Behind Closed Doors Meet the Romans with Mary Beard

Today, when we think of ancient Rome, this is what we see.

A city of marble ruins, colossal amphitheatres

and imperial power.

A world of emperors and armies and lavish spectacle.

All those gladiators fighting to the death.

But what happens if we turn that upside down?

We take a look at Rome from the bottom up.

Hidden away, all over the modern city,

you can still find evidence for a very different ancient Rome.

The forgotten voices of its bakers and butchers,

its slaves and children.

Gosh, this is a sad one. "He lived for just one year."

"Vixet Annum Unum." The death of a baby.

Here we've got a young slave girl, aged 17.

"Africana."

"She came from Africa."

This wasn't just a mugging.

This was mass murder.

In this series, I've been exploring the lives of these ordinary Romans

through the extraordinary stories they tell us on their tombstones.

We've already seen how the Empire turned Rome

into the world's first global city,

a place where a million people from three continents lived together,

where life was full of luxury and laughter,

but also disease and danger.

In this final film, I want to delve even deeper

and go behind the closed doors of the Roman home

to lift the lid on their personal lives and prized possessions.

It's a really, really precious piece because it's the only cradle...

-SHE LAUGHS

-..to survive from the Roman world.

And take you to meet some extraordinary, ordinary Romans

who'll reveal an intimate, at times dark,

but very surprising picture of the Roman family.

Step through the front door into a Roman home

and you'll find a place brimming with stories,

from the shocking to the sweet.

Loving couples, that's for sure, but also teenage pregnancies,

abandoned babies, drunken housewives, runaway slaves,

menage-a-trois

and a very nasty case of domestic violence.

Welcome to my Rome.

This house in Pompeii

is the perfect example of a conventional Roman home.

You come through the front door into a grand formal hall

with several rooms off it.

Pool for collecting water, and opposite the front door,

a reception room-cum-study called, in Latin, the tablino.

'The standard view is that this is where

the master of the house presided,

dressed in his toga, receiving his guests,

while at the back of the house, in the private quarters,

is where we find the wife and kids

and the cook, slaving away over a hot oven.

The problem with that is

there's a touch of the Frankie Howerd Mr and Mrs Pompeii about it.

Or, to put it another way,

there's temptation for us to take a rather idealising image

of our own families,

dress them up in togas, add a couple of slaves,

and say, "Hey presto! That's a Roman family."

And it's not actually entirely wrong,

and there's some quite strikingly familiar things about a Roman house,

right down to some of them having a "Beware Of The Dog" sign

at the front door.

But if you look a bit harder, you find it isn't quite so simple.

So, how do we start to bring back to life

what really went on within the walls of a Roman home?

And how do we get close to a real Roman family?

Well, the best way is to look at what the Romans themselves

tell us from beyond the grave.

When you come into a place like this,

what first hits you in the eye are the statues of the rich,

stern emperors and ladies with expensive hairdos.

But if you look behind them,

you'll find thousands of ordinary Roman voices,

compelling us to read their stories.

Some have forked out on portraits,

others on just a few lines of text.

But they all give you clues

about who they lived with and who they loved.

Here's a cute little boy with his pet dog.

Here's a dad.

He's commemorating his daughter, Giulia.

There she is. Really natty hairdo.

She must've been quite fashion-conscious, I think.

But one of the most striking things about all these tombstones

is how Roman husbands and wives portray themselves in death.

And if you want to know why we've inherited such a traditional view

of the Roman family,

then the best place to start is with Roman marriage.

So, this is one end of a big Roman marble coffin.

We don't know who was originally inside it,

but this end, at least, talks to us about marriage.

Got a husband, wife, and they're holding hands.

That's the absolutely classic image of the Roman married couple.

It's really such a cliched logo of Roman marriage

that stone carvers would have churned these things out

by the dozen.

This will all be prepared,

and the stonemason will just put your faces onto the heads.

Whatever it looks like,

it isn't an equal relationship, though.

In the stereotype, the husband has all the control.

The wife's job is to serve him every which way.

You even get some Roman epitaphs that sum up a woman's life,

just by listing her service.

She talked nicely, she walked nicely,

she had kids, she kept house, she made wool. Enough said.

And it goes right to the top of Roman society, too.

There's a lovely story about the Empress Livia,

the scheming, poisoning wife of the Emperor Augustus.

She's supposed to have taken great care that people saw her,

in the Imperial Palace itself,

spinning and weaving the wool for her husband's togas.

That was what Roman women were supposed to do.

On the surface, then, these tombstones show us

a rather poised, cool, even cold view of Roman marriage.

But tombstones tend to give that impression.

Even today, they trade in cliches.

But there's plenty of other evidence

that helps us get behind these stereotyped impressions.

At the British Museum in London is a wonderful collection

of Roman rings covered in the same imagery.

They look pretty familiar to us.

We know, actually, that what we call the wedding finger

was the favourite place to put a ring.

Some Roman doctors thought it was a direct link

between that finger and the heart.

But it's hard to get through these sort of standardised images

of the clasped hands.

Just occasionally, you can.

This ring here...

..it's a pretty plain ring,

but in the centre, it's got, written on it in Latin,

"Te Amo Parem."

Which means, literally, umm...

"I love you not enough." "I don't love you enough."

It's slightly odd at first sight.

It's particularly odd to imagine that

you would give a rather expensive gold ring to somebody to say,

"Here you are. Have this lovely ring.

"But I don't care for you that much!"

Think it's probably a bit cleverer than that.

And I think what the message must mean is,

"I can't love you possibly as much as you deserve to be loved.

"You are so fantastic and gorgeous and loveable

"that nobody could love you as much as you ought to be loved."

It's like a wonderfully rare, really rare, glimpse

of somebody's kind of personal voice,

sort of shouting through these rather cliched images of marriage.

That ring hints some of the passion you can find in Roman relationships.

But it's also there if you look beyond the man's voice

and think about it from the woman's side.

Scattered across Rome is an amazing trio of tombstones,

which although still written by men,

give us a much more intimate,

a more honest portrait of their partners.

You have to be a bit careful

about what husbands and wives say about each other on their epitaphs.

They do tell such terrible whoppers about their marriage.

"We lived together for 30 years without a cross word."

I don't imagine that that could've been any more true in ancient Rome

than it is now.

But just occasionally,

you find someone who comes a bit off-centre,

breaks through those cliches

and really conjures up the character.

This is a great example.

It's a tombstone of a woman called Glyconis,

put up by her husband.

Now, Glyconis is a Greek name and it means "sweet".

So, she's Sweetie. And he says that, in fact.

He says she is, "sweet by name but even sweeter by nature.

"She didn't like to be all proper and austere," he says.

"She much preferred to be a bit wild."

"Lascivos." "Rather sexy."

"Suaves." She liked to "get a bit drenched in Bacchus."

Now, Bacchus is the god of wine.

So, what he's saying is she was a bit of a wild thing

and she really liked a drink or two.

"It's a pity," he says, "she didn't live for ever."

After all that affection,

the next one reveals a much darker side to Roman marriage.

Here's another tombstone which doesn't look very special,

but has got a horrible sting in the tail.

It's put up by a husband and wife.

He's called Restutus Piscinesis.

And the wife is called Prima Restuta.

And they've put it up, "Fecerunt,"

to Primae Florentiae, their "dearest daughter,"

"Filiae Carissimai," "Dearest Daughter."

So far, so ordinary.

But HOW did she die?

"She was thrown," "Deceptaest,"

"In Tiberi," "into the Tiber,"

"by her husband, Orpheus."

"She was just 16-and-a-half years old."

If Mum and Dad are right, this was a case of domestic murder.

I'm afraid some things never change.

The woman in this last tombstone

deserves to be a lot more famous than she is.

Her story gives us a very different view

on Roman virtue and fidelity

and is put up to a woman called Alliae Potestatis.

And she's an ex-slave.

She's a "Liberta" of a man called Aulus, her partner.

Starts off with some pretty standard praise for a Roman woman.

She was "always the first to get out of bed in the morning

and "the last to go to bed at night,"

i.e. she was doing all the housework.

But then,

it starts to get a bit weirder...

..because the writer becomes...

..a bit strangely explicit about her body.

He says here,

"she's got lovely snow white breasts and small nipples"

and that "her arms and legs were beautifully smooth."

And then he explains why.

It's because she was a very "active depilator."

She "sought out every little hair and plucked it out."

But it gets even weirder than that.

This woman had actually "two lovers that she was living with."

One household held them all. "Una domus" held them all,

and they lived in a spirit of perfect harmony.

This is, in other words, a Roman menage-a-trois.

But after she died, the blokes went their separate ways,

and they're now growing old apart.

If you wanted just one example

of how Roman relationships could be as messy, as murky

and as mixed-up as our own,

it would have to be the household of Allia Potestas.

I can't help wondering, though, what Allia Potestas' version

of the story about these guys would have been.

So if these three voices tell us how we can fill the Roman home

with a more unexpected set of occupants,

what about the house itself?

Well, if you look beyond those rather posh houses in Pompeii

with their grand entrance halls and expensive paintings,

you'll find that Roman homes

came in just as many shapes and sizes as their relationships.

This place was in multiple occupancy.

It had three or four separate apartments,

and actually the walls inside were partly made of wicker.

A kind of ancient equivalent of prefab.

But don't think dirt poor,

there was a really pricey little collection of bronze statuettes

found in there.

This one is a pretty interesting one, actually,

because it seems to be partly apartment block,

but also partly lodging house,

partly B&B.

Just around the corner is one of my favourite Roman homes.

The ground floor flat

of what was once a quite comfortable Roman apartment block.

Anyone at home?

What's so surprising about this place is that its layout,

basically a series of rooms off a central corridor,

feels like any flat that you might find in any modern city.

It's now called the Insula of the Painted Ceiling,

for obvious reasons.

I almost feel I could move right in today!

Now, we don't know how many people would actually have lived here,

and that does make a difference to how we picture it.

And we certainly don't know exactly who they were,

but I don't find it difficult to imagine Glyconis or Allia Potestas

waking up early in a place like this.

The point is that most Romans didn't live in those grand houses

that you see in Pompeii.

They had all kinds of variety of accommodation.

Right at the bottom there were people who lived in slum tenements,

in a room over the shop,

or people who just bedded down under somebody else's staircase.

And this is comfortably in the middle.

This was someone's home, sweet home.

All the same, part of the difficulty we have

in trying to bring spaces like these alive

is that hardly any of the stuff that went into them has survived.

Imagine trying to work out what went on in a modern house

if we didn't have any of the furniture!

But the task is not entirely impossible.

Hidden away in a store room in Herculaneum

is a priceless treasure trove of domestic furniture

found in houses around the town.

Carbonised when Vesuvius erupted in AD 79,

they have been painstakingly put back together.

It's terribly evocative.

Here we've got a table, the kind of thing that you'd have by your bed,

it's what you eat and drink off,

don't imagine that all Romans lie down to eat,

they put their takeaways on here and sit down and have a nosh.

And here...

..two little wicker baskets.

I'm going to actually take the lid off.

Almost the kind of...

It's the stuff, the bric-a-brac that you'd find just in any Roman house.

It's as close as you can get to a Roman furniture shop.

There are table legs with stunning ivory decoration,

others with strange dogs carved all over them.

There's what we call a sofa bed,

which you can still see was beautifully inlaid.

Even a perfectly preserved cupboard

that I guess once held all sorts of trinkets.

It's beautiful. You can see all the little hinges

and the little handle.

But one find is the rarest of all.

And this is a baby's cradle.

It's a really, really precious piece,

because it's the absolutely the only cradle

that has survived from the Roman world,

and that makes you think that maybe we've just been unlucky

in not getting the other kids' cradles,

or maybe most babies didn't sleep in something like this,

but they bedded down in the ancient equivalent of a drawer,

or, actually, they slept in the bed with Mum or nurse.

When it was found, it actually had a tiny little skeleton in it,

and around the skeleton were bits of fabric textiles

and a whole load of leaves,

and it looks as if this baby was sleeping on a mattress

stuffed full of leaves, covered by a blanket,

when the eruption of Vesuvius came in 79

and put an end to that little life.

Still touching, though, isn't it?

Rocking the cradle that's been rocked by Roman mums and nurses.

For me, that collection of furniture is a symbol of all the things

we can put back into the Roman home if we try.

Not just the clutter,

but husbands and wives and their messy relationships, too.

Seeing a child's cradle up close reminds us

not to forget the children in the Roman household.

That baby, of course, didn't survive the eruption of Vesuvius,

but if it had, how different would its childhood have been from ours?

Nowadays, we separate childhood off from the adult world.

We dress kids in clothes quite different from adults,

we give them their own entertainment, their own books,

we even feed them different food,

and in the last 50 years,

we even invented the category of the teenager.

In ancient Rome, childhood was quite different.

We hardly ever see or hear the kids in a Roman home.

They're usually cast out at the back of the house, rarely mentioned.

Today, the only way we can hear their voices

is to look at the dead ones.

These books hold a record of over 30,000 tombstones

from the city of Rome.

Every age, sex and walk of life,

but what hits your first is the sheer number of child tombstones.

There's just hundreds and hundreds of them.

I mean, here's little Titius Eutychus.

He lived to be just four.

Here's Titius Posphorus.

He made it to five.

Over the page, Titiae Regillae.

She was one years old and five months and 11 days.

That's only a few of the Ts.

And it fits absolutely with what we know about child mortality in Rome.

At least half of the kids wouldn't have lived until they were ten,

a third wouldn't have made it to their first birthday.

And I think you have to have a heart of stone

not to be moved by that statistic.

All the same, it isn't quite all gloom and doom.

My absolute, absolute favourite

is a tremendous character.

A little girl who died when she was just five,

but we can really get a sense of her.

She was called Geminiae Agathe Matri.

It turns out she was a bit of a tomboy.

"I had a 'pueri voltum' - the face of a boy.

"But I was a gentle soul - 'ingenio docili'.

"I was pretty and I got a bit spoilt.

"'Veneranda'. I had red hair cut short on top,

"but I let it grow long down the back."

And then she says, "Don't grieve too much for me.

"Have a drink,

"and don't be too sad at the rest that my little body is having."

It's, as it were, speaking to her relatives.

There's also a message there, I think, for us.

Because although these tombstones are kind of obviously about death,

for me, they also reek of love, of warmth,

actually of life.

So what happened if kids like little Geminiae Matri did survive?

Are we talking school,

or did Roman parents have something else in store for them?

Well, rather predictably,

it depended on where you were in the pecking order.

In their labs on the outskirts of Rome,

a group of Italian anthropologists have analysed

over 6,000 Roman skeletons,

dug up in and around Rome over the past century.

Alongside full adult skeletons are some rare child bones,

found in poorer graves.

For although Roman kids died in vast numbers,

their fragile little skeletons rarely survive.

SHE SPEAKS ITALIAN

TRANSLATION:

What's extraordinary is that these bones

show some very telling signs of wear and tear.

So this guy has been doing hard work with his legs

for many years, and he is only 16.

You couldn't get those kind of lesions just by

playing football, or... skipping?

This has to be hard manual work?

And Fullonica...

You're treating the cloth, you're dyeing the cloth,

you're stamping on the cloth.

So what we've got is a kid doing heavy manual labour

at a time when we think they should be in infant school.

Also found by Paola's team, in the grave of a one-year old girl,

was a strange collection of trinkets that once formed

a gorgeous little necklace. They look pretty innocuous.

There's an amber rabbit, a figurine of an Egyptian god,

a mini phallus and some beads.

But hidden within them is a much darker story.

These are what the Romans would have called crepundia.

They'd have been strung together and worn around the neck of a child,

so they are half-toy, half-amulet or lucky charm.

But they also have a part to play

in one aspect of Roman culture that we find rather shocking.

And that is child exposure.

What that means, if in Rome you have a child you don't want,

you can just throw it away.

In the street, on the rubbish dump.

And that's where the crepundia come in.

Because some parents were supposed to have left these babies out

with their crepundia around their necks,

as a kind of link to their birth family, to their original identity.

It's a wonderful plotline, actually,

in some Roman comedies, that the slave girl heroine

is suddenly spotted and recognised by her mum and dad

because they've seen the crepundia that they had left out with her.

So in some Roman comedies,

these things can bring about a very nice happy ending.

In real life, I'm not so sure.

The unavoidable fact then, for Roman kids in poorer families,

is that if you weren't exposed, and let's be honest,

we don't know how many babies really were,

they were put to work as soon as they were fit and able,

perhaps as early as five.

But further up the social scale, things were predictably different.

In the centre of Rome, in a covered arcade just behind the forum,

we can still find evidence of a Roman school.

All over its plaster walls you find writing, drawing,

and even caricatures of the schoolmaster.

Which reminds us just how little kids have changed.

Here's a great picture of a bloke with a big beard, full on.

Here we're in Rome, a willy.

What you've got here is people's letter practice, A-B-C-D,

you've also got little snatches of Latin poetry written.

What it looks like to me is an old-fashioned school desk.

And that, in a way, is exactly what it is.

Schools in Rome weren't schools in our sense.

Lessons took place in arcades like this, under shady trees,

even in the streets. They were fee-paying, for the most part,

so only for the well-off and only for boys.

Some of those lessons would have been much like ours.

They would have learned to read and write,

they would have done a modern language,

in their case, it would have been ancient Greek,

no science and PSE, it would be public speaking and poetry.

An image of a Roman school in action still survives.

The original painting in Pompeii is pretty faded,

but this 19th-century copy shows exactly what's going on.

Here are the good boys at their lessons.

But here is the unfortunate malefactor.

He's the one who must have been caught

doing a caricature of the master on the wall.

He's being beaten.

He's being held down by two of his fellow pupils,

and he's been stripped down to his pants,

well, they're sort of pants.

And the master here is whacking him. And he is clearly screaming.

This was such a well-known form of Roman corporal punishment

that it even had its own name, catomus.

Perhaps it's not surprising that one favourite nickname

for a schoolmaster in Rome was Plagosus - "whacker".

For wealthy Roman families, then,

rote learning and discipline was the ideal boys' education.

But it also served as an ideal

to families trying to climb the social ladder.

The best way to put a human face to this story is to pay a visit

to one of my favourite characters, a real Roman schoolboy,

the son of ex-slaves whose memorial can still be found

overlooking a square in central Rome.

I have come here to meet up with this little lad.

Sulpicius Maximus was his name,

and he was something of a Roman child prodigy.

Aged just 11, he entered a grown-up poetry competition,

a sort of Rome's Got Talent.

But stardom was not to come.

He died, and his mum and dad put up this great memorial to him.

It says up there that he died of too much study.

I can't help thinking he might have been

a bit of a victim of pushy parents.

Sulpicius's original memorial is now

in an unloved corner of a Rome museum,

but it's a chance to meet the boy face-to-face.

His story makes me wonder what life was really like for kids like him

in families desperately trying to get on.

Were you never naughty? Did you ever refuse to do your homework?

Did you never lose your school shoes?

I can't help thinking that life in Sulpicius's household

wasn't quite what his parents wrote it up to be.

But all the same, there is a sense that childhood,

as a category that we know, didn't really exist in the Roman world.

I mean, look at him.

If you came across this statue

and you didn't know the story written round about him,

you'd think this was some orator haranguing the masses

in the Roman forum.

In fact, it's a kid of 11-years-old,

and you'd never know it.

For aspiring Roman families, if you wanted to educate your boy,

you concentrated on public life, and oratory, even poetry.

Not on what we would call emotional development.

But how different was it for rich Roman girls?

In the store room of the same museum is one remarkable object

that helps to tell their side of the story.

This is the most exquisitely beautiful Roman doll.

She's the most perfect specimen to survive from the Roman world,

and she is so precious and fragile that,

although I'm just itching to pick her up, I'm not allowed to.

She looks as if she's made of wood, but in fact she's ivory.

She's a woman with very cleverly jointed limbs,

she's got a rather posh, fashionable hairdo,

and on her hand she's got a little gold ring.

Now, there's no such thing as a toy shop in the Roman world,

and for most kids like Sulpicius if they went out to play,

they would be improvising with nuts and stones

and playing ducks and drakes on the river.

This is something a bit special.

She's not just Barbie, she's Empress Barbie.

But there's another side to a toy like this.

It's not just about play, like all toys,

it's helping to teach whoever owns it

what their role is going to be in life.

Roman women were made for marriage and for breeding children.

And in fact, some Roman writers tell us

that just before they do get married,

Roman girls would go along to a temple

and they would leave their dolls in the temple.

But that didn't happen to this doll.

Because, actually,

it was found in a big stone coffin

of a woman called Creperia Tryphaena.

To judge from the skeleton, Creperia was about 20.

She presumably hadn't got married,

so she took her doll with her to her tomb.

That's quite extraordinary to us.

We wouldn't ever imagine burying a 20-year-old with her Barbie.

An awful lot of Roman girls

must have gone to the grave with their dolls.

In fact, one of the most famous writers of the Roman world, Pliny,

tells the story of one girl who died young, Minicia Marcella,

the daughter of a friend of his, Fundanus.

Pliny says that she was going on 14,

but she had an old head on young shoulders.

She was wise beyond her years.

She was sweet and charming, and she was the spitting image of her dad.

The really sad thing, he says,

is that she was just about to be married.

By an absolutely extraordinary piece of good fortune,

we actually have Minicia Marcella's tombstone.

Here it is, this rather elegant, austere affair.

"To the spirits of Minicia Marcella," it says,

"the daughter of Fundanus."

But there's a sting in the last line.

Pliny said she was going on 14.

This says she lived for 12 years,

11 months, and seven days.

So she was 12 years old, and just about to be married.

Now, we don't know how many Roman girls got married this young,

but a significant minority, I think.

And it raises an obvious question.

Were marriages like this consummated straight away?

We like to think not.

But the chances are that they were.

When you put all these children together, our child workers,

child poets and child brides,

Roman childhood can appear a pretty brutal phase of life.

But I don't think we should get too carried away.

To help me put it into context, I met up with a colleague

and father of two Greg Woolf.

I still find it hard to get my head around Roman childhood.

I mean, was it really that brutal?

I'm not really sure that it is quite as unfamiliar as that.

Some bits were brutal, and some bits were different,

but a lot is just the same. They had a childhood, even if

it's a bit shorter than the childhood that our kids have.

But they're not the kind of protected species

-that modern Western kids are?

-That must be right.

They haven't got a kids' room full of kids' stuff.

They don't have kids' entertainment, they don't have kids' clothes.

Maybe just a few children of the very rich,

with their Greek pedagogue

or slaves taking them to school and their wet nurses,

but most children are just doing what adults did

in the same places with them.

We're undergoing a huge transition from a world where

lots of children are born and lots of them die,

where they are fully part of the world of the adults,

to a world where not many children are born and most of them survive,

and their childhoods are prolonged to a point

which Romans would have thought was well into young adulthood.

Yeah. If you reckon that half of them,

at least half of them are going to be dead before the age of ten,

what does that do

to the relationship between parents and kids?

I think they were tragedies when you lose a child,

in any society, any period.

And when Romans lost their children

we know sometimes they were devastated.

But it was a normal tragedy,

it was the same tragedy that the other families on your street had.

It's the same tragedy your parents had.

The tombstones kind of show us, really,

that even if it happens often, it still is terribly hurtful.

It isn't in some ways half as unfamiliar as we like to make it,

and I was struck by the tombstone on the wall of this bar up there

what's obviously mum and dad, a little kid,

and he's holding a dog, he's holding his pet.

You can sort of recognise that as mum, dad and child,

with all the things that we think go with it.

The difference is the project of having that is much more risky.

-It's a much more precarious existence.

-Yeah.

I mean, really, the bottom line is Roman childhood - a big risk.

Of course, we mustn't forget that for a Roman women the risk

was not just child-rearing, it was also child-bearing.

In a world with little medical care as we know it,

Roman pregnancy wasn't always straightforward.

One of the most suggestive objects to open this world to us

is an eerie-looking medical instrument found in Pompeii.

Every woman will recognise exactly what this is.

It's an ancient Roman gynaecological speculum.

The principle's pretty clear,

you have the prongs here and they're put into the vagina.

You then turn the screw,

which opens the prongs

and so extends the vagina, so you can examine the woman.

We all know how it works, I don't need to demonstrate it.

So a rather nice one, decorated at the top.

I think this was a rather pricy doctor who owned this,

with rather expensive female clients,

I don't think this got shoved up any poor woman.

But I think we shouldn't get carried away with the familiarity.

One of the nastiest bits of Roman literature I've ever read,

and there's plenty of nasty bits to choose from,

describes what you do when you can't get a baby out of a woman.

When the baby's got stuck and you want to save the mother's life.

You put a speculum up, you get a sight of what's going on.

You then put a hook into the woman and try to pull the baby out.

You'll kill it in the process,

it's going through its eye and skull.

I can't imagine, even if it was intended to save her life,

that many women could have survived that process.

Childbirth today has its dangers,

but in the Roman world, it was a battlefield.

I think if in the Roman world men died as soldiers,

women died in childbirth.

It's hard to get a feel for such experiences

in the Roman home itself.

The rooms they used for sex and childbirth have given us a few beds,

but curiously no double ones and plenty of erotic pictures.

But occasionally we get a glimpse of how women could transcend

the traditional roles that were expected of them.

In a house in Pompeii, now known as the House of Julius Polibius

after the man who owned it,

is one example of a woman who may have done just that.

I have come to see her with my colleague, Andrew Wallace-Hadrill.

What I'm interested in is this extraordinary painting.

It's showing a religious sacrifice going on

and it is full of weird religious symbolism,

like this snake and the altar,

but what I'm interested in is this couple here

because this to me

looks as if it's meant to be the head of a household and his wife.

And it's very unusual, because the standard scene

is just the man in his toga doing the sacrifice

and everyone always says,

"This must be the head of household" and here we have her too.

She's cut in on the action.

But the woman, because her property's completely separate

from that of her husband,

could be more wealthy and more powerful.

What's this lady doing here right bang in the middle of picture,

if she isn't richer and more important

than the little man at her side?

So in some cases it is possible to turn upside down

the traditional roles in the Roman household.

But there is still one part of the Roman home

that feels completely alien to us.

The part that actually made it function.

And by that I mean the slaves.

Archaeology has produced very little material

that relates directly to slavery,

but tucked away in a Roman museum is one rare object

that speaks volumes about its dark side.

You'd think this was a Roman dog collar,

a band of iron and a little metal tag on it.

And on the tag is written in Latin, "fugi - teneme".

"I've escaped, catch me, if you take me back to my master, Zoninus,

"you'll get a solidus, a gold coin."

It's probably not a dog collar.

It's probably the collar of a Roman slave.

Admittedly it's quite small,

but things like this have been found around the necks of human skeletons.

And actually the fact that we can't really be sure

whether it's a slave collar or a dog collar

tells us quite a lot about Roman slavery

and the inhumanity that it evoked.

There is a horribly touching story about the Emperor Hadrian,

who got cross with one of his slaves,

so cross that he gouged his eye out with a stylus pen.

Hadrian instantly felt apologetic,

humbled by what he has done and he said to the slave,

"Have any present from me, I'm so sorry, have anything you want."

The slave remained quite dumb.

Hadrian pressed him and said, "I'll give you anything."

The slave said, "I just want my eye back."

So it's not hard to see why Roman slaves might have wanted

to escape and why Roman masters might have wanted

to tag their slaves as their property.

Either this way, or with branding or tattoos.

My hunch, though, is that fewer actually escaped

or even tried to escape than we like to think.

My guess is that most slaves showed their resentment

against their masters by much more kind of domestic sort of warfare.

They'd have pilfered things, broken precious ornaments,

they'd have pocketed the loose change,

and I expect they'd have spat in the master's soup.

Today, slavery is one of the nasty cliches of Roman culture.

It's a word loaded, understandably,

with all kinds of modern preconceptions,

but the fact is, it was deeply embedded in Roman culture.

In a population of a million, one-third might have been slaves.

And they weren't just for the rich. Poorer households had them too.

Even some slaves had slaves.

Of course Roman slavery was brutal,

but relations between masters and slaves weren't anything like

as black and white as we tend to imagine.

Sure, there must have been fear, suspicion,

hatred, on both sides actually.

There are some marvellous Roman urban myths about crafty slaves

running rings around their poor long-suffering masters.

But at the same time, there was plenty of respect,

affection, even love.

One of the best places to see evidence

of these conflicting emotions at the heart of this relationship

is actually in one of Pompeii's grandest houses.

In a suite of rooms off the back garden is a private bath house

with some pretty graphic mosaics.

They hint rather heavily,

at one part of every slave's job description we tend to forget - sex.

-So this is the entrance-way to the hot room, the sauna room.

-Yes.

So what you've got here are some strigils,

bronze things that you use for scraping the oil off.

It's really rather gynaecological in the end.

The thing is, we can't really read that

without looking at this guy here.

This strange sort of naked black figure.

He's got little white panties on.

A white loincloth, which is completely failing to do its job.

The one thing it's not covering is his genitals,

which are enormous, hanging down.

The bronze tip matches those lamps or flasks,

or whatever he's carrying in his hands.

And they themselves look phallic.

So we're being given a very strong sexual theme as we enter.

-So this is the dinky little sauna.

-You can hear it echoes around us.

-It's lovely.

-It's an amazing space.

-And this mosaic, which is...

well, it kind of says "sex in the swimming pool" to me.

It appears to be another slave, doesn't it?

What comes out of this is something about the sexuality of bathing,

but also about the use of slaves.

Their total availability,

their bodily availability to their masters for sex.

No-one living in a big house says, "I'll go down to the local brothel."

They use a slave as they want, when they want,

and that's the basic deal of slavery.

Isn't it interesting that it's not just the master of the house

exploiting female slaves and male slaves,

it's also the female owners and dominant figures in the house

exploit male and possibly female slaves.

That's the really nasty bit of Roman slavery.

To be pressurised into having sex with the master or mistress,

it's an assault on your freedom, but that's the point,

you've lost your freedom, the freedom to control your body.

But you mustn't think that because sex happens

between master and slave,

it's necessarily a bad thing for the slaves all the time.

What about the fact that we constantly find

slaves marrying their masters?

Sex is a way of earning money, but it's also a route to freedom.

And that's the great paradox about Roman slavery.

We might think it was brutal, at times even amounting to rape,

but it was not always a life sentence.

And if you look at the tombstones, what's striking is that the majority

of those that survive from the city of Rome belong to ex-slaves.

They were freed in their thousands.

Here's a lady with a really great name.

She is and ex-slave, she tells us, a "liberta".

And her name is Vettia Erotice.

I like that name.

Here's a nicely complicated one.

It's a tombstone put up by an ex-slave, a "libertus",

to his own slave, and was "very dear to him", "carissimo".

This is a woman with an interesting job.

She's called Dorcas and she's the ex-slave of Julia Augusta,

that's the Empress Livia.

What was her job? She was an "ornatrix".

She was the Empress's hairdresser.

Nice work if you can get it.

This one's a nice picture. It's from a tombstone,

it shows a husband and wife, I guess, having a banquet.

But it's the little chap on the left but I'm interested in.

He's serving at table and he must be a young slave boy.

There were thousands and thousands like him at Rome.

I don't know exactly where they all came from, but,

almost certainly not all of them from the slave market,

as we like to think.

Probably the majority of them

would actually have been born in the household.

And like this little guy, they'd have got

pretty up close and personal with their owners,

wait at table, wet nurses,

tutors, nannies.

And it starts to give us a different slant on Roman slavery,

and it helps to explain

why you could get quite strong bonds of affection

between owners and their slaves.

Actually, the Roman word for family, "familia",

doesn't just include husband, wife and a couple of kids,

it also includes the slaves.

So, in Rome, slaves really were part of the family.

And that's what I find

so disappointing about the standard image of the Roman family.

The slaves are not always segregated,

they WERE the familia, as much as the master and mistress.

In fact, the best way to see

just how open it could be is to visit a Roman family tomb.

I've come to see some in ancient Ostia, with Corey Brennan

from the American Academy in Rome.

This feels like the kind of back alley in the city of the dead.

That's precisely what it is.

And here is a home in the city of the dead, so to speak,

and it's something that Marcus Saenius Aristo set up

for himself and for his ex-slaves,

the "libertis", the male ex-slaves,

and the "libertabus", the female ex-slaves.

It's interesting too that in the last line here,

he makes clear how much land he owns for this tomb, doesn't he?

It's not just marking off the legal perimeter of his space here,

but it's a way of boasting how much real estate he has here

in the city of the dead.

What's important then

is that masters and slaves chose to live together in death,

not just in life.

In a way, these tombs are like mirrors of their own homes,

with separate rooms, upper storeys,

and spaces for urns that outnumber the nuclear family.

What strikes you when you come in, is the kind of communality,

the sheer number of burials that must have been here.

Well, there's about two dozen of these niches,

and each niche is a double

and so you're talking 48 people or so.

It's interesting to see how they are all mixed in here.

You don't walk in here and say, "There's the masters niche."

In fact, it's hard to tell where it would have been.

And it's so completely different from what we're familiar with in,

say, Victorian England, where the idea that Mr and Mrs Posh

and their Posh kids would be buried in the same tomb

as the cook or the tweeny or the butler, is absolutely unthinkable.

This is meant to be an ideal, this is the image which these folks,

these aspirational folks, wanted to convey,

which was that of inclusivity, of the large family.

Harshness was not in anyone's interests.

It shows us a softer side of this horrible institution of slavery.

Yeah, it's great, you boast, "This is a tomb for me and my ex slaves."

But it wasn't always happy families,

as the unusual tombstone of a little girl called Junia Procula tells us.

Its storyline reads like a Roman soap opera.

The stone was put up by her father, a man called Euphrosinus.

When he was putting it up, for the little girl,

and eventually for himself and for somebody else,

whose name has been hacked out.

That's puzzling. Why has it been hacked out?

On the back of the stone, the puzzle's solved.

Because there's another text written there.

And what we can see has happened is that Euphrosinus

had had a slave called Acti.

He'd freed her, he'd married her, they'd had the kid, the kid had died

and then things had gone very badly off the rails.

He's cursing her on the back.

"These are the eternal marks of infamy," he says.

"On that ex-slave of mine who was a poisoner, who was 'perfida',

"who was faithless, who was 'dolosa', who was deceitful,"

and then he really curses her, he says,

"I'm bringing a nail and a piece of rope

"so that she can hang herself, and I'm bringing 'picem candentem'

"burning pitch, to consume her awful heart."

What on earth had happened? Well, he then explains.

"She had gone off with an adulteress, 'secuta adultorum'",

and what is more, she'd pinched two of his slaves, a boy and a girl.

She left behind poor old Euphrosinus

"lying in bed, robbed, all alone, an old man."

Now, we've got to remember that we don't know Acti's side of the story,

and that might have been very different, but what is clear is that

one man's domestic fluidity could be another man's domestic mess.

In a way, that's the Roman home in a nutshell.

For sure, it was a place inhabited by the traditional Roman cliches,

the pompous husbands in their togas,

the dutiful wives weaving their wool.

But it was also far more intriguing.

Especially if we put back all the clutter and the cradles

and the topsy-turvy relationships.

And above all, the extraordinary voices of the Romans themselves

that still talk to us after 2,000 years.

"I lived on Lucrine oysters."

"..snatched away from him."

"She had gone off with an adulteress."

"Secuta adultorum."

Menopholos.

Menopholos.

"And I don't any longer have those old, flaking feet."

This is a monument of the baker, get it?

"She much preferred to be a bit wild."

"..a Roman menage-a-trois."

And what they tell us is that ordinary life in ancient Rome

was as wonderfully mixed up, as messy and as emotional as our own.

It's almost as if they are holding up a mirror to us and our own lives

and they're speaking to anyone with the time to stop and listen to them.

It turns out, that's you and me.

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