than we like to think.
45:46My guess is that most slaves showed their resentment against their masters
45:51by a much more kind of domestic sort of warfare.
45:55They'd have pilfered things.
45:57They'd have broken the precious ornaments.
46:00They'd have pocketed the loose change.
46:03And I expect they'd have spat in the master's soup.
46:07MUSIC PLAYS
46:14Today, slavery is one of the nasty cliches of Roman culture.
46:18It's a word loaded, understandably, with all kinds of modern preconceptions.
46:22But the fact is, it was deeply embedded in Roman culture.
46:26In a population of a million, one third might have been slaves.
46:30And they weren't just for the rich. Poorer households had them too.
46:33Even some slaves had slaves.
46:36Of course, Roman slavery was brutal.
46:38But relations between masters and slaves
46:41weren't anything like as black and white as we tend to imagine.
46:45Sure, there must have been fear, suspicion, hatred on both sides, actually.
46:51There were some marvellous Roman urban myths about crafty slaves
46:56running rings around their poor, long-suffering masters.
47:00But at the same time, there was plenty of respect, affection, even love.
47:09One of the best places to see evidence of these conflicting emotions
47:13at the heart of this relationship
47:15is actually in one of Pompeii's grandest houses.
47:18In a suite of rooms off the back garden
47:21is a private bathhouse with some pretty graphic mosaics.
47:24They hint rather heavily at one part of every slave's job description
47:29which is sex.
47:31So this is the entranceway to the hot room, the sauna.
47:36Yes, yes.
47:37So what you've got here are some stridules,
47:40the kind of bronze things that you used for scraping the oil off.
47:43It's really rather gynaecological in the end.
47:46And the thing is, we can't really read that without looking at this guy here,
47:50this strange sort of naked black figure.
47:53He's got little white panties on.
47:55He's wearing a thin cloth which is completely failing to do its job
47:59because the one thing it's not covering is his genitals,
48:02which are enormous, hanging down.
48:05The bronze tip matches those lamps or flasks
48:10or whatever he's carrying in his hand.
48:12Which they themselves look phallic.
48:15So we're being given a very strong sexual theme as we enter.
48:21So this is the dinky little sauna.
48:24You can hear, the moment you get in here, it echoes around us.
48:27It's lovely, isn't it? It's an amazing space.
48:29And it's mosaic, which is...
48:32Well, it kind of says sex in the swimming pool to me.
48:35It appears to be another slave, doesn't it?
48:37What comes out of this is something about the sexuality of bathing
48:41but also about use of slaves.
48:43Their total availability, their bodily availability
48:47to their masters for sex.
48:50No-one living in a big house says,
48:52I know what I'll do, I'll go down to the local brothel.
48:55They use a slave as they want, when they want,
48:59and that's the basic deal of slavery.
49:01Isn't it interesting that it's not just the master of the house
49:05exploiting female slaves and male slaves,
49:08it's also the female owners and dominant figures in the house
49:14exploit male and possibly female slaves.
49:18That's the really nasty bit of Roman slavery.
49:21To be pressurised into having sex with the master or the mistress,
49:25well, it's an assault on your freedom, but that's the point.
49:28You've lost your freedom, the freedom to control your body.
49:31But you mustn't think that because sex happens between master and slave
49:36it's necessarily a bad thing for the slaves all the time.
49:40What about the fact that we constantly find
49:43slaves marrying their masters?
49:45Sex is a way of earning money, but it's also a route to freedom.
49:52And that's the great paradox about Roman slavery.
49:56We might think it was brutal, at times even amounting to rape,
50:00but it was not always a life sentence.
50:03And if you look at the tombstones, what's striking is that
50:06the majority of those that survived from the city of Rome
50:09belonged to ex-slaves.
50:11They were freed in their thousands.
50:13Here's a lady with a really great name.
50:16She's an ex-slave, she tells us, a liberta.
50:20And her name is Vettia Erotica.
50:24I like that name.
50:29Here's a nicely complicated one.
50:31It's a tombstone put up by an ex-slave, a libertas,
50:35to his own slave, and was very dear to him.
50:39Carissimo.
50:41This is a woman with an interesting job.
50:43She's called Dorcas, and she's the ex-slave of Julia Augusta.
50:49That's the Empress Olivia.
50:51What was her job?
50:53She was an ornatrix.
50:55She was the Empress's hairdresser.
50:57Nice work, if you could get it.
51:00This runs a nice picture.
51:02It's from a tombstone, shows a husband and wife, I guess,
51:05having a banquet, but it's the little chap on the left that I'm interested in.
51:09He's serving at table, and he must be a young slave boy.
51:13There was thousands and thousands like him at Rome.
51:17I don't know exactly where they all came from,
51:20but almost certainly not all of them from the slave market,
51:24as we like to think.
51:26Probably the majority of them would actually have been born in the household.
51:31And like this little guy,
51:33they'd have got pretty up close and personal with their owners,
51:38wait at table, wet nurses, tutors, nannies.
51:43And it starts to give us a different slant on Roman slavery,
51:48and it helps to explain why you could get quite strong bonds of affection
51:53between owners and their slaves.
51:56Actually, the Roman word for family, familia,
52:00doesn't just include husband, wife and a couple of kids.
52:04It also includes the slaves.
52:06So, in Rome, slaves really were part of the family.
52:14And that's what I find so disappointing
52:16about the standard image of the Roman family.
52:19The slaves were not always segregated.
52:22They were the familia, as much as the master and mistress.
52:26In fact, the best way to see just how open it could be
52:29is to visit a Roman family tomb.
52:32I've come to see some in ancient Ostia,
52:35with Corey Brennan from the American Academy in Rome.
52:38This feels like a kind of back alley in the City of the Dead.
52:41Well, that's precisely what it is.
52:43And here is a home in the City of the Dead, so to speak,
52:47and it's something that Marcus Sinaeus Aristo set up for himself
52:54and for his ex-slaves, the libertis, the male ex-slaves,
52:58and the libertabus, the female ex-slaves.
53:01It's interesting, too, that in the last line here,
53:04he makes clear how much land he owns for this tomb, doesn't he?
53:08It's not just a marking off the legal perimeter of his space here,
53:14but it's a way of boasting precisely how much real estate
53:17he has here in the City of the Dead.
53:21What's important, then, is that masters and slaves
53:24chose to live together in death, not just in life.
53:27In a way, these tombs are like mirrors of their own homes,
53:31with separate rooms, upper storeys,
53:33and spaces for urns that outnumber the nuclear family.
53:37What strikes you when you come in is the kind of communality
53:41of it, the sheer number of burials that must have been here.
53:45Yeah, well, there's about two dozen of these niches,
53:49and each niche is a double, and so you're talking 48 people or so.
53:54It's interesting to see how they're all mixed in here.
53:57You don't walk in here and say, there's the master's niche.
54:00In fact, it's pretty hard to tell where it would have been.
54:03And it's so completely different from what we're familiar with
54:08in, say, Victorian England, where the idea that Mr and Mrs Posh
54:14and their posh kids would be buried in the same tomb as the cook
54:18or the tweenie or the butler is absolutely unthinkable.
54:23But this is meant to be an ideal.
54:25This is the image which these folks,
54:28these aspirational folks wanted to convey,
54:31which was that of inclusivity, of the large family.
54:35Harshness was not in anyone's interest.
54:37It shows us a softer side of this horrible institution of slavery.
54:41Yeah, it's great, you know, you boast.
54:44This is a tomb for me and my ex-slaves.
54:53But it wasn't always happy families,
54:56as the unusual tombstone of a little girl called Junia Procula tells us.
55:01Its storyline reads like a Roman soap opera.
55:04The stone was put up by her father, a man called Euphrosinus.
55:10And he was putting it up for the little girl
55:13and eventually for himself and for somebody else,
55:17whose name has been hacked out.
55:20That's puzzling. Why has it been hacked out?
55:23On the back of the stone, the puzzle's solved.
55:27Because there's another text written there.
55:30And what we can see has happened
55:32is that Euphrosinus had had a slave called Actae,
55:36he'd freed her, he'd married her,
55:39they'd had the kid, the kid had died
55:42and then things had gone very badly off the rails.
55:47He's cursing her on the back.
55:49These are the eternal marks of infamy, he says,
55:53on that ex-slave of mine who was a poisoner,
55:57who was perfidious, who was faithless,
56:00who was doloser, who was deceitful.
56:03And then he really curses her.
56:05He says, I'm bringing a nail and a piece of rope
56:08so that she can hang herself
56:10and I'm bringing picem condentem,
56:13burning pitch to consume her awful heart.
56:18What on earth has happened?
56:20Well, he then explains,
56:22she had gone off with an adulteress,
56:25secuta adulterum, and what is more,
56:28she'd pinched two of his slaves, a boy and a girl.
56:34She left behind, poor old Euphrosinus,
56:37lying in bed, robbed, all alone, an old man.
56:43Now, we've got to remember that we don't know Actae's side of this story
56:47and that might have been very different,
56:49but what is clear is that one man's domestic fluidity
56:53could be another man's domestic mess.
57:00In a way, that's the Roman home in a nutshell.
57:04For sure, it was a place inhabited by the traditional Roman cliches,
57:08the pompous husbands in their togas
57:10and the dutiful wives weaving their wool.
57:13But it was also far more intriguing,
57:16because it put back all the clutter and the cradles
57:19and the topsy-turvy relationships.
57:22And above all, the extraordinary voices of the Romans themselves
57:26that still talk to us after 2,000 years.
57:29I lived on Luke Crine oysters for the very best.
57:33A dangerous life. Snatched away from him.
57:36And she had gone off with an adulteress, secuta adulterum.
57:40Menopholos. Menopholos.
57:42And I don't any longer have those awful aching feet.
57:45That's the monument to the baker. Get it?
57:48She much preferred to be a bit wild.
57:52Lascivious. A Roman ménage à trois.
57:58And what they tell us is that ordinary life in ancient Rome
58:02was as wonderfully mixed up, as messy and as emotional as our own.
58:09It's almost as if they're holding up a mirror to us and our own lives
58:14and not speaking to anyone with the time to stop and listen to them.
58:20Turns out, that's you and me.
58:35An all-new series from Lucy Worsley here on BBC HD tomorrow night
58:40reveals how certain items have changed the way we live.
58:43Look at the sofa first up in Antiques Uncovered at eight.
58:47Next night, it's Late Alive with Jules Holland.