Rome was the greatest empire the world has ever known.
Why are Roman arenas engineering
triumphs as well as celebrations of total violence?
Imagine 25,000 spectators are crammed in here, and they're all
looking for blood.
Did the Romans create a mobile and deadly
armored weapon, the world's first tank?
Wow.
That is one impressive machine.
And how was this ancient empire able to build a
massive wall, straight across Britain, in record time?
They were ancient geniuses.
What they achieved is truly extraordinary.
Monuments more colossal than our own, ancient
super weapons as mighty as today's, technology so precise,
it defies reinvention.
The ancient world was not primitive.
Their marvels are so advanced, we still use them now.
Travel to a world closer than we imagine, an ancient age
where nothing was impossible.
The Roman empire became super sized through great
feats of impossible engineering
aqueducts bringing fresh water thousands of miles...
Super weapons that enabled the formidable Roman army to win
against impossible odds.
But nothing sums up the power,
violence, and glory of Rome like
these massive arenas that were
scattered throughout the empire.
And the greatest example is here in Rome, Italy.
There are many facets of
Roman society that we've copied in part.
But what's remarkable about the
Colosseum is we've copied all of it.
We've copied the entirety of it.
It is perfect.
The emperor Vespasian commissioned the
Colosseum for the people of Rome.
But this was no ordinary gift.
Vespasian knew that the arena was the perfect way to control a
difficult population.
If your people are fed and entertained, they're less likely
to revolt, and here, they were entertained and more.
In arenas like the Colosseum, extreme violence was
the most popular entertainment.
The expectations of the people when they came into the
amphitheater is they expect blood.
They expect death.
Thousands of people died every year in arenas all
over the Roman empire.
It was so effective in keeping Roman citizens content that
almost every town had one.
To modern stadium architects, the achievement of building huge
arenas like the Colosseum seems impossible.
It was effectively two
amphitheaters back to back, welded together.
The construction is superbly efficient in the sense that they
took the same section and repeated it into the oval of the
complete shape you see today.
So there's a great deal of repetition, which is a very
modern construction technique.
The scale of Roman arenas was impossibly ambitious,
even for modern buildings.
Over 600 feet long, 500 feet wide, with a central area
equivalent to a modern football field.
The Colosseum, Rome's largest
arena, may have held crowds up to 80,000.
We would take two to three years to build that.
To think that the Romans built the Colosseum in about 8 years,
a truly remarkable feat.
To understand how Roman amphitheaters worked,
we've come to Nimes, Southern France.
Unlike the Colosseum in Rome, this arena has survived intact.
I'm in Nimes, and this has one of the most amazingly
well preserved amphitheaters in the ancient world.
You don't need to reconstruct this.
It's all here before you, 360 degrees.
Modern entertainments, or sporting
events, usually last just a few
hours, but the Roman games would go on for weeks.
The contests honoring the emperor Vespasian involved 9,000
animals and 2,000 gladiators over the course of 100 days.
The typical activities that took place in the amphitheater
in Nimes would be killing animals in the morning.
You had the bestiary, the gladiators trained to fight and
kill or be killed by wild animals.
At noontime, you could have the execution of criminals, or you
can go off and have a nice lunch and return afterwards.
The main event, though, was
gladiators man against man in the afternoon.
Beneath the arena was technology that no modern
stadium can compete with.
Today, sports teams enter their arena through a simple tunnel.
But in the Roman arenas, gladiators and their opponents
made their entrances in high style.
We're in the hypogeum.
We're beneath the arena floor.
This is where the gladiators and animals would wait, and then,
with the given signal, they'd be hoisted up by slaves using
capstans and pulleys.
There's a lot of tech that's involved in the hypogeum area
because you don't have people behind a curtain, and the
curtain opens up and then there's the performance.
You have them popping up.
And this is about as sophisticated as it gets in a
performance in the ancient world.
Experimental model maker Richard windley is
investigating the backstage magic that made the blood and
Gore of the arena possible.
We know from existing bronze bearings in the remains of the
Colosseum now that some kind of
winch system was used, possibly a windlass which is a kind of
winding mechanism, basically.
So I've showed one of those here, and this works through a
series of ropes and pulleys to actually lift the cages.
Now, we do know that very large animals were sometimes used in
these shows, even elephants, so
some of these devices would have
had to have been very, very hefty.
Richard has calculated that up to 8 men
would operate this windlass, and
under the Colosseum, there would have been up to 80 of these
elevators, an amazing feat that
has no comparison in our modern world.
I've built a trapdoor and a simple operating mechanism to
open and close it.
It's still quite a feat to think that the complexity of this
whole project could be undertaken such a long time ago.
To entertain the masses, Roman engineers used
their ingenuity to create even
more events we'd think impossible today.
In the Colosseum in Rome, they were reputed to even be
able to flood it with water to be able to stage naval battles
for the entertainment of the crowd.
Did Roman engineers really achieve this impossible feat?
We know that the city of Rome
was served by hundreds of miles of aqueducts.
But how did the Romans get the water to the Colosseum?
It started with an extraordinary
piece of hydraulic engineering called a castellum.
It's not just the aqueduct bridge and the channel bringing
the water to a city.
How does it get distributed throughout the entire city?
You come here to the castellum
to understand the sophistication
of distribution in a Roman city.
This was civilization.
Structures like these distributed more water per
head to the people of Rome 2,000
years ago than new yorkers get today.
It comes out right here into this large tank, and then the
water is distributed in 20 pipes.
There were two lead pipes for every one of these holes here.
There are 10 holes total.
And it is an amazing enterprise.
The thing is, every aqueduct had a castellum.
And there's another intriguing clue to how they did
it beneath the Colosseum itself.
The site of this mighty arena
was once a lake created for the emperor Nero.
Archaeologists have found the
water channels that fed the lake.
Could they have been used to flood the Colosseum, too?
They did it by diverting an aqueduct into underground
channels, which then flooded the entire arena.
But the most remarkable thing was they could then open up
sluices and drain and dry out the arena in exactly the same
time it took to fill it up to
stage dry events the very next day.
Staggering.
The Roman arena is more modern than we could ever imagine.
This was the epitome of entertainment.
It all built on the foundations of the perfect technical infrastructure.
Forget television.
2,000 years ago this is the greatest show on earth.
Coming up, were the Romans the first to build
stadiums with opening roofs? And later, the emperor Hadrian
tames Rome's wild frontier with the empire's greatest build.
We believe that nothing could be as advanced as
what we build today.
But 2,000 years ago, Roman engineers made the blueprint for
what we think are modern buildings sports stadiums.
If we look at the Colosseum as a template for a modern
stadium, then it's embarrassing
really as a stadium architect to
think that we can't really improve on it.
Stadium architect Andy Simons has discovered that
much of his work today was already done by Roman engineers.
Roman arenas, like this one at
Nimes, France, look identical to
modern stadiums all over the world.
And incredibly, the geometry used is identical as well.
This arena is 290x180 feet, a ratio of 5:3.
By repeating this ratio of 5:3
in the angle of the seats, every spectator has a perfect view.
Everyone had a great view of the action, which is an
astonishing feat of engineering and geometry for the day.
When we sit in a stadium today, we are
experiencing something that goes back 2,000 years.
It's the sort of place that'd be familiar to any modern sports
fan, with excited crowds, fans supporting their favorite
superstar, even sellers selling
snacks and drinks to the crowds.
If we stripped out the plastic seats from a modern
stadium, you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between
the Colosseum terraces and a modern stadium.
All around the arena are arches that both
support the structure and provide access to every seat.
This design is so effective, it still hasn't been improved.
This has phenomenal architecture, phenomenal engineering.
What you see is quintessential Roman the arch and the vault
on a massive, monumental scale.
And just like today, the people with top status got the best seats.
The lower tier had the senators, the prime position
closest to the access and they had the maximum width of
facilities to support them, and the easiest route in.
And as the building went up, of course the categories of seating
declined through the equestrian and the knights in the second
tier through to the free Romans in the third tier, and up to
women and slaves in the top tier.
This structure limited the space in the top rows.
But even this was part of the Roman engineers' plan.
The staircases, it's believed, were deliberately
restricted in width to limit the egress time for the top tiers of
the cheaper seats so that they didn't impede the easy flow out
from the best seats.
This incredible achievement was unique to the
Romans for nearly 2,000 years.
We've only matched the impossibly advanced design of
the Roman arena in the last few decades.
And there's one design feature
we've literally just caught up with.
The Roman arena had its own climate control system.
What's so fantastic about this place is that you have the
holes in place, which would have
held masts, big timbers, on top of which was added the awning
system so you could extend it from here toward the center of
the arena, keeping the people in shade on a nice sunny day.
Called a velarium, it was controlled like a camera
iris so that as the sun moved, everyone stayed in the shade.
How did this ultra modern system work?
Richard windley is finding out with this incredible model.
However this was done was a staggering feat of engineering.
The principle that I've gone with in this particular model is
one of what we'd now call a tensile structure.
One rope from each post, and this goes to a central
elliptical rope in the center, this is pulled into an ellipse
by careful tensioning of the cords.
Each one of these so called segments now will support a piece of sail cloth.
And there's a rope attached at
the front end which goes over a pulley.
By pulling on one cord, we could extend the sail, and by pulling
on the other one, we can retract it.
If I start and withdraw by pulling the cords, yeah, and
that's starting to withdraw quite smoothly, actually.
Some modern stadiums have opening roofs.
But the Roman arena could do much, much more.
And this gives us the intriguing possibility that the
velarium could have been moved
in various ways, not just simply completely in and out.
But it could have been gradually moved to favor the sun as it
moved through the sky, and if
this was the case, it's certainly feasible.
But that is a very sophisticated
piece of engineering and a very
sophisticated concept, in fact.
This system was so advanced that modern buildings
are only just starting to catch up.
If you take one of the stadiums with the soccer world
cup in Qatar, that has a retractable fabric roof for
exactly this purpose, pulled to and fro on wire guidelines
exactly like the velarium did at the Colosseum.
We see that the Colosseum 2,000
years ago was so far ahead of its time.
But the Romans used their engineering and building
genius for much more practical reasons, too.
Like defending the furthest reaches of the empire.
Coming up, a massive wall straight across Britain.
And later, what were the ultimate secret
weapons of the mighty Roman army?
We've seen the incredible technological
achievements of the Roman empire, and how some are so
modern, we're only just catching up with them today.
With Rome at the height of its power, one emperor, Hadrian,
undertook the empire's greatest
engineering project to secure its frontiers.
His most impossible task was to control the wild northern
frontier of the province of Britain.
Britain Britannia was very important to the empire
insofar as it was a productive province.
Further north, you've got tribes
who've been pacified for the moment.
So this wall along this edge of the empire secures the boundary
against incursion but also facilitates trade.
The end of the Roman empire was this frontier 73 miles long.
Hadrian sealed it with a vast wall on an unimaginable scale,
far larger than any fortification in the Roman world.
Originally it was 10 feet wide and up to 20 feet high.
If an enemy managed to cross the wall, the Romans had another
formidable obstacle lying in ambush.
But who constructed this mission impossible?
The Roman army.
At the siege of masada, these super soldiers moved the
equivalent of one and a half
Empire state buildings to build a vast ramp.
In just weeks, Roman speed and efficiency moved the greatest
man made mountain in the ancient world.
And subdued an impregnable fortress.
The Roman army had got an extended history of great
engineering works, but Hadrian, he had to go one better
a massive wall marking the northern boundary of the empire.
For hundreds of years after the fall of Rome,
this once mighty wall was robbed for building materials.
It seems impossible, but three
Roman legions, about 15,000 men,
built this 73 mile wall in just five years.
This wall contained 35 million cubic feet of material
and all moved and cut by hand.
It's just incredible.
Roman soldiers only had the tool kits they carried
on their backs, such as these.
The ligo was an entrenching tool that had the nickname, "the ankle breaker."
You swing it with your legs apart, and if you don't pay
attention, you end up breaking your ankles with it.
Secondly, we have a very famous tool, the dolabra.
Julius Caesar once said that more battles had been won with
the entrenching tool,
particularly the dolabra, than with the sword.
This was used for cutting out tree stumps.
It has a very sharp blade and a hook at the other end for
levering up roots and that sort of thing.
To make the wall an even more impassable barrier,
the Romans used existing natural obstacles like this cliff.
But how were these perfectly straight lines achieved along
the course of the wall?
The answer lies in another example of the Romans' mastery
of massive construction.
The groma.
With these machines, great
distances of straight lines could be marked.
This is the groma.
It's a simple and ingenious way
of plotting straight lines and right angles.
This is how Hadrian's wall was laid out so accurately.
They're simply string and lead weights, but the
mathematics involved in these machines set the Romans far
ahead of anyone else in their construction work.
These plumb bobs, or plumb lines, ensure that the pole is
completely upright and above the point you're measuring from.
Get an assistant with a pole and move him until his pole is
lined up with the three plumb Bobs.
It seems impossible that the
Romans could survey so accurately.
There were other monster fortifications in the
ancient world, but this mighty
Roman wall wasn't just about scale.
Sure, you can look at the great wall of China and think.
"Well, it's longer and bigger."
But for the size for the work force... Absolutely incredible.
Hadrian's wall, the engineering triumph of the Roman
legions, was built in just five years.
The great wall of China took nearly 2,000 years and may have
cost as many as a million lives.
The Chinese wanted an impenetrable barrier.
But the Romans wanted a modern
frontier to control trade and migration.
The Romans can reach out into the immediately pacified area,
and even further afield, to trade and obtain those resources
without having to actually live there.
Hadrian's wall doesn't just show us that the
Romans could achieve the impossible.
It's the beginning of the
modern frontiers that control our world today.
Coming up, Rome creates snipers, repeating weapons, and artillery
barrages to build an empire.
And later, insane emperor Nero
sacrifices his empire to create a building beyond the imagination.
Over 2,000 years ago, the Roman empire adapted a
deadly weapon so versatile, it
predated modern snipers... Machine guns...
Artillery barrages... And even tanks.
The Romans realized that long range firepower was a
game changer that could win against impossible odds.
How did this advanced military
technology achieve the impossible?
Rome was all about might and power.
In order to spread their influence,
they had to face numerous armies.
And to conquer them, they built powerful weapons.
Here in Rome, Italy, there is a monument that
tells us how Rome supersized its firepower.
Built for the emperor Trajan, it's a fascinating record of the
Roman army in the 2nd century A.D.
Trajan's column is 130 feet high
with a 650 foot long relief of Trajan's wars winding around it
like an ancient comic strip.
But we can see its details from these plaster casts made from
its magnificent carvings.
This shows the weapon that
emperor Trajan used to devastating effect the ballista.
The ballista was one of the
most powerful weapons in the Roman arsenal.
It draws its power from two twisted skeins of sometimes
rope, sometimes human hair, but particularly sinew.
These skeins of fiber the Romans actually called tormenta,
almost like tormented souls,
because as you crank them up...
You can hear them straining, almost screaming with the power
which is pent up, ready to shoot.
The twisted fiber Springs protected by brass
cylinders create the fighting
power of this battle winning weapon.
The windlass pulls back the
string attached to the ballista arms.
This creates enormous tension in the fiber spring, which left
unreleased, is fierce enough to tear the ballista apart.
Just imagine the power and lethality of these types of weapons.
It's something you would never want to go up against.
Incredibly, a ballista target used by the
Romans was found in the remains of a Roman fort.
These holes look like they've
been smashed with the force of modern bullets.
Archaeological evidence from the Roman base camp of
vindolanda on the Scottish border, they found animal
skulls, and we know that they
used these for ballista target practice.
It's good for the Romans, it's good for us.
For the first time, we're testing the power and
accuracy of this incredible ancient weapon.
And now we're putting the ballista to the test.
I'm gonna see if I can clock the speed of the bolt.
This radar gun normally checks speeding cars.
Today it's going to measure the speed of a ballista bolt.
Oh, man.
Ha.
Take a look at that.
Whoo.
That is what they call a kill shot to the head at 70 miles per
hour, just over 100 feet per second.
Whoo.
To give you an idea of just how powerful these weapons are, it
was recorded at the siege of
Rome that a bolt from a tower mounted ballista
penetrated a goth's armor and pinned him to a tree.
This is a weapon of intimidation, and it screams
"don't mess with Rome."
The ballista wasn't just powerful.
It was deadly accurate.
The ballista shoots a heavy bolt, wood and an iron tip, with
pinpoint accuracy long range, and it can penetrate armor.
So when a sniper sits back on a modern battlefield and takes
out a man behind his ceramic body plates...
The Romans were able to do that with a ballista.
We know that at short range, the ballista
worked like a sniper rifle.
But if you elevate the ballista, the bolt flies in a parabola
rather than a straight line and you quadruple the range.
The typical Roman legion had
about 60 ballistas as part of their armament.
They could deliver a deadly rain of about 120 bolts a minute at
enemy troops a quarter of a mile away over 1,500 years before
the artillery barrage.
We're using this ballistics dummy to show just how
devastating this would have been.
You can see where our modern word "ballistics" comes from.
This deadly weapon didn't just fire bolts.
It could also fire solid shot.
This is an actual Roman firing stone that would have
been shot from the ballista right here.
It's the size of a baseball, and it feels like a lead weight, and
they've taken the time to Polish the surface so that it has a
true flight path and it's accurate down range.
Imagine getting hit by that.
This test demonstrates the true power of the Roman weapons,
and having the most powerful weapons in the ancient arms race
allowed Rome to become the superpower it was.
And this versatile ancient weapon may have inspired
a revolution in warfare.
Coming up, did the Roman empire engineer the world's first tank?
And later, emperor Nero demands the impossible a massive rotating building.
When it was mission impossible for the mighty Roman
empire, they turned to the ballista.
There's tantalizing evidence that the Romans used the
ballista in another supposedly modern weapon system the tank.
In the Bodleian library in Oxford, england, there's
exciting evidence that could
rewrite how we view the Roman army.
The book I've got in front
of me here is something quite remarkable.
It's a copy, a manuscript copy of a book written in the 4th
century A.D., probably round about 370.
We don't know the author's name,
but his book was called "De rebus bellicis."
It's about matters of war.
This book reveals amazing insights into advanced
Roman military technology, like this full body armor.
The author came up with a lot of bright ideas that he then
sent to emperor suggesting how they could defend the empire
more efficiently and at less cost.
By the 4th century A.D., the Roman empire had changed forever.
The emperor Trajan, master of the ballista's use on the
battlefield, had expanded Rome's power.
But now the empire faced continual threats along its massive borders.
And the Roman army had to move fast to meet the next crisis.
The army is very different at the end of the empire.
They need cavalry to defend the
thousands of miles of frontier.
So if your artillery is mobile,
then that gives you extra firepower.
Now it's impossible to think
that the Romans invented a tank, but they did.
This remarkable illustration in the Bodleian
library is the vital clue that the Roman empire was able to
achieve the impossible.
This was a giant ballista
that was mounted on top of a carriage.
The ballista itself could swivel 360 degrees.
The carriage was drawn by two powerful armored horses.
It had mobility, it had protection, and it had firepower.
It was essentially a tank.
Archaeological evidence shows the Roman army
had fully armored horses.
And they were used to drive this weapon system, the ballista
quadrirotis, with all the characteristics of a tank nearly
2,000 years earlier than we ever imagined.
Like a modern tank turret, the
ballista quadrirotis could fully
rotate to face threats from any direction.
We know the Romans had spring suspension, so all in all, this
was a highly mobile vehicle.
And when we think of a tank, and with its modern day
characteristics, we think of
firepower, mobility and protection.
And the ballista quadrirotis has got all three.
The Romans achieved the impossible, developing the
ballista to make it the decisive
weapon of the ancient battlefield.
The ballista's a powerful weapon.
But it seems incredible to think that you can also make it a
semi automatic weapon.
Philo of Byzantium refers to one
from the 3rd century B.C. called a polybolos.
There are detailed descriptions of a weapon called
the polybolos in ancient Greek and Roman texts.
And scholar and ancient weapons
expert Alan Wilkins has studied
them to make his own polybolos.
It is a machine gun.
And the next machine gun in
history is the gatling gun of the 19th century.
Just like a gatling gun, the polybolos was a
hand cranked rapid fire weapon.
And like the gatling, gun it was
a huge step forward in technology.
It is probably one of the most impressive pieces of
ancient machinery because it has
a number of firsts in ancient technology.
It's got chain drive.
This is the first known chain drive in Western technology.
But there's much more to this impossibly modern
mechanism than a chain.
A gravity fed magazine takes 8 or 9 ballista bolts.
Keep this loaded, and there's no limit to how long this
incredible weapon can fire.
A mechanical imitation of an
Archer's fingers is locked over the bow string.
Turning the windlass pulls back the string,
locking and loading the ballista,
which fires automatically as soon as the string is fully drawn.
Rome's ingenuity perfected the ballista, creating weapon
systems to perform roles still vital on today's battlefields.
Coming up, Rome's lust for luxury and outrageous displays
of wealth push emperor Nero to create a building 2,000 years
ahead of its time.
The Roman army used advanced military technology and
rigid discipline to carve out
the mightiest empire of the ancient world.
Yet Rome's ruthless ambition to achieve the impossible wasn't
just confined to the battlefield.
You'd think that nothing from the past could match the wonders
of our modern cities, but here in ancient Rome, engineers who
were years ahead of their time created one of the greatest and
most technologically advanced cities ever seen.
To see just how amazing the architecture of ancient Rome
actually was, we've come to San Diego...
Home of one of today's most awesome buildings.
Al and Janet johnstone have
created a house that actually rotates.
We get a lot of people
volunteer to do the dishes at our house.
The sink is regular, but the view is awesome.
This house is a new step in architecture called "kinetic
architecture" moving structures.
It's the next phase of architecture.
But could this architecture have already been achieved by the Romans?
Beneath the ancient streets of central Rome lies a wonderful discovery.
This is all that remains of the
domus aurea, the opulent palace
of the tyrannical emperor Nero,
that once occupied at least 100 acres.
Throughout the structure you have polished marble, and then
plenty of fountains and lots of light sources.
And of course, you have the gilding on the ceilings.
Hence the name "domus aurea."
"Domus" means "house."
"Aurea" means "golden."
The golden house of Nero.
This mega mansion was created on a scale that is
impossible today.
But what did this unbelievable super palace have to match a
modern revolving house?
One ancient writer provides us
with a fascinating clue from his description of Nero's palace.
Suetonius described Nero's private dining room as rotating
as if it were in motion with the celestial bodies.
And no one really understood what suetonius meant by this.
Could it be that the ceiling was revolving and it perhaps had
stars and moon painted on it?
Or could it be that the walls were revolving?
In the ruined labyrinth that was once the
ancient world's greatest mansion is evidence that this amazing
room actually existed.
It has what looks like the foundations of a revolving floor about 50 feet in diameter.
These remains show how Roman engineers created a
revolving floor 2,000 years
before we'd think it was possible.
How did the Romans rotate such a massive structure?
3D analyst James Dean is using the latest technology to
re create this wonder of the ancient world.
The Romans reclined on
couches like this at their dinner parties.
But how did the Romans make the floor rotate continuously?
That seems impossible even today.
How would you have revolved a large banquet hall?
There are lots of theories brute physical force, with
weights, some sort of turning device?
In San Diego, al and Janet johnstone's rotating
house uses 21st century technology.
The house rides on the first floor.
And on the top of the first floor is a track and a one and a
half horsepower motor and a reduction transmission.
Then the motor drives the second
floor round that track in either
direction at whatever speed you choose.
But what technology was available to the emperor
Nero 2,000 years ago?
What they think probably moved this huge revolving floor
would have been effectively giant stone ball bearings.
The use of ball bearings nearly 2,000 years ago
seems impossible, and that's not the end of the technological
mysteries of Nero's rotating floor.
We've seen that the floor rotated on these ball bearings.
But how did they achieve yet another impossible task and get
a continuous regular rotation?
One method that has been suggested... Is hydraulic power.
Knowing Rome's mastery of hydraulic
engineering, it makes perfect sense.
But until further evidence is discovered, we can only guess.
No one has been able to work
out how this incredible rotating floor worked.
It shows how Roman engineers could achieve the impossible
dream of their insane emperor.
But Nero's high rolling lifestyle eventually led to his downfall.
In 68 A.D., facing a series of revolts sparked by high taxes,
Nero committed suicide.
Rival generals fought for the throne.
With outrageous spending and civil wars, the Roman empire was
ultimately doomed.
But its legacy of achieving the
impossible is still with us today.
The Roman empire set the standard for technology that
forms a vital part of our modern world, from sophisticated,
high tech weapons to totally modern architecture and the
first revolving room, proving that the Roman empire was able
to achieve the impossible, creating incredible technology
we can still see in use today.