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  • This programme contains some strong language.

  • In 79AD, this volcano exploded.

  • Down below, around the bay of Naples, there were farms, houses,

  • luxurious villas, Roman towns.

  • The best known is Pompeii.

  • The eruption which wiped this ancient town off the Roman map

  • is one of the world's most famous disasters,

  • but the tragedy has given historians a priceless legacy.

  • The inhabitants were overwhelmed by gas, lethal gas, volcanic debris

  • and we found their bodies exactly where they died.

  • Many have been cast in plaster, frozen in time.

  • They've tantalised the world with their last horrific moments of death.

  • But they tell us little about their lives.

  • Now, in a cellar just two miles outside Pompeii,

  • are 54 well-preserved skeletons lying exactly where they died.

  • They were hiding from the full force of the volcano.

  • 2,000 years later, they're about to give up their secrets.

  • I'm wondering whether they can tell us something

  • about the most interesting question in Pompeii,

  • which is not how the people died, we know how they died,

  • it's about how the people in Pompeii actually lived.

  • For the 25 years I've taught classics at Cambridge

  • I've been fascinated by what life was really like day to day in ancient Pompeii.

  • I am hoping these skeletons will help take this understanding

  • one step further and put my theories to the test.

  • I'll explore the opulent and the ordinary.

  • Don't have to be rich to wear jewellery.

  • In a city of the refined and the rude.

  • It looks to me as if the woman is on top of him but sucking his toes.

  • I'll see the hardship endured, and the pleasures savoured.

  • These guys don't look too pissed yet.

  • I can't find where I left my glass.

  • I want to see if we can probe a bit deeper and get beneath the skin of this ancient town.

  • - You don't get closer to real Rome than being in a cesspit, do you? - No.

  • I am hoping that the people in the cellar will help me discover

  • what life was like before Vesuvius forced them to flee.

  • Pompeii is the most important archaeological site in the Roman world.

  • Nowhere else do we come face to face with antiquity

  • up close in quite this personal way.

  • These perfectly preserved ruins

  • bring millions of us here each year to see a snapshot of Roman life.

  • But that's all we see, a snapshot.

  • Of a society where it appears the rich enjoyed a life of luxury

  • and everyone else, the poor and the slaves, lived lives of drudgery.

  • That's always seemed too simple to me.

  • It's much more interesting than that.

  • I want to bust a few myths about the rich and the poor in Pompeii.

  • This was the stretch of coastline where rich Romans,

  • I mean really, really rich Romans from the capital,

  • used to come for their holidays.

  • It was supposed to be particularly popular with the fast set,

  • they came here to gamble, to have fun, to have sex.

  • Sort of a cross between Las Vegas and Brighton.

  • And that's what makes Pompeii so remarkable.

  • It was a town where ordinary people lived cheek by jowl

  • with the hedonistic rich.

  • It had all the essentials of a Roman town, with a forum at one end,

  • and at the other an amphitheatre and training ground for gladiators.

  • A market, temples, baths, even a brothel.

  • Perhaps 12,000 people packed into less than a square mile.

  • Pompeii lies between the Mediterranean and Vesuvius.

  • It's 17 miles along the coast from Naples, not far from Herculaneum,

  • and it's in a suburb of Pompeii,

  • Oplontis, where the cellar of skeletons was unearthed.

  • It must have seemed a sensible place to come.

  • It's partly underground and that would have seemed safe,

  • but it's got good access from the road outside.

  • It's very hard not to be...

  • moved by this site.

  • They might be 2,000 years old

  • but they're still victims of a terrible human tragedy.

  • On the other hand, I can't help wondering

  • what these bones might tell us about the life of these people.

  • The first thing we can tell from the cellar

  • is that these people appear to be divided into two groups.

  • On one side they were carrying money and jewels.

  • These bodies have been catalogued and tidied away into boxes.

  • The others, left where they fell, were found with nothing.

  • So how can we explain this divide?

  • You could come up with all kinds of theories as to why it might be.

  • But for my money the most likely thing is that we're dealing with a distinction in wealth.

  • These skeletons are important

  • because many of the bones found at Pompeii have simply been jumbled up.

  • And the plaster casts, they're very poignant, but are much less useful

  • for forensic science because the bones inside get contaminated.

  • Remains preserved like those in the cellar

  • exactly where the people died are rare.

  • For the first time,

  • these are going to be analysed by a forensic team, led by Fabian Kanz.

  • So far we have found at least 54 individuals here, at least,

  • and this gives us a broad cross section of the society

  • of the Romans at that time.

  • The point is we have a great opportunity here because we have a snapshot of the society.

  • We might have slaves, we might have upper class people,

  • and we can find out if there have been big differences.

  • One of the most complete skeletons is that of a man of about 55.

  • Apart from some dental cavities he seems in pretty good nick.

  • If you look at the other bones, I noticed this.

  • I don't know much about skeletons but that looks to me like

  • something that's got a real big muscle attachment.

  • Yes, it's the right upper arm,

  • and it's the muscle attachment for the brachialis,

  • and as you can see on the left side, it's nearly the same.

  • And he must be a really strong man.

  • He's my age, he's got about as good teeth as me, but he's much stronger.

  • These are the rest of his bones, but why are his bones green?

  • Yes, you're right. On the whole left side he's green.

  • And green comes from metal objects, which means he was wealthy.

  • There was some bronze or copper

  • or brass objects buried with him.

  • He had a considerable amount of metal wealth with him.

  • Yes, the acid in the soil is reacting with the metal object

  • and that makes him green.

  • Nearly all of the so-called rich sample, have been at least one or two bones green.

  • So they all have been buried close to something metal.

  • Whereas what we call the poor, do any of them have this green?

  • No, not at all.

  • Carrying no possessions at all, the bones of the people on one side are unmarked.

  • But, on the other side of the cellar, the people with green bones

  • were discovered with a dazzling array of objects.

  • These are now kept in a guarded vault

  • at the archaeological museum in Naples.

  • For the very first time I've been allowed to get really

  • close to this amazing stuff, and actually get my hands on it.

  • Look, this is really exciting for me.

  • This is the first time I have even touched any jewellery from Pompeii.

  • I am going got be very naughty, and put the bracelet on.

  • However cynical you are, however much a boring old academic you are,

  • it's still exciting to wear the bracelet worn 2,000 years ago.

  • Nothing will ever stop me thinking that's exciting.

  • I think this is very attractive, actually.

  • You pick it up, you can feel instantly it's heavy. This is a solid bangle.

  • But what strikes you about it, instantly, is that it's so big.

  • It's not only women that wear bracelets,

  • this could be man's jewellery, a big hunky man.

  • This is really is a very, very delicate piece of jewellery.

  • They told specifically that I'm not allowed to try this one on.

  • The links are really tiny.

  • It's very high-quality workmanship, very nicely done.

  • It must've been, it would be very pricey now,

  • it must have been pricey then, too.

  • There was a vast treasure horde in the cellar.

  • Close to the skeleton of the man with green bones,

  • was a woman in her early twenties.

  • She had with her

  • one of the very, very biggest amounts of money found with anybody,

  • anywhere in Pompeii.

  • In Roman currency, it was 10,000 sesterces.

  • What that means is it's about the equivalent

  • of 10 year's pay for a legionary Roman soldier.

  • These are some of the coins.

  • Some were in silver, but a lot were in gold.

  • And she had them with her in two separate containers.

  • Instantly you can see

  • the silver ones are very worn.

  • These actually have been

  • money in circulation. These are for actually buying things in the Pompeian market place.

  • But the gold ones are in absolutely beautiful condition.

  • I think what this tells us is these really have been somebody's savings.

  • You can imagine very easily what must have happened, that the people were fleeing,

  • they wanted to take their valuables with them, they get the purse,

  • they stuff what's most important to them, these things.

  • They stuff it inside the purse, put it in their pocket and off they go.

  • This is what the people in the cellar chose to take with them

  • as they tried to escape.

  • They sought refuge from the eruption in what was probably an underground storeroom.

  • They never made it further than this cellar in Oplontis.

  • The building above the cellar appears, at first,

  • like a two-storey, residential home.

  • But, if you explore a little further,

  • you see that much more was going on.

  • There's a large building with two floors of storerooms,

  • piles of big containers and wheel ruts made by hundreds of carts.

  • This was clearly more than somebody's house.

  • This is an agricultural depot.

  • It's ghostly now.

  • In Roman times, it must have been an absolute hub of activity with people

  • packing things up, carting things, wheeling them off,

  • getting them ready for despatch.

  • Whoever owned this place must have been pretty wealthy.

  • But he wasn't anything like as wealthy as one of his neighbours,

  • because just over there, few yards form this place,

  • is one of the most luxurious villas

  • ever found in all of the Roman world.

  • The cellar is only a stone's throw from this stunning Roman mansion.

  • 100 rooms, decorated with sumptuous frescos, painted with pigments from

  • the farthest corners of the Roman empire.

  • And to top it all, an Olympic-size 200-foot-long swimming pool,

  • where the guests could let their hair down.

  • So, while the rich frolicked at their pool parties,

  • what was life like on the streets of Pompeii?

  • What I used to...

  • Mattia Buondonno's family has lived in Pompeii for generations

  • and he's one of the site's most experienced guides.

  • He's got a local sense of how this place might once have been.

  • What's your sense of what the ancient town was like, the basics, what was life like here?

  • Smell!

  • Smell of the people, smell of the activities of

  • commerciality that was here, smell on everywhere,

  • smelling on money.

  • And the smell of the animals too, presumably.

  • - Yes! - And just think of the smell of the shit.

  • - Yes! - Awful!

  • For them was normal life.

  • To get an idea of Pompeii

  • as the people in the cellar would have seen it, I've come to Naples.

  • Though it's a modern city,

  • there are some striking similarities with the ancient town nearby.

  • - So, you could feel yourself in Pompeii. - Here? - Yes. - Why?

  • Because more or less, the atmosphere, the first floor,

  • and the busy town...

  • It's easy to forget that Pompeii was a two-storey town.

  • People lived above their shops and bars and stairs opened

  • right onto the streets, just as they do in Naples today.

  • I think people often wonder where all the stuff was in a Pompeian shop or a bar.

  • What this tells you is that you can actually hang it from the ceiling...

  • Like they did 2,000 years ago, as this painting shows us.

  • All around modern Naples are echoes of Pompeii's past.

  • From the doors, just like the ones you see in Pompeian frescos.

  • - There are things like this in Pompeii, are they? - Oh yes, they had! They had!

  • - Careful, because we don't want the owner to come. - OK, we can get out.

  • To the images they left on their walls.

  • I think the graffiti is pretty Pompeian.

  • The Pompeian graffiti were better than this.

  • Yes, they were wittier. Wittier, I think.

  • Ah! That's very Pompeian, is it?

  • No, Pompeii was cleaner.

  • - Pompeii was cleaner than that? - Yeah.

  • You really think so?

  • Mattia, you don't, do you?

  • So we can find all kinds of clues

  • as to how ancient Pompeians lived in modern Naples.

  • But what can the bones from the cellar

  • add to the picture of their lives?

  • This looks quite ordinary to me. This is the leg bone?

  • This is the lower part of the leg bone and if you compare it to

  • this bone, it's swollen and you can see all these little holes.

  • - And what is that? - This is an infection of the skin and the bone.

  • A possible reason for this might be a cut, is one explanation for it.

  • So, you get a cut, you haven't got any antiseptic...

  • ..you maybe you don't even know exactly what the relationship

  • is between dirt and infection,

  • so the cut never properly heals and is a kind of

  • lifetime infection really.

  • Painful or not painful?

  • Very painful, very painful.

  • So where could this infection have come from?

  • After all, we tend to think of Romans as a rather clean lot,

  • regularly visiting the baths.

  • It's true that bathing was an important part of life,

  • as we can see at the baths near the forum in Pompeii.

  • They give us a better picture than anywhere else in the world of how Roman bathing actually worked.

  • This is where you took your clothes off.

  • I think it must have been quite stunning to come in from the hot

  • sweaty outside, through the narrow corridor

  • into this beautifully decorated room.

  • You have to imagine the baths as being a place where someone,

  • who's life could be a little bit drab, could come to bright colours,

  • twinkling lights, water splashing, everybody with their clothes off.

  • The baths were the people's palace.

  • Bathing was a great leveller.

  • Almost everyone in ancient Rome, rich and poor, men and women

  • would have gone to the baths,

  • including the people from our cellar.

  • These feats of engineering had under-floor heating,

  • a series of hot and cold rooms and in Rome itself, they could even have a library attached.

  • You get all sorts of things when you come into Roman Baths.

  • You get hot and cool, you get rest, but it's also crucial to remember,

  • you get wonderful things to look at, too,

  • and the ceiling still has some traces of the kinds of

  • over-the-top decoration that you expect in a really good Roman bath

  • and everybody shares those things.

  • We tend to think of these luxurious baths as pristine marble palaces,

  • where people came to get clean.

  • But is that really the case?

  • Here is where I guess you'd have spend your time,

  • in this lovely marble pool.

  • It's a bit like a Jacuzzi, think California

  • or perhaps think rugby club.

  • You sit down, the warm water is around your feet,

  • this is a great time to relax,

  • to talk to your friends, in this lovely setting.

  • There is however a nasty surprise in store.

  • We can see ever so clearly where the water comes into this pool,

  • there is a nice little spout here to bring the water in

  • but you can look all around and there isn't a single place where it can go out.

  • All this means is there's absolutely no circulation of water

  • at all in this pool.

  • All people who piss in here, their sweat,

  • it all comes into a steaming hot, watery mess.

  • Just how healthy is that?

  • It's not at all healthy,

  • even some Roman doctors realised it wasn't healthy.

  • The great Roman doctor called Celsus, who says,

  • "Make sure you don't go to the baths if you've got an open wound,

  • "because you're likely to die of gangrene if you do."

  • Whether the people in the cellar made that connection we don't know.

  • But the bones offer an extraordinary revelation about another area

  • of the population's health.

  • - So these are two different people, are they? - Yes, two different people.

  • 10 to 12-year-old children.

  • They're both the same age and they both have the same abnormalities on their teeth.

  • We think, most probably, they have been twins.

  • Same age, same teeth.

  • Yes and they had a problem.

  • On closer examination of the twin's teeth,

  • Fabian's colleague, Maciej Henneberg,

  • discovered evidence of a horrible and unexpected disease.

  • They must have had a massive illness.

  • One possible explanation for it is

  • congenital syphilis.

  • I am not joking, but...

  • I thought syphilis didn't come to Europe until much later than this.

  • If this were the case,

  • this would be our first Roman case of congenital syphilis.

  • - Yes, of course. - Well, that would be something to find in this cellar, wouldn't it?

  • If this is true, it would overturn the idea

  • that the disease first arrived in Europe with Columbus' sailors.

  • This would be the first recorded case of syphilis by more than 1,400 years.

  • But the twins in the cellar

  • also tells us about another aspect of ancient Roman life.

  • This must have been a really bad and serious illness.

  • Somebody had to take care of them,

  • very, a lot of care, a lot of healthcare,

  • a lot of effort that they made it.

  • What strikes me is that they were found in the so-called poor sample,

  • but still must have received years of medical care.

  • It is interesting because it's going from

  • a really nice scientific observation, just to a glimpse of

  • a family support network, parents looking after them,

  • the very base of their survival is about human care.

  • The possibility of a sexually transmitted disease

  • might at first sight reinforce a view many people have

  • of ancient Rome as a society of debauchery and sexual excess.

  • There's willies, big willies everywhere.

  • When one object was first first found in a Pompeian bar,

  • it was deemed too shocking to be put on public display.

  • It's a bronze lamp and all kinds of things dangle off it,

  • bells and stuff, a kind of wind chimes for us,

  • the Romans would've called it a "Tintinnabulum".

  • But the centre of attention was to be this chap here,

  • a bronze hunchback pygmy

  • with a huge willy, which he is in the process of cutting off.

  • I like to think that this shows greater anxiety

  • on the part of the Romans about their masculinity, but who knows?

  • Maybe it's a strange form of erotica,

  • maybe it's a joke on the guys who came to drink in the bar,

  • or is it in the end, just a lamp?

  • Whatever its function, you only need to stroll around town

  • to see the same phallic theme again and again.

  • What do they mean?

  • What were they for?

  • Everybody's had a theory and there have been some pretty mad ones.

  • Do they, for example, point to the nearest brothel?

  • I'm afraid, not a hope!

  • If this were the case, Pompeii would be littered with brothels.

  • Some people think it is, but I'm not so sure, if you look carefully

  • at this upmarket bath house,

  • you see that displays of sex can be interpreted differently.

  • The painting on the room you come into,

  • features all kinds of sexual positions,

  • from back, from the front, with the tongue, you name it, it's here.

  • Not just that, each one is given a number.

  • This has launched the theory that this bath establishment

  • is not just a bath establishment but has, perhaps on the upper floor,

  • a brothel attached.

  • It's a kind of massage parlour with fringe activities.

  • I am afraid the truth about these paintings is a bit more mundane.

  • What we have really come into is the changing room.

  • You can see along the walls,

  • the place where the shelf to hold your clothes would have been put.

  • What this paintings are, they are not

  • adverts for the sex that might have been going on upstairs, "Please can I have three hours of number four,"

  • I think they are a clever way

  • of helping you remember where you left your tunic or your toga.

  • In fact, if you look rather carefully,

  • at what the numbers are written on, they're written on wicker baskets, which I think is what we imagine,

  • would be on the shelf below where you left your belongings.

  • So the idea would be,

  • "I left my toga near the fellatio."

  • It's a kind of joke!

  • But if you head across town there is one building

  • where there is no debate about its intended function.

  • As far as I'm concerned this is the town's one and only known brothel.

  • This is where you can see that the whole wall

  • is covered with the graffiti of the customers.

  • They're an interesting multicultural bunch, there's a couple in Greek.

  • They're very hard to read, Latin handwriting is absolutely dreadful,

  • but this one here is clear and pretty typical.

  • "I came along here and I had a good fuck"

  • which is about as clear as you can get.

  • It's a pretty gloomy place and my heart goes to the prostitutes

  • who had to work here.

  • The sex here still sells 2,000 years later

  • because this is the most popular visitor attraction on the entire site.

  • This place is always packed with people because we still have

  • a glamorous view of Roman sex and Roman brothels.

  • We are also get told a lot of rubbish about it.

  • If you listen to what the tour guides are saying here,

  • they look at these paintings up above the cubicles and they say

  • these are the menu at the brothel,

  • you might not be able to speak Latin very well

  • but you could always ask like in a bar,

  • "Can I have some of that one above that door."

  • It's rubbish! It doesn't add up to me.

  • I think they are fantasy images about sex.

  • This place is bad enough.

  • It's dark, it's dingy, the girls are working in prison cells effectively,

  • and you don't have to make it worse by pretending you chose sex

  • like the way you choose a hamburger.

  • Between the frescoes, the phalluses and the brothel,

  • you can see how we ended up with the image of Pompeii as a society obsessed with sex.

  • But we need to think again about this ancient myth.

  • My idea is pretty simple, honestly.

  • I don't think that the Romans were more interested in sex than we are.

  • I think it's much more to do with male power.

  • It's to say, "This is a very masculine culture."

  • Roman power is about male power,

  • the phallus tells you that Roman power is built on its masculinity.

  • We've been too keen to see sex in every corner of Pompeii

  • and that may go for another image of Roman life too.

  • We picture the rich gorging themselves in gluttonous feasts,

  • whilst the poor and the slaves, who serve them, go hungry.

  • I wonder if the skeletons in the cellar can give us a different view on that, too.

  • Fabian, is there anything that you've been able to discover so far

  • which might tell us about the diet of these people?

  • From what we can see with the naked eye, we didn't find any signs of malnutrition or lack of minerals.

  • There is no significant difference between the two groups.

  • - So everybody here was getting enough of what they needed to keep alive and pretty healthy? - Yes.

  • This is remarkable.

  • We might expect to see big differences between rich and poor,

  • the poor perhaps smaller and showing signs of nutritional deficiency, but not here.

  • So can we find out more about what these people had actually been eating?

  • Fabian, I noticed when I was looking at some of the teeth, that they seem very worn,

  • much more worn down than modern teeth.

  • Because mainly the process of milling the grain is completely different

  • and in this time there was a lot of stones in the flour.

  • So when our Pompeians eat their nice Pompeian bread, they're also eating bits of the millstone and

  • - it abrades the teeth. - Yes.

  • Bread was such a staple food that in Pompeii alone there are 30 bakeries.

  • One of the biggest is on the town's high street and it gives us

  • a vivid picture of how Pompeians baked their daily bread.

  • One thing that we can be certain about all the people who ended up in our cellar, rich and poor alike,

  • is that they would have eaten bread from the same sort of bakery, maybe even the same bakery.

  • Now this is a really typical baking establishment of Pompeii.

  • I'm standing now in the area where the corn was ground, mules would have driven these rotating mills,

  • the main entrance to the bakery from the street was there

  • and this is where the dough was prepared, probably by slaves.

  • Flour was brought from this area, round to here, they formed it into loaves as yet unbaked,

  • they put those loaves on the shelf here and they whooshed through

  • to be picked up and put in the oven here.

  • And we know exactly what it looked like.

  • A painting from Pompeii shows us round loaves of bread, divided into eight portions.

  • In fact, 81 carbonised loaves cooked and ready to be sold

  • have been found perfectly preserved in one of the town's many ovens.

  • That's not all.

  • Archaeologists have found pomegranates, walnuts,

  • even eggs preserved for 2,000 years.

  • And now, an extraordinary piece of new research

  • means we can prove that it wasn't just rich Romans who ate well.

  • In Herculaneum, nine miles from Oplontis,

  • historian Andrew Wallace-Hadrill is leading the excavation project.

  • Herculaneum was buried under more than 50 feet of ash and volcanic debris during the eruption of 79.

  • Above this street was an apartment block inhabited,

  • not by Rome's super-rich, but by the ordinary people of the town.

  • What went into their mouths came out, 15 feet below.

  • Let's come down here, Mary, it's not so scary as it looks.

  • Down here, the evidence of Roman diet has been perfectly preserved for two millennia.

  • I am not great on ladders actually.

  • You appear to be disappearing into the bowels of the Earth.

  • You can see some very good down pipes here.

  • This whole sewer is fed from above, the stuff coming down,

  • smears down the wall, generations of stuff, leaves a trail

  • and it's still brown - you can see very clearly how brown it is -

  • it just leaves this trail of shit.

  • It feels real! You don't get closer to real Rome than being in a cesspit, do you?

  • - No! - So, you've got a layer of shit on the floor and then volcanic material covering it.

  • Exactly! Beautifully sealing the stuff on the floor.

  • - So you take out the volcanic material and get to the shit. - Yes.

  • It's all gone now!

  • It's all been removed.

  • It was up to our knees roughly.

  • It was really, really precious material.

  • In archaeological terms, this is gold.

  • It's precious because it literally was what had gone through these Roman lavatories.

  • Down here was the story of Roman diet, just waiting to be found.

  • This is the world's largest archaeological excavation of sewers.

  • Over 700 bags of human waste were collected from the sewer floor

  • and are being systematically analysed to tell us more about what Romans were eating.

  • What have you learnt?

  • In terms of diet, the amazing thing about the contents is the variety.

  • You've got bones of all sorts, a lot of fish bones.

  • We're right by the sea, they had a high fish diet but also chicken and eggs, we've got walnuts,

  • a good variety of nuts, so you have a complete mixture between local stuff

  • and imported stuff which is so typical of the Roman empire.

  • They certainly lived healthy on this.

  • What's important is to try and fix who the people were that were living

  • above this cesspit and sending their cess into the sewer.

  • Yes. There is a series of shops immediately above us,

  • so some of them are shopkeepers. definitely and, then above them,

  • are two more floors of flats.

  • It's terribly tempting to think because they're flats, these must be absolutely dirt poor.

  • They're neither dirt poor nor stinking rich, and this is the really hard thing.

  • People often think of the Roman world as being these really posh people

  • at the top and everyone else is ground down and miserable. No, sorry!

  • It's much more complicated than that, these are not really posh people,

  • they aren't rich enough to live a life of luxury, they're ordinary people.

  • The excavation in the sewers

  • supports what we found in the cellar, that rich and poor shared the same basic, healthy diet.

  • But let's not kid ourselves, the rich took every chance

  • to show off their wealth and where you ate was one way to do that.

  • This is a top of the range Roman dining room.

  • We might imagine that some of the richest of the skeletons in our cellar,

  • even if they didn't own something like this, might once or twice have eaten somewhere like this.

  • It's built around the idea of running, trickling, trinkling water.

  • Water would rush down from that little niche at the back.

  • It would then feed in to this pool here.

  • It would feed out over the marble

  • and it would end up in another pool with a fountain overlooking a garden beyond.

  • The other thing that is quite interesting

  • is that it reveals very sharply

  • how dependent the rich would be for their display eating on slaves.

  • You've got to get up there, to recline. How do you do it? And how would you do it in a toga?

  • The answer must be that you were helped by your slaves.

  • It's a very nice day-to-day indication

  • of how the Roman elite relied on the servant class.

  • Let me try and get up.

  • It's not easy.

  • Whoops!

  • Now I suppose that what I do is recline like this

  • but I hope to goodness they had some cushions

  • because it really isn't very comfortable

  • and I'm a bit far from where my wine might be in here.

  • Certainly, it seems to me that this is ostentatious dining

  • coming at the price of comfort.

  • So unlike today when having money means you can eat out,

  • if you were rich in Pompeii, you were dining at home, surrounded by opulence.

  • But what about ordinary Pompeians who weren't living in luxury, where were they eating?

  • Fast food joints are one of the commonest features of the Pompeian street scene.

  • There's over 150 of them in the city, there's 20 of them in this section of street alone.

  • There's so many of them that they can't possibly have been

  • for the rich alone, they probably weren't for the rich at all!

  • They were for people who didn't have places to eat at home, for people coming in from the countryside,

  • or people coming in from the port who wanted to get a bite to eat.

  • You've got two choices if you're a customer at this bar.

  • Either you come to the street or to the counter,

  • see what they've got on offer on the dishes here,

  • choose what you want and take it away.

  • Fast food. If you've got more time, and I guess more money,

  • it was probably like modern Naples -

  • you got charged more if you want to sit down.

  • You go into the back room and spend time eating and drinking at a table.

  • I imagine it was pretty crowded,

  • perhaps six or eight tables with people sitting around and when you got down, at the table,

  • sitting on the chairs, at your eye level, are these lovely little scenes of life in the bar.

  • From the storerooms of the Naples museum, a fresco found in Pompeii has been brought out for me to see.

  • It once decorated the walls of another bar and gives us an idea of a typical Pompeian night out.

  • They're very clever, actually,

  • because the paintings have got the ancient equivalent of speech bubbles attached to them,

  • so a little dialogue, a little story develops.

  • And the story is not entirely unfamiliar.

  • After a good few drinks, two men get into an argument about a game of dice.

  • The upshot of this we see in the sadly bashed-up last scene, but happily the writing still survives.

  • One's saying, "You scumbag, I won!"

  • And the other is saying, quite literally, "No, you didn't, you cock sucker."

  • Just at the right-hand corner,

  • it must be the landlord because his speech bubble is saying,

  • "Look chaps, if you want to fight, get outside."

  • I think it's nice ending this little series of scenes with the landlord

  • because it reminds us that bars are not just places where people go and get drunk, gamble and flirt,

  • they're actually somebody's business.

  • So where rich and poor were eating and drinking was worlds apart,

  • but what they ate was for the most part very similar.

  • Everybody shared the benefit of food grown in this marvellously fertile region

  • and sourced from the plentiful Mediterranean, which in those days was right on their doorstep.

  • It's easy to forget that in Roman times, Pompeii was absolutely on the seashore.

  • It's only the seismic activity that means it's now inland.

  • Pompeii itself had a port and there are other little harbours up and down this coastline.

  • Goods came in from abroad, and goods went out from this rich agricultural land.

  • It might have looked like a small provincial Italian town by the sea but there is plenty of evidence,

  • some of it from the skeletons in the cellar, of just how far Pompeii's international connections stretched.

  • What we've got here is a gorgeous, gorgeous necklace.

  • It was found near one of the skeletons, the likely candidate is a middle-aged woman.

  • It is stunningly modern in its feel.

  • It's quite a narrow neck it's going to go round,

  • I think it might just go around me, but it's too big to be a bracelet.

  • It must have been a choker, going tight around somebody's neck.

  • One of the puzzles about these things always

  • is where the raw material for them comes from.

  • Emeralds aren't found naturally near Pompeii. The likelihood is that they come from Egypt.

  • These roughly shaped emeralds belonging to one of the skeletons

  • aren't the only evidence we have of Rome's two-way global traffic.

  • This is one of the most extraordinary objects ever found in Pompeii.

  • What it is...

  • is an ivory statuette, and you only have to look at it

  • to see this looks Indian and it is Indian,

  • that's where it comes from.

  • It brings it home to you in an instant that Pompeii and Pompeian inhabitants

  • know about what happens in the outside world,

  • or they have an awareness of Egypt and Africa and Asia

  • and all the other places around the Mediterranean in a way that is quite different

  • from what one imagines the global view of an English village might be in the 18th or 19th century.

  • So Pompeii was a small town with a world view.

  • But how far do our skeletons in the cellar reflect that?

  • We know Pompeii is in some ways

  • a surprisingly multicultural little place.

  • There are foreign objects, foreign imports, it's got a port, it's looking towards the outside world.

  • What's always been trickier to pin down is just how far the population was multicultural.

  • Have we got any evidence from these skeletons about the make-up of Pompeian society?

  • I mean the ethnic or racial make-up?

  • We found two skeletons where we are quite sure they are of African ancestry.

  • This is from the so-called rich group

  • and there is another one, it's a female lying on her belly there, she is of African origin.

  • Tell me how you know it's of African origin.

  • It's just the shape of the face.

  • Are you talking about sub-Saharan African, not North African.

  • - Yes, black. - Black African.

  • What you're seeming to suggest, and I think it's a really important point,

  • is that there are people living here

  • who have an origin really on the other side of the Roman empire.

  • That's not the only thing interesting about the African skeleton.

  • His skull is green, stained by metal objects

  • and he's in the group found with treasure.

  • It's possible he was the slave of someone rich, but he might also have been rich himself.

  • We can't assume all Africans were slaves.

  • Brutal and degrading as Roman slavery could be, it wasn't as straightforward as that.

  • In one ancient cemetery outside Pompeii is a tomb that paints a much more complex picture of slavery.

  • What you've got here

  • is a tomb that holds the ashes of three people.

  • And they tell you who they are.

  • There is man called Publius Vesonius who is an ex-slave, he tells you he's an ex-slave.

  • There is a woman called Vesonia who had actually owned him

  • and then freed him, and my guess is they probably then got married.

  • And he's also putting it up for the guy on the right, a friend of his.

  • The first text says Vesonius put this up for this trio.

  • But the text underneath...

  • tells the sequel, which isn't so happy.

  • "Stop and read this," he says,

  • "because that guy on the right who I thought was my friend

  • "turned out to be false. In fact," says Vesonius, "he took me to court. We quarrelled

  • "and he took me to court, but luckily my innocence and the gods above saved me.

  • "But he was a complete bastard."

  • We don't know why this man didn't just remove his ex-friend's statue.

  • It's what I would have done. But luckily he didn't as this monument tells a fascinating story.

  • Here was an ex-slave rich enough to put up this big tomb for three

  • and then to go to court to settle a dispute with his former friend.

  • The point about Roman slavery is that it isn't always a lifetime sentence.

  • Slaves get freed by the people who owned them

  • and they sometimes go on to do very well.

  • In fact, my guess is the majority of the Pompeian population,

  • certainly some of the people in our cellar, would have had slaves somewhere in their ancestry.

  • It's been calculated that more than half the population of Herculaneum were descended from slaves.

  • Slaves certainly sometimes did what we think of as high status jobs.

  • There's evidence for that in a very surpising place.

  • Here you have the bog, probably one seat here and then ...

  • Yes, you can come and sit by me.

  • What's brilliant about this is that the last person to use this loo

  • before the eruption happened has left his name.

  • It starts with an A.

  • - That's right. - And what he's saying is it's his name... "Apollinaris...

  • "Medicus T...T.imp..."

  • So "Apollinaris, the doctor of the emperor Titus..."

  • Then you can't read this any longer because it's got too faded.

  • Hic bene cacavit. He had a good shit here!

  • This name Apollinaris - we can't be certain, but is very likely a slave name.

  • So the emperor's doctor is a slave.

  • We tend to think the slave jobs as being very drudge manual labour,

  • some certainly were, but slaves also did, in our terms,

  • high-status professional jobs like being doctors.

  • That's another reason why slavery is more complicated.

  • Also, to be a slave of the Emperor is to be someone quite important.

  • In some ways it's better to be the slave of an emperor

  • than an ordinary freeborn person with a tiny little shop in Herculaneum.

  • I'd much rather be the Emperor Titus's slave doctor

  • - than a flower seller in the streets of Pompeii. - He was on the way up.

  • So slavery was a fact of life in Pompeii.

  • Almost certainly some of the people in our cellar were slaves,

  • they died right next to their masters, as they would have lived.

  • At the house of a baker on the main street of Pompeii,

  • we find a nice illustration of that closeness in a painting on the dining room wall.

  • These guys don't look too pissed yet, although we can imagine what might have happened next,

  • but the give-away scene is in the background where that lady is clearly about to keel over

  • and she is being propped up by the slave behind her.

  • I guess the slaves came pretty handy for this kind of job.

  • But it wasn't just slaves and masters living on top of each other.

  • Here in the baker's house, right next to the smart dining room,

  • there's a stable, and in it, the bones of the animals,

  • the ones he used to turn the mills which ground the grain, and no doubt delivered the bread around town too.

  • Here we've got the finest room in the baker's residential quarters

  • right up next to where the mules lived.

  • Just a few yards away is the back end of a really rich house in Pompeii

  • that was being given a complete make over at the time of the eruption.

  • So the rich are living right next door, right up against the working bakery.

  • The baker has his poshest room right next door to his animals.

  • That's how Pompeians lived - cheek by jowl.

  • And that's how we find the people in the cellar -

  • rich and poor, male and female, old and young,

  • lying close to each other in death as they would have been in life.

  • But in 79AD, that life came to an end.

  • Neither they, nor the others in this town, had any idea they lived in the shadow of a volcano.

  • The last major eruption had been 1,500 years before.

  • Nothing could prepare the population for what happened when Vesuvius exploded.

  • The people in the cellar had one choice - to try and escape, or stay and find shelter.

  • From out at sea, you get a very good impression

  • of how Vesuvius really lours over the whole area.

  • But also, you get this slightly uncomfortable sense

  • of how very close the volcano is. It makes you realise how difficult it would have been to escape from it.

  • Especially if you left it a little bit too late.

  • While friends and neighbours fled, our 54 people looked for cover,

  • and many took their most precious belongings with them.

  • Why most of them stayed put, we can only guess, but in one case, there's a strong clue.

  • Fabian, tell me about the remains of this person laid out here.

  • This is maybe one of the most dramatic and tragic persons

  • we found in this whole sample,

  • because these are the bones of a young female and we found with the skeleton this small bone.

  • The pelvic bone of a foetus.

  • She must have been pregnant.

  • If you measure it, you can determine

  • it was in the last month of pregnancy and it's quite traumatic.

  • The thought of being 8.5 months pregnant and trying to flee for your life from the erupting volcano,

  • it's just dreadful.

  • Amazingly, an eyewitness account of the eruption survives.

  • It describes how on that fateful day you could hear the shrieks of women, the squalling of infants

  • and the shouting of men, some calling out for their parents,

  • others for their children or wives.

  • It was so dark, they could only recognise them by their voices.

  • Many pleaded for the help of the gods,

  • but more thought that the gods had disappeared, and that the world had been plunged into eternal darkness.

  • It must have been pitch black when the volcanic debris started to fall and our people tried to escape.

  • Several of them certainly had brought lamps with them.

  • This one is quite nice because the centre, just where the oil goes in,

  • has got a lovely picture here of the goddess of Rome herself.

  • She is sadly broken in half but she is quite recognisable with her helmet on.

  • The people in the cellar were sheltering there

  • as the eruption intensified outside, plunging them further into darkness.

  • Heaven knows how you could have found your way through the streets at night using just one of these.

  • It makes me realise how vulnerable the people in this cellar must have felt.

  • They fled through the darkness, all trace of the sun has been obliterated by the volcanic debris,

  • they've come in here, they're huddled together for shelter and support

  • and the only protection against the dark they've got is half a dozen little lamps like this.

  • Of course, in the end these people couldn't protect themselves from the same fate as the others in Pompeii.

  • But the Romans in the cellar didn't just leave us with evidence of their tragic death

  • but of the lives they lived too.

  • It may have been a male-dominated world where the rich dined in luxury and exploited the poor,

  • but Pompeii was also a place where slaves could earn their freedom, where women could own wealth,

  • and the ordinary Roman could eat and drink well.

  • It was a place where even the poorest knew something of the world outside.

  • The people who died in this cellar helped us to understand that Roman society

  • wasn't quite as black and white as we often imagine it to be.

  • Sure, these people would had vastly different lifestyles,

  • but they lived cheek by jowl and they shared a lot too.

  • The smells, the dark, and the dirt.

  • Not to mention the wine, the sex, the food and the fun.

  • And in the end, of course, they shared the same fate, in the same cellar 2,000 years ago.

  • Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

  • E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk

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