Once you've got an empire, what do you do with it
and what did it feel like to be part of it?
Buona sera. Ciao. Prego.
Well, clues can often be found in very surprising places.
I'm talking rubbish.
Ancient Roman rubbish.
I'm in the middle of a Roman landfill site.
Millions and millions of broken pots
that once contained the fuel of the ancient city -
olive oil.
It's trash,
but it's very valuable trash,
because it's through the leftovers of the Roman world -
the bits and pieces and the junk
as much as the monuments and the treasures -
that we can see how the Roman Empire works.
What feeds it?
What connects it?
Who are the winners
and who are the losers?
The Romans never set out to acquire an empire,
but their undistinguished little town came to control a territory
that stretched from Britain in the north
to Algeria in the south...
...Spain to Israel,
the Nile to the Rhine.
How did it look to the Romans?
What did they make of it all?
How did they visualise it?
We tend to joke when we say "All roads lead to Rome,"
but actually they did.
What about the conquered?
What difference did it make to them?
Just olives, olives and more damn olives.
There were great fortunes for some,
but at the expense of the many.
This tombstone, for me, is a bit of a tear-jerker.
So just how did Rome transform the landscape of our world?
For an extraordinary record
of the scale and impact of the Roman Empire,
I've come to see what must be one of the most remarkable
and surprising leftovers from the Roman world.
So I'm going to show you our freezer.
And it's not a piece of pottery or even an inscription.
Should I shut the door? Yes.
Blimey, this must be what Greenland feels like.
Yes.
What I'm here to see is ice
recently drilled from the Arctic ice sheets,
preserving layers and layers of buried history
right back to Roman times.
How far in Greenland do you actually have to drill down to
get to the Roman bit?
I would say 400-500 metres deep in the ice sheet.
By analysing this ice,
Celia Sapart and her team at Utrecht University
have discovered some striking evidence
about Rome's impact on the environment.
So here you can see a piece of ice from Greenland
that we have already measured.
So in fact you see all these small air bubbles
and each air bubble represents the composition of our atmosphere
in the past.
Gosh.
There's Roman history melting in your hands.
And what we do, in fact, is we measure the greenhouse gases
in those little bubbles, especially methane.
That's our main interest.
And we had a big surprise -
around year one we had an increased level in this methane fingerprint
showing that higher level of biomass burning,
burning can be... burning because of deforestation,
burning because of all kind of other processes.
Comparing our data with historical data,
this peak was related to population growth
and to the Roman Empire expansion.
The data revealed a sharp spike in the level of methane
in the Earth's atmosphere
that wouldn't be seen again for over 1,000 years.
This is really great for me
because we know that the Romans had all this extra increase
in productivity and industry etc,
but, you know, actually to see it kind of trapped there for ever
in the ice, that's truly extraordinary.
I kind of think we feel a bit differently about it perhaps,
but I think the Romans would have been absolutely delighted
to see their impact kind of preserved like this.
Roman pollution captured in the Greenland ice sheets
is dramatic evidence of a burst of energy
as Rome transformed the world it conquered.
In southern France is another of the remaining traces
of that transformation - the Via Domitia,
the ancient road linking Italy to Spain,
because Rome built its empire from the ground up,
connecting people and places
in a way that had never been seen before.
For us, roads almost STAND for Rome
and, actually, Roman roads still do lie underneath
many of our own transport routes,
but it's easy to forget quite how revolutionary it was
to go from a system of windy local dirt tracks
to great paved highways striking out across the continent.
It wasn't that the speed you could go on them was that impressive -
it still took even the fastest Romans about a week
to go what we could cover in a day,
but the idea that you could start out in Rome,
get on a road, stick on it
and end up in Spain or Greece, that was entirely new.
Like sinews crossing the empire,
the Romans built a network of roads
over 80,000km long,
not only creating a new geography
but introducing an entirely new Roman way
of thinking about the world.
This is a bit of disused signage from a Roman road.
It's one in a series of milestones that were set every Roman mile -
that's about 1.5km -
along all the major routes.
Most of the writing on it
is actually the emperor's name and titles
so you know who to thank for this lovely road.
Underneath, there's a big number three.
That means we're three miles from the nearest staging point.
What's important about this is that you know exactly where you are.
For the first time, you can place yourself in the world.
Of course, once you got off the beaten track,
people in the countryside may hardly have noticed the arrival of Rome.
Life would have gone on much as before.
But where there were Roman roads, things changed,
not necessarily for the better.
It wouldn't have been fun finding a brand-new superhighway
going straight through your land
and Romans complained, much as we do,
about the bad food and exorbitant prices
at the ancient equivalent of service stations.
For some, though, these new roads were a cause for celebration.
These are copies of four really strange Roman drinking goblets.
They're quite recognisably in the shape of milestones,
but not just that,
they've got lists and lists of names of places scratched into them.
What it says round the top is that this is the route from Gades -
that's Cadiz in Spain -
to Roman, to Rome.
And between each place,
it's giving you the number of Roman miles
that you have to travel.
And at the bottom, it does a grand total
of the whole length of the road,
which is over 1,800 Roman miles.
That would take you more than 40 days to travel.
Now, quite what they were for is actually a bit of a mystery.
I mean, they might be very practical.
It might be a useful travelling cup
plus your route inscribed on the outside of it,
but I think it's rather more likely
that they're either souvenirs of the road
or a sort of celebration
of the length and the splendour
of this great road.
The simple idea that you could find Romans
drinking out of lookalike milestones
really shows how sort of internalised
that sense of road culture had become,
which is exactly what I'm going to do.
Salut, everybody!
The goblets also point to that other great marker
of Roman presence on the landscape -
towns.
The Romans sponsored the greatest programme of urbanisation
in history,
and in Western Europe, their cities still often underlie our own.
All over the empire,
towns needed infrastructure.
It's the old cliche about the Romans,
that they built roads and bridges,
baths and drains
and aqueducts like this one,
and they ploughed an awful lot of cash into it.
This wasn't one of the longest or the most vital aqueducts
in the Roman world -
it channelled water just 15km
from a mountain spring to the small Spanish town of Segovia,
but all the same, it's hard not to feel impressed
by the ingenuity of it
and the sheer chutzpah of that series of arches.
This is where even I get a bit gobsmacked by Roman engineering.
And in a way, that's the point.
It's one of the trademarks of the Roman Empire.
It's meant to be in your face
and its message goes far beyond any practical purpose.
This can't just be about the water supply.
This is about Roman power,
it's about the Romans making an impact on the landscape,
it's about the Romans making themselves permanent.
To put it another way,
if you want to bring a water supply to a small town,
do you really need all this extravagance?
Aqueducts,
towns,
roads -
these are the classic stereotypes of the Roman Empire.
They're what it did for us.
But, more than just clever engineering projects,
the Romans could imagine them all fitting together.
This is a map of the Roman Empire. Oh, right.
An ancient map. It's a medieval copy of an ancient map.
Oh, medieval. But it's copying a Roman map
which doesn't survive.
This is the only Roman map of the empire we have,
or, actually, it's a copy of a 13th century copy
of an ancient Roman map.
Why this is important is it gives us a glimpse
of how the Romans pictured their own empire.
Some of that's pretty obvious.
You've got Rome right in the middle
and leading out from it you can see the roads.
There's some familiar names.
There's Naples, or Neapolis,
and there's Pompeii.
And that rather squashed island there, that's Sicily.
But then you move further and further east.
Past Crete here.
But my favourite bit, I think, is the Nile Delta
with the city of Alexandria and its lighthouse here
and then all the little rivers and tributaries in the delta there.
In some ways this looks like a very mad representation of the world -
it's all terribly squashed and it's not arranged north-south,
but it's making more important points than that.
It's saying that Rome is at the very centre
and what's important about the empire is its cities,
its towns and its roads.
We tend to joke when we say "All roads lead to Rome,"
but, actually, they did and they led away from Rome, too.
What the Romans are telling us is that theirs is a joined-up world.
It's a dramatic statement of Roman power and control
and a network of connectivity
which joins up places never before joined up.
And in this new, connected world, the demands of the Roman state
and over a million consumers in Rome itself
could be met by producers many hundreds of kilometres away.
This is when the hills of southern Spain became a giant olive farm
and juicing enterprise.
This kind of monoculture - just olives, olives and more damn olives,
is one legacy of the Roman Empire.
It was then that southern Spain first became
the world's biggest producer of olive oil.
More than seven million litres of the stuff
going to the city of Rome alone every year.
It was an agricultural revolution.
Anyone who'd lived through it would have seen
the countryside around about them completely transformed.
The Roman Empire ran on olive oil.
It was used not only for cooking, but lighting,
and even the ancient equivalent of soap. You couldn't live without it.
Olive grower Francisco Nunez de Prado is still in the business.
Is the whole economy of this area, is it all based on olives?
Yes, olive trees with olive oil and the whole process,
represent, in this area,
practically 70% of the income.
Some people, like you, are growing the olives. Yes.
But then you've got your pickers, your specialist pickers.
But you've got, presumably, transporters,
you've got a middleman, expert agents.
Everybody has to be specialising in something.
It was much the same 2,000 years ago.
Olive oil provided jobs in a highly profitable industry.
There were lots of people who made lots of money out of all this.
There were the growers and the pickers and the pressers
and the packers and the transporters and the distributors.
And don't forget, there were the men who cashed in on it all
by making the containers to put it in.
This was an oil economy.
BELL CHIMES
Shipping seven million litres of olive oil
to Rome and the wider empire each year,
required more than just trees and presses.
It needed an entire infrastructure,
whether in the form of warehouses, bottling plants or ports.
One of the main transport hubs and distribution centres
was a place the Romans called Hispalis, and we call Seville.
Built into the fabric of the modern city,
unnoticed by most passers-by today,
is an introduction to one of the Roman officials whose job it was
to make sure the precious oil reached its final destination.
This is a plaque put up in honour
of a man called Sextus Julius Possessor,
and it's ended up, I'm afraid, in an extremely inconvenient place.
Really, what it is, is a description of Possessor's whole career.
First of all, he seems to be stationed in Italy itself,
looking after the incoming supply of oil
from both Africa and Spain.
But then he moves out to Seville to a job
which is described as procuratorial,
somebody's who's in charge of the "ripam Baetis",
the river bank of the river Baetis.
An interesting case of how Roman imperial administration works.
They never have very many people on the ground,
but they do get men into place in key areas.
And here we've got Possessor, I think,
as a safe pair of hands in Seville,
making sure that nothing goes wrong
with the supply of oil to Rome from this end.
Of course, ultimately, this was all for the benefit of Rome.
But a more complex exchange was taking place too.
As olive oil flowed to Rome, money flowed into Spain
and there's evidence in the branding stamped into the oil jars themselves
that this new wealth allowed some people
access into the politics of Rome itself.
This is a particularly tantalising example,
because the stamp here reads very clearly,
"Port P-A-H".
That's port, short for portus, or probably river warehouse,
of someone called P-A-H.
One thing we know is that the father of the Emperor Hadrian had
those initials.
Publius Aelius Hadrianus.
So it's possible that this handle is telling us something
about the source of the wealth of Hadrian's family in the oilfields
of Spain and that it's telling us something about the commercial
profits that underpinned the power structure of the Roman Empire.
Whether this was really where he'd made his money or not,
we know that Hadrian, the man on the Roman
throne for 20 years in the second century AD, came from Spain.
It's a reflection of just how joined up the empire had become
and it's not surprising
that Hadrian bankrolled big building schemes here.
This is what's left of the town of Italica, where the
Emperor Hadrian's family came from.
They weren't native Spanish,
they were Roman settlers from way back,
but they obviously thought of Spain as their home.
Hadrian ploughed an awful lot of cash into his hometown,
tremendous showing off and, to be honest, all a bit out of proportion.
One of the biggest things he did was
put up this huge amphitheatre.
It would have accommodated 25,000 people.
Now, to put that in context,
the Coliseum in Rome accommodates about 50,000 or so,
so you've got a small town amphitheatre in Roman Spain
with half the seating of the Coliseum.
Or to put it another way, the population of little Italica
was only something like 8,000 people in all.
To me, that sounds a bit like a plutocratic benefactor giving
little Cambridge United a stadium half the size of Wembley.
It is a little bit absurd.
We're now almost in the century of the arena.
This is where the gladiators would have fought, where the wild beasts
would have been slaughtered and, right in the middle here, you've
got a sort of mini version of what you find in the Coliseum itself.
The underground cellars, where the gladiators
and the animals would have waited to come up into the arena
through trap doors in the floor.
It's very easy to get a rather
overblown view of the brutality
and the extravagance of gladiatorial
and animal spectacle.
My guess is that you didn't see gladiators here very often.
You certainly didn't see very many exotic wild beasts.
They did put on performances,
perhaps once a year on Hadrian's birthday, would be my guess,
because the real point of this monument was not actually
entertainment for the locals, of whatever sort.
The real point of this monument was to stamp
the image of Hadrian on his native city.
And what Hadrian's Italica really shows is something of the wider
process by which Rome remodelled the world in its own image.
In Spain and elsewhere, Rome established itself for good,
not just in bricks and mortar, but in institutions and laws
which defined a specifically Roman urban way of life.
These bronze tablets are just covered in columns
and columns of writing,
and what that writing is, is a constitution
devised in Rome for a Roman town in Spain.
Really, it's a series of do's and don'ts,
how to be a Roman town abroad.
Here's one about what the local
officials called the aediles should do.
They're supposed to, every year, to put on some nice plays in the city.
They have to pay no less than 2,000 sesterces -
that's twice a soldier's pay - from their own money,
"de sua pecunia", and they might just get
a grant of 1,000 sesterces from public funds if they do that.
So here we've got our generous local officials obliged to
give us a theatrical display.
Everything, from seating arrangements at public events to
the speaking time allotted to accusers and defendants at trial,
are outlined in this document, and many have a familiar feel.
There's a great bit here which is about...
well, in our terms, it's about electoral expenses.
It says - if you are standing for office, you're a candidatus.
What you mustn't do is lavish expensive meals
on people in order to encourage them to vote for you.
Although it is allowed to give
nine people a meal on one day.
But no more than that.
After that, it's bribery.
That's the kind of level of micromanagement that the Romans
are trying to impose.
From roads to aqueducts, civil servants to public performances,
in this kind of empire building, cash was as important as armies.
In the ancient world, if you needed cash, you had to dig for it.
Southern Spain wasn't entirely olives.
There were plenty of riches in the form of silver to be
unearthed here too.
Ex-miner and local archaeologist, Saturnino Aguera, is taking me
to see evidence of the Roman operations here.
2,000 years ago, this would have been an industrial landscape,
heaving with people.
One Roman who actually visited reckoned that there
were 40,000 men working for the mines in this area.
HE SPEAKS SPANISH
Right.
So what we've got here is a place where the later mining has
cut through to give a cross-section of the Roman working
and you can see some little square holes,
galleries or passageways, and all over the rock you can,
I think, see the pockmarks where the Roman miners have come in
and they must have followed the ore seams and just taken
the silver ore out and not bothered with the rest of it.
And it's the scale of the industrial processes that
went on around here, from the mining to the smelting, that helps us
understand those traces of methane we can still recover
from the Arctic ice sheets.
The Romans also recognised the problem of pollution.
They built the chimneys of the smelting plants very high,
to get rid of the noxious smoke.
It was a terribly exploitative system of resources,
of landscape and of people.
But there were also vast profits to be made too.
There were people who came here from Italy in search of their fortune.
I mean, in a way, this was a bit like the Gold Rush,
or Spain, in a sort of way, was Rome's Eldorado.
The first silver entrepreneurs took full advantage of a ruthless system
in which profit was the sole consideration.
The organisation of the Spanish mines was a mixture of public
enterprise and private enterprise.
The Roman state owned most of them, but didn't have the infrastructure,
so it sold the franchise to a range of private companies.
They called them publicani.
In our terms, that's public service providers.
The dangers of that are obvious.
The state gets the basic minimum.
The only incentive for the private companies is to maximise their
profits, and the people who pay the price are the poor guys down there.
We've got to imagine hundreds of people underground,
all toiling to get the ore out, and using pretty rudimentary tools.
This is a Roman pick and you have to imagine that there's a wooden
handle here and you're picking at the surface of the rock like that.
This one is really heavy. It's a rather clever dual-use tool.
Again, it's got a wooden handle going through there
and you can either hammer at the rock or you can
pick at the rock, using the other end.
You'd have to be pretty strong to wield that effectively.
You'd have to be even stronger, though, to manage this crowbar.
Imagine you're coming and you're trying to pick out
the seams of the ore and you're jabbing this
into the rock to loosen it out with this sharp end.
This is obviously very dark, dirty, sweaty, heavy labour.
And it's a reminder that beneath the surface of this sparkling new empire
there were the silent underclasses keeping the wheels in motion.
This tombstone for me is a bit of a tear-jerker.
We read about Roman children being used in the mines as workers,
but here we actually seem to meet one.
He's a little boy called Quintus Archilus
and he lived to be just four years old.
There he is - he's got a little tunic on,
he's got a pick in one hand and a basket in the other.
He's all set for working the mine.
We don't actually know that that's where he died,
although many children must have.
What we do know, is that it is as a miner that he is being remembered.
It was on small backs like these that the wealth of Rome was built.
The silver he helped to mine minted into the currency of empire.
What most of this Roman silver went into was coin, things like this.
One Roman estimates that each year in this area, they got
nine million of these.
That's an enormous impact
on Roman economy and society.
You can buy an awful lot of aqueducts
and armies for nine million of these.
But what's amazing is that these coins came to be used all over
the Roman Empire - same denomination, same designs.
Jonathan Williams is an expert in coins
and deputy director of the British Museum.
These are two very similar coins
of the Emperor Hadrian.
Distinctive face there.
And Hadrianus Augustus. That's right.
They are very similar. They're both Roman silver denari,
the lifeblood in many ways of the Roman currency system.
Both have that of Hadrian on, very similar.
They're the same value, same mount of silver,
but they were found completely
opposite ends of the Earth.
This one here was found
in Bletchley, in southern England,
and this one was found in southern India.
Britain, of course, inside the empire.
India, outside the empire.
But loads of trading links.
Absolutely. Does that mean that,
in a sense, what Rome has done
has created a unified, internal
economy and coinage system?
We've got monetary union, really,
in the Roman Empire.
It's a single currency union when you're talking about gold
and silver coins particularly. Those are the ones, as we see,
that circulate throughout the Roman Empire and beyond.
Everybody wants good Roman gold and good Roman silver.
But what you do have, the other way
in which the currency unifies
the Empire, is that they have all got the head of the ruling man
and it's his head being seen and used and noticed and counted upon,
from Britain all the way through to India.
That's one of the key unifying factors about the Roman Empire,
together with all those statues and all those other things.
From its Spanish mines,
Rome maintained a constant flow of hard cash,
trickling down to contractors, soldiers
and traders across the Roman world,
who could hardly have forgotten that all this wealth
was tied to Roman power.
In return, Rome became the focal point
for all the Empire had to offer,
drawing in taxes, talent and the raw materials
to build the imperial city we know today.
And one of the highlights still standing in all its glory
is the Pantheon.
For many Romans walking past this building,
the most striking thing about it would have been the columns
holding up the porch.
We tend not to pay them very much attention
and if we do notice them, we really don't know how to read them.
But they're actually one of the loudest boasts you can make
about imperial power.
That's partly because they are monoliths.
They're carved out of a single piece of stone.
Just think how difficult that would be to do
without them breaking or cracking.
But it's also the material itself.
They all come from quarries
deep in a province 3,000km away from here - Egypt.
They've been loaded onto camels and donkeys, dragged across the desert,
put onto ships in the Nile, taken to the Mediterranean,
across the sea, to stand here.
It's an extraordinary statement about the resources of empire
and about the ability of the Emperor Hadrian, who put this building up,
to control those resources.
In a sense, the stone is the message.
But even emperors couldn't control everything.
If you look hard at the building, you'll see some awkward mismatches,
some odd misalignments, which make it look as if the architects
had been expecting columns a few metres taller
and had to make some last-minute adjustments
when smaller ones arrived.
Maybe the quarry just couldn't supply what was asked for,
or maybe some poor devil got the order wrong.
I wouldn't have liked to have been him!
For me, the Pantheon reflects how the empire changed Rome
just as much as Rome changed the empire.
The capital was where stuff from all over the Roman world
was on display and on sale.
And at the centre of this world was the Mediterranean itself -
Rome's internal sea.
It was much quicker and cheaper to bulk transport goods by water
than by land, and the Mediterranean became a busy highway
with cargo ships laden with things from grand granite columns
to humble objects of daily life.
Everywhere you went in the Roman Empire,
you would have found people eating and drinking
out of shiny red pots like this.
You still find them stacked on museum shelves
everywhere from Hadrian's Wall to north Africa.
Most of us - that's me included -
just walk past them without a second glance.
But, actually, they are what's left of a most extraordinary case
of Roman mass production.
Most of them are pretty plain
but this one has got a more exciting decoration.
It's got pictures of the goddess Diana having a bath
and being spotted by the unfortunate Actaeon,
who gets attacked by his dogs
as punishment for having seen
the goddess with no clothes on.
It's quite hard to place exactly the social level of this,
but I reckon it's, erm, sort of...
very, very middle-market ordinary.
That's to say there would be some people
who would lust for just one of these bowls for their table.
There would be others for whom this would be
normal everyday crockery.
What's really important about all this is the simple fact
that it just got everywhere.
When people dig us up in 2,000 years' time,
I guess they'll find loads and loads of fizzy drink cans
and identical trainers across the world.
This is one of the first examples of globalisation.
This is the Roman brand.
Through its roads and sea routes,
the Roman brand spread throughout the empire.
This wasn't only the movement of goods, but people too.
In the remote town of Hierapolis, in modern Turkey,
we find the remarkable tomb of a man who seems to have made the most
out of the opportunities of belonging to the new Roman world.
This is a wonderful story of an exciting life on the high seas.
It's the tombstone of a man called Flavius Zeuxis
and he says that during his life
he has sailed around the promontory of Cape Malea -
that's the very southern tip of Greece -
between here in Turkey and Italy...
72...times.
So what's he doing?
Well, Hierapolis was the textile capital of this part of Turkey
and he can only have been going from here to Italy
to flog all the things they were making.
But what's interesting is, what he chooses to put on his tombstone
to sum up his life
are those dangerous 72 journeys.
Zeuxis must've been unusually successful,
or he wouldn't have bragged on his tomb.
But with someone like him,
the Roman Empire made the world simultaneously bigger and smaller.
Bigger because of the expanded horizons
and the distant markets now open to those who dared.
Smaller because of the network of connectivity that enabled
people and goods to get around the world more easily than ever before.
And a key part of that distribution were the ports -
nerve centres of Roman trade and commerce.
One of the cities that flourished in the commercial world
of the Roman Empire was Ephesus,
which became a hub of import and export.
It had once been an old famous Greek town going back centuries,
but it was transformed by the Romans.
Everything we now see here is the result of Roman investment.
And the reason it was so important in the Roman world is simple -
its harbour.
Imperial trade needs more than ships and merchants,
it needs well-functioning harbours.
The coastline around Ephesus has long since changed,
and it's now a good way inland.
But in its heyday it was an important maritime gateway
to the East and to rich pickings from as far away as India.
A reminder that the Roman world was much bigger than the Roman Empire.
And Ephesus would have felt like the whole cosmos had descended here.
People from everywhere, speaking as many languages
on the streets then as they do now.
A city of a quarter of a million.
Not just those that lived here, but people coming and going.
And everyone busy, busy, busy.
The honest guys doing a hard day's work,
the cheats and the chancers, the go-getters and the bureaucrats,
and of course the money makers.
If you could afford a pad in the heart of Ephesus,
then the chances are you'd profited
from the constant flow of goods through the harbour.
These are upmarket houses for those who'd made it.
This is all amazing, but it's also quite confusing.
There's a series of houses, one above the other,
running up the hillside. And they're partly interlocking,
so it's quite hard to tell where one house stops and the next one starts.
But what is clear is that there was a luxurious lifestyle going on here.
That some people in Ephesus,
including the owners of these properties,
were doing very nicely, thank you.
And it makes the point that the benefits of empire did not
only flow to the Imperial Palace or to people in Rome itself.
The homes of the Ephesus elite were evidently pretty flashy -
no expense spared.
The fashions and trends of the city of Rome itself
were imitated and reproduced.
Here we've come into a kind of reception hall
on a really palatial scale.
Also, it must all have been faced with marble right the way round.
And you can see the columns of marble on the side,
and there would be panels in between.
And this is where somebody big entertained
and displayed his wealth and power.
This is, you know, almost imperial scale.
It must have been pretty terrifying, I think,
to be a guest at this house.
I'm standing on a modern walkway,
but you can see there must have been a great big door,
and there's big door fixings on either side.
You have to imagine that you would have had the door opened
for you into this.
And there, the big man would be ready
to greet and possibly humiliate you.
The things that came from the temples of Ephesus really live up
to that classy Roman style.
So too do the things from the terraced houses.
One of the highlights are some exquisite -
of to my taste, slightly militaristic -
ivory plaques showing the Emperor on campaign.
But across the board, the finds here
really are top of the range -
the best that money could buy.
The question is, where did the money come from?
Where did these guys who own these houses make their cash?
Well, trade, obviously.
But to say "trade" makes it all sound a bit easy, a bit comfortable.
Cos one of the biggest commodities that came through
the port of Ephesus were human beings.
This town was a great centre of the slave trade.
Slaves flowed through the marketplace at Ephesus,
like olive oil through Seville.
The brutal truth was that many Romans wouldn't have seen
much of a distinction between the two.
As they saw it, slaves were one of the products of empire.
Many, the victims of Roman conquest, kidnapping or just foundlings.
If you wanted to buy a slave this is where you'd have come.
It's uncomfortable to grasp,
but the Roman Empire depended on slave labour and,
like every other ancient society,
the Romans took slavery absolutely for granted.
But uncomfortable as it is, if we want to understand,
rather than just deplore, what went on here, we have to try to
get into the mind-set of those who came to buy slaves.
What did they think they were doing?
My guess is they thought they were doing their shopping.
Perhaps they were here after a gardener,
or a tutor for their child,
or maybe a hairdresser.
How are they going to be sure they weren't ripped off?
Could they trade in last year's model?
Where they missing out on a special offer next week?
Three for two.
That may seem a very callous way of putting it,
but it is the everyday reality of Roman life.
Slaves were the operating system of empire.
Picking the olives, quarrying the stone, mining the silver
and constructing the buildings.
They weren't just a perk for the rich,
quite ordinary craftsmen or small farmers
could have afforded at least one.
But if you were the emperor, it would have been thousands.
In fact, it's at the Emperor Hadrian's villa,
just outside Rome at Tivoli, that we can see still get
one of the clearest glimpses of the slaves' world,
and the strict social hierarchy that underpinned the empire.
And this is where the slaves lived -
in hundreds of rooms.
How many were squashed into each one we just don't know.
But I don't imagine we should be thinking of individual bedsits.
Some of those slaves were servants or labourers,
and that's how we usually think about slavery.
But others would have been slave doctors, accountants,
librarians and musicians.
These were the people who were needed to power this estate.
A slave in the imperial household would have been in a lucky position
compared to those working in the silver mines of Southern Spain.
But the truth is we can't ever see it from their point of view because
they haven't left any account which gives their side of the story.
So all we can do is imagine it.
This is where some slaves spent most of their working lives -
downstairs in a network of dark service tunnels -
beneath the grand, airy quarters upstairs.
But people scurrying about down here were always meant
to be invisible,
and they've remained pretty much invisible to us,
largely because they've left no trace behind them.
For me, this underground world is a powerful symbol of
one very nasty side of Roman slavery and exploitation.
But before we feel too much moral superiority coming on,
it might be worth reflecting how many invisible people
there are beneath the surface of our world, too.
This was the empire that Hadrian kept hidden -
a labyrinth of tunnels separating the underclasses from the elite
who inhabited the luxurious buildings above.
This was the empire that Hadrian wanted to present to the world,
and it was built very deliberately to do just that.
Even after almost 2,000 years of plunder
and exposure to the elements,
it's at Tivoli that we can still see
better than anywhere Hadrian's own vision of the empire
in the biggest palace the Roman world had ever seen.
If you came to visit the Emperor Hadrian in his great villa
this is the approach you'd have taken.
And pretty impressive it was too.
Big flight of stairs leading up to the monumental gates,
and on each side fountains playing,
a niche for statues,
and there probably would have been some burly guards.
In fact, "villa" is a dreadful understatement.
Even "palace" doesn't quite get it.
This imperial residence - Hadrian's country pad -
was the size of the town.
Once you'd passed security and got your foot in the door,
the sheer scale of the place and the luxury would have been dazzling.
The paths, the libraries, the miniature theatres.
Not that you'd have found Hadrian here very much though.
More than any other Roman ruler,
he was off for years touring his empire.
Hadrian was always getting on the back of his horse going somewhere.
He was one of the greatest tourists of the Roman world,
and half of his 20-year reign he spent on the road.
What he saw - the monuments, the temples,
the exotic highlights of the provinces -
he reproduced, replicated and copied at Tivoli.
The organisation it would have taken to construct this place
is almost unimaginable.
The builders themselves were only a part of it.
There were the people who sourced the material,
who placed the orders,
the architects, the accountants and clerks,
and the dinner ladies who catered for the whole team.
I don't know if anybody's ever actually counted
the total number of bricks in Hadrian's villa.
But this really is building as a military operation.
Those bricks now do make it all look a bit naked, but remember,
it was originally covered with slabs of marble and works of art.
It's difficult to visualise it today, but Tivoli's interiors
must have been amongst the most lavish in the Roman world.
Just a few broken pieces of marble have been unearthed,
giving us a snapshot of what it might have looked like.
Conservationist Barbara Caponera has the tricky task of trying
to put the jigsaw back together.
Sometimes you can get to see what covered those bare brick walls,
and this is an amazing image of a horse
and a charioteer or his rider.
It's the horse's tail here and his leg there.
It's all made on the kind of same principle as a mosaic,
but with larger pieces.
So this is marble
and the horsemen's belt is made out of blue glass.
And it was surrounded by a frame,
so it's kind of like a painting on the wall.
These marbles have been brought in from all over the empire.
The horse's body is a rich yellow marble
that we know comes from Tunisia.
And one of these other fragments here is a great green marble
that was from Greece, actually in the area around Sparta.
What else have you got, Barbara?
SHE SPEAKS ITALIAN
Right, so this is porphyry from Egypt,
and it can go next to Tunisia.
And this is another very bright, red, orange marble
that comes from Greece.
That goes next to Sparta there.
It's almost as if we've got a map of the empire in marble
on the walls and the floors of the villa.
Tivoli echoes Rome's imperial possessions.
Here, statues representing Rome, with its mythical founders,
Romulus and Remus, sit side by side with the God of the River Nile,
representing Egypt.
A visual reminder of how far and wide the emperor's domain stretched.
At the pantheon,
Hadrian had displayed his power to control the resources of empire.
But here he went a step further -
trying to evoke, on his own estate,
some of the most admired monuments and landscapes of the provinces,
including a slice of Egypt.
This was perhaps the swankiest dining room
in the whole of the Roman world.
You have to imagine the select few guests reclining here,
surrounded by water and picking up the delicacies from little boats
floating in front of them.
But they weren't just eating five-star food
in a lavish setting,
they were eating in a replica of one
of the most famous monuments of the province of Egypt.
Because Hadrian's project was not simply
to create a luxurious lifestyle for himself,
it was to make the empire seem to converge here.
Whether by sucking in its resources to this one place,
or by literally recreating the wonders of his world on his estate.
To tour the villa must have been like touring the empire.
This WAS the empire in microcosm.
In its ambition, Tivoli captures the essence of an empire that
brought together places and people as never before.
Along its roads, in its busy cities and ports,
the inhabitants of the Roman Empire
experienced deep changes which still affect the world around us -
revolutions in engineering, trade and agriculture.
These offered new opportunities and the riches for some,
and matching inequality for others.
It's always easier to find the winners than losers.
The destitute, the exploited, the underdogs
have left very little behind them.
The profiteers of Ephesus, the oil barons of Spain and the
entrepreneurs of the seas have left the traces of their success stories,
whether in the shape of broken bits of pottery or great grand columns.
But one thing is for sure, winners and losers lived in a new world.
Hadrian's villa at Tivoli offers an idealised and,
to be honest, rather sanitised vision of the Roman Empire.
An ordered world with established hierarchies and everything in its place,
And here, obviously, under the command of one man.
The reality of course was more fluid, more fractured and messy.
But this is the emperor's frozen vision
of how the Roman world was and should be.
In this new joined-up world,
what did it really mean to be Roman?
You saw the toga everywhere - "frequens toga".
How would you become one?
And what difference would it make to your life?
"Have a good bath," it says.
And I suppose it means,
"Flip-flops only in here."