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- [00:00]
A
When we think of great cities founded by the Romans, we think of Pompeii, perhaps Constantinople, and above all of Rome. I don't think we much think about London, or at least not to start with. But if you scratch the surface of London and have to say, if you go down about 6 meters below the surface, the remains of that original Roman settlement are absolutely everywhere.
- [00:34]
B
The modern city of London is where it is because the Romans decided to build it here. And when you read a description of London by Tacitus, the Roman historian, one of the first written descriptions of London in existence, if not the first by a Roman historian, he describes it as a city full of traders and commercial traffic. And you already begin to think, actually has London changed that much over the past 2,000 years?
- [01:10]
A
That's one of the questions that we're going to hope to answer a little bit. We're going to go back in time to think what the first London was like. We're going to be saying, what was life like here in London? Can we actually conjure up, can we get close to any of the early Londoners? Can we find the people of Roman London? And as Charlotte said, what other. Are there any real similarities between ancient London and modern London? You know, is London a bit like it once was, really, after all?
- [02:02]
B
So at Instant Classic we are super committed, obviously, and we are recording this episode not only in London Londinium, but in the remains of London's Roman amphitheatre, which is right underneath the Guildhall Art Gallery in the heart of the city of London. And we are doing it just like the gladiators who stood in this spot before us in front of a live audience.
- [02:39]
A
This is Instant Classics Live. It's the show that uncovers the ancient stories that still shape the modern world. I'm Mary Beard.
- [02:51]
B
And I'm Charlotte Higgins. Each week we dive into the myths, the dramas and the characters of the classical world to discover what they still mean to us now.
- [03:01]
A
And this episode is Life, Death and gladiators in Roman London. Zootopia 2 has come home to Disney. Let's go get ready for a new case. We're gonna crack this case and prove we're victorious partners of all time. New friends. You are Gary Destiny.
- [03:32]
B
And your last name.
- [03:33]
A
The Snake Dream Team.
- [03:36]
B
Habitats Zootopia has a secret reptile population.
- [03:40]
A
You can watch the reptil record breaking phenomenon at home.
- [03:43]
C
You're clearly working at Zootopia 2.
- [03:47]
A
Now available on Disney. Rated PG.
- [03:50]
B
So I just want to say to those of you who are listening to the episode as A podcast rather than in the room where we are. We are in way below the beautiful art gallery, the Guilthall Art Gallery, in the centre of London, in the City of London, about six metres below, right in the very depths of the basement. And we're sitting in the actual remains of London's Roman amphitheatre, which was discovered in 1988 when the new gallery was being built. In reality, Mary and I are in the arena, hopefully not shedding each other's blood. And our live audience is sitting in the eastern gateway of this amphitheater.
- [04:35]
A
The only thing that's, that's actually the only part that's really been excavated is the East End. And we're just at the very edge of that east end. If you want to know how big it once was, then you go up to ground level into the Guildhall Yard. Somebody has very kindly traced out the dimensions of the amphitheatre there on the floor of the yard. The truth is it isn't quite like the Colosseum, right? It's quite a bit smaller in the form that we now see it, which was really a second century improved rebuild of an original wooden structure of the 70s CE. It would have held 7,000 people, probably as against the Colosseum's, let's say, 50,000 people. Now that's still quite a lot because in the early days of the City of London, that would have been one third to one half of the population. So it's big news for London. It's not all like the Colosseum in masonry. I mean, we're surrounded here by bits of masonry because the gateway into the arena is in stone. But the seating for those 7,000 people, the seating is. It's wooden and I Suppose it's about 100 meters in length. We shouldn't say it's just a pale shadow of the Colosseum. It's instantly. It is a pale shadow of the Colosseum, but it's instantly recognisable. There's nothing else this could be. And we've been helped out here in the restoration of it, have given us some rather kind of wonderful fluorescent green fighters that we're enjoying looking at what is missing here. They've done their best when they were reconstructing it. What's missing here, though, what we're trying to put in to our picture of the amphitheater, which is who are the people that we would imagine, who are those 70,000, those 7,000 people sitting around here? And that's the big question that we're going to be looking at in this episode and we'll be exploring them, but coming back to recite them here at the very end and to wonder what. What the shows were like that they actually looked at. But I, at this point, am bowing a bit to Charlotte, who's really the Romano British expert. You know, let's just get a bit of a straight historical intro to where did Roman London start? What happened to it?
- [07:44]
B
Right, so the conquest of Britain begins in 43 CE. That's Claudius, the Emperor Claudius, and that is the Romans conquering Britain after several failed attempts. So Julius Caesar tried it a century earlier, a couple of times, kind of slightly whitewashed his failed attempts. In his autobiography, Caligula had a bit of a go at it, or he'd got as far as Gaul and then sort of turned back. And then finally, Claudius does it in 43 CE, and he establishes the capital of this new province of Britannia, not in London at Colchester, Colchester in Essex, Camalodunum, as it was known by the Romans. And that's where the temple to Claudius is built. Because, you know, you're an emperor, you have your own temple, of course, and that's the sort of heart of this nascent province. But very quickly, London, it seems, starts to get built. And very characteristically for Romans building places, it's built at the first bridgeable point in the Thames that can also be used as a port. And so there was a bridge at some point, there was a crossing and then a bridge over the Thames, more or less exactly where London Bridge is now. And this settlement, this city, grows up. And that sort of convenient way of thinking about where it is is that it is where the City of London is. So the commercial heart of today's city sort of occupies this ancient Roman city that eventually, in the late 2nd, early 3rd century CE, acquired a set of city walls. And those city walls are kind of where the medieval walls of London are and the boundaries of the city of London. So that's kind of convenient. And it went across the river a bit into. Into marshy Southwark.
- [09:44]
A
Yeah, Southwark. South of the river was the suburb, and a quite interesting suburb where a lot of. Quite a lot of Roman evidence has come up. But it's from its very origins, really. It was bridging the river, I think, you know, north, and I tell you, north and south of the river were actually very different in character. Right. As they may be today. Right.
- [10:11]
B
London gets mentioned in Roman texts because of one quite specific and quite brutal
- [10:18]
A
historical event, is a historical event that we've already covered in the podcast, it's the rebellion of Boudicca in the early 60s. We don't know exactly when. What I think is amazing about that is that an awful lot. And we talk about this in the episode an awful lot. Most of what we know about Boudicca is a Roman fantasy, Roman projection of their fears of a warrior queen. And there are speeches put in her mouth, there's kind of claims to the kind of destruction she committed. And it would be quite easy, I think, to imagine that that early Roman rebellion, early British rebellion against the Romans, was hugely exaggerated. Now, it may well be hugely exaggerated, but one thing that you find in the archaeological record of London, wherever you dig down, is a great thick black layer of burning, which is the trace of what Boudicca did to the city in 60 or 61, which was burnt it down. And so if ever you. As I quite often am tempted to think that Boudicca was a figment of Roman imagination, the archaeology of the city of London is marked by this burnt layer of what Boudicca does to it. And really, most of the evidence that we're going to talk about, not absolutely all of it, but most of that is the refoundation of the city after
- [12:00]
B
Boudicca had trashed it only 20 years into its. Into its life. And of course, it does become. It recovers quickly. We'll talk about. It becomes the sort of central node of. It becomes the most important city in Britannia.
- [12:13]
A
And it doesn't start out, so far as we can see, as the capital of the province, whatever the capital of the province means. But it becomes pretty clear that soon enough, after the Buddhican revolt, this is where the big guys in the province are. There's a fort, there's a relatively small military base here. There are administrators and a lot of people doing a lot of business.
- [12:42]
B
Yeah, I mean, one of the things about Roman London is, of course, it's really, really unlike walking through, say, Rome. The traces of Roman London, you have to really look for them. They're not visible. There are not. Well, they are visible, but you have to find they are not kind of enormous structures like the Colosseum or the kind of great triumphal arches or the Forum in Rome. But to me, that's kind of what makes it a lot of fun. Right. It's a kind of adventure to find these traces. And there are a surprising number of them, and it's almost like a mosaic, because all of Roman London is sort of on this level, deep below the modern city. And these traces get revealed basically when something Awful. Happens like the Great Fire of London. And actually Christopher Wren, when he was rebuilding St. Paul's found a bunch of Roman artefacts which he gave to the Royal Society and have found their way into museums since. Chunks of Roman London get revealed during the Blitz. So when huge tracts of the city are blown apart, that revealed things like the lengths of the Roman city wall on Noble street, not so far from where we're sit. And then particularly in the 20th century and the later 20th century it's been. And that's what's exciting. Cause things keep turning up, it's that it's building projects. So it's people digging foundations, just as in the case of this building, and finding stuff.
- [14:15]
A
Well, also the 19th century, I mean, the sewers of London were a great way of finding Roman London. Everywhere you dig down usually to build foundations, you find Roman London.
- [14:29]
B
And before the advent of modern archaeology and modern sort of ideas about preserving this stuff, I mean, Christopher Wren was an antiquarian as well as all the other things he was. So he was really interested when they were building the sewers. There was a chemist who kept a shop near the bank of England, who was a sort of one man antiquarian machine and campaigner against the. This sort of habit of destroying everything as they built the sewers. And he found lots of stuff and paid workmen to bring him old and interesting stuff that he found. That they found.
- [15:03]
A
Yeah. And the post war. So you've got this fantastic re. Understanding really of Roman London in the 19th century building projects. Then you've got post war. And one of the buildings we're going to be talking a bit about later is the Temple of the God Mithras which was discovered in a building project in. In the early 50s. But I thought your favourite was your hairdresser.
- [15:29]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's an underground car park on London Wall which is near the Barbican Arts Centre and you can just go into this underground car park and in Bays 53 and 54 there is a sizable chunk. Very tall, actually, you know, 10 foot tall or something. Anyway, impressive, complete Roman wall built out of Kentish ragstone. And my other favourite is that there's a hairdresser's called Nicholson and Griffin in the City of London and you can politely ask and say, do you mind if I go and look at your Roman romaine? And you can go into their basement among all the hairdryers and towels and people having their hair done and look through a sort of vitrine or window and see a tiny and potentially kind of unimpressive bit of wool, which was part of the Basilica of Ancient Roman London, so the kind of big. A big building essentially where business and administrative stuff was done. But that building was 100 meters long and it formed one side of the huge forum of London, which was 170 meters long. And, you know, it. Actually, the scale of some of this stuff that was put here is. I mean, it's inconceivable at any time before about the 19th century, I'd say. Actually, the sort of. I mean, to us it seems a bit kind of unimpressive because what remains is a bit rubbly. But if you exert your imagination, it's very exciting, I promise.
- [17:06]
A
I mean, in some ways it's that kind of sense of mosaic, which is fascinating. You know, it's not one of those Roman sites where you just clear the topsoil away and the town plan emerges. Right. This is about kind of piecing little bits together in a jigsaw puzzle and really extraordinary things over the last three or four centuries have been coming up which actually help us construct that image of just the city plan. There's also, I suppose, a kind of. There's a change in the nature of the archaeology, which makes it exciting too, because, you know, if we're Christopher Wren, we're just getting things up from the. From the destruction levels. You know, our chemist, he's called Charles Roach smith in the 19th century, he's going for great mosaics and that kind of stuff as well as more humble things. What is, for me really interesting about the recent building projects, every time you see a really ugly building in the City of London, think at least that it revealed Roman remains underneath it. It doesn't matter how ugly. One of the things that have come out, both of the new building at 1 Poultry now. Who designed that? It was Stirling.
- [18:28]
B
James Stirling.
- [18:29]
A
Yeah, it's really ugly, actually.
- [18:31]
B
Oh, I disagree, Mary. It's a great masterpiece of postmodernism, It's
- [18:35]
A
a great masterpiece of brutalism. But particularly the Bloomberg headquarters, which is actually not very close to here. One of the things that has marked those out is not just the indestructible ceramics, jewelry, et cetera, et cetera, walls in the Bloomberg HQ. In particular, over 400 Roman writing tablets have been discovered overall in London, partly because the soil is pretty Wet. More than 500 Roman writing tablets have been discovered. And I've helpfully brought along this evening a replica Roman writing tablet, because they're going to play a big part in what we have to say, what you can See here is that this method of Roman writing is very simple. You've got a wooden frame and you can tie two of them together to make a little book. And in the middle of the woman, in the middle of the wooden frame, you've got a bed of wax. And in order to write your letter, you get your sharp metal stylus and you scratch your message out in the wax. And it's very easy, and it's very easy to reuse, because when you've received the letter and read it, you can take the blunt end of the stylus, you can rub out the letters that were written and you can use it for your own writing. Now, these are what survive, but it's a bit more complicated than that, because the wood survives but the wax doesn't. Why we can trace the writing is that Romans were a bit like kind of kids who press very hard, you know, on their piece of paper, and in most cases, they pressed so hard into the wax that you can still see on the wood beneath, you can see where they really scraped through onto the bedding. And what we're reading is we're not reading the letter as written in the wax, we're reading the letter, the traces of the letter that have come through on the wood underneath, often layer after layer, because you're getting the first guy's writing, then the second guy, and then they're writing again. They're kind of layers of writing. But there is hundreds of those tablets, which I think earlier archaeologists probably wouldn't have noticed. Over the last 20 or 30 years, our view of what you can say about Roman London has changed, because you've got not just the masonry and the staff, all the skeletons, all the tombstones, you've also got the documents, the writings and the letters. We'll come on in a bit to say, you know, what. What are the kind of. The juicier things that you find out about that? But just on many of them, then you get the names of the people who. Who it's from and who it's to. And they're kind of marvellous names which start already to hint at the sort of community this is, because there's one here I found was he's a man called Nabantobogus. Right now, that is not a regular Roman name. He's a guy from Gaul. And you get little addresses written on saying, please give this to Junius the barrel maker. He lives opposite the house of Catullus. So you start to be able to at least populate the city with some of the names of its inhabitants. That in some ways, in our mosaic of Roman London, is the most recent level where actually we're being able to read some of the things they said to each other.
- [22:53]
B
It's the most amazing thing. And when we say able to read them, the decipherment of these tablets is an extraordinary science, art, craft, act of incredible historical imagination. It's a cryptography, it's linguistic skill. I mean, you're looking at really fragmentary, badly handwritten traces of something that was written in. It's an extraordinary skill.
- [23:24]
A
What Charlotte is trying to say is that we couldn't do it.
- [23:26]
B
I am very much trying to say that. I'm very much trying to say that. Except that there are one or two where, once you've been told what it says, and one or two of these tablets are on display in the Bloomberg headquarters and you can go in for free, and it's next to the Mithraeum, which we'll talk about in a bit. But there's one of those tablets there and it actually says the word London on it. Okay. It says Londinium. And do you know, I actually found it incredibly moving that someone 2,000 years ago was writing that word. And it's still. It's our city, it's, you know, it's the capital of my country. I mean, I don't know.
- [24:03]
A
Well, I feel the same about Nabanto Brigos or everything.
- [24:09]
B
There he is.
- [24:10]
A
You know, he's actually. Somebody had a thing like this pointed metal stylus I'm holding and scratched his name into these wooden. Into the wax on the wooden tablets, which eventually some extremely clever nerd has deciphered. Roger Tomlin. Yes, sorry, he's more than a clever nerd. Brilliantly clever nerd.
- [24:35]
B
Right, so listen, what these tablets, I think what we're guessing towards, what we're able to edge towards with these wonderful tablets is beginning to start to put a bit of flesh onto the bones of London and really try and think about, you know, who were these people in London? You know, where did they come from? What did they do? And Mary, after the break, let's talk about that a little bit more.
- [24:59]
C
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- [25:36]
A
Point one about the people of London. London is a new city. I mean, I think many of the settlements and the towns in Roman Britain that go on to be big, like Colchester, start out because they are pre existing settlements. A few people wandered around the Thames before the Romans came, but there was no fixed settlement. This is a new build, this is a new town that gives London a particular character and a particular sense, I think, of people coming from the outside to populate it. Archaeologists can be extremely ingenious in not just using tablets, they can be extremely ingenious in how they manage to plot that sense of immigration into this new city. And one of my favourite examples of that is the study of Roman metal brooches. Now, when I say brooch, it sounds like jewelry, but they're used more like safety pins. They're for kind of buttoning up pins to kind of keep you top together, right? Hundreds of those have been found in London and they're a very interesting kind of Roman artifact because they're found all over the Roman world. But they have very kind of characteristic local differences. So you can kind of tell a safety pin made in Gaul from a safety pin made in Britain. What is really interesting, if you. And you can also tell their date, by the way, similar high quality archaeological skills. What is really interesting is that in the first years of the city, first 50 years of the city, there is a. Is the biggest level of all of safety pins from northern Europe, right? They're safety pins from France, Gaul, Germany, the Rhineland, etc. Now you might imagine that there was a kind of very big import trade of safety pins cum brooches into the early city. That is extremely unlikely. By far the most likely thing is that we are seeing what the new immigrants were actually bringing with them from home. So it looks as if, of course, there are locals being drawn into this new conurbation. But we can see that it starts off as an immigrant community. Probably most, I mean, let's leave aside the soldiers and the administrators of the province, but in terms of the people coming to make their money here, they're people coming across the Channel and they're coming with what they wore and we're finding what they wore. Later on, British safety pins take over. But the first 50 years it's foreign safety pins because it's foreigners who are here.
- [28:58]
B
And of course, Roman Britain goes on for 400 years, right? This is a really long period and over the course of that we know from all kinds of evidence that there's a big Diversity of people. So there's a tombstone in London which is devoted to a man from Antioch in modern Turkey. There's another tombstone for a bloke who was born in Athens. There's all sorts of, I mean, modern archaeological technique can analyze DNA. It can also do something called isotope analysis, which looks at teeth effectively.
- [29:38]
A
While your adult teeth are still in your gum during that period up to the age of 5 to 10, they are taking in the chemical traces of the environment in which you were then living. So if you analyze the grown up teeth from Roman skeletons, you can see what kind of environment these people were brought up in. It's pretty, it's rough and ready, but you can tell whether they were brought up in a warmer climate or with different kind of diet, different kind of trace elements. It is rough and ready because it's a bit hard sometimes to decide whether the person came from the Isle of Wight or Malta. But you can certainly see that there's a lot of these skeletons, they were not brought up in Britain.
- [30:46]
B
Well, there's one really interesting one where the guy was from Africa, that's from DNA analysis, but he grew up in Britain. So that's quite an interesting kind of reflection on diversity. But there are people from all around. I mean, I suppose that's one of the essential things about the Roman Empire. Even though this funny little province was stuck out on the northwest edge of this empire, that it was still plugged into a network that spread all the way to the east, to the side, to Syria in the east, to Egypt in the south, to the Bolster, I say, the Baltic. We start to talk about trade goods then. I mean, there was amber coming in from the Baltic. There were all sorts of goods, wine and oil. You know, it's on the edge, but it's still connected.
- [31:38]
A
Yeah, I mean, in a way you might say you couldn't be part of the Roman Empire without being a diverse community. And what we have in London is we have a community that starts diverse because it's a new build, but that diversity never, ever goes away.
- [31:58]
B
And you can see that also in sort of religious cults. There's clearly worship of the Egyptian gods of Isis, Osiris, and there's a beautiful little silver figure of Harpocrates who is the sort of, it's the sort of Greek version of the God Horus, who is the child of Isis. And this lovely little statue was found in the 19th century in the Thames. It doesn't mean there are Egyptian people here, but that cult, it's a cult that originates in Egypt and is quite popular throughout the Roman Empire. And there's the Temple of Mithras, which was discovered in the 50s, as we said, and now has a sort of fancy new home. That's a Persian cult, right? Originally.
- [32:44]
A
Ultimately, I mean, it's very hard to kind of, I think, put an ethnicity onto these cults. But one of the things that clearly happens to Roman religion and it's. And it's evident in, you know, this backwater province, because, you know, ultimately it is a backwater province, but even a backwater province is seeing this kind of cultural mix. And that cultural mix is spread in all kinds of ways. And, you know, originally Mithras, the God Mithras does come from Iran, but it becomes reformulated and rethought about. And it's spread partly partly by the Roman army.
- [33:23]
B
There is this amazing thing in the museum of which you are a trustee. Mary Beard, the British Museum. There is a remarkable artifact that looks almost like a pair of callipers, which purport, which was found in Roman London or found in London and is Roman and purports to be a. I should know the word for this. What do you do when you lop off someone's testicles? A castration tool. Castration tool supposedly relating to the cult of Cybele, the Asia Minor. The cult from Asia Minor.
- [34:03]
A
What is interesting about this is that it is a kind of. They look like tongs, really, that you might use, but actually they've got blades, so. So they look as if they're for cutting something off.
- [34:15]
B
They look a bit too blunt for my liking.
- [34:19]
A
They are decorated with heads of divinities along the side. They're very expensive, these tongues. One of the heads is certainly, because we can match her up to other examples, is the head of the goddess Cybele, who also comes from the eastern Mediterranean and in the hinterland behind Turkey.
- [34:44]
B
And the point is, right, that the priests were supposed to be castrated.
- [34:49]
A
The priests of Cybele were said to be self castrated. I'm sorry about this. I am going to have to say this. Maybe we can cut it out in the podcast. They were supposed to be self castrated with only using stone. But this is believed to be a castration tool for the wood devotees of the cult of Cybele who needed to self castrate. I have to say, I think Charlotte. Charlotte is telling one of the party lines about this.
- [35:25]
B
Yeah, it's in the British Museum book about Roman Britain.
- [35:29]
A
Believe it if you will. I think it's much more likely to be for castrating animals than humans. So we can rest assured, I think it's not quite as bad as it looks. Right. And I think some jokers has kind of put Cybele's head on the animal castration tool in order to sort of reference that kind of jokiness about castration. Now, in some ways it still backs up the point of diversity because somebody in Roman Britain, even if all they're doing is castrating bulls, is using a castrating tool which references deities from the east. So I don't think you don't need to go so far as to say that there were self castrated priests of Cybele here to see that. Oh, Charlotte. Yeah, somebody knew what a self castrated priest was. I think that's what's important. That is what is important. It's a city in which just so much that's kind of foreign and foreign and being incorporated and reinterpreted. I mean, you know, we're sitting here in the amphitheatre. One of the beautiful amber bits of kind of ornament is a gladiator's head with a gladiator mask in amber. That must come from the Baltic. So it's a place where you would always be seeing things that came from somewhere else or people that came from some, you know, lots of people and lots of things here came from elsewhere.
- [37:18]
B
And what were these people doing, I mean, aside from castrating themselves or others? We know that Tacitus, the Roman historian, wrote of London as being full of trade and commerce. Is that backed up, Mary, by the evidence of the tablets that you've, that you've read?
- [37:37]
A
It is. I mean, I think that there's no single population here. It's not, you know, it's, it's not a monocultural town in terms of occupation, you know, or whatever. And, you know, of course we've got soldiers here. This is a military province and there's a fort and, you know, we've got Roman administration here. And one of the great monuments also in the British Museum, and rather more clearly and firmly identified than the castrating tool is the tombstone of a guy called Julius Classicianus, who actually plays a part and is name checked in the stories of the Boudican revolt, because after the governor starts to take really, really horrible replacement reprisals against the British rebels In the early 60s, Julius Classicianus is the absolutely classic whistleblower and he basically phones up head office in Rome and says, you've got to get rid of the governor. He's causing us trouble now. We don't know much more about Julius Classicianus, except that the governor was replaced. But we do have his tombstone showing us actually that he was another of these Romans from Gaul, Germany, who were being the Romans who were governing Roman Britain.
- [39:06]
B
And it's so fascinating how that is a grand inscription in the British Museum, also on display. And it was found by Charles Roach Smith, this. This chemist, this amateur antiquarian collector in the 19th century. And he found half of this stone, right, or a chunk of it anyway, on which part of the name Classicianus was written. So he had read his Tacitus, you know, this guy's named in the historian Tacitus. And so he concluded that it was indeed the very tombstone of the person who was mentioned in Tacitus account of the Boudican revolt in London. But more academic historians said, oh, pull the other one. You know, what are the chances, you know, you found this fragmentary inscription, you have ascribed it to being one of the minute handful of Romans who are actually named in Roman histories of Britain. You know, it can't be. And various other theories of what this tablet might have been guessing at were put forward. And now the name Classicianus, that was sort of partly there. And classis is the word for fleet in Latin, so various people thought it was to do with the fleet. And then long after poor old Charles Roach Smith was dead, in the early 1930s, they were building an electricity substation near the Tower of London. And they found the other bit. And the other bit proved that this chemist was absolutely right. And the other thing that's really interesting, in my view, about the discovery of this grand tombstone, which was set up by the wife of Julius Cassicianus. By the time it was discovered in the modern period, it had been recycled by Romans into a bastion of the wall, the Roman wall of the city. So I don't know, I think before I found out about that kind of stuff, I always assumed that the Romans were very reverential to all of their monuments and never took them down, or, you know, they were permanent. But actually the Romans were incredibly pragmatic about moving stuff, reusing it, taking it down. And this is a really concrete example of creative recycling.
- [41:30]
A
You've got all that kind of stuff, right? You've got the guys. The official. I mean, Classicianus is actually the finance officer of the province. What you've also got is the population of what is a pretty thriving port city. This is where we need to go back to the tablets, because tablets have been very kind of sexy in Roman Britain for some time now. And the most famous ones are from the fort near Hadrian's Wall at Vindolanda. And they are in a huge bit of exciting information about how people lived, real people lived. And Vindolandra has captured the imagination because they're kind of invitations to birthday parties, they're people wanting to have woolly socks
- [42:24]
B
sent, complaining about the British people, explaining
- [42:26]
A
about how awful the Little Brits are, etc. Etc. You know, now, I did build up, I think, The Bloomberg tablets, 405 of them, in quite a big way, I have to say. They're not as exciting in some ways as the Vindolanda tablets. You haven't got those kind of domestic details of, you know, do come and celebrate my birthday. Really looking forward to seeing you or whatever. What they are, and actually this is truly extraordinary in a way, is almost all of the ones that we can read are about doing business. They're all business documents, they're loan documents, they are contracts, they are about the commercial infrastructure. Often you only get that little. You get a snippet and you can't quite work out what the rest of the document must have been like. But here's one letter which says they are boasting through the whole market that you have lent them money. Therefore, I ask you, in your own interest, not to appear shabby. Right? There's kind of loads of stuff with things like I have written that I owe you this. I have taken delivery of that. Another slightly very Brit name here, Actigniomanus, came to the city and he was saying that he was in receipt and has from you the 300 denarii received properly and time and again, the little bits of invoices, bills, contracts, sometimes quite formal records of loans, absolutely formally dated documents saying, in the consulship of Nero, Claudius, Caesar, Augustus Germanicus, etcetera, I, Tibullus, have written, and I say that I owe Gratus 105 denarii. So what you seem to have is filing cabinets worth of commercial transactions.
- [44:47]
B
There's one I really like.
- [44:48]
A
You don't like the commercial. I mean, it's just.
- [44:51]
B
I suppose it's not really my thing. But there's one. There is one which on the surface seems completely uninteresting because it's just someone writing the Alphabet, A, B, C, D, E. But actually if you think somebody writing the Alphabet on one of these styluses and there are sort of similar ones in Vindolanda, it's somebody learning to write, it's somebody practicing their handwriting. At least the Romans were The first people to introduce writing to these islands and they were the first people to write about Britain. Britain was first. I mean, that survives. I guess some Greeks wrote about Britain too. There are a couple of lost works that would be really interesting to read, but we don't have them. The first surviving stuff written about Britain was written by Romans and Romans imagined these islands in a way that has been really quite indelible. The idea of Roman Britain as remote and misty in these strange grey seas with its strange misty weather, that is all Tacitus. And when I think about that person writing the Alphabet out on one of these tablets, it really, to me, it just reminds me of how, what an incredibly significant shift it was from a pre literate society, Iron Age Britain, to this, you know, 400 years of Roman rule. And certainly in this part of the island, which was absolutely founded on record keeping, inscriptions, literature was a high, you know, was a society that absolutely depended on writing.
- [46:28]
A
Yeah. And that's in a sense that's a revolution that happens with the advent of Rome here. Yes, there's some, no doubt very nasty, brutal bits of imperialism and rebellion. But the whole world of the cities in Brit, we're not talking about the countryside, the world of the cities is revolutionized by writing. And I mean, I think what's quite interesting about that is that it gives us evidence not just of these literate commercial types or the relatively rich, it in passing gives us evidence of those people in Roman London who were at the very bottom of the pile. I think for me, the most moving document that we have from Roman London, also a wax tablet, is a document about buying a slave. And it's not from Bloomberg, it's from the Sterling Building Foundations at One Poultry. And it is the clearest evidence we've got of some form of slave trading happening in London. Interestingly, it's a purchase by a man called Vegetas, who is an assistant slave of Montanus. So he's the slave of another slave who is himself the slave of the Emperor. So we've got a whole hierarchy of slavery here. The purchaser is the slave of the slave of the Emperor and he has bought a girl called Fortunata. And he says, I've bought the girl Fortunata, or by whatever name she's known, who is a Diablintian by nationality, she's Gallic. He's bought her for, he says, 600 denarii. That's two years wages for a soldier. The girl in question is, has been handed over. He guarantees that she's in Good health and she is warranted not to be liable to wander or run away. So she comes with a clean bill of health and a promise that she's not a wandering type.
- [49:07]
B
It's pretty mind boggling, isn't it? I mean, for a start, Fortunata, which means lucky. I mean, lucky for some. I'm not sure whether how lucky she was. She was the slave of a slave of a slave of the Emperor. Thinking of enslaved people in the Roman Empire, owning other enslaved people, who in turn owned other enslaved people is a bit of a sort of. It's kind of hard to get your head around. And it's a very different sort of sense of what enslavement consisted of from other forms that we might be more familiar with, you know, in our own modern age and in America, for the West Indies or whatever, this is a very, very different thing. And the guy who's buying Fortunata, he's paying two years a lot of money. So she's expensive and he's rich and
- [50:01]
A
he's a slave of another slave and he's buying a slave. So you have this kind of Chinese boxes slavery.
- [50:10]
B
I mean, the other end of the spectrum. And there are, you know, is a spectrum, there's an amazing burial, very famous burial of someone who has become known as the Spitalfields lady. Because unlike Fortunata, she does not have a name, but she's from the 4th century, so sort of towards the end of the, the Roman period in Britain actually. But she, she was found in a stone sarcophagus. And then inside the stone sarcophagus was actually a beautiful lead coffin. And this, this woman had. Her head was resting on a pillow of bay leaves, imported bay leaves. And there were resins around her that were from pistachio trees and pine trees. And she was wearing a dress made of Chinese damask silk. That doesn't mean she'd come from China, but it means that Britain was on the very end of a very, very long trade route. And she had, there were bits of bands of wool that had been dyed purple and purple could only be achieved by crushing Murex shells, which was done, you know, little seashells. And that was done only really in Phoenicia, in modern Lebanon. Incredibly expensive process. And she had perfume bottles and one of her perfume bottles had a dipper made of jet. And that debt probably I would imagine would have come from Yorkshire, from Whitby. So she was obviously at the super top end of Britain's elite, or Roman Britain's elite. And then you go all the way down to poor old Fortunata before we
- [51:51]
A
come back to the amphitheatre again, which we must do. I can't resist saying that one of the most extraordinary survivals, you know, I've been going on about writing tablets. One of the most extraordinary survivals is aspects of clothing. Now we can get a little hint from time to time about, you know, British cloaks in referred to in literature. If you say, what do we know about what these people wore in Roman London? One thing we know about are their shoes. There are more shoes than there are writing tablets. Actually, there are at least 2,000 individual shoes found in the waterlogged conditions of Roman London.
- [52:41]
B
We're so lucky with that bog and that underground river. The Walbrook preserves everything. And this wonderful organic material, which includes the writing tablets and includes these beautiful leather shoes. Some of them have got lovely hob nails.
- [52:56]
A
What is surprising about them, though, is that they all fall into this. Very much the same type, right? One Roman shoe. There's about three sorts of Roman shoe and they fall into that. But the other thing is that 80% of these shoes are women's shoes, right? Now, I do not believe that 80% of the population of Roman London was female. So maybe women had more pairs of shoes than men. But you have one of the biggest ranges of Roman footwear from anywhere in the world comes from Roman London.
- [53:39]
B
Oh, well, we've got that to be proud of, don't we? So let's just come back to the amphitheatre now, Mary, where we're sitting with our fantastic audience. Now, having thought a bit about the people of Roman London, can we imagine who would be sitting watching this extraordinary display of gladiatorial combat in London?
- [54:03]
A
Well, I think it's gotta be all these people we're talking about. It's the ones with the names I can't say, because they come from bits of the Roman world I don't know enough about. We've got the high officials, we've got the traders, we've got the people who are the, you know, the beer maker. We've got a beer maker from Roman London. They're all coming together and a lot of them. But I. I think we. This is where I'm going to sort of. My last, you know, big point is going to be a bit of a downer.
- [54:38]
B
Are you going to tell me that there weren't lions and tigers? Are you going to tell me it wasn't quite like Gladiator 2?
- [54:43]
A
I'm going to say it wasn't quite like Gladiator or even Gladiator 1. You know, it wasn't like Gladiator 2 or 1. And I think that we've got to adjust our expectations about what would have happened here. Honestly, I suspect that the kind of combat and happily, probably, I mean, happily, certainly, I expect that the kind of combat is not quite as deathly as we like to think. I mean, it's more wrestling than boxing happens here, and certainly more wrestling than fighting to the death. And I think that the likelihood is, and this is only guesswork, that the kind of animals that would have been parading where Charlotte and I are sitting would have been somewhere on the range from wild boar to sheep would be my guess.
- [55:39]
B
Well, you know, fight sheep to the death, Mary.
- [55:41]
A
Well, I expect you can if you try, right. I think, you know, we and the Romans are so committed to this over the top brutal image, extravagant, lurid, brutal image of gladiators that we kind of don't stop to think that this wasn't very likely actually in Roman London. We were coming together, we were seeing a bit of, you know, a bit of kind of combat and some animals. But I don't think, you know, you're all sitting in the place where they came in into the arena, and I think it was probably what you could get on the hills outside the city. I don't think anybody saw a lion in here. I am pleased to say that I don't think they did.
- [56:28]
B
Okay, fair enough. We don't like cruelty to animals particularly. And in fact, the amphitheater itself starts to fade out of use by, you know, in the three hundreds. It's not really getting used very much anymore. It fades away. And do you know what? The whole of Roman London fades away. The whole of Roman London fades away. And the archaeology shows us that building. There's a kind of layer of loam which suggests that a lot of the. There was a sort of depopulation. A lot of it wasn't being used. In the 300s, the population had diminished in general in Roman Britain, Towns were not the places that they had been a couple of hundred years.
- [57:19]
A
The big villas. There were people who were going outside and living in quite luxury.
- [57:23]
B
People like living in the Cotswold, in the Cotswolds.
- [57:26]
A
So it's not that everything is completely falling apart, but it's changing. And the cities are kind of going out with a bit of a whimper, not a bang.
- [57:36]
B
And one of the things that I find unbelievably haunting about it is that when Roman rule ends and by the way, neither of us thinks that there was a day when they went, right, Roman rule has ended, you know, and there was a mass exodus of Romans. That's not how it worked. It would have limped on from day to day, getting a little bit different or a bit worse, depending on how you think of it. You know, the army not being a little bit better, depending on how you think of it. There's no hard cut off, it fades away. There's a sort of traditional day in the early 400s, but, you know, it's not like people boarded ships and said goodbye. That's, that's not how it would have been. But actually, London does end up being completely disused for centuries. So the city of London, that is the Saxons, built their port and their settlement around where sort of Covent Garden is now. So that's a little bit to the west of here. But the city of London inside those Roman walls only becomes revivified as a city and starts again 400 years later when Alfred the Great reinhabits these city walls as a defense against the Vikings. To me, it's a very poignant and kind of haunting idea that this city really got going. The city that we know and to an extent recognize got going because of the Romans, and then paused a centuries long pause before beginning again. But in a sense with a certain Roman ness in its bloodstream, in its unconscious almost, I would say, and I
- [59:19]
A
think it's easy and I'm very tempted to do this, to say, look, actually the diverse community, the commercial population, the sense that this is a city full of people from other places, full of people, some of them pretty nasty, I imagine making a lot of money. That is part of what's in kind of the DNA of London. I think that's. And there is something kind of strangely and slightly uncomfortably familiar about that. But I think that I have to say that if I now, if I think of an inhabitant of Roman London, the one I can't get out of my mind is Fortunata, who didn't run away, you know, And I think that it's easy to see these, you know, these slick commercial guys, and there were plenty of those, but they were also like in the modern city, the people living on the margins, exploited, you know, owned by someone, you know.
- [60:29]
B
Mary, I think that's a fabulous place to end. Thank you all so much for being with us for this episode. We want to thank the Cultural Mile Business Improvement District, the City of London Corporation, and of course the Guildhall Art Gallery and London's Roman Amphitheatre which is free to visit and open Monday to Sunday, 10am to 5pm as ever, we want to know your thoughts and comments, ideas, questions and so if you have them, please do send them to us@instantclassicspodmail.com or on our social media at Instant Classicspod. Bye.
- [61:21]
D
To some, he is the revolutionary hero who restored China to its rightful place on the global stage.
- [61:27]
E
To others, he's a brutal despot accused of presiding over more civilian deaths than either Stalin or Hitler.
- [61:34]
D
Mao Zedong has one of the most recognizable faces in the world, yet he started life in a muddy provincial village.
- [61:41]
E
A rebel son who hated his father, survived a 6,000 mile walk across China and rose to become a figure of
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D
titanic proportions From Empire the Goal Hanger World History Show. I'm Anita Arnold.
- [61:54]
E
And I'm William Duranpole.
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D
In this six part series, we're joined by world renowned expert Rana Mitter to explore the life of the father of Communist China, Mao Zedong.
- [62:06]
E
We'll track his rise from a bookstore owner to a guerrilla commander and we'll witness his ruthless elimination to secure total power. And we'll descend into the dark experiment of the Cultural Revolution, a time when ancient temples were burnt, children denounced their parents, and a nation worshipped a mango as a sacred relic.
- [62:27]
D
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