Pomp and Perversion Treasures of Ancient Rome

I'm continuing my quest to change the way we view ancient Rome.

The collapse of the republic shortly before the birth of Christ

unleashed a new era of imperial magnificence.

Rome's empire was built on the might of its legions

and genius of its engineers.

We all know that.

But there was something else equally important.

The power of art.

And you can't understand the history of Rome until you understand its monuments.

Like Trajan's Column.

Emperors like Trajan were the masters of this new type

of strident, declamatory art.

They transformed their public monuments into big, brash billboards,

boasting of their conquests.

But there was another side to Roman art,

the private world of the emperors

who collected art overflowing with mythological fantasy,

unimaginable cruelty and red-hot eroticism.

For all of those mad, bad and dangerous emperors of the first century AD,

people like Caligula and Nero, art of the highest quality

offered a backcloth for their hedonistic debauchery.

To the modern eye, much of what we'll see is shocking and

depraved, and it tells us much about the emperors and their many vices.

By dropping in on the emperors at home in their lost

pleasure palaces, we'll see how art dominated their lives.

"History" always gives the wrong sense of the word - something in the past that's done and dusted.

But it's not - it's a beautiful unfolding story that's continuing.

This was an era of exuberance and of great artistic triumphs.

And one man presided over a cultural golden age that crystallised

the look of the Roman empire at its zenith for ever more.

The emperor Hadrian.

The first emperor, Augustus,

had brought peace and prosperity to Rome after years of civil war.

He also killed off the republic and replaced it with a new

political and artistic vision for an imperial future.

The big question was what would happen after his death.

It's something Augustus had planned for.

This is the Maison Carree,

it's one of the best-preserved Roman temples anywhere in the world.

And it was dedicated to Augustus's grandsons,

Gaius and Lucius Caesar, who'd been anointed as his heirs,

but they died early, long before he did.

And you can see it's a stunning building in its own right.

But, despite its splendour, it isn't anywhere near Rome.

In fact, this was built in Nimes, in the south of France.

Just imagine the kind of message that buildings like this must

have sent out to the people who lived in Roman colonies.

The Maison Carree is a gleaming marble-clad vision of the future.

All sorts of details of it proclaim a new era of peace

and prosperity, like these abundantly carved Corinthian capitals

you can see at the tops of the columns.

And their lush acanthus foliage you can see scrolling right round the temples,

sumptuous and very crisp, frieze.

The temple was also the beginning of something new,

because above the entrance, you had the names of members

of Augustus's family, emblazoned in big bronze letters, and today

you can still see the holes where those letters were attached.

So the Maison Carree was the beginning of what would

become essentially a cult that spread right across the empire

with astonishing speed -

honouring and celebrating the emperor and his dynasty.

After the death of Augustus in AD 14, temples like this

were decorated with statues of emperors as gods.

Augustus himself was deified by the senate

and depicted as the most important god of them all, Jupiter.

It was the start of an imperial cult

which played an important role in uniting the empire

that sprawled all the way across three continents, from Gaul

in the north, to Asia Minor in the east, and Egypt in the south.

Augustus had created the Julio-Claudian dynasty.

Everything now depended on his successors,

starting with his adopted son, Tiberius, Rome's second emperor.

When we think of Roman art, most of us think of galleries of busts and sculptures.

But in the late republic, in the early empire,

there was another art form which was very exquisite and prized,

actually more highly by the Romans themselves,

which was the carving of gemstones, semiprecious stones.

And there's a piece here in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris,

which is the biggest gem to have survived from antiquity,

and this is it.

It's known as the great cameo of France.

And as you can see, it is ginormous.

It's made of an Indian stone called sardonyx.

This is a layered semiprecious stone.

And this is a cameo, which means it's been carved in relief,

so the artist who's created it

has taken advantage of the different colours of the layers of the stone

to achieve the effect of the brightness of the figures in the foreground,

versus the darkness of the background.

And there's a great deal of subtlety in-between as well.

And this piece shows in the centre

the emperor Tiberius enthroned as Jupiter.

Above him you can see his ancestors, there's Augustus,

veiled with a crown, being taken up towards the gods.

And beneath him you see a bunch of barbarians huddled together,

so there's a very clear demarcation between the enemy beneath,

the Roman court in the middle,

and their proximity to the world of the gods up above.

We know quite a lot about Tiberius

and the other 11 of the first 12 Caesars from this.

This is Suetonius. My granny first recommended this book to me,

she loves it, and I always find that quite amusing

because when you read it, it's so compelling

because it feels like a red-top expose of these different Caesars.

It's, to be honest, completely scabrous,

scandal-filled, salacious filth.

And we hear a little more about the kind of man that Tiberius was.

He was quite cruel, he was very cruel.

He was quite superior and proud, saturnine.

He wasn't the most affable person.

He had a load of pimples.

Next to Tiberius, as well, you can see his mother Livia.

Supposedly he quarrelled openly with Livia.

And, in fact, their quarrels were so intense and

he was so upset by her overbearing presence in the politics of Rome,

that eventually he left the city altogether

and retired to a pleasure palace.

So this vision of domestic harmony and bliss

is really a far cry from the truth.

During the early years of the empire

cameo carving enjoyed a boom

and cameos were among Rome's most prized artistic treasures.

The artists were bigger names than sculptors and painters.

Ciro Accanito is a modern-day cameo carver.

There was another side to Tiberius's taste in art,

which we can revel in at a very special private place

where he came to get away from his domineering mother.

Anyone who assumes that Roman art is the stuff of

monochromatic marbles in boring old stuffy museums

needs to come here to this spectacular place, Sperlonga,

which is 60 miles south of Rome, on the coast.

And it was once the setting for this luxurious seaside villa,

where Tiberius used to come, and retreat from public life.

And back in the '50s there was an amazing archaeological discovery

in a grotto just over there, which yields so much insight into how art

was actually viewed by the Romans themselves. Rather than seeing

the pieces in museums, this place is all about the context of the art.

The centrepiece of Tiberius's villa here at Sperlonga

was this craggy grotto where Tiberius hosted what must have been

these breathtaking dinner parties, banquets.

Imagine how spectacular they must have been with the sea crashing outside,

and in here, a bunch of cosmopolitan guests, stuffing their faces.

And it's a famous location, this,

because Tiberius was almost killed here in this cave,

when there was a rock fall.

In fact, the story gets another outing in good old Suetonius,

who talks about Tiberius's dinner party here at the cavern -

"spelunca" in Latin -

when some huge rocks fell from the roof,

killed several guests in attendance close to him

and he miraculously survived.

And I imagine that many of those guests would have been a bit

disappointed that he did survive because, by all accounts,

Tiberius was a very dour, cruel-hearted, cold-blooded emperor.

Supposedly one of Tiberius's ways to get off

was that he trained little boys, whom he called his minnows - brilliant detail -

to chase him while he went swimming

and get between his legs to lick and nibble him.

Each to his own, I guess! But the important point for us,

aside from all of the colour in Suetonius,

is that this cavern was an art gallery as well as a social space,

and it shows how art was used socially.

Back in the '50s

they salvaged around 7,000 scraps of marble statuary

whilst they were excavating Tiberius's cavern.

And the most important have been meticulously reassembled

here in the museum at the site, alongside these colossal

recreations of the sculptural centrepieces of the grotto.

And this is a piece known as the Blinding Of Polyphemus.

It presents a scene from The Odyssey, in which Odysseus and his followers

have become trapped in the cave of the Cyclops Polyphemus,

who's started eating some of the followers.

He had a couple for dinner one night,

next morning he ate a couple more for breakfast.

Understandably, Odysseus wants to leave.

So he hatches a cunning plan, which is to get the Cyclops drunk,

so you can see one of Odysseus' followers is carrying a leather wine skin.

Polyphemus himself has been drinking a load of wine in his wine bowl,

and it's just slipped from his fingers and he falls back in a drunken stupor on this rock,

with his single Cyclops eye closed, ready to be blinded

as Odysseus, with great drama, frenzy on his face,

commands his followers to pick up a burning stake

and shove it right into Polyphemus's eye.

What a wonderfully ironic piece to have

for the middle of a banquet setting in a cavern.

You can't help but speculate

that some of the guests who were in the cavern in real life

would have looked at this group and thought,

"I'd really like to stick a stake of my own, right into Tiberius's eyes."

One person who wouldn't have been welcome at one of his raunchy cave parties was his mother Livia.

She had a villa of her own at Prima Porta near Rome.

Her taste was somewhat more refined than her son's.

I really feel that this is one of the gentlest

and most beautiful works of art to have survived from the Roman world.

And it's extraordinary to think it was painted 2,000 years ago

for a windowless room, a triclinium or dining room in the house of Livia

which would have been used as a refuge from the summer heat.

And what you see is this magical, transporting woodland fantasy.

Oaks and laurels and pomegranates and quinces and cypresses, date palms.

There are poppies, there are cabbage roses.

And replete with all of these exotic songbirds

which are luminescent in the foliage.

And the whole thing's been suffused with this beautiful greeny-blue,

murky, magical early-morning mist so that the trees in the foreground

are so sharp you could practically lean over these fences

and pluck the fruit off the bough and take a bite.

But in the distance, it's much more shadowy and indistinct,

which creates that sense of depth and a feeling of wellbeing, really.

It makes you feel very happy and calm.

I want to dive into this strange, magical fantasy land

on the other side of the fence.

Most of the paintings that survive from antiquity are frescoes.

That's because they're literally part of the walls.

The fresco is a technique

in which you paint on the wall

so for this we need to apply plaster made with sand and lime.

And on the top of this layer we paint with the pigments

mixed with water only.

The pigment soaks into the pores of the plaster and hardens.

Pigment mixed with wax is used to paint the fine details.

I think the Romans were very natural painting.

In the houses, to decorate on the walls is fantastic.

Tiberius outlived his mother but by the time of his death,

he'd withdrawn entirely into his own private world, with his minnows.

He was succeeded in AD 37 by his great-nephew

Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus,

better known as Caligula.

Probably the most scandalous Roman emperor of all.

I've come to Lake Nemi just outside Rome,

to investigate a story of depravity,

modern-day tomb raiders, and a lost masterpiece.

Caligula got his nickname because when he was growing up

he spent a great deal of time with the Roman army.

And he used to have this miniaturised soldier's uniform.

The soldiers had standard-issue boots

and the Latin word for boots is "caligae",

and the diminutive is "caligula",

so it was quite an affectionate, sweet name, really,

quite endearing imagining this little boy in his soldier's outfit,

trying to be one of the big boys.

Of course it doesn't bear witness remotely

to the extent of his cruelty and debauchery.

And we get a very good sense of that from Suetonius.

You know, we think that Berlusconi had these debauched bunga bunga parties,

I tell you, he didn't have anything on these 1st century AD emperors.

I mean, the section on Caligula goes on and on.

Well, for one thing, when he was having dinner,

he enjoyed breaking it up by having sex with his sisters,

he was really into incest.

All three of his sisters had to sleep with him at regular intervals.

There was probably something actually wrong with him mentally.

He really enjoyed watching people being executed in a very slow fashion.

Apparently his familiar order, "Make him feel that he is dying," soon became proverbial.

There's been a recent and exciting new twist in the story of Caligula.

Tomb raiders struck gold, or rather marble, near the lake shore.

Broken fragments of a rare statue of Caligula.

The police arrested the thieves as they tried to smuggle the statue

to Switzerland, en route for Japan.

Their discovery confirms that Caligula did, in fact, have

a palatial villa on Lake Nemi.

The statue's now safely installed in the museum,

next to replicas of two of Caligula's ships.

The originals were salvaged from the lake in 1932,

on the orders of Mussolini,

only to be destroyed in a fire 12 years later.

Say this had been sold on the black market,

how much would it have fetched?

We don't know for sure, that kind of sculpture have a lot of appeal

so it's a thousand, over a million maybe.

A million euros?

-Yes.

-But it's so weathered and it's so fragmentary.

The antique market is like this, you know.

How excited did you feel? I mean, this must be quite a rare discovery.

SHE SPEAKS ITALIAN

To me there's a contradiction that someone as debased as Caligula

could represent himself as a god.

It's a paradox that runs right through Roman art and society.

On the one hand Rome is the last word in ancient civilisation,

but at the same time it had a shocking blood lust

and taste for cruelty that's played out in the artistic arena.

This is one of my favourite works that survived from antiquity.

It's the sculpture of what's called the Hanging Marsyas,

and Marsyas was a character from ancient myth.

He was a satyr who played the pan pipes,

and he challenged the god Apollo, who played a lyre,

to a musical contest,

and obviously that was a contest he was doomed to lose.

And as a result Apollo condemned him

to be executed for the temerity of challenging him

to this contest in the first place, by being flayed alive.

So here he is, his feet tied together,

possibly his shoulders have already been dislocated,

he's strung up, and we know about the Hanging Marsyas because

about 60 copies of the sculpture from the Roman world have survived.

This one is particularly grizzly,

because the marble that was used to carve it

is known as pavonazzetto, it's a red streaked marble,

you can see there's a violet crimson-ish tinge to the stone

which in a way prefigures the punishments about to be enacted.

All of the blood and guts and sinews and veins that would have been seen

after the executioner started flaying Marsyas alive

is there already in that red sheen to the stone. It's very gruesome.

This particular one was discovered in a garden in Rome,

gardens belonging to a very wealthy man called Maecenas

who was the patron of the poet Virgil.

And, in a sense, the Hanging Marsyas gets right to the heart

of Roman art, because it illustrates the whole conundrum about it.

How could such a gruesome scene of punishment

produce pleasure for the Romans,

so that they would have things like this hanging up in their gardens?

Another stunning example of the Romans' love of violence

is the Farnese Bull, which was found in the Baths of Caracalla in Rome.

Astonishingly carved out of a single piece of marble,

it shows the punishment of Dirce, a character from Greek mythology

as she's tied to the horns of a bull, then gored to death.

Just what you want from a piece of public art.

Cruelty was one side of the coin,

on the other was no-holds-barred debauchery.

This can be seen in one of the most controversial works

to have survived from ancient Rome.

So if ever you doubted that the past can be a foreign country,

then the Warren Cup provides the proof.

It's a silver wine goblet,

and it's very distinctive because it's decorated with these two scenes,

really quite raunchy scenes celebrating gay sex.

I guess the thing that's proved controversial to modern people

is just that the two scenes are quite eye-wateringly explicit.

So on one side on this side you've got a young man,

who's holding a strap,

and he's lowering himself onto an older bearded man.

You can see a small boy, slave, a peeping Tom, who's just

poking his head round the door to watch the action.

On this side you've got two younger men,

and one of them's entering the other from behind,

and again you can just make out his silver testicles, which

have been very lovingly picked out by whoever's made this work of art.

It's a really beautiful, very high-status object,

but that's not really why this cup's so interesting.

It's interesting to imagine how this was used socially.

What was the context for something like this?

Would it have raised eyebrows in the ancient Roman world?

We don't know, but presumably not.

Something like this must have been an erotic centrepiece

for the sorts of lavish parties and banquets that

would have been held by Tiberius at Sperlonga or Caligula at Lake Nemi.

You can readily imagine that downing a load of wine from this goblet

would really help get you in the mood

for whatever Tiberius was expecting.

After Caligula had been murdered by his own soldiers,

he was succeeded by Claudius, and now I'm on his trail.

I'd like to introduce you to my new best buddy.

Sergio here has brought me to Baia,

which is just north of the Bay of Naples,

because back in the '60s there was an extraordinary discovery when a big storm churned up the sea bed,

and people looking down through the surface of the sea

suddenly glimpsed some, what looked like, classical statues.

And it began this huge period of marine archaeology,

and they excavated here something called a Nymphaeum,

which was a sort of fantasy grotto, if you like,

part of a big pleasure villa complex

that belonged to one of the emperors from the 1st century AD, Claudius.

You can, in fact, see just above the cliff there the remains of his villa.

And I thought, before we actually go diving to explore his Nymphaeum,

there's just time to have a look at Suetonius's

Twelve Caesars, because somewhere around here we learn about his...

the way he looked, the way he behaved.

He was apparently quite tall, he was well built and handsome,

but he had various strange tics, he had this uncontrolled laugh,

and this horrible habit that stuck in my imagination,

under the stress of anger, he used to slobber at the mouth and run at the nose.

He had a stammer and a persistent nervous tic that grew so bad

under emotional stress that his head would toss from side to side.

It's not really what you expect of someone who leads the Roman empire.

He also had quite lavish tastes,

they all did really in the 1st century AD, all the emperors.

He gave many splendid banquets, usually in large venues,

and at times invited no fewer than 600 guests.

And it's tempting to imagine that 2,000 years ago, here,

beneath the waves, Claudius would have hosted some extraordinary parties,

big banquets, lavish, opulent affairs

with hundreds of guests visiting his Nymphaeum.

OK!

It's hard to believe

but we're actually swimming through the lost world of a Roman emperor.

You can imagine carts trundling along the cobbled Roman road.

My favourite moment comes as we're swimming along

and Sergio starts pushing away sand and stones from the sea bed.

Underneath is this beautiful red-stained marble flooring

that looks like a piece of delicious Italian bresaola.

It's the closest I'll ever come to uncovering real treasure.

It starts getting eerie as figures appear suddenly out of the blue.

This one is Dionysus, the god of wine.

The statue's a copy, the original's now in a museum.

Next, we meet what's left of Odysseus,

and one of his friends,

carrying a wine skin ready to get Polyphemus drunk.

So this time, perhaps wisely,

Polyphemus hasn't stuck around to get another stake in his eye.

There are also members of Claudius's family. I get to say a quick hello

to his mum Antonia Minor before coming up for air.

That was very, very magical.

That was cool, there was... Oh, God, I've come a bit like Claudius.

I've got a runny nose, I'm slobbering, but that was beautiful.

Really beautiful.

Claudius supposedly died after eating poisonous mushrooms,

as Roman emperors do.

He was succeeded by his great-nephew,

the last of our mad, bad and dangerous emperors, Nero.

While the other emperors cultivated the arts,

Nero actually took to the stage and performed.

His passion for theatre can be seen in this villa,

reputedly owned by his wife Poppaea.

During Nero's rule, the arts became infused with all sorts of theatrical

flourishes that blurred the borders between reality and illusion.

How rare... I mean, what sort of a find is this?

This is really an extraordinary find.

These second style paintings are the largest and most complete

that have ever been found or associated with an atrium.

And in fact, the whole ensemble of painted works of art here

is really unsurpassed.

Vitruvius tells us that one of the subjects that the wall paintings took were stage facades.

So there was probably a kind of cross-fertilisation

between theatrical painting and domestic painting.

The theatre was hugely important

and was made particularly important in the last days

of this villa because Nero himself was a patron of the theatre.

He acted, he performed for the first time, we're told by the Roman historians, in Naples,

so in a sense it all became super respectable then.

What could be better than having the Emperor himself saying, yes, theatre is great and good?

Didn't he lock the doors so people couldn't escape when he was performing?

The ultimate captive audience!

One of the Roman historians says that his performances were so long

and tedious that people used to fake dying to be carried out,

to be relieved of this tedious performance.

I wonder whether that's why you've got the closed doors.

Along the whole eastern side of the villa

is this enormous great swimming pool.

And not just for the swimming,

but along that side of the villa,

they built a number of reception rooms, pleasure rooms,

rooms for dining, rooms for relaxation,

rooms for, you know, enjoying the ambiance.

But then, as you turn, you see again and again and again

this series of apertures, each one with a garden,

which had real flowers, real plants, real fountains on it.

And then along the walls of those rooms,

you had painted flowers and gardens.

So in the middle of this there would have been a garden?

There would have been plants and probably some kind of a fountain.

-The artists have replicated it.

-You're looking at the real thing

but you're actually looking at the unreal thing,

and because this is enclosed space, you can't actually get into it.

Your mind's eye is being drawn into both the real world

and the illusionistic, imaginary world at the same time.

I love some of the details. There's a tiny bird there.

But think how more evocative it would be

when there were real birds flittering around here.

On a summer's day, while you were lounging by the pool.

Do you think this is a kind of Roman sensibility,

this double-edged thing between nature and artifice somehow,

-that they liked being on the cusp?

-They revelled in it.

They wrote about the delight in basically art imitating nature...

-There IS a bird!

-There's a bird indeed!

-Sorry.

Bird has returned to its lair!

No, artifice and... Art and artifice and life and nature

constantly suffusing, intermingling.

Which is what we see here.

The garden, and then garden all around.

Real garden, painted garden. Yeah.

Wonderful!

Nero's suicide in AD 68

signalled the end of a dynasty.

And for Rome, things could only get better.

To understand how it changed,

we need to look at a very different kind of art.

The art of pomp and power.

The great historian of ancient Rome, Edward Gibbon,

once described the second century as

"The period in the history of the world

"during which the condition of the human race

"was most happy and prosperous".

It was the golden age of the Roman empire.

The era of the good emperors.

People like Trajan and Hadrian and Antoninus Pius.

And also this man.

Marcus Aurelius,

Rome's 16th emperor,

who ruled from 161-180 AD.

And this colossal gilt-bronze portrait

of him mounted on horseback

is one of the great glories of Roman art.

It doesn't take much, though,

to be awestruck by the thunderous authority

of this monster-sized masterpiece,

because Marcus Aurelius is SO enormous.

He's a superhuman.

He's far bigger in relation to his steed than any ordinary man.

And he feels like a commander of a race of giants,

descended onto Earth, who can easily command our pygmy-like human realm.

I feel quite cowed looking up at him.

And immediately, this is an expression.

This is the creation of a supremely self-confident society.

You can feel that.

The thing about Roman art of the high empire

is it's the sort of stuff that can only be produced

by a totalitarian regime,

colossal works pushed through by the will of one man.

And one innovation epitomises this.

The Triumphal Arch is one of Rome's greatest legacies to art.

Arches, they're such a prominent feature of modern cities.

Think of Marble Arch in London, Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

But they wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the ancient Romans,

who decorated their monuments with historical reliefs,

turning them into these enormous marble billboards,

if you like, of imperial propaganda.

And this one is one of the greatest of all.

It's the Arch of Titus at the entrance of the Roman Forum.

It celebrates the crushing of the Jewish revolt

by the emperor Vespasian and his son Titus in AD 70.

On the inside of the arch there are two stunning reliefs

featuring Roman soldiers carrying the spoils of war

from the temple in Jerusalem,

including the sacred menorah or candelabrum.

The carvings are worn, but still dynamic.

This one, typically triumphalist,

shows Titus accompanied by the goddesses Victoria and Roma.

Monumental arches sprung up all over the empire

and became the artistic symbol of imperial Rome.

It may not look like much, but on the other side of this door,

there's going to be an extraordinary Roman masterpiece

and we're going to get a very special view. So...

Buongiorno. Alastair.

Grazie! Well rehearsed!

OK, so we're going into a church.

What we're about to see is one man's bid for immortality.

Getting a bit out of breath!

Yeah, maybe this one.

HE TURNS KEY

Eccoci qui.

Ci troviamo sul terrazzo della cupola.

Prego...

I think that means "the terrace of the dome."

Somewhere around...well, up there. So which way?

-Oh, yes. Thank you.

-Thank YOU!

This is going to be... This really is going to be a good view, I think.

Oh, my God! Look! Check this out!

This really is genuinely an exciting moment!

Trajan's column was dedicated in AD 113,

and it commemorates two successful campaigns

that the emperor Trajan waged against the Dacians,

a barbarian tribe from modern-day Romania.

This is a magnificent view!

On the column itself there are 2,639 figures.

Trajan himself appears 59 times.

The other thing to remember about this column

is that nothing like it had ever appeared before

in the history of art.

So this is bona fide Roman, right to the bone.

I mean, this piece, Trajan's Column,

that's how you do monumental sculpture.

Trajan's Column was made by a team of sculptors

from 29 different blocks of marble,

each weighing up to 77 tonnes.

Whoever designed it was a real genius in the art of storytelling.

There are 155 scenes,

that spiral up for 200 metres.

It's only when you see the scenes in close-up

that you really appreciate the full effect.

And the place to do that is the Museum of Roman Civilisation,

which has a cast of the whole shebang.

So, Vito, this gallery really gives us a sense

of just how monumental the column was, because you can see

it stretches down, I guess, for 100 metres that way,

and 100 metres back, and there's the frieze on either side.

-It's amazing, yeah.

-So this is the base of the column,

and they've done it in sections that it takes us up,

but it's quite a good opportunity to talk about the way

that the narrative has been structured.

Well, it's a big narration.

It's an epic narration, 200 metres long.

And it's sort of a long movie about History with a capital H.

And it seems that, at the beginning,

the Trajan Column was in colour.

So it was in colour

and 3-D, we could say today.

As a matter of fact, we can notice

that it there are some holes in many hands,

like this, for example.

Here, the soldier was supposed to hold weapons,

stuff like that,

so it's contributed to give that three-dimensional effect.

In here, we can see by the way

this is beautiful in terms of art.

Pure art.

Look at the composition of this, round circles.

What's happening here?

Here the Romans are defending themselves.

They're throwing stones against the Dacians,

and the whole story is seen from the point of view of Decebalus.

He's the chief of the Dacians?

He's the chief of the Dacians.

"They're crazy," this Roman says. Very angry here.

And he looks to the long shot,

where many dramatic things are happening.

That feels like a cartoon! He's going, "Oh, you pesky Romans!"

Yeah, exactly!

Sometimes it is a little ironical.

Sometimes, it's like a horror movie.

And later, you will see that Decebalus fights,

and finally, he kills himself.

You know, not to be a prisoner. You know, he kills himself.

You're giving away the ending of the film!

Oh, sorry! But it's not a detective story!

The Roman soldiers try to catch him but he doesn't want to be caught,

and he kills himself with a knife.

So this is the big climax. The money shot.

Yeah, but after the big climax, the real ending of the movie, quote-unquote,

will be the Dacian people slowly abandoning their land.

And then it fades to black. The end.

After that, you see the sky and the moon.

Of course. That's the technical, cinematical term.

-It's a dissolve we're seeing there.

-Yeah, exactly!

So far, we've seen two sides of Roman imperial art,

one private and perverted,

the other public and propagandist.

One emperor had a vision of how to bring these two together

and create a coherent imperial vision,

that would inspire loyalty as well as awe.

When Hadrian became emperor in AD 117, he inherited

one of the mightiest empires that the world had ever seen,

stretching all the way

from the Scottish lowlands to the Sahara Desert,

from the Atlantic Ocean to the River Euphrates.

By the time that he died, 21 years later,

and you can see his majestic mausoleum behind me,

he'd presided over an artistic renaissance

that would shape our image of the Roman world for ever.

Hadrian has a reputation as peace-loving emperor

who set the empire's borders in stone,

with Hadrian's Wall in the north of Britain,

and the "limes" in North Africa.

In portraits he wears a beard,

supposedly to portray himself as a Greek-loving intellectual.

But he was more complex than that.

In other works, he's shown hunting,

or as a military strongman, crushing the enemy underfoot.

During his rule, he undertook two grand tours

and visited almost all his provinces in an attempt to promote stability.

It enabled him to create an inclusive

and pan-imperial artistic style,

influenced by the most distant corners of his empire.

And of all the monuments from this Hadrianic golden age,

none bears his imprint more than this vast temple to all the gods.

The most miraculous achievement

of Hadrian's architectural renaissance

was the famous Pantheon in Rome.

At first sight, you see this temple facade,

and it seems relatively conventional, if monumental.

There are one or two quite spectacular details, though,

not least these enormous eight grey granite shaft columns here,

supporting the facade.

And all of them are monolithic,

which means they weren't constructed

out of several different drums put on top of one another.

They are one piece of rock.

And they didn't even come from Italy.

They were hewn out of a quarry in the eastern desert of Egypt.

So here you have the emperor

almost supernaturally snapping his fingers,

and he can command the natural world

and things are brought to Rome, suggesting Rome's mastery.

But that sense of majesty that's in the porch

is just a mere appetiser, compared to what happens

through the bronze doors in the main centre of the space.

I have visited the Pantheon once before,

but I imagine that it doesn't matter how many times you come,

nothing can lessen the extraordinary impact of entering this space

which has this almost stupefying splendour.

You can see that every element bespeaks the majesty,

the imperial might of ancient Rome.

The surfaces are covered with all sorts of coloured marbles,

other stones, including porphyry, serpentine,

that come from many different places in the empire.

Egypt, Tunisia, Thessaly...

But the real tour de force,

the centrepiece of the rotunda, is up above.

This enormous, coffered, cast-concrete dome.

Look, there's no doubt, of course, that this is an engineering marvel.

This is a feat of Roman architecture and building.

But it's more than that.

If feels like a big, bejewelled bauble.

This is a kind of electrifying arena

where imperial spectacle would have been played out.

And it has this spiritual power,

a sense of a kind of proximity to some sort of divinity,

up through there, through the infinity of the oculus,

that makes it, for me, a work of art.

This is one enormous work of art.

It truly is one of the most spectacular treasures

of ancient Rome.

Previous emperors had kept their passions private,

but Hadrian realised that he could exploit his to win over his people.

In doing so he created one of the most intimate icons of art history.

This melancholic youth is someone very, very special indeed.

He's the last pagan god of antiquity

who once gave Jesus Christ a run for his money.

And more portraits of this fellow have survived

than of any other figure from the Roman world,

bar Hadrian and Augustus, both emperors.

Around 100 marble images and counting, in fact.

In the Roman era, he enjoyed almost unparalleled posthumous celebrity,

and his cult offered very vigorous competition to Christianity

in the early years of the religion.

And yet today, most people haven't heard of him.

His name is Antinous, and his story,

involving a grand affair of the heart on the part of an emperor,

and also an unsolved mystery surrounding his death in the Nile,

is totally spellbinding.

The love story between Hadrian and Antinous

has all the makings of a Shakespearean tragedy.

The emperor doted on the beautiful young man

from Bithynia, modern Turkey,

and was left brokenhearted

when he mysteriously drowned in the Nile.

He was only 19.

Hadrian built a new city close to where Antinous died

and named it Antinopolis.

A cult worshipping the beautiful but tragic young man

flourished there and spread around the empire.

I've come to the Louvre to meet Ernest Gill,

a priest in the modern-day cult of Antinous.

This is one of them.

Oh, this is one of my favourites.

Antinous Aristeos.

Aristeos is a totally forgotten god now,

but he introduced farming to mortal human beings,

and every farmer in ancient Rome knew exactly who this was.

He's holding a cluster of olives here

and he's holding a rake or something, and has a farm hat on.

Before we go any further,

I just wanted to see whether I should be calling you Ernest,

or Hernestus, because I've been told that that is your official title.

Yes, well, Hernestus is my priestly name.

You can call me Ernest.

-That's fine.

-Thank you.

-You are a priest of the cult of Antinous.

-Yes.

-With a straight face, seriously?

-Absolutely, absolutely.

He's always been,

not so much worshipped, but admired, by homosexuals throughout history.

-He's a gay icon.

-He's a gay icon.

All the gay aristocrats in the 18th century wanted statues of Antinous.

And a cardinal in Rome, Cardinal Albani,

had a huge villa full of Antinous statues and other things.

And he had a German friend of his who was an art collector,

Johann Joachim Winckelmann,

who went out and would scour everything

looking for Antinous statues, basically.

Winckelmann is known as the father of art history, so you're suggesting

that we have Antinous to thank

for the entire discipline of the history of art?

And it was rumoured that they were secretly priests of Antinous.

But throughout history it was sort of a coded way of saying,

HE WHISPERS "I'm one of these people,"

you know, without actually saying it.

"Oh, you have a lovely statue of Antinous." "Yes, indeed!"

And that sort of thing.

This really does remind me quite strongly of the pure Antinous,

which is over here. Let's have a look.

It's a bust of just Antinous, not as a farmer,

not as Dionysus or Osiris.

This is him, and the most interesting part is the hair.

You can always tell exactly what this is based upon.

Doctoral theses have been written about the curl.

This curl goes this way, this curl goes that way.

That's how experts know,

"Ah, yes, that's a statue of Antinous."

And, I mean, do you feel when you look at this

he must have been a very beautiful youth?

To me, he always looks a little bit sulky.

He looks sulky, and that's another one of the great mysteries.

Why is he looking downward,

and why is he looking somewhat melancholy?

Of course, homosexuals throughout the ages have said,

"Oh, yes, we understand. He was misunderstood."

Well, here he is as the Egyptian god Osiris.

Now, I know that he drowned in the Nile.

That's an Egyptian association.

But do you think there were any political implications

for Hadrian to show Antinous dressing up as an Egyptian god?

Oh, absolutely, because Hadrian, as emperor,

was also Pharaoh of Egypt.

There had been a terrible, terrible drought,

and the Egyptians had been begging for a miracle.

And after Antinous died, the Nile rose up in a bountiful flood.

That was called his first miracle, and Hadrian was saying,

"Yes, of course. Antinous has risen from the dead,

"just as Osiris rose."

So it was a canny way for Hadrian to ensure loyalty

-from his Egyptian subjects?

-Yeah.

And I imagine that for you,

this must be like confronting the holy of holies!

The Mondragone head that got Winckelmann so excited.

Absolutely! It got all of Europe excited.

It is, of course, Antinous in the form of Dionysus or Bacchus.

It's so big! I mean, it's just magnificent.

Is this your favourite one?

Mustn't tell the others, but it's one of my favourites, yes.

They're all magnificent.

Do you feel like you're tending a flame in a time of heathens?

Although, of course, he's a pagan god. But you know what I mean?

-No-one really knows about poor Antinous.

-Yeah.

But more and more people are knowing about him,

and I think that was Hadrian's goal,

to create the perfect society

based on Hellenistic principles of peace, learning, understanding.

And I think he's a very good god for the 21st century.

Hadrian had a flair for melding the private with the public,

and this vision culminated in a villa unlike any other.

It was at once a personal playground

and the political nerve centre of the Western world.

To call this place Hadrian's villa,

in a sense, is just a total misnomer.

It's a red herring.

Because what was actually constructed,

this sprawling complex here

in the foothills of the Tiburtine mountains

about 30-odd kilometres east of Rome,

was just colossal.

The site has barely been excavated yet,

but already, just from the known structures,

there are 900 rooms and corridors.

The grounds would have extended for about 120 hectares.

There would have been hundreds, possibly even thousands of staff,

who would have scurried around the site

using these underground hidden passageways and corridors

so that the visiting dignitaries from abroad and Rome's elite

who came here for informal gatherings,

would never have had to encounter them.

And just over this drawbridge

is one of the earliest structures on the site,

which is known as the maritime theatre.

And this may have been Hadrian's private quarters.

And so you can imagine him

following those extensive travels all around the empire,

returning here to relax and recuperate.

But in Hadrian's day,

this would have been sumptuously, lavishly decorated.

Every surface would have been covered

with the finest-quality mosaics and paintings and marble.

You can actually see where the marble was clad to the walls.

The holes would have taken the iron supports for the marble cladding.

The eye would have been dazzled and ravished by what was inside here.

There would have been phenomenal sculptures

and the very best art that could possibly be acquired.

And it was surrounded by this canal,

which doubled as a swimming pool,

and was linked to a private bathing suite for Hadrian.

So it's very easy to be impressed by the grandeur of the Pantheon.

Of course. But it's very formal, in a sense.

What you have here is something much more private, much more informal.

It's the material representation of Hadrian's character.

I like to think of this specific place

as the epicentre of the Roman empire.

This was the fortress of Hadrian's mind,

the resting place, if you like, of his artistic soul.

Hadrian's villa was full of art

inspired by masterpieces from around the empire.

This marble fawn is exquisite.

The Doves of Sosos

is one of the most celebrated mosaics from antiquity.

And these two centaurs,

carved from a smoky grey marble,

represent the highs and lows of love.

The perky young centaur contrasts with his sorrowful companion,

perhaps reflecting Hadrian's grief for Antinous.

Hadrian recreated many

of the artistic highlights from his grand tours.

As befits his nickname, Graeculus, or, "Greekling,"

he commissioned perfect copies of Greek statues.

Here, Rome meets Egypt.

The Tiber, this bearded river god,

leans on Rome's iconic she-wolf.

And this is the Nile, resting on a sphinx.

All very symbolic of the wider empire.

The Egyptian theme is completed with this scary crocodile.

Carved from Cipollino marble, it brilliantly brings to life

the croc's rough and scaly hide.

Many of Hadrian's finest sculptures adorn this magical pool,

a homage to the canal that cut through northern Egypt

from Alexandria to Canopus.

Since the death of Antinous, it was a corner of an empire

that held a very special place in Hadrian's heart.

We know that Hadrian liked magnificence,

but I feel that here, he surpassed himself

by creating this spectacular setting,

essentially for dinner parties.

We know he loved dinner parties,

it says that in the ancient literature.

And imagine this long canal, a colonnaded extravaganza

where guests would have been reclining

in-between the pillars, eating.

Apparently there was sometimes food actually in the middle of the canal that could have come over,

controlled by slaves on little ships.

You pluck the food off.

And I like it particularly at this point,

because the pillars which elsewhere are just ordinary columns

are replaced by these caryatids,

which are an allusion to very famous statues

that supported a building on the Athenian acropolis.

And on either side of these four caryatids,

two drunken Silenae, this old soak character from ancient myth,

with a pot belly and a beard,

and he's a bit pissed, basically.

And I quite like the idea

that that would help get you in the party spirit.

Here's the pillar. Sprouting out of his head would be a load of grapes

cascading down, like the top of a Corinthian capital.

And if you were a guest, you just had to look up there

and there's your example for how to behave at a Roman dinner party,

the convivium that Hadrian loved.

Hadrian himself would have sat right at the end there,

in that semi-dome,

which would have been covered with sparkling mosaics.

There was a podium in there with spaces for seven people.

And Hadrian would have come out,

sat right in the centre, looked straight down this canal,

which goes for about 120-odd metres,

and I think if you were a guest

at one of those parties thrown by Hadrian here in the Canopus,

you must have felt like the most urbane, chic, glamorous person

it would be possible to be,

as if you were at the very centre, not just of the world,

but the whole universe.

Under Hadrian, the Roman empire stretched across three continents

and Roman art was also at its zenith,

because the great classical tradition

which the Romans had inherited, and reinvigorated,

by tailoring it to their own society,

was at its most stunning and urbane.

Roman culture was the envy of the known world.

And there are some traditionalists

who suggest that the quality of Roman art from this period

would never be surpassed.

There's definitely something in that argument,

but it's not entirely true.

The aesthetic achievements under Hadrian are brilliant,

but they're not the final chapter in the story of Roman art.

In the next episode, the empire strikes back.

How far-flung provinces transformed the look of Rome,

and an obscure cult emerged,

to seize the mantle of art history.

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