Rome audio tour for kids

Statue head of Commodus

TULLIA: Welcome to Rome!

MARCUS: Ancient Rome.

TULLIA: Yes. Ancient Rome. I’m Tullia.

MARCUS: I’m Marcus.

TULLIA: We’re twins. And we’re also …

MARCUS: Flies on the wall.

TULLIA: Yes, really.

MARCUS: We’re flies on the wall and we’re going to be your guides on this journey into the past.

TULLIA: Together we’ll find out how the Romans lived and we’ll unearth a few surprises along the way.

MARCUS: Why are you staring at the statue of Emperor Commodus?

TULLIA: Do you think he looks like a tyrant?

MARCUS: What does a tyrant look like? You can’t tell if someone is a bully or cruel just by looking at them.

TULLIA: Mmm, I suppose not. But when it comes to emperors …

MARCUS: Okay, emperors. There were some reasonable ones.

TULLIA: And some who were mad, bad and dangerous to know, like Commodus.

MARCUS: There are lots of stories flying around about the crazy things Roman emperors did. But they aren’t always true.

TULLIA: In Commodus’s case though, they probably are.

MARCUS: He’s obsessed with gladiatorial combat and has spent …

TULLIA: Wasted!

MARCUS: Huge sums of money on it.

TULLIA: Why don’t you come to the Colosseum with us? That’s where the big fights take place.

MARCUS: Do you think Emperor Commodus will be there?

TULLIA: Yeah, dressed up as Hercules, pretending to be a gladiator.

MARCUS: Shh! Don’t say that. Suppose someone hears you? You’ll be in deep you-know-what.

TULLIA: We’re flies, Marcus. We like you-know-what. And because we are flies, we don’t need tickets. We can sit wherever we want in the Colosseum.

MARCUS: Unlike everybody else. Inside the Colosseum separate seating is allocated for men and women, and for different categories of people. Important men get front-row seats.

TULLIA: The lower levels have the best view of the action. That’s where the senators sit.

MARCUS: Non-citizens and slaves are confined to the upper sections.

TULLIA: As are women and girls. Except for the Vestal Virgins, Roman priestesses, who sit near the emperor. And of course the gods have their own special seats.

MARCUS: The whole event kicks off with wild animal hunts. Or wild animals fighting each other. Followed by public executions. Then gladiator contests.

TULLIA: Does anyone actually choose that? To go into the arena and face-off a lion?

MARCUS: Gladiators are usually slaves, criminals or prisoners of war. But some are professionals. And the most successful fighters are celebrities.

TULLIA: We like these events because there are always good pickings to be had — for flies like us.

MARCUS: Scraps — yum!

TULLIA: Blood — yum!

MARCUS: Guts — yum! Shotgun first!

Bronze mirror

MARCUS: Psst. What’s that?

TULLIA: A mirror.

MARCUS: Doesn’t look like a mirror.

TULLIA: Well, that’s what it is. A bronze mirror. Listen …

MOTHER: This is a big day for you.

DAUGHTER: It is.

MOTHER: I know you’re nervous, of course you are.

DAUGHTER: Not only about today, the wedding. About leaving here, leaving home. Leaving everything and everyone I know to live with a man I hardly know.

MOTHER: It’s true he’s a lot older than you, but we’ve chosen a kind, fair-minded man. He’ll be a good husband.

DAUGHTER: Will he? How can you be sure?

MOTHER: He has a fine reputation. Wealth, education, social position. Things that will make your life comfortable. This mirror is a gift for you. A way to keep an image of yourself. To see yourself reflected on its polished surface.

DAUGHTER: What’s the engraving on it?

MOTHER: That’s the god Zeus. Zeus complains to Hephaistos, the god of fire and metalwork, that he’s got a splitting headache. So Hephaistos swings his axe, cracks open Zeus’s head and, lo and behold, out leaps Athena, in full armour. She’s the goddess of many things: wisdom, learning, art …

DAUGHTER: … courage, mathematics …

MOTHER: … et cetera. A powerful woman.

MARCUS: Historians think that Etruscan women had a better deal than Roman women.

TULLIA: Women in Rome were expected to bear children, weave wool and more or less fade into the background. Who were the Etruscans?

MARCUS: Oh, they controlled the north of Italy. Their civilisation was around before the Romans started empire-building.

TULLIA: Can you imagine getting married at 13 or 14? That’s the age most Roman girls got married. Their husbands were often much older. How do you say, ‘Who wants to marry a rich old man’ in Latin?

MARCUS: Quis vult nubere divis [sic] senem?

Let’s check out the kitchen.

TULLIA: No. Not yet. It’s too busy in there. Let’s wait until the food’s ready.

MARCUS: But they’re making honey cakes. I love honey cakes.

TULLIA: Later, Marcus.

Portrait head resembling Cleopatra

YOUNG WOMAN: Ouch! That hurts. It’s too tight.

HAIRDRESSER: Sorry. Let me take out that braid and redo it. There. Is that better?

YOUNG WOMAN: Yes. Much better.

TULLIA: Right now the fashion in Rome is for all things Egyptian, including hairstyles. That’s because Cleopatra recently visited Rome.

MARCUS: Remind me again, who is Cleopatra?

TULLIA: The Egyptian queen.

MARCUS: Got it. The one with the big nose.

TULLIA: Marcus!

MARCUS: I mean, the one Julius Caesar is in love with.

TULLIA: Hairstyles are important in Ancient Rome.

MARCUS: At the barbers or hairdressers you can let your hair down.

TULLIA: And pick up the latest gossip.

YOUNG WOMAN: There’s a lot of talk in Rome. You should hear some of the things they’re saying about her. About Cleopatra.

HAIRDRESSER: They say that Julius Caesar would feast with her all night long until daybreak.

YOUNG WOMAN: Despite having a wife in Rome.

HAIRDRESSER: And now he’s erected a golden statue of her in the temple of the goddess Venus Genetrix.

YOUNG WOMAN: Rome is scandalised by the Egyptian queen.

HAIRDRESSER: She is very beautiful — or so I’ve heard.

YOUNG WOMAN: They call her an evil temptress who leads men astray. And worse …

RANDOM VOICES: Enslaved to a woman —

This queen with her flock of base men plots death and destruction —

Polluted by disease —

She drives men mad —

Destroys what is good and pure in them —

Nothing, but nothing, cools her fury —

A monster no less —

Venomous as the poisonous snakes she loves to handle —

This shameless queen and her entourage infect our city —

Go back to Egypt!

Go back to the Nile!

Go back to where you came from!

YOUNG WOMAN: So much hate. Where does all that fear and hatred come from?

HAIRDRESSER: I don’t know.

YOUNG WOMAN: What about her intelligence? The quality of her conversation?

HAIRDRESSER: Doesn’t she speak several languages?

YOUNG WOMAN: She does. Aramaic, Ethiopian — about nine, I think.

MARCUS: Wow. Greek was her first language.

TULLIA: She learnt Egyptian so she could speak to her people in their own tongue. The writer and philosopher Plutarch wrote that she …

MARCUS & TULLIA: ‘Could pass from one language to another.’

TULLIA: And hardly ever needs an interpreter. Pretty impressive, huh?

HAIRDRESSER: There you are. Your hair’s all done.

YOUNG WOMAN: How do I look?

HAIRDRESSER: Positively Egyptian.

Tombstone of Aurelius Saturninus

FRIEND 2: Titus Aurelius Saturninus.

FRIEND 1: He was a fine horseman.

FRIEND 2: A loyal soldier.

FRIEND 1: A loyal friend.

FRIEND 2: Buried here.

FRIEND 1: Far from home.

FRIEND 2: Without wife or nearby family.

FRIEND 1: So it’s our duty as his friends to ensure he receives the proper rites.

FRIEND 2: To pass into the afterlife. It is our duty as his friends to make sure …

FRIEND 1: That he is honoured and remembered.

FRIEND 2: We served together.

FRIEND 1: The three of us. Foreign auxiliaries in a cavalry unit.

FRIEND 2: The equites singulares Augusti.

FRIEND 1: An imperial bodyguard that accompanied the emperor around the empire.

FRIEND 2: Far from home.

FRIEND 1: He could read and write. He sent letters to his family. Wrote home asking for underpants and warm socks.

TULLIA: Which you’d need if you were riding around all day in freezing weather guarding the emperor.

MARCUS: The Romans were very good at winning battles, and everywhere they conquered they conscripted people into the army. These foreign warriors are known as auxiliaries.

TULLIA: They often have skills the Romans themselves lacked.

MARCUS: Like archery or horsemanship.

TULLIA: As a member of the emperor’s personal bodyguard, Aurelius Saturninus would have been given Roman citizenship.

MARCUS: Yes. And if you become a Roman citizen then all your family do as well. And with citizenship status comes a whole heap of benefits and advantages.

TULLIA: Eventually, though, foreigners with the Roman army rejected Rome. I wonder why that happened?

FRIEND 2: Titus Aurelius Saturninus.

FRIEND 1: He was a fine horseman.

FRIEND 2: A loyal friend.

CHORUS:
Dis Manibus
Tito Aurelio Saturnino
equiti singulari Augusti turmae Aeli
Crispi natione Pannoniae vixit annis
XXX militavit annis XI Titus Flavius Marcellinus signifer heres
et Titus Aurelius Secundinus
secundus heres amico optimo
faciendum curaverunt.

Lamp in shape of gladiator’s helmet

TULLIA: We’ve used our wings and buzzed over to a far-flung corner of the Roman Empire.

MARCUS: Britain.

TULLIA: Cold, damp Britain.

MARCUS: Someone’s coming.

TULLIA: Quick! Get off the ground. You don’t want to get squashed underfoot.

MARCUS: Who is it?

TULLIA: I can’t see, it’s all dark and shadows.

MARCUS: You’re a fly, use your superpower. Recent research shows we flies see a heck of lot more than you humans think we do.

TULLIA: It’s a father and his young son.

MARCUS: They’ve been to the games. The little boy is clutching a terracotta helmet. No, wait, it’s a lamp in the shape of a gladiator’s helmet.

TULLIA: His father must have bought it from one of the souvenir sellers.

MARCUS: What’s going on up there?

TULLIA: The usual animal fights.

MARCUS: But there aren’t any tigers in Britain. Only small animals. Hmm. If you went to the games expecting to see man versus lion and got instead man versus squirrel, I reckon you’d be pretty disappointed.

TULLIA: There were bears in Scotland. There’s a horrible description of a man ripped apart by a Caledonian bear at the Colosseum.

MARCUS: They must capture the animals elsewhere and bring them to Rome, or Britain.

TULLIA: Elephants from North Africa, lions from Asia Minor, tigers from Armenia.

MARCUS: You would need a huge supply.

TULLIA: No wonder they drove some species to extinction. Cicero who was a Roman statesman and orator wrote:

MARCUS: ‘About the panthers, the usual hunters are doing their best on my instructions. But the creatures are in remarkably short supply.’

TULLIA: The little boy is fast asleep, deep inside a dream.

MARCUS: Look, the souvenir lamp is there beside him.

TULLIA: Its glow warms the long midwinter night.

MARCUS: It’s so cold and gloomy here in Britain.

TULLIA: Let’s go back to Rome.

MARCUS: All roads lead to Rome!

Bath

MARCUS: Here we are back in Rome. Hovering over some rather grubby bathwater. Happy?

TULLIA: Very.

SLAVE: Is it hot enough? Too hot? Too cold? Too dirty? Not steamy enough? A slave’s work is never done.

TULLIA: He’s testing the waters for his master.

MARCUS: Most Roman families rely on slaves to do the heavy lifting.

TULLIA: Run their household, help their business, tutor their children.

SLAVE: You name it, I do it. Day after day, months without end. Shopping, cooking, forever cleaning. Not to mention all the scummy jobs.

TULLIA: Private bathtubs were rare.

MARCUS: So were private toilets. Most people used public lavatories and bathhouses.

TULLIA: These are places where people socialise, tell jokes …

MARCUS: Discuss political events, the latest celebrity gladiator scandal.

SLAVE: Water piping hot, not warm. All right for some. A nice, relaxing bath before dinner.

If I ever stop being a slave and become a freedman, I’ll come here to the bathhouse at the end of the day. I’ll bring my own slave with me to look after my things while I bathe. Make sure no one steals my toga and I’m forced to walk home naked. Here’s the oil. Check it’s the right oil. Check I’ve got the strigil to scrape the oil off my master’s body. And in he goes. The master of the house likes it hot.

TULLIA: Where’s the soap?

MARCUS: Soap hasn’t been invented yet. The Romans use oil instead. They smear it on, then the slave scrapes the dirt and oil from his master’s back with a tool called the strigil.

TULLIA: Imagine how polluted …

MARCUS: And contaminated …

TULLIA: That shared bathwater is.

MARCUS: Good for flies. Deliciously good for us. Not so good for humans though.

TULLIA: Just as well the Romans were excellent engineers and brilliant at inventing things. They designed drains and sewerage systems to get rid of the yuck, the muck, the slime and the scum.

TULLIA: Imagine what life would be like today without all those Roman inventions.

MARCUS & TULLIA: Hmm.

Statuette of a lar

YOUNG DAUGHTER: Father?

FATHER: Come and stand over here with me for a minute. I want to explain something. As you know, we have many gods. Big, powerful ones with their own temples.

YOUNG DAUGHTER: Like Jupiter or Venus?

FATHER: Yes. And we also have household gods, friendly ones who protect our homes. They’re called lares.

YOUNG DAUGHTER: Lares.

FATHER: Every household has a shrine where we gather as a family. Make offerings to the domestic gods and ancestor spirits. We pray for good fortune, health, a plentiful harvest. In the shrine we keep images of these guardians. Small statues. Look at this one, he’s holding a dish in one hand and a vessel in the other.

YOUNG DAUGHTER: Oh no. Sorry, I know you don’t like dogs inside the house. I thought he was outside. Shoo! Shoo!

FATHER: On special occasions …

YOUNG DAUGHTER: Birthdays?

FATHER: Birthdays, weddings, when a family member departs or returns from a journey, we make extra gifts to the lares.

When your marriage has been arranged — not yet, in a few years’ time — and when that time arrives, you will select some of your valued possessions and make a present of them to the lares and you will ask them to grant you a happy marriage.

Sometimes soldiers carry these statuettes into combat, like talismans, to bring them good luck and success in battle. To maintain good relations with the deceased, we gather here and offer incense.

YOUNG DAUGHTER: And juniper berries to make the crops good this year.

FATHER: We offer wine and water.

MALE VOICE: Accept these almonds, protect our home.

FATHER: We offer salt and spices.

YOUNG DAUGHTER: We offer cakes

MALE VOICE: Please bless our family.

MARCUS: Cakes? Did someone mention cakes? What kind of cakes?

TULLIA: Forget cakes, Marcus. The issue here is not cakes. Or biscuits.

MARCUS: What is it then?

TULLIA: It’s how little we know about the religious life of the ordinary Roman household.

MARCUS: Why is that? We know a good deal about other aspects of Roman life.

TULLIA: We know about concrete things, like buildings or swords or …

MARCUS: Swords are made of metal, not concrete.

TULLIA: Concrete things are real things that you can see.

MARCUS: Like chariots?

TULLIA: Yes. Whereas things like bravery …

MARCUS: Curiosity …

TULLIA: Or faith. You can’t see them. Or touch them. Or smell them.

MARCUS: So we don’t know a lot about those everyday domestic rituals …

TULLIA: Because they don’t leave much in the way of archaeological traces.

Toothpick from the Hoxne Treasure

MARCUS: What’s cooking? TULLIA: Got a craving for peacock tongues?

MARCUS: Need a recipe for braised flamingo?

TULLIA: How about a jellyfish omelette?

MARCUS: Look no further.

TULLIA: The Romans would try anything — at least once.

MARCUS: Like now, what you ate in Ancient Rome depended upon what you could afford.

TULLIA: Poorer people, the plebs, have a basic diet of bread and porridge. With the occasional piece of fruit or bit of stew.

MARCUS: But the rich people have feasts that last for hours.

TULLIA: With hares and hens.

MARCUS: Fish, mushrooms, goose liver.

TULLIA: Apples made sweet by sunshine.

MARCUS: Dates from Egypt.

TULLIA: Blackbirds baked with raisins and chestnuts in a pie.

MARCUS: Strange birds brought from the Straits of Gibraltar.

TULLIA: Custards.

MARCUS: Sausages were popular.

TULLIA: At a banquet to celebrate the victories of Julius Caesar, 6000 moray eels were served.

MARCUS: Do you think that’s true? Or the Roman equivalent of an urban myth? All those stories of excess and bizarre behaviour. Some old man rabbiting on said: ‘They vomit that they may eat, and eat to vomit.’

TULLIA: That was Seneca. He was a philosopher and playwright, and he wasn’t impressed by all that over-indulgence.

MARCUS: The Romans did eat stuffed dormice though.

TULLIA: Yes. They were a favourite snack.

MARCUS: ‘Cook together oil, leeks, small fish, pork glands, the testicles of a cockerel’?

TULLIA: That recipe for stuffed dormice comes from a Roman cookbook called Apicius. Its dishes are mostly aimed at wealthy people. But the majority of people in towns lived in flimsy apartment blocks with wooden floors. Lighting a fire to cook food was risky — you might burn down the whole building. So people bought hot food from street sellers.

MARCUS: Back to this stuffed dormice recipe: ‘Pound with pepper, nuts and herbs, moisten with garum.’ What’s garum?

TULLIA: A kind of fermented fish sauce. It was an essential ingredient in heaps of Roman dishes — often to disguise rotting meat and vegetables. No use-by dates in Ancient Rome.

MARCUS: Good for us then. Hey, come on, we’re flies. Rotting stuff is our thing.

TULLIA: We thought garum disappeared with the fall of the Roman Empire. But, guess what! A number of today’s chefs are putting it back on the menu. Coming soon to a kitchen near you. Maybe.

Selby Coin Hoard

MARCUS: We’ve time-travelled. Fast forward the centuries from Ancient Rome to — what year is this?

TULLIA: 2010.

MARCUS: Right. It’s 2010.

TULLIA: We’re in Britain.

MARCUS: Wow! How much money is that?

TULLIA: It’s a lot of silver …

MARCUS: Yes, but how much? How valuable were these coins?

TULLIA: They’re silver denarii from the reigns of Marcus Aurelius and Commodus. See, those are their faces on the coins. They were originally worth 16 asses.

MARCUS: Okay, an ass is another word for a donkey, and if it’s 16 donkeys per coin, that’s 16 times the number of coins — whoa, we’re talking a mega-herd of donkeys here.

TULLIA: No. Asses were bronze or copper coins.

MARCUS: And these denarii were found by some random person with a metal detector? Awesome!

TULLIA: Come on, let’s find out more from the experts.

ARCHAEOLOGIST: Archaeologists today are lucky because we’ve got a lot of technologies to help us uncover the past.

Hi, I’m Kim. I’m an archaeologist. These coins were buried inside two ceramic cups. A lot of them were stuck together and almost impossible to remove. We needed to identify them, but how?

SCIENTIST: We used a new X-ray technique — computed tomography if you want to get geeky about it. And we used this technique to produce three-dimensional images of the coins inside the cups.

ARCHAEOLOGIST: This meant we could examine them virtually.

SCIENTIST: The advantage of this method is that the coins could be identified quickly, and without the risk of damaging them.

ARCHAEOLOGIST: When archaeologists find things — artefacts — we ask questions: What are they? What do they do? Who might have used them?

MARCUS: Why do you think these coins were buried?

TULLIA: Perhaps there was some kind of crisis? And people buried their treasures hoping that once the crisis passed they’d be able to retrieve it.

MARCUS: Organic material …

TULLIA: Wheat chaff …

MARCUS: ... found among the coins suggests it may have been left as part of a ritual.

TULLIA: What kind of ritual?

ARCHAEOLOGIST: We don’t know what kind of ritual. As archaeologists and historians we’re finding out new things about the Romans every day. We’re still digging up artefacts and looking for clues about how they lived thousands of years before.

But we don’t have all the answers. We spend a lot of time building up a picture of the period. It’s painstaking work, like putting together a huge jigsaw puzzle where some of the pieces are missing. Why these coins were buried remains a mystery, although we do know that many coin hoards were offerings to the gods.

MARCUS: So keep digging. You never know what you might uncover.

Child’s sandal

GIRL: It’s not fair! It’s not fair! It’s not fair!

MARCUS: Hey, watch out!

TULLIA: What’s that? It nearly hit me.

MARCUS: That girl just threw her sandal out of the window and into the street.

GIRL: Don’t just stand there, Slave! Go and fetch it.

SLAVE: Why did you do that?

GIRL: Because I’m angry, Slave.

SLAVE: I know I’m a slave. You don’t have to keep saying it. Why are you so angry?

GIRL: Because it’s not fair!

SLAVE: Huh. Try being a slave.

GIRL: What did you say?

SLAVE: Nothing. Your parents will be angry. Shoes don’t grow on trees, they cost money. They’ll be angry with you, and then they’ll be angry with me.

MARCUS: What do you think would have been the best thing and the worst thing about being a child in Ancient Rome?

TULLIA: If your family was poor you had to go to work. But if your family was well-off it was a different story.

MARCUS: Families who can afford it, send their children to school. Boys and girls. A slave takes them to school and often keeps an eye on them there.

TULLIA: Boys continue with their education after the age of 11. But girls are expected to stay home and prepare for marriage.

GIRL: It’s not fair.

MARCUS: No, it isn’t. Thank goodness things have changed and it’s not like that now.

GIRL: It’s so not fair. I’m much better at reading and writing than my brother, everyone says that. But his schooling goes on while mine stops.

TULLIA: There are exceptions of course, but Roman men didn’t like their women to be too well educated.

GIRL: You should go and look for the sandal I threw out the window.

SLAVE: You think that’s fair?

GIRL: You’re a slave. It’s your job.

MARCUS: The main streets in Rome get swept but the lanes and alleyways are often ankle-deep in waste and pretty disgusting. People chuck their garbage out of windows.

TULLIA: The unfortunate slave wades into piles of dirt and rubbish.

MARCUS: Animal bones.

TULLIA: Decaying food.

MARCUS: And no doubt rats as well.

TULLIA: Was Ancient Rome full of rats?

MARCUS: You bet.

SLAVE: Here it is! I’ve found it. It needs a good clean — no prizes for guessing who’ll be doing that — but I’ve found it. I’ve found your shoe.

Pyramid of Cestius, Rome

BUILDER: Concrete. I love it, I really do.

G’day. I’m Rufus and I’m a builder. Now, you probably think of concrete as grey and boring, but it’s incredible stuff. It’s been around for ages — roads, walls, buildings — we take it for granted, but it was the Romans who invented concrete. They mixed lime with volcanic ash and water then added stone chips to give it extra strength.

It’s strong, light, easy to use. The Romans worked out that if they filled their walls with concrete they could reach new heights with multistorey structures. With concrete they could create huge spans. The Pantheon held the world record for a concrete span right up until 1958.

MARCUS: I didn’t know the Romans invented concrete. Wouldn’t mind seeing a Roman building site for myself. How about you?

TULLIA: Yeah, let’s go.

MARCUS: We’re back in Ancient Rome.

TULLIA: Back with the fashion for all things Egyptian.

MARCUS: And like the pyramids of Egypt, this Roman pyramid was built as a burial place.

TULLIA: It was built by a magistrate called Caius Cestius. Well, built by people he employed.

MARCUS: Caius Cestius had fought campaigns in Egypt and neighbouring Nubia, and after seeing pyramids there he decided he wanted one of his own.

BUILDER: Look, we could use all marble, course we could, but it’ll cost you a fortune.

CAIUS CESTIUS: But …

BUILDER: I know you had your heart set on marble, but …

CAIUS CESTIUS: But …

BUILDER: But it’s not really doable within budget.

CAIUS CESTIUS: But …

BUILDER: I know you don’t want to hear it.

CAIUS CESTIUS: But …

BUILDER: I know I said we can fix anything, even the crack of dawn if you’ve got the money. I was joking.

CAIUS CESTIUS: But …

BUILDER: Hang on a minute. I’ve got a solution. And I think you’ll like it. What if we use concrete?

CAIUS CESTIUS: But …

BUILDER: No, let me finish. What if we use concrete on the inside and a veneer of marble on the outside?

TULLIA: When this pyramid was built it was located outside the city limits.

MARCUS: Burials were not permitted within the walls of Rome.

TULLIA: If you go to Rome you can see Caius Cestius’s pyramid.

MARCUS: It’s still standing.

BUILDER: That’s concrete for you.

TULLIA: Enough with the concrete. You can’t eat concrete and I’m hungry!

BUILDER: Roman concrete is one of the most durable building materials in human history. While modern concrete exposed to seawater erodes within decades, marine structures built two thousand years ago are still standing. So scientists are studying the chemistry of Roman seawalls to see what modern engineers can learn from it.

MARCUS: Could Ancient Roman concrete help us adapt to a world of rising sea levels?

TULLIA: I’m ever so hungry.

MARCUS: Me too. And I think I can smell honey cake.

TULLIA: Seems like it’s time for us to buzz off.

MARCUS: Goodbye, or as they say in Ancient Rome …

MARCUS & TULLIA: Vale!

TULLIA: And if it’s to more than one person …

TULLIA & MARCUS: Valete!