How Did The Ancient Roman World Work? With Mary Beard

Once you've got an empire, what do you do with it? And what did it feel like to be part of it? 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 Concord? 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. How did Rome transform the landscape of our world? History Hit is a streaming platform that is just for history fans, with fantastic documentaries covering fascinating figures and moments in history from all over the world. Our extensive catalogue of documentaries covers everything from the rise of Hannibal Barker to the illustrious treasures of King Tut, so sign up today for broadcast-quality documentaries uncovering the mysteries of the ancient world. And it's not just documentaries either. We have a network of incredible history podcasts bringing you new episodes every day. Sign up now for a free trial and Odyssey fans get 50% off their first three months. Just be sure to use the code ODYSSEY at checkout. 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. Shall 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 bed? I would say four or five hundred metres deep in the ice sheets. By analysing this ice, Celia Sappot 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. 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 that we measure the greenhouse gases in those little bubbles, especially methane, that's our main interest. And we had a big surprise that around year one, we had an increased level in this methane fingerprint showing that higher level of biomass burning. So burning can be burning because of deforestation, burning because of all kinds 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 a thousand years. This is really great for me because we know that the Romans had all this extra increase in productivity and industry, etc. But actually to see it kind of trapped there forever in the ice, that's truly extraordinary. And 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. And 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. 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 80,000 kilometres 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 of a series of milestones that were set every Roman mile, it's about one and a half kilometres, 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 is 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 Gardes, that's Cadiz in Spain, to Roma, 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. Simple idea that you could find Romans drinking out of look-alike milestones really shows how sort of internalised that sense of road culture had become, which is exactly what I'm going to do. Salud, 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, do 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. An ancient... It's a medieval copy of an ancient map of the Empire. Oh, medieval. But it's copying a Roman map. 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. 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. A tick 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 Nuneto Porrado is still in the business. Is the whole economy of this area, is it all based on olives? Yes, olive trees and olive oil and the whole process represent in this area practically between 70% of the income. I mean, 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 middlemen, you've got export agents. Everybody have to be a specialist 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. 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. Shipping 7 million litres of olive oil to Rome and the wider empire each year required more than just trees and presses. You 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 pluck put up in honour of a man called Sextus Iulius 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 he's described as procurator, somebody who's in charge of the Repambitis, the river bank of the river Bitis. 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. And 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 oil fields of Spain. And 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 2nd 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. A 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 Colosseum 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 Colosseum. 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, you know, almost in the centre 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 Colosseum 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. I mean, really, it's a series of do's and don'ts for how to be a Roman town abroad. Here's one about what the local officials called the Aediles should do. Now, they're supposed every year to put on some nice plays in the city. Ludi, Skyniki. They have to pay no less than 2,000 sestices, that's twice a soldier's pay, from their own money, de sua pecunia, and they might just get a grant of 1,000 sestices 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, if 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 Aguero 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. 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. And 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 El Dorado. 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 to manage them. 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. 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 a sharp end. This is obviously very dark, dirty, sweaty, heavy labour. 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 Artulus 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 work in 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's 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, very similar. They're both Roman silver denarii. The lifeblood in many ways of the Roman currency system. Both of them have Hadrian on. Very similar. They're the same value, same amount of silver, but they were found at completely opposite ends of the earth. This one here was found in Bletchley in southern England. And this one was found in southern India. It's 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 is created a unified internal economy and coinage? We've got monetary union, really, in the Roman Empire. It's a single currency union when you talk about the gold and the silver coins, particularly. Those are the ones, as we see here, that circulate throughout the Roman Empire and beyond. Everybody wants good Roman gold and good Roman silver. But what you do have, of course, the other way in which the currency unifies the empire is that they've 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 could make about imperial power. That's partly because they're monoliths. They're carved out of a single piece of stone, and 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 3,000 kilometres 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, to 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'd have found people eating and drinking out of shiny red pots like this. And you'd still find them stacked on museum shelves everywhere from Hadrian's Wall to North Africa. Most of us, and that's me included, just walk past them without a second glance. But actually, they're what's left of the most extraordinary case of Roman mass production. Most of them are pretty plain, but this one's 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 sort of social level of this, but I reckon it's sort of very, very middle-market ordinary. That's to say there'd be some people who would lust for just one of these bowls for their table. There'd 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 Xerxes, and he says that during his life he has sailed around the promontory of Cape Malia, 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. Xerxes must have been unusually successful, or he wouldn't have bragged on his tomb. But for 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. It's 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 the 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. 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'd be panels in between. 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 and I'm standing on a modern walkway that 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, if 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? Now, where did these guys who owned these houses make their cash? Well, trade, obviously, but to say trade makes it all sound a bit easy, a bit comfortable. 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 or 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 mindset 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 were they going to be sure they weren't ripped off? Could they trade in last year's model? And were 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 it 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 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, or 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. The 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'd probably 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 a 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 baths, 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. There'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 horseman'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? 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. It goes next to Sparta there. It's almost as if we've got a map of the empire in marble on the walls and 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, 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 riches for some, and matching inequality for others. It's always easier to find the winners than the 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's 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.