Mary Beard’s Ultimate Rome: Empire Without Limit

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 program me 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 channel led 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