Mary Beard’s Ultimate Rome: Empire Without Limit

This is the skull of a Roman.

When we say "Romans", we tend to think of men from Italy

dressed up in togas, orating in the Forum, trampling over

the fields in armour, building bridges and probably overeating.

This Roman lived in York.

And this Roman was a woman.

All we know about her comes from her bones and what was found with them.

She can't have been more than about 20 when she died

and she must have been pretty well-off,

to judge from the nice jewellery that was found with her.

It's a lovely little blue necklace...

...a jet bracelet, an ivory bangle,

a nice blue glass vase and a pair of little glass earrings.

There's actually more to her than that.

We can tell from the shape of the skull

that she was certainly of mixed race.

Either she came from North Africa or maybe her parents

or perhaps her grandparents.

So she really makes us think -

who were the Romans?

And what did it mean to be Roman?

Of all the ingredients that helped the Romans build their empire,

none was so successful or surprising as the one you can't see.

Citizenship.

And their ability to turn people not born in Rome

into fully fledged Romans.

He saw the toga everywhere. "Frequens toga."

A Roman could be all sorts of different people.

Rich or poor, black or white, from the fringes of the Sahara

to the damp frontier of northern Britain.

The Britons were really tough. It was true grit!

So what difference did it make to be a Roman?

And how did you become one?

Buried behind a modern industrial estate in southern Spain

are the ruins of a small Roman settlement.

You have to be pretty determined to find this site.

I don't think it's on the main tourist beat, really.

This is the beginning and the entrance to the site.

It's beginning to look a bit more hopefully Roman.

Right.

This one looks fairly ordinary, but for me, this place is one

of the most important places in the whole history of the Roman Empire.

The story goes back to 171 BC.

A delegation from Spain turned up in Rome,

representing more than 4,000 men who were the sons of Roman soldiers

and Spanish women, and as such, they had no political rights.

They were effectively stateless and they were looking for a home.

It was one of the unintended consequences of conquest and, interestingly,

the historian Livy calls these people "a new species".

And the Romans, characteristically, improvised a new solution.

For a start, they gave them Carteia to be their home.

But the Romans did more than that.

They didn't just give them a home, they gave them a status.

They made them Latins, which was the kind of halfway house

between being full Roman citizens and not citizens at all.

And that may not sound very much, but it was actually revolutionary,

because it established the principle that you could be a Roman citizen

of some sort without having anything to do with Rome and Italy itself.

And it kick-started a process that ended up, hundreds of years later,

with every free inhabitant of the Roman Empire being a Roman citizen.

Throughout history, citizenship has come in many forms.

But the idea that outsiders in large numbers could become Roman citizens

was entirely new in the ancient world.

Radical, startling and the unique ingredient of empire.

To see what being Roman looked like thousands of kilometres from Rome itself,

I've come to what is now Algeria, on the Empire's southern edges.

When the Romans conquered a place, they didn't

set about imposing their norms, they didn't make people learn Latin,

they didn't make people worship Roman gods,

they didn't even make people use the Roman calendar.

They exercised their power through incorporation.

Now, I'm not talking about the poor suffering peasants here,

but they managed to get the local elites onside.

And one of the main ways they managed that was by extending

full Roman citizenship.

Salud!

Roman citizenship was always a gift.

You didn't have to pass a citizenship test, or pay a fee,

you didn't have to learn Latin, and you didn't have to salute the flag.

Not that Romans had flags, but you know what I mean.

So, why would you want to be a Roman citizen?

Well, there were all kinds of particular legal rights it

gave you - to make contracts, marriage rights,

and it meant you could never be crucified.

I doubt that that's what's driving most people.

The important thing about Roman citizenship was that it gave

you a stake in Rome.

It's a bit like the American Dream.

You know it doesn't work for most people, but the dream still matters.

We don't know how far the extension of citizenship was

a carefully planned strategy, or one of history's lucky accidents,

but the Roman Empire worked better by bringing people in

and not by keeping them down.

Now, we shouldn't exaggerate the effect.

I bet many locals here wouldn't have been keen on becoming Roman

citizens or wouldn't have cared either way.

And in any case, imperialism is never cosily consensual.

Algeria is no stranger to the conflicts of empire,

to put it mildly.

From the Ancient Phoenicians, through the Arabs

and Ottomans, to the French, and that's not to mention the Romans.

In fact, it's in Algeria that some of the most impressive Roman

remains in the whole world are to be found.

And they have really important stories to tell.

The story of Roman Algeria began, as most stories of the empire

began, with the brutal oppression of the native population.

I'm driving through what were once the killing fields of Africa.

It's where the Romans fought for decades and even after the conquest

proper, there were thousands of soldiers stationed here,

policing and nudging the frontier sand.

Even in parts of the empire where there had been no towns before,

the Romans sponsored,

encouraged and bankrolled

the building of cities, Roman style.

Timgad was originally built for retired Roman soldiers,

serving nearby, to settle.

And it reveals a lot about how Rome put down roots far from Italy

and how its identity

and culture flourished at the fringes of the empire.

I'm beginning to get my bearings now.

This must have been one of the main gateways into the town.

When you first walk in, it looks a terrible jumble, actually,

but almost instantly, you come to a cross street, you can

see another paved street, an absolute grid pattern.

This must be one of the best surviving examples of Roman

town planning anywhere in the empire.

It's a pretty aggressive statement of Roman-ness in the middle of the

desert, which means it's not that hard for me to find my way around.

And I guess I'm now in a little house, and a rather splendid door...

This is a truly regal set of Roman loos.

It's on the standard multi-seater pattern.

You get a little bit of privacy from these rather natty dolphins here.

It's a nice thought, I think, that one of the poshest sets

of loos anywhere in the Roman world is still to be found in Algeria.

Ooh!

What I've got in my sights now is a rather grand building coming up,

the grandest we've seen really, with a whole load of columns,

which is worth exploring, I think.

A rather posh entrance courtyard. What on earth is it?

This is really interesting. It's a bibliotheca. It's a library.

If that's the case, it must be, this is a very, very rare example

of a surviving public, presumably, library from the Roman world.

It's very smart.

Sort of...

It's quite interesting that we've come into this town

and the first monument we really met is indeed a monument to culture.

The public library.

I think if I'd been a citizen of Timgad,

this is where I would have spent my time, if I'd been allowed.

My guess is that this library was a pretty blokeish community.

It might have started off as a Roman soldiers' retirement home,

but within just a few generations of its birth,

Timgad had expanded well beyond its original foundations,

home to over 10,000 reasonably peaceful

inhabitants of Roman, African and Berber descent.

You might expect to see a very filtered down version

of Roman-ness here, and yet, we find quite the opposite.

This is the main square, the forum, the centre of business life,

commerce, law and local government.

What is striking is it actually looks so standard.

Anyone visiting here from Roman Italy would instantly

recognise this as the forum.

Recognise this as the forum.

And yet, we're just on the edge of the Sahara.

Whoever designed this must have been working from some

kind of kit for Roman forums.

Or actually, a kit for a whole Roman town.

You really do get the feeling that the people of Timgad are

investing unusually heavily in high culture and in their Roman identity.

All around the forum, all around town,

there are thousands of inscriptions proclaiming

the Roman-ness of the inhabitants,

but the man who really capped it all for culture is this man, Vocontius.

And it's actually written, not in the usual capital letters that you

see on inscriptions, but in the lower case

that you get in manuscripts,

so it's as if you're reading a book here.

Now, instead of the usual CV that you'd expect under his statue,

you get an elaborate hymn of praise

to Vocontius's culture.

The ordo, the local council, has put this up to him.

It's the council of the town that lives next to a spring,

a spring that brings it water.

But Vocontius is a spring, they say, that brings them something more.

He's their "other source".

What he's a source of is not water, it's culture, literature

and eloquence.

Here, on the margins of the empire, the people of Timgad

are as committed as anyone else to showing they are Romans.

All these mosaics come from the floors of buildings in Timgad

and they give you some idea of what the original

colour of the place must have been like.

And also, the richness.

We might call this Roman soft power.

Most of the people who lived in Timgad would never actually

have seen Rome, but they're using their Roman-ness as a badge

of honour, a way of showing they belong.

That must come from a little bath building -

"Have a good bath," it says.

And I suppose it means - flip-flops only in here.