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This is the Appian Way,
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one of the roads that took thousands of Romans
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in and out of their capital city every day.
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Young and old, rich and poor, clean and dirty.
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And it's where I want to start,
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asking a question that really interests me.
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Who were the ancient Romans?
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Outside the city, it was lined with thousands and thousands of tombs,
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so before you got into the city of Rome, you'd already met the Romans.
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Dead ones, that is.
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And the lives of many of them began or ended a long way from Rome.
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This is just a tiny fragment of someone's tomb.
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Someone called Eschinus.
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"Occisus est in Lusitania".
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He was murdered in Spain.
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This lady's Usia Prima,
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a priestess of the Egyptian goddess Isis,
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and there's her little sacred rattle.
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She's almost looking at you.
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I feel like saying, "Pleased to meet you, Prima."
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They come from every walk of life and every part of the Empire,
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and a lot of them had once been slaves.
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These aren't the kind of guys we usually think of
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when we think of Romans.
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These Romans all lived at the centre of a vast Empire
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that stretched from Spain to Syria,
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and which dominated the Western world for over 700 years.
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Like it or not, ancient Rome is still all around us,
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in our roads, laws and architecture.
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We keep on recreating it in film and fiction,
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and every year, thousands of us trek here
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to see its monuments up close,
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and to imagine the emperors and the armies,
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the gladiators, and let's be honest, the gore.
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But hidden all over the modern city,
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in its walls, behind the facades,
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even under its streets,
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is something much harder to find but just as captivating -
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the forgotten voices of the ordinary people.
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They're still there, if you know where to look.
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Calidius Eroticus means "Mr Hot Sex".
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This is a Roman menage a trois.
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This wasn't just a mugging.
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This was mass murder.
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The Romans didn't just carve their names and dates on their tombstones.
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Keen never to be forgotten,
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they left their thoughts,
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their achievements, even entire life stories chiselled into stone.
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It's a unique record of real Roman lives.
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I've spent most of my life with the ancient Romans,
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and not just the big guys - the emperors, the politicians,
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the generals, the posh ones.
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The people I've most enjoyed getting to know are the ordinary ones,
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who had their own part to play in the story
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of this extraordinary city.
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And what gets to me every time
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is that we can still have a conversation with them -
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even 2,000 years later.
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In this series, I'm going to get their voices speaking again,
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to piece together a very different story of life in ancient Rome.
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I'll step behind the doors of their homes to meet
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flesh and blood Roman families whose lives and possessions
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can reflect our own in surprising ways.
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This is something a bit special.
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She's not just Barbie, she's Empress Barbie.
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I'll go down into the streets, where the dirt, crime,
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sex and humour in everyday Roman life shows us
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what it was like to live in an ancient city of a million people.
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"Baths, wine and sex," he said, "ruin your body."
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True. But they're what makes life really worth living.
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But I'll start by telling the real story of Imperial Rome,
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looking beyond the violence and spectacle
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to find a global city which reached for talent and treasure
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from the far ends of the earth -
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a place where everything and everyone was from somewhere else.
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These are the Romans I'm interested in.
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Welcome to my Rome.
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When you arrived in Rome at its imperial height 2,000 years ago,
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you found yourself in a new kind of city.
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Rome had once been a small city-state,
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but in conquest after conquest,
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it became capital of a vast Empire,
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a place in which, for the first time in history,
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a million people from three continents managed to live together.
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One thing we know about Rome is it wasn't just a city,
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it was an Empire,
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and for us, that means marauding armies,
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conquering generals and bloodthirsty emperors.
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We tend not to think about the ordinary people
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who lived here at the very heart of it all.
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For them, the Empire brought them into contact with a whole world,
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from Scotland to Afghanistan,
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and it made this city a more cosmopolitan place
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than anywhere had ever been before or would be again
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for hundreds of years.
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And we're always asking, "What did the Romans do for us?"
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I think we should be asking,
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"What did the Empire do to the Romans?
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"And who were those Romans, anyway?"
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Around the city, there's more evidence than you'd think
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for the impact that Roman conquest had
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on the lives of ordinary people here.
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All it requires is that we look from a slightly different angle.
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One of the most famous monuments in the forum
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celebrates the moment when one conquering army came home.
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In 71 AD, the city got a day off
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for the triumphal return of the emperor Vespasian and his son Titus,
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who had crushed a rebellion in Judea.
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We've got here the victorious general, Titus,
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driving through the streets of Rome in his chariot
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to celebrate his victory...
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..and on the other side,
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we've got the booty that he's brought home with him.
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Titus had devastatingly conquered the Jews,
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and here we can see the loot that he has got from the Jewish temple.
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It's a grand display,
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but what I want to do is
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to try and undercut the pomposity of it a bit,
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and to ask what was it like for the people,
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the ordinary Romans who showed up to watch this,
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left their apartments and came to see the spectacle?
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A triumph like this would have been the first sight the Roman people had
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of all the things the armies brought back from their distant victories.
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The rich spoils, the maps of the conquered territory,
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the models of the fighting,
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even the trees that they'd uprooted and brought back to Rome.
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How did people react?
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Some must have gasped, others would have jeered the captives.
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Or maybe their minds were on other things.
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One Roman poet recommends the triumphal procession
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as a place to pick up a girl.
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How would you do it?
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Well, he says, watch the stuff go past, nudge up to her and say,
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"Ooh. I think that's the Euphrates there,
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"and that's the Tigris over there."
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You don't have to know, he says, you just have to sound confident.
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And then you'll make your own conquest!
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It's a good joke.
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But it also hints at the way Roman lives could be changed
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by the spoils coming back from the Empire.
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This girl can't have been the only person who found all this
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pretty strange, but also exciting.
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So what did the Roman armies bring back from the Empire?
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The import that made the biggest impact
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is one we don't think about often enough - human beings.
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These are forgotten people, but if we take the time to listen,
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we can still hear the voices of some of the millions
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who followed the Roman armies into the city
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for all sorts of different reasons.
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"This is for my brother, Habibi Annu from Palmyra.
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"I'm Germanus, Regulus' mule driver."
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"This is for Diocles, champion chariot racer from Spain."
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Here we've got a young slave girl, age 17,
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Phryne, the slave of Tertulla.
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"Africana". She came from Africa.
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This one is put up by a soldier for his wife Carnuntilla,
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born near Vienna in ancient Pannonia.
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What's weird is that Carnuntilla isn't really a real name.
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It comes from the name of a town in Pannonia, Carnuntum.
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It means, sort of, "my babe from Carnuntum".
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So my guess is,
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he perhaps bought this girl as a slave,
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he freed her, he brought her back to Rome, he married her.
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But sadly, his babe from Carnuntum died when she was just 19.
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Poignant stories like this are everywhere in the city.
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They're reminders of the different ways
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real lives could begin abroad and end in Rome.
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But there's more to it than that.
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These people weren't just brought in to serve the Romans.
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They were becoming Romans.
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One of the tombs on the Appian Way
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gives us the other side of the story of the Arch of Titus.
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It's a tombstone of three guys,
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one called Baricha, one called Zabda,
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and one called Achiba - typical Jewish names.
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So the question is, what's the story of Baricha, Zabda and Achiba?
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How did they get here?
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If they did start out life in Judea,
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how come they end up as Roman citizens in Rome?
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It's more surprising than you think.
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To judge from the letters and how they're written on this stone,
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this was carved in the first century AD,
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and at that point, we can put two and two together.
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I'm almost certain that these three men
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must have been part of the Jewish rebellion against the Romans
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in the late 60s AD.
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These men surely came into Rome with Titus' army,
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as prisoners of war.
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It must have seemed like the worst moment of their lives -
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jeered at, catcalls, people throwing things at them.
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But perhaps worse was to come.
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They were auctioned off as slaves
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and bought by a man called Lucius Valerius.
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What their life in slavery was like, we don't know, but he freed them,
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and they become new Roman citizens,
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with his name, Lucius Valerius,
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but their Jewish names
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still asserting their Jewish sense of identity.
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This is one of the ways that Roman conquest works.
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It does bring slaves, but it also brings,
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eventually, new Roman citizens.
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It's a fairy-tale happy ending,
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and a classic Roman story.
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When guys like this were freed,
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they didn't just go back to their old lives in Judea.
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They stayed in their new home, and what's more,
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they became Romans, with all the rights and privileges
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which came with full Roman citizenship.
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But what kept them in Rome? How many of them were there?
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And where did all these new Romans live?
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To try and make sense of it all,
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I went to meet a colleague in Trastevere, which literally means
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"across the Tiber from the ancient city centre".
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It's got a reputation as a bit of an immigrant area in Rome even now.
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This area, Trastevere, across the Tiber,
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was the fringe of the ancient city of Rome,
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and this is where we have the biggest evidence
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for immigrant communities - Jews, the Syrians.
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I guess if you said to an ancient Roman,
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"Where's the biggest immigrant area of the ancient city of Rome?"
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They'd have said... Over the river. Over. On the other side, yeah.
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Part of the answer to the question
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of why an area like this could be so cosmopolitan
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lies in the story of slaves like Baricha, Zabda and Achiba.
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Greeks thought Romans were really weird
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for freeing as many slaves as they did.
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And making them citizens? Yes.
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Although it's very brutal,
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being a slave can be a kind of stage in a life, like an apprenticeship.
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You come in as a German, you get a Roman name, you learn Latin,
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or you learn to manage in Latin,
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you learn some kind of job that's useful to your master,
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your master sets you free, and there you are -
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you're a Roman citizen with a trade and a Roman name
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and a bunch of powerful people you know.
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Yeah. This is your entry into Roman society.
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Now, multiply that by hundreds and thousands of slaves being freed,
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and you can see that the whole ethnic nature
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of the people who call themselves Roman citizens
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is really changing very quickly.
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Roman is a kind of vocation.
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It's a movement into which other people are drawn.
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This was a completely new idea.
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And, in many ways, the secret of the Empire's success.