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  • Rome, 2,000 years ago, was the world's first ancient megacity.

  • In a world where few towns had more than 10,000 inhabitants,

  • more than a million people lived in Rome.

  • It would take almost 1,800 years for any other city in the West

  • to achieve the same population.

  • How did they manage, without all the technologies our modern cities

  • rely on, technologies of transport, communication, energy?

  • How did they get enough food and drink to the population,

  • how did they house them?

  • How did they maintain law and order?

  • How did they make this great city work?

  • I'll show you how Rome surpassed all the cities that had gone before

  • and rose to many of the challenges faced by megacities today.

  • By taking you on a journey up ancient tower blocks...

  • What I love is that this isn't just a bit of archaeology,

  • it's a bit of living history.

  • '..incredible infrastructure...

  • '..and some very proud people.'

  • MEN SHOUT IN LATIN

  • Fantastico!

  • Making a city of a million work in ancient conditions

  • was an enormous challenge.

  • But in 31 BC one man, who would become

  • the Emperor Augustus, became Rome's undisputed ruler.

  • His role was to maintain peace across all his imperial territories,

  • but if Augustus couldn't run his capital

  • he couldn't run an empire, so in rising to the challenge

  • he set new standards for how a city could be organised.

  • So, historians are always chucking around numbers for how many

  • inhabitants there were in cities.

  • How do they know?

  • And, to be honest, a lot of the time they're bluffing.

  • But with the case of Rome under Augustus

  • we've got an amazing bit of evidence here.

  • This is Augustus's own account of all his achievements.

  • Augustus was obsessed with numbers -

  • how many victories did he win, how many cities did he found,

  • how many laws did he pass.

  • And he loved counting the citizens.

  • Censum populi. "I did a census of the people."

  • That is of course the citizens in all the Empire.

  • Luckily in the case of Rome he also counted

  • the number of inhabitants of the city.

  • Because they were very privileged citizens,

  • he gave them cash handouts.

  • And he says, "On no single occasion did

  • "I give the money to less than 250,000 people,

  • "and on one occasion I gave it to 320,000 people" -

  • nearly a third of a million people.

  • And that is just adult male citizens.

  • Where are the women?

  • Where are the children? Where are the slaves?

  • And where are the immigrants? It's clear you've got to multiply up.

  • A million is the figure people chuck around as the population of Rome.

  • To be honest, that's a minimum.

  • In my view you could be talking about one and a half million people.

  • It is an absolutely enormous number for antiquity.

  • There had been other great capitals before Rome.

  • So how was this city able to achieve what they could not?

  • Perhaps the most obvious competitor should have been Athens,

  • and indeed early Rome was developing at the same time.

  • They both embraced one common and powerful idea.

  • The citizen.

  • SPQR.

  • Senatus Populusque Romanus, the Senate and people of Rome.

  • Those were the initials of authority of the citizen body itself.

  • Populus Romanus, the citizens of Rome.

  • In antiquity, that was their symbol of their authority and civic pride.

  • It was picked up in the Renaissance, when Rome became

  • an independent city, and it has continued to this day.

  • The symbol of a city run by its citizens for its citizens.

  • But in ancient Rome, as the population increased, this way

  • of running a city-state was no longer enough

  • to make the capital work.

  • When Rome was founded, 753 BC,

  • and probably for the next 500 years, Rome was a city-state,

  • just like hundreds of city-states in the Greek world, a polis.

  • A polis run by its politai, its citizens.

  • Rome had its cives, it was a civitas,

  • and, just as Greek has given us the word politics

  • and everything related to it,

  • Latin has given us citizen, city, civic, civil, even civilise.

  • So Rome was run by its cives, its citizens,

  • meeting down there in the Forum in the central open space.

  • But by 200 BC Rome was expanding very rapidly

  • and as it acquired an empire

  • it became harder and harder to run as a city-state.

  • And, to cut a complicated story very short, the answer was a new

  • form of military power, the emperor, and the emperors built their palace

  • up there on the Palatine, and from now on they ran Rome.

  • But they couldn't do without their citizens,

  • they can't ignore their citizens.

  • And one of the major concerns of the emperors is to keep

  • the citizen population happy.

  • How can they get them enough food?

  • How can they make sure there's a good water supply?

  • How can they maintain law and order?

  • It's much easier to see how Rome worked for its citizens than Athens,

  • because more of the old infrastructure has survived.

  • No ancient map exists of the Greek capital.

  • But, by contrast, there's an extraordinary piece of evidence

  • that reveals just how the Romans

  • designed their city to accommodate a vast and growing population.

  • Today, this great wall is the outside wall of a church,

  • the Church of St Cosmas and Damian.

  • In antiquity it was the inside wall of a vast imperial building

  • and on it there was a fantastic thing, a map of the city of Rome.

  • It was on marble slabs -

  • you can still see the fixing holes for those slabs.

  • And the map spread over the whole wall.

  • On it was depicted the city of Rome in great detail.

  • Alas, those slabs are terribly damaged and broken today.

  • We've only got about a tenth of them.

  • But it's enough to be able to reconstruct in a lot of detail

  • the street plan of ancient Rome.

  • One of the fascinating things we can see from that

  • is that the street plan of the city of Rome in many points corresponded

  • precisely to the street plan that survives today.

  • The modern Via Cavour is six or seven metres above the older

  • street level and here we're in the Suburra,

  • famed in ancient Rome as being the slum district.

  • But though it was a slum district here we have the Via Urbana,

  • and it follows exactly the course of the ancient-Roman Vicus Patricius,

  • which was in fact one of the most snobbish streets in town.

  • The surviving fragments were rediscovered as far back as 1562.

  • But four centuries later scholars are still trying to puzzle out

  • where each piece of this vast jigsaw belongs.

  • What enables us to place the fragments of the marble plan

  • in this area of town is this road, the Via Delle Zoccolette.

  • Its long curve is created by the curve of the Tiber River,

  • just beyond us,

  • and on the fragments we find a street with a long curve,

  • and it fits.

  • What it reveals is an area nearly three miles long

  • and two miles wide, including many landmarks that we know today.

  • Though the streets are mapped and monitored by the authorities

  • far more closely in our era,

  • it's still a struggle to make densely populated cities work,

  • with all the challenges we have today, like terrible traffic.

  • In one place at least, it's taken 2,000 years to catch up,

  • as the current mayor of Rome,

  • who's just pedestrianised the area around the Colosseum, explains.

  • - It was black for the pollution that we had. - Yes.

  • And, you know, it cost about 25 million euros to clean it up,

  • and now you can see the stones as they were 2,000 years ago.

  • For us one of the interesting things

  • is that already the ancient Romans had the same problems.

  • - Julius Caesar closed the Forum to traffic, didn't he? - Exactly, and...

  • - Do you think of yourself as the new Julius Caesar? - No, no, no!

  • Ancient Rome, like modern Rome, was densely populated.

  • This was reflected not just in its traffic but in every aspect of life.

  • It had its Forum.

  • It had piazzas with shops.

  • And of course it had its housing.

  • To help me fill in the gaps about how and where ancient Romans lived,

  • I've been joined by my colleague from Cambridge, Tiziana D'Angelo.

  • So I guess we have Mussolini to thank for clearing this space.

  • 'Without trains and buses, Rome's population had to live centrally.

  • 'To solve the problem of housing a million-plus people,

  • 'the Romans built upwards.

  • 'This is an ancient apartment block, or insula.'

  • I think it's amazing,

  • because below the modern ground level we've got two entire floors.

  • - And don't forget the three floors up there, so... - Yeah.

  • - Five floors in all of ancient-Roman apartment block. - 2,000 years old.

  • It shows how you can do dense housing

  • in the heart of a city, doesn't it?

  • 'We may reckon that this apartment block was home to

  • 'up to 200 people, one of thousands of complexes

  • 'housing Rome's burgeoning population.'

  • What I love is that this isn't just a bit of archaeology,

  • it's a bit of living history.

  • There have been people living here right up till 1932.

  • 'Insulae are often portrayed as dark, miserable, cramped slums.

  • 'But is that really true?'

  • - So this looks like one unit of an apartment. - Yeah.

  • Well, there are quite a few of them. There's actually a row of four.

  • - OK, we've got four... - Yes.

  • And we've got them on five floors, so this is just one standard unit.

  • - It's not bad in terms of size, is it? - It's not small.

  • - It's quite spacious. - We've got, what is it, four metres by nine...

  • - 36 square metres? - It's much bigger than the average apartment nowadays.

  • People have this image of how Romans lived in apartment buildings,

  • in complete squalor, in tiny little pokey apartments.

  • You've got filth on the floors, you've got bare walls.

  • Is this life in a Roman apartment?

  • Well, you have to use a little bit of imagination.

  • There is no reason why these walls or this ceiling could not be

  • decorated when they were built. So, for example, look at the ceiling.

  • We do have traces of plaster, so probably the whole ceiling

  • - and all the walls were plastered. - Yeah.

  • But we can do something more for you if you're difficult. So we can...

  • - I am a demanding client here. - We can decorate a bit further.

  • For example, that back wall, that main wall, second century,

  • we could paint it those red and yellow panels that were so stylish.

  • Yeah. What are you going to do with the floors?

  • Well, we'll clean it up a bit!

  • And then we could have something like what we have in the corridor

  • outside, that opus spicatum, so the herringbone pattern, which is

  • very resistant on the one hand, and it looks relatively pretty.

  • OK, suppose I'm the tenant, I'm moving in, and I say,

  • "Excuse me, landlord, I really don't like this floor at all.

  • "I want a proper mosaic floor."

  • 'Not far away there are remains of decoration.

  • 'It looks like a modern building.'

  • Biblioteca Centrale per i Ragazzi.

  • This is a kids' library. It's wonderful.

  • It's absolutely wonderful.

  • Oh, my God. OK, so what is going on here?

  • I think we've got some serious Roman bricks.

  • Yeah, it's much more regular.

  • 'Houses in Rome, like any city, were continually changing,

  • 'with new owners doing their own makeovers.'

  • Look at these mosaics.

  • Yes, it's, erm, sort of psychedelic, isn't it?

  • Or it's as if someone's been trying to balance ostrich eggs

  • on top of each other and they're all taking a tumble.

  • Well, in the second century AD

  • this would have been quite fashionable actually.

  • It's a black-and-white mosaic and, yes, you're right, the pattern is not

  • a masterpiece, and you can also see that from the size of the tesserae.

  • They're quite big, it's over one centimetre.

  • But still the mosaicists were taking a long time to make these works

  • and they were paid quite well, they were paid 60, 65 denarii per day.

  • That's quite a bit.

  • That's an enormous amount, that's way over a legionary's pay.

  • - Well, it's an excellent floor, though. - Great work if you can get it.

  • And you need more than a mosaicist, don't you? You need a plumber.

  • - Yes, that's important. - I want running water in my apartment, please.

  • - And, lo and behold... - Yes.

  • We have a pipe running through.

  • So presumably this means that at least in some rooms

  • there is piped water.

  • 'It's a remarkable thought that by the first century AD

  • 'there were individual flats in Roman apartment blocks

  • 'which were being supplied direct with running water.

  • 'Something that even today isn't available

  • 'in many parts of the world.'

  • There's nothing so important

  • for the health of a great city as clean water.

  • Clean water to drink, clean water to wash in.

  • One of the joys of Rome is that there are fountains

  • with lovely fresh water everywhere.

  • And that's down to the Renaissance Popes, who filled Rome with

  • fountains like this one, outside the Palazzo Farnese.

  • Oddly enough, this particular fountain is

  • made from a part from a Roman bath, the Baths of Caracalla.

  • This ornamental bath was brought in to make a fountain.

  • Because the Romans, too, the ancient Romans,

  • really understood the importance of fresh water,

  • and they brought it in in vast quantities.

  • We all know that the Romans had big baths, but don't forget,

  • the fundamental thing was they had a fresh supply of drinking water.

  • This was no mean feat.

  • It required perhaps the greatest public infrastructure project

  • ever attempted in the ancient world.

  • Aqueducts are one of the most vivid signs of the growth

  • of the population of Rome.

  • The first ones built as early as 312 BC

  • and one after another are added,

  • until in the end there are 11 separate aqueducts providing water.

  • They got their water from the south of the city on the whole.

  • The Alban Hills immediately to the south were volcanic,

  • and that's not such good water,

  • so they went further south, to the limestone hills of the Apennines.

  • And that meant pushing their technology,

  • building enormously long aqueducts.

  • This particular aqueduct, built by the Emperor Claudius,

  • went 45 miles back, and it's an extraordinary

  • feat of engineering to bring water 45 miles without the use of pumps.

  • It means you have to keep it gently, gently, gently sloping down.

  • That means building great arches across the valleys.

  • Sometimes you build tunnels under mountains.

  • It's not just an extraordinary engineering feat,

  • it's also an extraordinary feat of organisation.

  • We happen to have a treatise by a chap called Frontinus.

  • He was a Roman general,

  • indeed he was the Roman general who conquered Wales.

  • And when he'd finished beating up a few barbarians

  • he came back to Rome and organised the aqueducts.

  • And he wrote down, being an extraordinarily efficient man,

  • in absolute detail about each aqueduct,

  • exactly how long it is, how many litres of water it carried,

  • how many men it had in the maintenance teams,

  • and so on and so on, and you can see the enormous administrative machine

  • that lies behind keeping the people of Rome supplied with fresh water.

  • After the fall of Rome in the fifth century,

  • the aqueducts fell into disrepair.

  • The Renaissance Popes tried to rebuild them

  • but even a thousand years later

  • couldn't match their ancient predecessors.

  • So the Aqua Marcia is a fantastic bit of Roman construction,

  • running at quite a high level, and here we have the Acqua Felice.

  • A sort of concrete tube was the best that the Popes could manage.

  • Here we have its name, Acqua Felice.

  • They're really rather proud of it,

  • they've put a little plaque in marble,

  • but let's not pretend it's at the same level of engineering expertise

  • as the Roman aqueducts of antiquity.

  • In fact, it was only reviving the ancient-Roman aqueduct system

  • that made the spectacular fountains of Renaissance Rome possible.

  • The Campo de' Fiori here, in the morning it's a flower and vegetable

  • market, in the evening it's where everyone comes for a drink.

  • In antiquity it's where the great Theatre of Pompey was,

  • and you can see it very clearly on the marble plan of Rome.

  • There's one more thing that really interests me about this place,

  • and it's the best salami shop in Rome,

  • and in fact I'm going there right now.

  • It was of enormous important to emperors to keep the citizens fed.

  • Quarter of a million citizens got free grain under Augustus,

  • but gradually emperors added other offers.

  • They got free oil.

  • In 270, the Emperor Aurelian - he's the guy who built the great

  • walls around Rome - he added a pork ration.

  • Five pounds of pork a head per month, they got.

  • In total, three million pounds of pork per annum

  • were consumed at the Emperor's expense.

  • And Rome, ancient Rome, was full of pork butchers, suarii.

  • And that tradition has lingered on.

  • Ooh, Andrea, buona sera!

  • 'The ancient Romans loved sausages. Me, too.

  • 'I often used to come here when I lived in Rome,

  • 'and Benedetto's always up for a bit of banter.'

  • Ah, bellissimo!

  • Ciao, Andrea. Ciao.

  • Just five minutes' walk from here, and marked on the marble map,

  • were the riverside docks of the ancient city.

  • It was an area of warehouses, shops and private dwellings,

  • as it is today.

  • Often the modern houses and businesses, like this restaurant,

  • are built on top of ancient ones.

  • - Buona sera. How are you? - Oh, Roberto! - Welcome.

  • THEY SPEAK ITALIAN

  • - A little Prosecco. - A little Prosecco, fantastic.

  • I suspected as much.

  • Every place I've ever been into here

  • has got yet another bit of ancient Rome.

  • 'This restaurant is built 20 feet above the ancient ground level.

  • 'So, who knows what treasures lie below?'

  • This is what I was hoping for, a little door down to the cellar!

  • What do we have?

  • You can smell the antiquity!

  • But this is amazing!

  • Oh, my God, there's a wee beastie down there.

  • I think it's a horse. No, no, is it a horse?

  • It's a hippocamp.

  • And there's someone on... That's a nymph riding a seahorse.

  • Absolutely fantastic!

  • That is a better piece of mosaic

  • than in the official excavations just behind.

  • Fantastico.

  • He says that's not all there is

  • because there are three further levels down below it.

  • And that's Rome. That's the heart of Rome.

  • Dig down and you will find antiquity,

  • and you find it at many levels.

  • The population of Rome was so vast that

  • even 2,000 years of history couldn't bury it all below ground level.

  • Well, here I am, standing on top of a ginormous Roman rubbish...

  • an ancient-Roman rubbish heap.

  • This is 50 metres and more above the modern street level.

  • That means that as we look around there's not a single rooftop

  • that even comes up near the height of this.

  • And it's enormous -

  • going around it, it's more than a kilometre in circumference.

  • That means it's the equivalent of something like six urban blocks.

  • And it's not any old rubbish. This is quite specialised rubbish.

  • Let's have a look at it.

  • It is entirely composed of these things,

  • terracotta fragments from...pots called amphorae.

  • It's been estimated that this hill is composed of 50 million amphorae.

  • So we know an enormous amount about Roman amphorae.

  • They're terribly distinctive, and they all come in different

  • shapes and sizes from all the corners of the Mediterranean.

  • And the archaeologists have studied these and what you need to do...

  • That's a bit of the bottom. But it's much better to get one of these.

  • Now, that is a rim and that gives you the dimensions of the amphora.

  • Erm, or you look for a handle. There's a nice handle.

  • And you can pin them down

  • and the archaeologists say that these are all from Spain,

  • from south Spain, from Baetica, and they all contained olive oil.

  • And what do they need this prodigious amount of olive oil for?

  • After all, there's a limit to how many salads you can eat.

  • But it's not just for cooking. It's also for illumination.

  • They don't have any electricity,

  • they have little lamps which they fill up with olive oil.

  • And it's also for washing.

  • There's no soap, so for cleaning you cover your body with olive oil

  • and scrape it down.

  • So they get through enormous quantities of this olive oil.

  • So our rubbish heap is on a great bend in the Tiber River.

  • You can just about make it out down there, that line of trees,

  • and it goes right round us and round there.

  • And this whole area down below us was full of warehouses.

  • And round the corner.

  • This particular stuff, these olive oil amphorae,

  • probably came from the Horrea Galbana, Galba's warehouses,

  • which is actually marked on the map of Rome.

  • The Tiber flows through the heart of modern Rome,

  • just as it did in ancient times.

  • But there were big differences between the river then and now.

  • Today, the Tiber is flanked on both sides by massive embankments.

  • These were built in the late 19th century

  • to stop the city from flooding.

  • In antiquity there were no embankments

  • and they had terrible problems with flooding, but they USED the river.

  • In antiquity the river was buzzing with activity,

  • there were boats coming up and down.

  • You don't see a single boat on the Tiber today.

  • There were hundreds of boats, bringing up merchandise -

  • grain, wine, oil, and luxury goods of course -

  • to the hundreds of warehouses that lined the banks of the river.

  • But for Rome to function for a million people

  • the Tiber could only work as part of a much bigger transport system.

  • With Rome expanding its trade links

  • to cater for an increasing population,

  • centres were established to handle the huge

  • amount of imported produce heading to the capital.

  • One of the places you get the most vivid idea of the sheer scale

  • and complexity of the trade that supplies Rome with food

  • is here in Ostia.

  • What we have is an enormous piazza with a sort of covered walkway here

  • and, behind it, a series of offices.

  • And this is where the shippers and traders do their business.

  • And they put up sort of publicity signs.

  • This is a picture of the River Nile and its delta.

  • Egypt and Alexandria were one of the most important

  • sources of trade in the Empire.

  • Here we have a rather nice picture of how you do the shipping.

  • You come into harbour with a big ship

  • and there's a guy on the gangplank, bringing over an amphora,

  • which is moving onto a smaller ship,

  • which is then going to go upriver to the warehouses in Rome.

  • Then over here...

  • ..we've got a rather nice scene of the lighthouse.

  • Of course, when you're coming across the Mediterranean

  • and you see the great lighthouse, you know you've made it at last.

  • And there are a couple of ships, dolphins and so on.

  • And here we can see just where they come from.

  • Here we have the navicularii, the shippers,

  • and the negotiantes, the businessmen,

  • of Karalis - that's Cagliari in Sardinia.

  • And remember it's not just one trade.

  • Some people owned the ships, some people do the negotiation,

  • do the business, because there is a lot of money, both to make

  • and to lose, in shipping.

  • And you can just imagine, this place would be

  • full of hundreds of traders trying to do a little deal.

  • One of the interesting things is they're all private,

  • they're doing it for the state,

  • they're doing it because Rome needs corn,

  • but individuals can make a packet out of it.

  • Here are the people... Isn't this wonderful?

  • This elephant, saying you are in North Africa,

  • and they are from Sabratha in Libya.

  • That whole coast of North Africa supplying Rome with corn

  • but also with other goods.

  • And this is the place where trade happens,

  • this is the place you come and make a fortune.

  • Ostia was such a lucrative hub for trade

  • that it flourished as a town in its own right.

  • And you can still see the trappings of wealth

  • in the buildings and decoration.

  • The wealth and global trade coming into Rome by the first century

  • meant Ostia couldn't cope.

  • Ancient Rome had to adapt and expand further.

  • And, two miles north of Ostia,

  • it embarked upon a monumental piece of infrastructure

  • to sustain its burgeoning city,

  • at the very site of modern Italy's greatest transport hub.

  • Well, here we are,

  • right by the hurly-burly of Rome's Fiumicino airport,

  • traffic whizzing past all the time, low-flying planes

  • whistling overhead. Sometimes hard to make yourself heard.

  • And yet this is one of the least well-known

  • but most important of Roman sites.

  • It's the great port of Rome

  • that the Romans simply called Portus, the port.

  • Now, Rome didn't have a natural harbour.

  • The Tiber comes out into the sea and it doesn't have a bay around it.

  • Think of Athens. They had the Piraeus, a natural harbour.

  • Rome had to make a harbour artificially,

  • overcoming natural obstacles.

  • And that took the resources of empire.

  • It took the Emperor Claudius,

  • and these columns are very typical of constructions

  • by the Emperor Claudius, who cared about infrastructure.

  • He cared about chunky, practical building,

  • and he made a vast artificial harbour at the mouth of the Tiber.

  • Along with the harbour

  • came all the surrounding buildings and warehouses.

  • To get a sense of the scale of this place,

  • I've come to meet my old friend Simon Keay,

  • who's made a remarkable discovery.

  • - Oh, my, Simon. You've been busy bees. - We certainly have.

  • It's quite a hole you've made in this poor beauty spot.

  • 'What Simon has excavated is just a tiny element

  • 'in a whole network of ship installations.

  • 'This trench represents just part of one bay

  • 'in what was a massive complex.'

  • This bay would originally have been just under 60 metres long,

  • so that's actually three of these.

  • - Imagine them stacked against one another. - So it goes way down there!

  • - And it's just under 12 metres wide. - Height?

  • Height, well... Are you prepared for it?

  • This is a building which stands to at least, well, a maximum of 18 metres,

  • - which is somewhere up there. - At the top of the trees? OK.

  • So this is truly massive.

  • And it's meant to be seen, it's a statement

  • about what the Romans are able to do, in creating a facade

  • that reflects Roman power and has a great functional use and so on.

  • What we're seeing is just a third of one ship bay.

  • Imagine, this 18-metre-high construction would have been

  • a tiny part of a complex that could berth at least 500 ships.

  • It gives us a glimpse of the remarkable scale

  • the port was built on.

  • The site occupies a staggering 860 acres.

  • Part of which is now the stately home of Duke Sforza Cesarini,

  • who feels a strong connection with his Roman past.

  • Claudius built Portus because Ostia became too small for Rome.

  • But trade grew so fast that the harbour had to be enlarged again,

  • in the second century, by Trajan.

  • A new, 80-acre basin was constructed.

  • 'It was recorded that it was formed in the shape of a huge hexagon,

  • 'to maximise the berthing space for ships.

  • 'You get little idea of this from the ground.

  • 'There's only one way to find out.'

  • - Ohhh. - Oh, wow. Fantastic.

  • Yeah, that's what we wanted.

  • 'From 500 metres in the air,

  • 'you can clearly make out the sides of Trajan's hexagon.'

  • Luckily enough, the Emperor Claudius left his mark in the shape

  • of this inscription here, which explains a bit about

  • what he thought he was doing in making his great port.

  • Like all imperial inscriptions

  • it starts with his name in enormous letters.

  • Tiberius Claudius son of Drusus Caesar,

  • and then a whole load of titles that go on for a couple of lines.

  • And then he explains what he's up to.

  • Fossis ductis - "I dug canals from the Tiber

  • "in order to support my works on the port.

  • "And by doing so," he says, "letting them out into the sea,

  • "I saved the city of Rome from the danger of flooding."

  • So he sees his engineering works as a whole package.

  • It's not just that he creates a port,

  • he links the port to the city by the canals

  • and the canals save the city from the danger of flooding.

  • Like this one.

  • Known as Fiumicino, or little river,

  • it gives its name to Rome's airport nearby.

  • And though it dates from the time of Claudius

  • it's still fully functioning.

  • And, even 400 years before these canals were completed, the Romans

  • had grasped the importance of drainage in their city.

  • One of the vital steps of turning Rome into a city

  • from just a cluster of villages

  • was to create a great drain, the Cloaca Maxima.

  • The original settlements were on hilltops, the Palatine Hill,

  • the Capitoline Hill, and between them was an enormous swamp,

  • a river flowing down and spreading out.

  • To get from one hilltop to another you had to use a boat.

  • And it's one of the first kings of Rome - you could call him

  • a tyrant, Tarquin - who famously created the Cloaca Maxima,

  • the great drain of Rome.

  • And what that great drain does is get rid of the swamp and create

  • a dry area which was to become the Forum, the heart of the city.

  • But the Cloaca Maxima served other purposes, too,

  • and progressively all sorts of stuff was sent down into the great drain

  • and it turned into a great sewer.

  • So, what's all this? OK.

  • Oh, crikey. Right. Another arm... That's another arm.

  • Ooh, it's rather small.

  • Right.

  • That'll keep the shit out.

  • The Cloaca runs nearly a mile from North to South,

  • traversing ancient and modern Rome underground.

  • The Greek writer Strabo said the sewer was wide enough to

  • drive a cart loaded with hay, and I can't argue with that.

  • It is huge.

  • I've come to meet the head of the archaeological team

  • looking at the Cloaca, Dr Luca Antonioli.

  • And you can see the wooden shuttering on which it was poured.

  • What I love about Roman cement

  • is this was poured in AD 100 or so

  • and it's still as solid and serviceable,

  • it works for the sewers of Rome today.

  • It doesn't need any form of repair.

  • It's remarkable that the Cloaca Maxima survived

  • whilst the rest of Rome was crumbling.

  • Over time, as the greatness of the city began to fade

  • and the Forum above was built over with the houses of a later Rome,

  • the Cloaca was forgotten.

  • They build new drains

  • because they don't even realise this drain is running underneath.

  • And it's not until... the 19th century,

  • when Rome becomes a capital city,

  • that they rediscover and reactivate the great sewers of ancient Rome.

  • Rome's sewers, like its aqueducts, were an attempt to tackle

  • the public health of a city which had topped a million people.

  • But daily life was not the only challenge.

  • So was death, and the problem of burial.

  • This may look like a park shed

  • but there's more to it than meets the eye.

  • From the second century BC onwards,

  • cremation had become increasingly popular at funerals.

  • Little wonder, with a rising urban population and space at a premium.

  • I have to say, this is one of my favourite Roman tombs.

  • It's called the Columbarium of Pomponius Hylas.

  • Well, as we discovered as we were coming down the stairs.

  • But Pomponius, was he the owner of this tomb? He wasn't, right?

  • No, he's clearly not.

  • There's a beautiful mosaic with his name and griffins around a lyre.

  • It's charming.

  • But it's quite clear he was one of the last people to be buried here.

  • The first guy's got to be this guy, hasn't it?

  • Or the first couple, because there's the man and his wife.

  • And they got a most prominent location as well,

  • probably not by the stairway but on the main wall,

  • and they built themself this really large and nice niche.

  • And you've got him and his wife depicted on them all.

  • And look at the material, they look like alabaster ash urns,

  • - which was very expensive. - Yeah, you pay a lot.

  • Yeah, because they probably actually paid for this whole thing.

  • They took care of the entire decoration on this ceiling

  • and here in the recess, you can see a similar style.

  • So I think we have to assume these are people who...

  • He's made a packet and yet, he's not one of the Roman nobles, is he?

  • The whole Roman fashion for having grand, ostentatious tombs

  • starts with the Roman nobility, but by the time we are here

  • in the 1st century AD, the sort of people who are being buried

  • are actually ex-slaves.

  • This guy is Granius Nestor.

  • Nestor, a sort of Greek mythological name,

  • a freeborn man could have it.

  • But it's very improbable.

  • - And his wife's called Hedone, meaning... - Different name.

  • Hedone, Mrs Pleasure.

  • That is a very characteristic slave name, isn't it?

  • They also present themselves, you know, in a very Roman way.

  • Look at him there, wearing a toga, holding a scroll.

  • It could be the sort of image that they want to project of themselves,

  • of good Roman citizens.

  • They're really showing that they made it, in a way,

  • they made it in their circle and look at it. Look at what they got.

  • The use of colour is fantastic, isn't it?

  • I mean, that was Egyptian blue, one of the most expensive pigments

  • that you could possibly get in antiquity.

  • So that already tells us something.

  • It's not like the other niches.

  • They are just yellow and red, which...

  • Your natural colours are way less expensive.

  • You want to project the same values that you have in real life

  • also here, you want to be able to see it in the commemorations

  • that perhaps were held here every year.

  • So that's what you want the living to see and to commemorate you for.

  • This tomb has over 100 niches for the ashes of those laid to rest.

  • The word "columbarium" comes from the Latin meaning "dovecote".

  • They come from a city that's densely populated.

  • There are tens of thousands of other people like them

  • and they don't even dream of having a tomb all to themselves.

  • They build it with lots and lots of slots for lots of other people.

  • It's a bit like a insula block, isn't it?

  • You can see them stacking up and they're all packed in like sardines.

  • Because, in a really crowded city,

  • you live stacked up in apartment blocks

  • and you die stacked up in columbaria.

  • Every great city depends on immigration.

  • It needs it for numbers, it needs it for cheap labour,

  • it needs it for specialist services.

  • Modern Rome, and here we are near the station, in an area

  • full of immigrants, Bangladeshis, Chinese, Africans,

  • Romanians, all sorts.

  • Modern Rome couldn't function without its immigrants.

  • And it's just the same in ancient Rome.

  • Unlike modern Europe, in ancient Rome, there's no limitation

  • on immigration and, indeed, there is compulsory immigration.

  • Slavery means that tens, even hundreds, of thousands of people

  • are brought from all over the world to Rome.

  • And then there are plenty who come voluntarily, free men,

  • citizens, they come to Rome to make their fortune.

  • The city had a massive draw.

  • Unlike the provinces, Rome was a tax-free zone and its citizens

  • received free hand-outs of food and sometimes even money.

  • Under the Emperor Augustus,

  • Rome became the biggest place of employment in the ancient world,

  • with public services which wouldn't be matched for another 1,800 years.

  • Amazingly, this even included a professional fire service

  • of 7,000 men.

  • The most important thing that Augustus did to protect Rome

  • from fire was to set up a fire brigade.

  • It was a quasi-military organization with seven cohorts.

  • This is an inscription put up by the fifth cohort.

  • In each cohort, there are 1,000 men.

  • Those seven cohorts controlled the 14 regions of Rome,

  • so each cohort is split in two and does two regions.

  • Here we have an inscription from Cohort Number Five.

  • And these three guys at the top in the biggest letters

  • are the most important.

  • The prefect, Gaius Julius Quintilianus.

  • The sub-prefect, Marcus Firmius Amyntianus.

  • And then there's a tribune

  • and then these guys are the centurions.

  • And one of the intriguing things about them is each of them

  • gives where they came from.

  • Now, you'd expect the fire brigade of Rome to be locally recruited,

  • but no.

  • This guy comes from a place called Berva, which is near Venice.

  • This guy comes from Savaria, which is in Hungary.

  • This one from Ratiaria, which is in Bulgaria.

  • This one from Poetovio, in Slovenia.

  • And this one from Aquincum, which is Budapest in Hungary.

  • So they come from way, way east of Rome.

  • That's not all.

  • You then flip round the other side and then you get all of the names

  • of the ordinary Vigiles, all 1,000 of them,

  • in teeny little letters, column after column.

  • Under the Emperor Nero in 64 AD,

  • the Vigiles were put to the test when a great fire swept Rome.

  • It was a disaster.

  • Notoriously, the Emperor was blamed for fiddling whilst Rome burned.

  • What the cause of the fire was can be debated,

  • but what's certain is how Nero responded afterwards.

  • We're underneath the street level of modern Rome

  • and under a multiplex cinema.

  • When they were constructed this,

  • they were trying to go further down to add extra rooms and what

  • they found was they were blocked by a massive bit of Roman building.

  • What we have here...

  • is two entire urban blocks, back-to-back with each other,

  • that were at least three floors in this insula.

  • We know from the brick stamps...

  • Romans liked to stamp their bricks with their names.

  • We know from those that it was built under the Emperor Nero.

  • What we can see here are the dividing walls of the two blocks.

  • And Nero said, "You're not allowed to use party walls,

  • "you can't build one block against another.

  • "You've got to have separate walls,

  • "because that stops the fire spreading."

  • During the great fire,

  • the Vigiles had complained of a lack of water to fight the flames.

  • Nero decreed that every insula must have access to a cistern

  • with an abundant water supply.

  • Despite his reforms, the myth about Nero lives on to this day.

  • The modern fire service takes its name from the Vigiles

  • and their ancient counterparts are still celebrated.

  • FIRE SIREN BLARES

  • MEN YELL IN LATIN

  • Wow, here is a fine-looking group of Vigiles.

  • The standard-bearer...

  • And a pretty tough lot they look.

  • I don't think I would want to mess with them.

  • And we have here the centurion.

  • THEY SPEAK IN ITALIAN

  • Certo, certo.

  • A Roman axe.

  • Well, well, this is one scary bit of kit.

  • This would be through the woodwork in no time.

  • Fabulous.

  • A Roman fire blanket, which you make of a patchwork of wool.

  • So this you dip in water but also vinegar,

  • because vinegar has an important fire retardant effect.

  • 'Water was transported from the systems using amphorae.'

  • Yes, I can imagine it might be a bit hard to extinguish a fire

  • just chucking it straight from the amphorae.

  • But the Vigiles had a secret weapon...

  • a hydraulic pump called a siphon.

  • So you have two tubes, one sucks the water in,

  • then it passes into the piston and, as the water goes in,

  • the air is under pressure and then,

  • as you send the valves up and down, the water squirts out both sides.

  • - Bravissimo. - Grazie.

  • Fantastico.

  • Nero's Vigiles were a semi-military organization

  • and also had a policing role.

  • Together with other paramilitary forces, there were no less

  • than 20,000 man dedicated to keeping Rome's citizens safe.

  • The principles of policing have remained the same in modern Rome,

  • though the technology has changed.

  • CCTV performs many of the surveillance duties

  • done by the Vigiles.

  • But though the Romans didn't possess digital mapping,

  • they did understand that planning, just as in so many spheres

  • of Roman life, was the key to making their city work.

  • The only private house marked on the Forma Urbis

  • is the residence of the urban prefect, Fabius Cilo,

  • the man responsible for Rome's forces of law and order.

  • It seems very possible that the document that has helped us

  • understand the plan of ancient Rome was in fact

  • displayed in the office of their Chief of Police.

  • Already under Augustus, the population of Rome

  • had reached a million and it probably stayed at more or less

  • the same level for the next 300, even 400 years.

  • It's not until the imperial power of Rome implodes

  • that the population also collapses.

  • By the middle of the 6th century,

  • it may have shrunk to as few as 30,000 people.

  • And no city in Europe was again to reach the figure of a million

  • until the beginning of the 19th century.

  • You're looking at it now.

  • By no coincidence, London, too, was capital of a world empire,

  • and made no disguise of the act it was following.

  • Yet, Rome had achieved a million when the world population

  • was a fraction of its modern size

  • and without motor transport, gas or electricity.

  • Today, we live in a world of megacities,

  • but Rome remains the inspiration for them all.

Rome, 2,000 years ago, was the world's first ancient megacity.

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BBC Building the Ancient City Athens and Rome 2of2

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    Amy.Lin に公開 2018 年 08 月 10 日
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