Episode 3 Mary Beard's Ultimate Rome: Empire Without Limit

This is the skull of a Roman.

When we say "Romans", we tend to think of men from Italy

dressed up in togas, orating in the Forum, trampling over

the fields in armour, building bridges and probably overeating.

This Roman lived in York.

And this Roman was a woman.

All we know about her comes from her bones and what was found with them.

She can't have been more than about 20 when she died

and she must have been pretty well-off,

to judge from the nice jewellery that was found with her.

It's a lovely little blue necklace...

..a jet bracelet, an ivory bangle,

a nice blue glass vase and a pair of little glass earrings.

There's actually more to her than that.

We can tell from the shape of the skull

that she was certainly of mixed race.

Either she came from North Africa or 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 helped the Romans build their empire,

none was so successful or surprising as the one you can't see.

Citizenship.

And their ability to turn people not born in Rome

into fully fledged Romans.

He saw the toga everywhere. "Frequens toga."

A Roman could be all sorts of different people.

Rich or poor, black or white, from the fringes of the Sahara

to the damp frontier of northern Britain.

The Britons were really tough. It was true grit!

So what difference did it make to be a Roman?

And how did you become one?

Buried behind a modern industrial estate in southern Spain

are the ruins of a small Roman settlement.

You have to be pretty determined to find this site.

I don't think it's on the main tourist beat, really.

This is the beginning and the entrance to the site.

It's beginning to look a bit more hopefully Roman.

Right.

This one looks fairly ordinary, but for me, this place is one

of the most important places in the whole history of the Roman Empire.

The story goes back to 171 BC.

A delegation from Spain turned up in Rome,

representing more than 4,000 men who were the sons of Roman soldiers

and Spanish women, and as such, they had no political rights.

They were effectively stateless and they were looking for a home.

It was one of the unintended consequences of conquest and, interestingly,

the historian Livy calls these people "a new species".

And the Romans, characteristically, improvised a new solution.

For a start, they gave them Carteia to 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 was the kind of halfway house

between being full Roman citizens and not citizens at all.

And that may not sound very much, but it was actually revolutionary,

because it established the principle that you could be a Roman citizen

of some sort without having anything to do with Rome and Italy itself.

And it kick-started a process that ended up, hundreds of years later,

with every free inhabitant of the Roman Empire being a Roman citizen.

CALL TO PRAYER

Throughout history, citizenship has come in many forms.

But the idea that outsiders in large numbers could become Roman citizens

was entirely new in the ancient world.

Radical, startling and the unique ingredient of empire.

To see what being Roman looked like thousands of kilometres from Rome itself,

I've come to what is now Algeria, on the 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 people worship Roman gods,

they didn't even make people use the Roman calendar.

They exercised their power through incorporation.

Now, I'm not talking about the poor suffering peasants here,

but they managed to get the local elites onside.

And one of the main ways they managed that was by extending

full Roman citizenship.

Salud!

Roman citizenship was always a gift.

You didn't have to pass a citizenship test, or pay a fee,

you didn't have to learn Latin, and you didn't have to salute the flag.

Not that Romans had flags, but you know what I mean.

So, why would you want to be a Roman citizen?

Well, there were all kinds of particular legal rights it

gave you - to make contracts, marriage rights,

and it meant you could never be crucified.

I doubt that that's what's driving most people.

The important thing about Roman citizenship was that it gave

you a stake in Rome.

It's a bit like the American Dream.

You know it doesn't work for most people, but the dream still matters.

We don't know how far the extension of citizenship was

a carefully planned strategy, or one of history's lucky accidents,

but the Roman Empire worked better by bringing people in

and not by keeping them down.

Now, we shouldn't exaggerate the effect.

I bet many locals here wouldn't have been keen on becoming Roman

citizens or wouldn't have cared either way.

And in any case, imperialism is never cosily consensual.

Algeria is no stranger to the conflicts of empire,

to put it mildly.

From the Ancient Phoenicians, through the Arabs

and Ottomans, to the French, and that's not to mention the Romans.

In fact, it's in Algeria that some of the most impressive Roman

remains in the whole world are to be found.

And they have really important stories to tell.

The story of Roman Algeria began, as most stories of the empire

began, with the brutal oppression of the native population.

I'm driving through what were once the killing fields of Africa.

It's where the Romans fought for decades and even after the conquest

proper, there were thousands of soldiers stationed here,

policing and nudging the frontier sand.

Even in parts of the empire where there had been no towns before,

the Romans sponsored,

encouraged and bankrolled

the building of cities, Roman style.

Timgad was originally built for retired Roman soldiers,

serving nearby, to settle.

And it reveals a lot about how Rome put down roots far from Italy

and how its identity

and culture flourished at the fringes of the empire.

I'm beginning to get my bearings now.

This must have been one of the main gateways into the town.

When you first walk in, it looks a 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 best surviving examples of Roman

town planning anywhere in the empire.

It's a pretty aggressive statement of Roman-ness in the middle of the

desert, which means it's not that hard for me to find my way around.

And I guess I'm now in a little house, and a rather splendid door...

This is a truly regal set of Roman loos.

It's on the standard multi-seater pattern.

You get a little bit of privacy from these rather natty dolphins here.

It's a nice thought, I think, that one of the poshest sets

of loos anywhere in the Roman world is still to be found in Algeria.

Ooh!

What I've got in my sights now is a 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's a 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...

It's quite interesting that we've come into this town

and the first monument we really met is indeed a monument to culture.

The public library.

I think if I'd been a citizen of Timgad,

this is where I would have spent my time, if I'd been allowed.

My guess is that this library was a pretty blokeish community.

It might have started off as a Roman soldiers' retirement home,

but within just a few generations of its birth,

Timgad had expanded well beyond its original foundations,

home to over 10,000 reasonably peaceful

inhabitants of Roman, African and Berber descent.

You might expect to see a very filtered 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 actually looks so standard.

Anyone visiting here from Roman Italy would instantly

recognise this as the forum.

And yet, we're just on the edge of the Sahara.

Whoever designed this must have been working from some

kind of kit for Roman forums.

Or actually, a kit for a whole Roman town.

You really do get the feeling that the people of Timgad are

investing unusually heavily in high culture and in their Roman identity.

All around the forum, all around town,

there are thousands of inscriptions proclaiming

the Roman-ness of the inhabitants,

but the man who really capped it all for culture is this man, Vocontius.

And it's actually written, not in the usual capital letters that you

see on inscriptions, but in the lower case

that you get in manuscripts,

so it's as if you're reading a book here.

Now, instead of the usual CV that you'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 town that 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 else to showing they are Romans.

All these mosaics come from the floors of buildings in Timgad

and they give you some idea of what the original

colour of the place must have been like.

And also, the richness.

We might call this Roman soft power.

Most of the people who lived in Timgad would never actually

have seen Rome, but they're using their Roman-ness as a badge

of honour, a way of showing they belong.

That must come from a little 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 the classic scenes of Roman mythology.

There's the goddess Venus up there, rising from the ocean

and balanced a bit awkwardly on 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 there are artists round here who can

produce this kind of stuff

and the people of Timgad are literally at home with it.

They're really unmistakably doing the Roman thing.

I'm sure there must have been awful quarrels going on here,

but on the surface, Timgad looks a pretty happy little place.

And that's summed up by this bit of pavement art.

What it is is a gaming board, with words written across.

In fact, you move your piece from 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 realise how far this place

and its inhabitants have come.

They started out as a bunch of top ex-squaddies.

A few generations later, they're not just hunting and bathing,

they're bookworms in the local library, and they're visiting

a rather posh local lavatory with dolphin fittings.

In some ways,

it didn't matter how far from the centre of the empire you were.

Being Roman meant belonging.

If you had lots of money.

By allowing the local elite into the club, Rome secured their support.

In return, the local rich felt part of a bigger world

and it's here in Algeria that we have one of the most

extraordinary cases of how one could climb the greasy pole of Roman

political power.

This is a really proud boast of success.

It's a standout memorial,

designed to show just how far you could go, even if you were

brought up on the margins of the empire, in what's now rural Algeria.

It's put up by a man called Quintus Lollius Urbicus to his dad,

to his mum, his brothers and his uncle.

But most of all, it's put up to himself.

We know precious little about Urbicus's roots,

whether he was of Roman or Berber descent, or perhaps both.

What we do know is that he grew up just a few kilometres

away from the family mausoleum, in the small remote Roman

town of Tiddis and his family were Roman citizens.

And you can tell it's Roman because of all these winged willies.

Even in its heyday,

Tiddis is unlikely to have had more than 1,000 inhabitants.

It's more of a village than a town.

And I doubt that it was particularly well known in Algeria.

No-one else in the Roman world would even have heard of it.

This really must take the prize for being the smallest

forum in the whole of the Roman Empire.

Local offices there, loads of plinths that once carried

statues of emperors and 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 see where 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, but you can just about feel the letters.

You can see his name here, Lollius Urbicus.

You can see that...

Well, you can feel that he was consul and underneath, you get loads

of the other things that he did in his life, the offices he held.

We learn that he was a bit of a war hero,

he served in the expedition against Judea with the Emperor Hadrian

and he seems to have won military decorations, a sort of

honorific spear and a golden crown, a bit like a purple heart or an MC.

He's the biggest thing that ever came out of Tiddis.

He's the local boy who really made good and no-one made gooder

and round here, he would have been absolutely exceptional.

What we've got to remember, though, is that there were

thousands of people like Lollius Urbicus

in the Roman Empire, going from provincial towns to make it

big in the city itself and in the army.

In some ways, for me, that's what's exceptional about the Roman Empire.

The story of Urbicus doesn't end here.

If we follow his trail, Urbicus takes us about as far

away from Africa as you could possibly get in the Roman Empire.

To the empire's northern frontier.

It's in Britain that a plaque was discovered, put up by a unit

of the Roman army, recording some new building they'd just erected.

This unit says they're working underneath

Quinto Lollio Urbico, Quintus Lollius Urbicus, who was "leg aug",

he was the Legatus Augusti, he was the emperor's representative.

That's to say he was the governor of the province.

So, our man from Africa has ended up with the top job in Britain.

So, what we have here is one provincial turned Roman now

governing other provincials on the other side of the Roman world

and that was part of a regular pattern.

What Lollius Urbicus from North Africa

made of his time in Britain, we can only guess,

but in the Roman imagination, this island had particular significance.

By expanding beyond the Mediterranean world, and conquering

a place across different seas, they were venturing into the unknown.

For the Romans, this wasn't just the 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 attractive to conquer and explore,

but it was almost as if they were going into space, in our terms.

And of course, they told loads of tall and not

so tall stories about what you might find 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 tall cos it was so cold

and they lived to a vast age, 120 years old, you'd find people here.

Some people even said it didn't exist.

But there were others who thought that, actually, Britain was

where you found real virtue.

The Romans had become corrupted by decadence and luxury,

the Britons however were really tough.

It was true grit!

Britain was certainly the perfect target for the doddery

Emperor Claudius, who needed a decisive military conquest to

bolster his unmilitary reputation.

Yet like anywhere, even here,

where the cultural gap was perhaps at its widest, an outsider could

become Roman, if he served for 20-odd years in the Roman army,

a clever mechanism that turned the conquered into the conquerors.

These pieces of bronze must once have been someone's most

precious possession.

They belonged to a man called Reburrus,

and what they do is they document the fact that

when he'd completed his years of army service,

the emperor had then given him Roman citizenship.

I think what we have to imagine is that there would be some very

big document on public display in Rome,

naming a load of people who were given citizenship,

but individuals could get their own personalised little copy, like this.

It does a bit more than just give him citizenship.

It's very clear about that, "civitatem".

It also gives citizenship to his children, to his descendents, and if

he's living with someone as man and wife, the wife gets citizenship too.

But if he's a bachelor,

then anybody he subsequently marries will get those same rights,

provided, it says, there is no 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 sham marriages for immigration purposes.

Reburrus was Spanish in origin, but he'd done his military

service in Britain and almost certainly

settled here on retirement.

He was one of very many.

Because long after the Emperor Claudius had

celebrated his British conquest,

guerrilla warfare raged on and there were thousands of Roman

soldiers based in barracks across the country, like this one,

tucked away amongst modern terraced houses in South Shields.

This all looks very Roman and very military,

but we shouldn't imagine that this was a world in which Roman

soldiers were cooped up in their barracks

and the native British were somewhere outside.

There were all kinds of things going on 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 imagine that all the Roman soldiers

came from sunny Italy,

just itching to get back home to better weather and better food.

Most of the men actually came from places much like this in other

parts of the empire - from Belgium, Germany, or northern France.

And for a real glimpse into the cultural complexity that you

find on the northern frontier, I think

this tombstone is absolutely extraordinary.

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 that he is from a long way away.

He's Palmyrenus, he says very proudly across the middle.

He is a man of Palmyra, that's in 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 that kind of cultural mishmash to it.

Partly, she looks here like many Roman

women are represented in death.

They're obedient, they're doing their spinning, we've got

her wool down here, got a little treasure chest here.

But it's not quite as simple as it seems

because various bits of the image seem to be drawn almost

directly from Palmyrene or Syrian examples.

Sadly, someone's bashed off her face,

but what you can still see of her hairstyle is

a kind of hairstyle that you find in tombs in Syria

and this little idea of having this spindle held in her hand and put

across her lap, that's also found very often in Palmyra,

so you've got Palmyrene, Roman, British identity,

being paraded both by the writing and by the image.

Now, for me, this raises any number of questions.

I mean, I wonder, for example,

how a poor girl from the Catuvellauni tribe ended up

being the slave of a Palmyrene and eventually marrying him

and ending up here on Hadrian's Wall,

but I wonder even more, really,

did this couple stick out in 2nd century AD, South Shields?

Did people sort of think that their relationship was noticeable or

did they just blend in with a lot of other people who were

enjoying very kind of mixed relationships?

And what language do we think they spoke at home?

And I guess overall,

this looks to me as if it's an absolutely perfect example

of the kind of clashes of cultural identity, the merging of cultures.

If you like, the sort of cultural mess that you find

when you look carefully at the kind of communities that you have here.

This is about mobility of people.

This was a world where people moved around freely.

All kinds of migrants travelled the empire in search of a career

opportunity, or simply dreaming of fortune.

We can see what this mobility meant by looking at their skeletons.

It's changing our view of 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 investigating the identity of individuals

discovered in ancient burial sites throughout the country.

How do you actually go about working out where the guy or woman

came from?

We usually start with the grave goods and here you can see

an array of finds from Catterick and they're quite unusual.

So, there are crossbow brooches here, like this.

And they are thought to be worn as badges of office,

so soldiers and administrators wear them.

And the object itself might not be unusual,

but the idea of placing it 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 is we will test the teeth,

so we will look at the molar and we will test the chemical signature,

preserved in the tooth's enamel, and it will tell us

what was the geology like where this 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 gets locked 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 coastal North African climate,

that will look different chemically to a continental cool climate,

like Germany or Poland.

Right. And for this one?

For this one, we think that this individual and a whole group of...

Most of these men come from somewhere colder

and more continental.

-Be somewhere like Germany or Poland, something like that.

-Right.

'So Polish migration to Britain isn't as new as we think.'

If I were to ask you to just guess - what rough proportion

of the people in Roman Britain do you 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't move very much in the countryside.

But for the cities, which is where our work has been, we think 20 to

30% of the ones we've sampled may be incomers, from outside of Britain.

So quite a significant proportion of migrants, doing what?

The cities are very mixed and diverse

and what they seem to be doing,

a lot of these individuals are in quite high-status roles,

so the lady from York has very rich grave goods,

these individuals, they have these crossbow brooches and the belt

fittings, so they're probably soldiers and administrators.

They're running the Roman Empire.

So our picture of Roman Britain has to be, it's not

just that there are cities,

it's that there are cities with a very different

sort of community than you could ever possibly have found,

you know, a couple of hundred years before the Roman invasion.

-Absolutely.

-Yeah.

These migrants, Poles and Germans,

people like the Yorkshire lady with roots in North Africa,

or Barates from Syria, made the Roman Empire,

just as much as the emperors and the politicians did.

And it isn't just a question of moving around the empire.

It's also people from the provinces making it to Rome, getting to

hold the highest positions of power in the capital itself.

In our terms, the Roman ruling class

was strikingly ethnically diverse, but we shouldn't

conclude from that that the Romans were all sugar coated liberals.

When they felt like it, they could be just as xenophobic as anyone.

And we can see that from an extraordinary

survival in the French city of Lyon. That's to say, in Gaul.

It's all related to a proposal of the Emperor Claudius -

the same man who took Britain as his trophy.

He stirred up a real hornet's nest in Rome when he suggested

that Gauls should be allowed into the heart of Roman government.

Claudius ran in to all kinds of objections.

Some people complained that the Gauls had only recently been

vicious enemies of Rome and others said they didn't much fancy

kowtowing to a load of nouveau riche men 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 up in Gaul.

The interesting thing is that Claudius

justifies his policy by going right back to the very

beginning of Roman time, when he says -

"aileni et quidem exter ni."

Aliens, foreigners, and some outsiders already came to Rome,

and that's going back to the time of Romulus.

Now, to be honest, Claudius's speech is a bit nerdy

and he grindingly goes through every example

he can think of of foreigners coming in to the political

structure of Rome, people who - "Romam migravit" -

the people who came as migrants to Rome.

But objections or not, Claudius got his way.

And the Gauls were incorporated into the power structure of Rome.

And that was really the standard pattern.

One notable exception was Britain.

We don't know of any native Brit who made it big at Rome.

If the Brits never dominated Rome, the Roman way dominated Britain.

Whether that was spending their afternoons,

like we imagine every Roman did, going to the baths,

or whatever the weather, dressing up in a sheet.

Some locals probably just didn't get all this bathing stuff.

Or take to wearing the toga.

But some must have relished the fun you could have here.

And some probably got a 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 Roman writer, referring to Britain,

has to say.

He says he saw the toga everywhere.

"Frequens toga."

And they took to baths and to elegant dining

and they called it culture.

But it was really "pars servitutis" -

part of their enslavement.

This was partly mocking the people for their Roman pretensions.

And at the same time acknowledging

that it played into the hands of Rome.

But the cultural interactions are more complicated than that.

Here in Roman Bath, long before the Roman invasion,

the local population had worshipped the goddess Sulis

at these hot springs.

After the conquest, the Romans saw her as the equivalent

of their own goddess Minerva and addressed her by that name.

She began to be called Sulis Minerva, a hybrid god

combining both identities.

But was she really native, or was she Roman?

What's left of the facade of the temple tells us

a lot about the world of Roman Bath.

Some of it is really very, 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 shield of the goddess Minerva.

Which in Roman mythology had at its middle

a snaky-headed female figure.

The gorgon looking out.

That's fine, except what we've got here is a bloke with a moustache.

Now, the question is, has the sculptor just got it wrong?

You know, has he failed to be properly Roman?

Or has he perhaps refused to be entirely Roman?

And is this Sulis, you know, creeping in?

Or is it actually something a bit more interesting than that?

Is this really a new hybrid culture for a new Britain?

In the merging of Roman and pre-Roman images in art,

in the worship of dual gods,

and in the cultural mix of its towns and cities,

what we're beginning to see is the emergence

of a new identity in Britain.

Perhaps we shouldn't think of these people as being

either native or Roman,

perhaps being Roman here meant something new altogether.

That is - British.

When the Romans invaded this island,

it was home to thousands and thousands of people.

Lots of different groups,

each one thinking a little bit of it was their own.

It wasn't a political unity in any sense.

That's what the Romans tried 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 the Romans that we have London.

London was a brand-new Roman city.

Basically, there was just open country here before.

And it's actually thanks to the Romans

that London became the capital city, stuck down here in the South East

with all the disadvantages and advantages that brings.

And what's amazing is if you dig down

underneath the later buildings that we now see,

you find all kinds of elements still surviving

of the Roman city itself.

For us, that's the Guildhall.

But it's where the Roman amphitheatre once was.

And underneath here was the Roman forum.

The city centre.

Supposed to be one of the largest public buildings north of the Alps.

Most people here are looking at the Tower Of London.

Behind them, they'd see part of the Roman wall, 1,000 years older.

But we can't ignore that all this

was bought at the price of violent conquest

and that not everyone in Britain

and the other provinces of the empire were busy

happily embracing their new identity.

In fact, one of the heroines of British national culture

is a rebel and resistance fighter against the Roman occupation.

She's Boudicca, the wife of a local king,

who'd actually got on rather well with the Romans

and had left his kingdom to them.

The trouble was, that the Romans took over their inheritance

with terrible brutality.

They flogged Boudicca and they raped her daughters.

Boudicca seized her chance and led a revolt.

Storming London and other Roman towns, burning them to the ground.

On one occasion,

Boudicca's forces are supposed to have cut off the breasts

of the Roman women and sewed them into their mouths

when they killed them.

In the end, however, Roman firepower won out, as it always did.

And Boudicca killed herself.

The strange thing is, that a couple of hundred years ago,

Boudicca, that virulent opponent to the Roman Empire,

was reinvented as an ancestor of the British Empire.

The words on the base of her statue say it all.

Basically, don't worry, Boudicca, your descendants will conquer

more territory than those Romans ever did.

I have to say that for different reasons,

a bit of my heart's invested in Boudicca.

The tough woman who stood up to 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 were exaggerating about her crimes,

she was a brutal terrorist.

And what sort of place would this have been if she'd got her way?

I often find it hard to decide which side I'm on.

Romans or rebels.

But one thing's for sure,

Romans had to fight to maintain a hold over Britain.

And the island was always something of an awkward and exotic possession.

On the other side, going east, things are very different.

The Greek world, that also included what we call Turkey

and much of the Near East,

cities, urban living and long-standing relations with Rome

had existed for centuries.

MAN SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

Becoming Roman here took a very different form.

All the same, there was still a desire to make sense

of the brave new world to which they now belonged.

I'm in a place that I 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 place in the whole of the Roman Empire

where you can see better than anywhere else

how it was that people outside Rome

represented the power of Rome to themselves.

'And we can see how the two civilisations of Greece and Rome

'came together and what the empire looked like from the Greek side.'

People in the eastern part of the empire

went on speaking and writing Greek like they had for centuries.

The Romans didn't make them change to Latin,

they went on being Greek, under Rome.

They went to Greek plays, they read Greek books,

they worshipped Greek gods in Greek temples.

And they did something the Romans rather disapproved of.

Naked athletics.

In stadia like this one.

This is the 30,000-seater stadium of Aphrodisias.

In contrast to the new towns and cities that sprung up

in Britain and Algeria,

here there are at first sight few clear signs

of specifically Roman culture.

But if we dig beneath the surface, another story begins to emerge.

It takes a bit of a leap of the imagination

to imagine the scene of Greek athletics going on

underneath all this long grass.

But that's what happened here.

But it wasn't the only thing that happened here.

It's always worth looking very hard at the details

on these big lumps of stone.

We can see some strong hints of a very Roman kind of use.

All along the front row of the seats,

there are these little fixings.

There's a hole here which must have taken rope.

There's some kind of wedge here which presumably took a post.

What these are, are part of a structure

of ropes and posts and nets

which keep the audience safe from something dangerous

going on in the stadium.

Now, that's not athletics.

That's animals.

What we've got to imagine is that sometimes the people of Aphrodisias

were showing up here to watch the very Greek sport of athletics.

Sometimes, they showed up for the characteristic Roman entertainment

of gladiatorial combat and wild-beast hunts.

So, this stadium is kind of dual use.

And it shows just how much this Greek culture is incorporating

bits of Rome.

And there's another even more obvious way

that the people of Aphrodisias incorporated Rome

into their own cultural world.

That is in the worship of the Roman emperors.

And in a brand-new sanctuary,

sponsored by some local grandees, for exactly that purpose.

This is one of the most important archaeological discoveries

of the last 50, even 100, years.

It's a temple complex dedicated to the honour and worship

of the Roman emperor.

And I'm sitting on the temple steps.

We have to be a bit careful about what we mean by worship.

I think there's no chance that the people of Aphrodisias

thought the Roman emperor was just the same

as Zeus, or Aphrodite, or any of those traditional gods.

What they did think is that the power of the Roman emperor

was very like the power of a god.

And they worshipped him in those terms.

Temples dedicated to the Roman emperors

have been found all over the empire.

But what made this discovery

so special was that it was loaded with sculptures.

Represented are the emperors, their families,

images of the traditional gods and myths

and the conquered provinces imagined in human form.

This wasn't simple flattery of the central power,

though there was no doubt a bit of that,

this was a local initiative designed for a local audience.

Setting in stone their own interpretation

of the Roman world and their place in it.

And here's an almost-naked emperor having a go at a province.

What's quite interesting about all the ways

that provinces and conquered territories are represented

in this series is that they're all female.

So, there's a wonderful bit of gender...

Or a horrible bit of gender politics going on,

with the heroic, masculine emperor slaughtering,

or raping the helpless woman.

A woman trying not to reveal her naked body.

And is putting her hand up, probably to ask for mercy.

He's got his hand tugging on her hair.

The caption is wonderfully revealing.

The emperor is Tiberius Claudius Kaisar.

That is the Emperor Claudius.

But the province is a bit of a surprise.

Because she's "Bretannia".

It's about the easiest bit of Greek you could ever see.

This actually is the very, very first image of Britannia

ever to appear in world art.

And I think it's a bit of a shock to discover that she's not appearing

as a proud warrior woman on the back of a coin,

but she's here as a rather sad victim of what is,

to all intents and purposes, rape by a Roman.

It's funny that once you get down to look at the captions,

you start to see these sculptures in a bit of a different light.

Because they were really meant to be seen very high up from below.

And they look quite different 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 rather pathetic face of Britannia.

And that must be the view of her that the Aphrodisians

walking down the porticoes must have had.

We can only wonder what they would have thought as they looked.

My guess is that a few of them might have been on Britannia's side.

But many of them would have been in awe

of the god-like power of Claudius.

And many would have seen Rome's glory as their own.

Not so much subjects, as partners in the empire.

Here, you could be Greek and Roman with no contradiction.

For me, the really important thing that comes out of all this

is that there was no single way to be Roman.

We've been all over the Roman Empire,

we've found Romans in togas, in tunics, in trousers, probably.

We found them speaking Latin, Greek, Celtic.

There wasn't a rule book for how to be Roman.

In fact, it was the sheer diversity

and the acceptance of diversity

that actually underpinned the Roman Empire.

Whether you came from the margins of the empire in the east,

its northern frontiers, or the fringes of the Sahara in the south,

if you were a Roman citizen,

you had the same rights and privileges as a citizen in Rome.

And that was radical and new.

An idea still worth cherishing.

Rome's extension of citizenship was one factor

that gave its empire unity.

Something few empires before or since have managed.

But one man would put that unity on an entirely new footing.

The Emperor Caracalla was born here, in Lille.

And he's gone down in history as an awful brute.

He started his reign by murdering his brother.

A bit like Romulus.

But in this case, the poor lad was sheltering on his mother's lap.

Things went on from there.

But in 212, he changed the world.

He gave full Roman citizenship to every free inhabitant

of the Roman Empire.

About 30 million people became Roman citizens at a stroke.

Why he did it? We haven't a clue.

By the look of him, I don't imagine it was simple generosity.

All the same, it was the culmination of the Roman project

of incorporating outsiders, extending citizenship

and making the Roman way of doing things seem universal.

Even natural.

After 1,000 years, in a way,

this was the triumphant finale of that project.

But the truth is that when they became all the same,

the Romans soon found new ways to divide and exclude.

'Now, the Roman Empire would come under pressure

'both from the outside...'

The wall must have been something to do with controlling that.

'..and from a new threat within.'

This was Romans attacking Romans.