Julian Barnett
Hidden Rome, Part 2: ‘Pleasure, Commerce and Warfare’: Further Lesser Known Parts of Ancient Pagan Rome
Summary
In this second instalment of Republican and Imperial Rome, Julian takes us even deeper into the more obscure areas of these most ancient parts of Rome. He supplies the back stories behind the city’s pyramid, aqueducts, walls, bath houses and ruins, which all continue to feature in this lecture.
Julian Barnett
Julian Barnett is a teacher, collector, tour guide, and writer with a specialist interest in ultra-orthodoxy within the various faiths. For the last 35 years, he has been investigating and documenting the most extreme sects of the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim worlds. His experiences and travels were serialized in the Jerusalem Report and also broadcast on BBC Radio Four Religion. Outside of his full-time history teaching post at Southbank International School, Portland Place, London, Julian lectures at numerous venues around the UK and beyond. In 2013 Julian was a joint winner of the National Teacher of the Year Award.
They do need maintenance, of course, and the municipality spends quite a lot on them. But they are powerful structures that sort of, I mean, I don’t want to downplay the fact that they do need maintenance, but they do look after themselves as well. That said, remember that Rome is built upon masses and masses of catacombs, because those million Romans were buried in catacombs. Rome must be the only municipality in the world that has a full-blown, fully-manned, 100% fully-funded department of sinkholes. Because sinkholes occur quite frequently in Rome. Most of them aren’t vast. Most of ‘em don’t kill anyone, but they happen, because Rome is this massive honeycomb of catacombs and temples and so on. All the time, new catacombs are being found. And all the time, when new constructions are made, they find catacombs, they rediscover them. So walls do need maintenance. Rome needs maintenance. The whole of Rome is a honeycomb of sinkholes and many of them are underneath the walls. So, yes indeed.
Indeed, they did. But remember, many of the ancient walls were hollow, anyway, because you had Roman soldiers garrisoned within the walls, not just upon the walls. So, within those walls, there were many corridors and fortresses, where the Roman soldiers lived themselves. Roman soldiers will be stationed on those walls for two years at a time. A Roman soldier would leave his family for two years, be stationed on the wall. See, he would live in that wall for two-years time, spending some time above, some time below, within it. And we’re moving on to the questions.
It depends, the walls are built over a long period of time and sometimes slaves, sometimes professionals, sometimes hard labour, mercenary labour for other parts of the empire. It depends. Remember, we’re talking about an empire that spanned from approximately 500 B.C. to 500 A.D. So, a thousand-year empire, there were different principles of building, as the empire progressed.