- [Darius] Libyan, German, Dacian, Parthian, you'd have found them all on the streets of Imperial Rome.

Close to a million people lived in this metropolis.

How do they all end up in Rome?

Welcoming foreigners to Rome is a quintessential Roman trait.

And the story goes that right here on the Capitoline Hill, it was Romulus, the city's founder that created a safe haven, an asylum.

And then he said, "anybody can join this new city."

Brigands, shepherds, runaway slaves.

This was a safe space to join the city.

It was safe for everyone and anyone.

Rome was cosmopolitan from its earliest beginnings.

Right here in the forum, there was actually an early Etruscan neighborhood.

So you have from the earliest beginnings, Rome has immigrants that come and they bring cultural traditions.

They bring their gods, they bring their culinary traditions.

It's just like when you look at the history of New York, big cities today, they've got their little Italys and their China towns.

So the immigrants came in and created their own neighborhoods.

And in those neighborhoods, they brought their traditions.

And those traditions became part of the history of Rome.

Many of the people that arrived in Rome were enslaved.

Many of those slaves were freed, and they took on a new status, they're called liberti.

So freed men and freed women could participate in Roman society, even becoming citizens of Rome.

We had another group of people in the city of Rome, the foreigner who never became a citizen.

They're called a peregrinus.

And that meant they came for work, they came for opportunity, they came for jobs.

So they're inserted within the city, and yet they're distinct from Roman citizens.

And these two groups, the liberti and the peregrinus communities, well they added a lot to the city of Rome, making it bigger, richer, and far more diverse than any other city in the ancient world.

But let's make no mistake.

So many people were enslaved after losing to Rome in war, never to be freed.

They were destined to work the fields, toil away in quarries and to be trained in the arena to become gladiators.

So where did the gladiators come from?

We wanna think about them as people that were enslaved after war.

And in fact, in the Republican times, we look at the names of gladiators.

They're Samnites, they're Thracians, they're Gauls, places that were being conquered by Rome.

So you brought them in and then you sold them off.

And they were trained in the gladiator schools.

But over the passing of time, those places of the enemy were being absorbed into the Roman Empire.

And its citizens were becoming, over time, citizens of Rome.

So it wasn't really good to call them the names of those places that were once foreign lands.

So they changed the names describing the gladiators according to how they fought.

So one of my favorites is the retiarius.

It's a guy with a net and a trident.

Oftentimes he's paired with murmillo, who's a guy with a helmet with a crest, sometimes in the shape of a fish.

So it's like the fisherman going against the fish.

And he had a rectangular shield, he had a sword, the gladius, and he had some padding on one of his arms.

And you have these kinds of pairs afterwards.

You're transforming, you're evolving the gladiator games because the Roman empire was evolving and its citizenship was expanding.

(dramatic music) In second century CE, Trajan, the emperor, pushed the boundaries of the Roman Empire and crossed the Danube river and waged war against the Dacians in modern Romania.

And what you have depicted on Trajan's column in his forum is spectacular.

You've got 2,500 figures that are carved, spiraling up to the top in about a 100 scenes.

And it really is a manual on the art of war, how the Romans fought their foes, crossing rivers, foraging for food, making encampments, worshiping the gods, and of course, addressing the emperor.

And so many times it's scenes of battle.

And you can see the Romans, you can see how the Romans fought, the armor that they wore.

You can see the helmets that they wore.

You can tell they're definitely Romans.

And of course, in distinction, there are the barbarians, there are the Dacians, the other, wearing pants, and they have shaggy beards.

So they're displaying on this magnificent column, the victory of the Romans against the non Romans.

And you're depicting them in their traditional dress.

This is what you get when you observe all these scenes on Trajan's column.

Many of those enslaved in war ended up in Rome, adding to the crowds already there.

I check in with my archeologist colleague to find out more.

When you make your way through the streets of Imperial Rome, who are those people you're gonna encounter?

Where are they from?

- A variety of people at this point, coming from everywhere around the empire.

So in addition to what we would consider local Roman inhabitants, you could expect to run into Greeks.

Greeks and Eastern Mediterranean people were present in Rome since the time of the conquest of those regions.

We know there were physicians, some of them were tutors, former slaves that had at that point, very well integrated into Roman society.

There was also a large presence of people coming from the Middle East region.

There was an important Jewish community based in Rome since the second century BCE, and also especially during the late centuries of the Empire, the African presence was relevant.

Language was the first giveaway.

And we can imagine that even if people live in Rome at some point learned Latin, we know that Greek remain very important.

It was the second most important language.

In addition to that, you could expect to hear Aramaic from the Middle East area.

You could expect to hear people speaking the language from North Africa - [Darius] In the later empire, emperors hailed from all over the Mediterranean.

Septimius Severus was from North Africa, and his wife was from Syria.

He and his family certainly left their mark on Imperial Rome.

The emperor at the time is Septimius Severus.

He is an emperor actually from Libya, still a Roman citizen, becomes a senator in Rome, and ultimately is governor in Pannonia, which is modern day Hungary.

And when the previous emperor was assassinated, he made his claim to the throne.

And that led to wars fought throughout the Roman Empire, including the war against Parthia.

So it's here in Rome, he's consolidated his power and he is showing off his victory.

And then what do we see here?

We see important battles, various cities of the Parthian empire, the capital cities that are crushed by the Roman might.

We also see on a smaller freeze the depiction of the triumphal procession.

We see the goods, the spoils of war that are gonna be led on display.

And ultimately you have sacrifices to the gods that protected and ensured the victory of the Romans.

And probably the most pathetic scene that you see is at the bottom, at the base you have a number of Parthians depicted.

They've got their special hats, they're wearing pants, they've got shaggy beards, they are the other.

They are the non Roman, and they are in chains.

And one figure in particular is even holding his infant child.

So you're getting a real opportunity to connect with these people.

Romans faced wars, Romans were aware of those battles and they were aware of the human side and the toll that it took on people, winner and loser.

For all this diversity, there were lots of complaints.

And we have the famous ranting of Juvenal, his very xenophobic comments about the Orontes river from Syria polluting the Tiber river for a very long time with the people and their customs and their languages, just messing everything up for the local Romans.

But the truth is, Rome was a mix of cultures from the beginning.

(upbeat music) So much of Rome's history is tied to the Tiber river.

It connected the city to the rest of the Mediterranean.

If you didn't have the Tiber, the city never would've been connected to the rest of all those people, people that would eventually conquer.

And at the mouth of the Tiber River was its port city, Ostia Antica.

Ostia is the archeological site that best reflects what Imperial Rome of 1 million inhabitants once looked like.

An impressive brick city that was so crowded, that land was at a premium and you had to build up.

(upbeat music) I've just walked up three flights of stairs in an apartment building.

It's called an insula.

And this is typical in Imperial Rome.

But the cost of living in Rome was so high, the average person wasn't able to afford to live in a house.

Rather they lived in an apartment on multiple stories.

In fact, in Imperial Rome, the average apartment building was six stories in heights.

I'm here in Ostia, and what we have preserved is the third floor height of an apartment building right around the corner from the forum of the city.

And the forum was always the ultimate hub of exchange, buying and selling and trading, a cacophony of sounds and languages of people from all over the empire.

We've seen that Rome was one large melting pot through its history, and people came from all over, from its earliest beginnings all the way through the imperial period.

And all these people coming in with their ideas and beliefs and their gods and their customs are gonna have an effect upon the city.

So Rome was always in flux.

Rome was always evolving, and it meant that anyone coming into Rome could have a piece of that story, could affect that story.

And it's the true beauty of the history of Rome.

When we examined it and we look at the daily lives of the Romans, as it was constantly an evolution.

(upbeat music)