Ancient

Professor Mary Beard looks beyond the stories of emperors, armies, guts and gore to meet the everyday people at the heart of Ancient Rome's vast empire. In this programme, Mary asks not what the Romans did for us, but what the empire did for Rome. She rides the Via Appia, climbs up to the top seats of the Colosseum, takes a boat to Rome's port Ostia and takes us into the bowels of Monte Testaccio. She also meets some extraordinary Romans: Eurysaces, an eccentric baker, who made a fortune out of the grain trade and built his tomb in the shape of a giant bread oven; Baricha, Zabda and Achiba, three prisoners of war who became Roman citizens; and Pupius Amicus, the purple dye seller making imperial dye from shellfish imported from Tunisia. This is Rome from the bottom up.

Dr Michael Scott journeys to Athens to discover that from the very start the theatre was about more than just entertainment - it was a reaction to real events, it was a driving force in history and it was deeply connected to Athenian democracy. In fact, the story of theatre is the story of Athens.

Ancient Greece's most powerful god wages an epic struggle against his father for control of the universe. It's the ultimate Clash of the Gods as the Olympians challenge the Titans in mythology's greatest showdown. This is a pivotal battle that experts believe may have been ancient code for a real world event - one of the greatest natural disasters the Earth ever experienced.

The word Anunnaki means "princely seed" or "princely blood". The idea is that the Anunnaki were direct creations of Anu, who was regarded as the father and king of the gods. Ancient Aliens: "In the ancient texts of Sumeria we have descriptions of these being descending from the sky called the Anunnaki. The term Anunnaki means 'those who from the heavens came."

This programme focuses on Nero, charting his obsession with becoming a god, how his plans to turn Rome into a glorious city bankrupted the Empire, how he married his slaveboy and killed his beloved wife in a frenzy, and how he was finally overthrown.

In this programme, Mary descends into the city streets to discover the dirt, crime, sex and slum conditions in the world's first high-rise city. This Rome is not the marble Rome we know, but a vast, messy metropolis with little urban planning, where most Romans lived in high-rise apartment blocks with little space, light, or even sanitation. Forced outdoors into the city streets, she reveals where they went to hang out, get drunk, have sex and get clean. She looks at the Forum as a place of gamblers, dentists and thieves, and she explores the lustiness of Roman bar life and jokes. Finally, exploring law and order from the bottom up, Mary examines how this city really worked. She meets Ancarenus Nothus, an apartment dweller who lived in fear of the rent collector; Notorious Primus, who wrote about his three great pleasures in life - baths, wine and sex; and Unlucky Doris, a seven-year-old girl killed in one of Rome's many fires.