When most people think of ancient Rome, they imagine marble temples, mighty emperors, grand speeches in the Senate, and legions marching in perfect formation. For centuries, the story of Rome has been told through the lens of emperors, generals, and elites—the men whose names were carved into history. But in 2012, the celebrated historian and classicist Mary Beard turned that perspective on its head with her BBC series Meet the Romans with Mary Beard.
Across three episodes, Beard invites viewers to step away from the marble monuments and into the crowded streets, noisy taverns, and bustling tenements of the Eternal City. She doesn’t just recount history; she reclaims it for the millions of ordinary Romans who lived, worked, and died in one of the greatest cities the world has ever known.
A Historian Who Brings the Past to Life
Mary Beard, Professor of Classics at Cambridge University, is renowned for her ability to make the ancient world feel immediate and alive. She’s not your typical television historian—her delivery is conversational, witty, and irreverent, yet underpinned by formidable scholarship. She isn’t afraid to challenge old assumptions or get her hands dirty—sometimes quite literally, as she digs through ancient rubbish dumps or handles graffiti-scrawled relics to piece together the lives of people long forgotten by traditional history books.
In Meet the Romans, Beard’s guiding question is simple but profound: Who really lived in ancient Rome? Not just the emperors, philosophers, and patricians, but the bakers, prostitutes, slaves, and bar owners who formed the lifeblood of the city. Her mission is to uncover the voices of the ordinary citizens who are too often drowned out by the grandeur of the empire.
Reconstructing Everyday Life in Rome
The series is divided into three episodes: All Roads Lead to Rome, Street Life, and Behind Closed Doors. Each explores a different facet of Roman life through the evidence left behind—inscriptions, graffiti, tombstones, and the ruins that still shape the city’s landscape.
1. All Roads Lead to Rome
In the opening episode, Beard takes viewers into the heart of the empire—Rome itself. She paints a vivid picture of a city bursting with life: a million inhabitants packed into narrow streets and crowded insulae (apartment blocks), where rich and poor lived side by side.
We learn that Rome was not a pristine marble metropolis but a noisy, dirty, and chaotic city. The air was filled with smoke from cooking fires and the stench of open sewers, yet it was also a place of vitality and diversity. People came from every corner of the empire—Spain, North Africa, Greece, and beyond—making Rome one of the earliest true melting pots of cultures.
Beard’s approach is wonderfully tactile. She doesn’t just talk about history—she walks through it. She examines tombstones and inscriptions that reveal the names and occupations of real individuals: bakers, midwives, tavern owners, and freed slaves. These fragments tell stories of ambition, resilience, and struggle. One inscription she examines reads like a small victory over anonymity—a man who had been a slave proudly declares his new name and his status as a freedman.
2. Street Life
The second episode, Street Life, delves deeper into the social fabric of the city. Here, Beard explores the vibrant and sometimes dangerous world of the Roman streets—the markets, bathhouses, and taverns where people gathered, gossiped, and conducted business.
Through graffiti preserved in Pompeii and Rome, Beard uncovers the humor, politics, and passions of ordinary Romans. The walls were the social media of the ancient world, filled with insults, love notes, political slogans, and crude jokes. Far from being silent ruins, these spaces still echo with the voices of people who lived nearly two thousand years ago.
Beard also looks at how Romans navigated daily life in a crowded city: how they fetched water, bought food, and entertained themselves. We meet the shopkeepers selling bread, the water carriers, and even the city’s notorious public toilets—communal spaces that doubled as social hubs.
Through all this, Beard humanizes the Romans. They emerge not as distant figures in togas, but as people with familiar desires and frustrations—trying to make a living, falling in love, complaining about their landlords, and poking fun at politicians.
3. Behind Closed Doors
In the final episode, Behind Closed Doors, Beard takes viewers inside the Roman home—not the grand villas of the elite, but the cramped apartments of the urban poor. Using archaeological evidence, she reconstructs what it was like to live in such close quarters.
The typical Roman apartment was small, dark, and crowded, often housing multiple families. Yet these modest homes were filled with life and creativity. Household shrines, cooking pots, and simple decorations reveal how ordinary people made their spaces their own.
Beard also explores family life, gender roles, and the status of women and slaves. She highlights how Roman society, despite its inequalities, was deeply interconnected—slaves could earn freedom, women could run businesses, and immigrants could rise in status. Rome’s greatness, she suggests, was built on this dynamic mix of ambition and adaptability.
A Different Kind of History
What makes Meet the Romans so compelling is its bottom-up approach to history. Instead of focusing on emperors and battles, Beard tells the story of the many rather than the few. She reads history not in marble statues but in broken pottery, street graffiti, and tomb inscriptions.
This approach challenges long-held assumptions about ancient Rome. The series shows that the empire was not just sustained by conquest and politics, but by the labor and ingenuity of its everyday citizens. By piecing together their stories, Beard restores humanity to a history that has too often been told in terms of glory and power.
Her style is refreshingly informal and inclusive. She strolls through modern Rome, chatting with locals, drawing connections between past and present. When she points out how ancient Romans complained about traffic jams and noisy neighbors, it’s hard not to smile at how little human nature has changed.
Mary Beard’s Signature Style
Mary Beard’s personality is central to the success of the series. She is passionate but never pretentious, witty without being dismissive, and unafraid to challenge the myths of antiquity. Her enthusiasm is infectious—she treats history as a living conversation rather than a list of dates and monuments.
Perhaps her greatest strength is her empathy. Beard approaches her subjects not as distant curiosities but as fellow human beings. When she reads an inscription marking a freed slave’s tomb, or examines a child’s toy preserved in volcanic ash, there’s a palpable sense of connection across the centuries.
In this way, Meet the Romans is not just about understanding the past—it’s about understanding ourselves. The lives of the ordinary Romans remind us that civilization is built from the ground up, by countless individuals whose stories deserve to be remembered.
Critical Reception and Legacy
When Meet the Romans aired in 2012, it was widely praised for its originality, insight, and accessibility. Critics lauded Beard’s engaging style and her ability to make ancient history feel modern and relatable. The series stood out for its human-centered storytelling, which contrasted sharply with the more traditional, museum-like treatments of ancient history.
It also resonated with audiences because it celebrated diversity and inclusivity. Beard’s Rome was not an empire of marble heroes, but a living, breathing city of immigrants, laborers, and dreamers—a reflection, perhaps, of our own urban world.
The series reinforced Beard’s reputation as one of Britain’s most important public intellectuals. It also inspired renewed interest in classical studies, reminding viewers that the ancient world still has much to teach us about resilience, community, and identity.
Conclusion: Meeting the Real Romans
Meet the Romans with Mary Beard is more than just a history series—it’s a celebration of humanity across time. By focusing on the forgotten voices of ancient Rome, Beard reminds us that history is not just about kings and conquerors but about ordinary people whose stories form the foundation of civilization.
Through humor, empathy, and scholarship, Beard tears down the marble façade of ancient Rome to reveal the messy, vibrant, and deeply human world beneath. The result is a series that doesn’t just teach us about the Romans—it allows us to meet them.
In doing so, Meet the Romans achieves something rare in historical television: it makes the distant past feel intimate, relatable, and alive. It’s a reminder that while empires may fall, the human stories they contain continue to speak to us across the centuries.
