The Fall of Rome: Origins

The Roman Empire, once an ancient powerhouse, experienced a dramatic fall from its golden age to eventual collapse. Tristan Hughes and guest Dr. David Gwynn launch our new Ancients mini-series on The Fall of Rome by exploring how internal pressures, civil wars, economic instability, and the rise of Christianity contributed to the decline of the Western Roman Empire. They compare the structural changes made by emperors Diocletian and Constantine, the impact of class tensions, and the challenges posed by external threats, setting the stage for the empire's fall. Join them as they uncover the complex processes that led to one of history's most dramatic and world-changing collapses. MORE: The Origins of Rome: https://open.spotify.com/episode/26cmn3eQrPb0LQ7Jiu92cP Rome's Crisis of the Third Century: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3VgvW43kHAxzSl43hWJiRZ Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editors are Aidan Lonergan and Joseph Knight, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

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• 1:29Tristan Hughes?

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• 2:11Tristan Hughes?

  gate with better snacks and worse lighting, and what actually happens when an airline loses your luggage for 12 days, and how to get real money back instead of a free drink and an apology. Plus, the tip I really needed: how to book flights without it turning into a part-time job. Travel smarter and spend less with help from NerdWallet. Follow Smart Travel wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:53Tristan Hughes?

  The Roman Empire, the beating heart of the ancient world. A dazzling expanse of marble and martial valour, of togas and trade routes that spanned three continents. It was constructed over the course of a thousand years and rose from a city that was once an overlooked backwater. Rome's sweeping imperium came to define the very concept of civilisation, but then the cracks started to emerge. Rome, once a dominion of glory and gold, in just two centuries would become synonymous with decay and collapse. And over the next two weeks, the question we're asking on The Ancients is how?

• 3:38Tristan Hughes?

  How was the most illustrious empire the world had yet seen brought to doom and destitution? You're listening to The Ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and this is the story of the fall of Rome.

• 3:58Tristan Hughes?

  Today, in the first of four special episodes, we’re starting at the beginning, casting the net wide to trace the origins of the Western Roman Empire’s collapse. From civil wars that pitted emperor versus emperor, to the contested rise of Christianity, we’ll explore the swirling maelstrom of internal pressures and tensions that pushed Rome to breaking point. Next, we’ll journey north to the unruly borderlands along the rivers Rhine and Danube, to mingle among the so-called barbarians, who flooded across the empire’s boundaries and carved out their own barbarian kingdoms from the husk of this fallen superpower. Then, we’ll travel east, past the lands of the Goths and the Huns, to the fertile crescent

• 4:43Tristan Hughes?

  of Mesopotamia and the faraway lands of East Africa, tracing the origins of a series of indiscriminate deadly plagues that ripped through the empire’s population. We’ll ask: was disease the main factor that brought Rome to its knees? And finally, to bring things to a head, we’ll tell the tale of Rome’s last emperors, the rump Roman state they supposedly controlled, and we’ll ask what happened next: did Rome really fall, or did it evolve and continue by another name? Throughout it all, world-leading historians will bring their unique insights. Together, we’ll discover thrilling revelations and immerse ourselves in the world of ancient

• 5:25Tristan Hughes?

  Rome, to help us unpack its ultimate fate. But all of that is yet to come. First, let’s wind back the clock and imagine Rome before its fall, back to an empire that heralded the likes of Augustus and Trajan, Caesar’s who dripped with prestige and power, to a dominion that bounded the azure swells of the Mediterranean and stretched from the dampened drizzly marshes of Caledonia in modern-day Scotland, to the parched deserts and wild badlands of Parthia in the Middle East. For those who experienced it, the majesty of Rome in the first and second centuries was undisputed.

• 6:06Tristan Hughes?

  Its people were “the mightiest of men” and “commanded the fairest portion of the earth”, so claimed Salvian, a 5th-century churchman looking back wistfully on the empire’s greatest days.

• 6:24Tristan Hughes?

  We can imagine a merchant vessel coming in to dock at the great lagoon port of Ostia, some twenty miles from Rome. She is loaded with precious cargo: ceramic urns of aromatic spices from Arabia, oil and grain from Egypt, silk and pepper from the faraway lands of India and China. But also enslaved people, captured on the battle-worn frontiers of the empire. Built to be nimble and weave through the waves, the wooden ship with its red cloth sail is dwarfed by the great public buildings which line the shore and snakeback inland to the capital. The skyline is crowded by the roofs of basilicas, temples, theatres and markets.

• 7:09Tristan Hughes?

  Slavers and traders barter and haggle, the chains of bondage clink and clang. Gold coins, each stamped with the portrait of the reigning Augustus, are pulled from purses and chain hands. The goods are distributed throughout the boot of Italy and beyond, along newly cobbled roads that slice through the empire into the lavish pantries of grand townhouses and country villas. Owned by wealthy aristocrats and senators, these extravagant dwellings stand as centuries to the Roman elite’s undiminishing largesse. Rome’s ancient senator class spent most of their time mingling amidst the public

• 7:50Tristan Hughes?

  squares of the forum, shaded by the huge senate house and the temples of Saturn, Casta and Pollux. They listen to budding orators, and seasoned elected officials deliver speeches flattering the emperor. Beside them, and throughout all public forums of the empire, stand magisterial statues of the emperor’s likeness, hewn from gleaming marble and coloured too. To the multitudes in the provinces, this was as close as many would get: to the real thing, to the real emperor. Whilst much of Rome's domain was won by conquest and annihilation, up to the

• 8:30Tristan Hughes?

  year 225 AD, Rome's emperors oversaw a period of unprecedented peace: the Pax Romana. Pliny the Elder, the famed Roman author who perished in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, wrote:

• 8:46Speaker 03

  "Living standards have improved by the interchange of goods and by partnership in the joy of peace and by the general availability of things previously concealed."

• 8:57Tristan Hughes?

  But all good things must come to an end. This vision of a Rome triumphant would perish and fade, as all empires are wont to do. For many, the collapse came as if a bolt from the blue. Saint Jerome, a 5th century churchman based in Bethlehem, is said to have lamented: "Who would believe that Rome, built up by the conquest of the whole world, had collapsed?" But for those wise enough to recognise the fleeting nature of history, it was a destiny that could be foretold. As the great philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius once said:

• 9:32Speaker 03

  "Reflect upon the rapidity with which all exists and is coming to be is swept past us and disappears from sight. For substance is like a river in perpetual flow, and ever at our side is the immeasurable span of the past and the yawning gulf of the future."

• 9:52Tristan Hughes?

  So, now we're firmly in this world, let's find out more. To help us understand how an empire of such strength and majesty could fall so far and so quickly, I'm joined today by Dr David Gwynne from Royal Holloway University. David, he's a great friend of the podcast. He's previously joined us to talk about the Goths and Rome's 3rd century crisis, and today we're delving into the origins of this incredible story of mass decline. A story of broken ambition, of destructive power, and fated inevitability. This is the beginning of the end of Rome.

• 10:38Tristan Hughes?

  David, it is wonderful to have you back on the podcast today.

• 10:41Speaker 04

  Thank you very much. Great to be here.

• 10:43Tristan Hughes?

  It feels important, first of all, to highlight how important it is to take a long-term approach when discussing this massive topic, which is the fall of the Western Roman Empire.

• 10:54Speaker 04

  The fall of the Roman Empire in the West shaped subsequent medieval history. It destroyed the last great unity of the Mediterranean world, replaced it in the West with a mosaic that shaped medieval Europe and medieval Christendom. A change that great simply cannot happen fast. It's long, it is indeed complex. A lot of Roman elements survived, even while the imperial superstructure collapsed, and we see those elements all around us. So we've got to take a long view. Yes, there are great individual episodes: the Gothic Sack of Rome in 410, the fall of Romulus Augustulus, the titular last Western Emperor in 476. But there is no one moment. It's a process.

• 11:39Tristan Hughes?

  And how shall we define fall then in this case? Because, as you've mentioned, some parts of the Roman Empire, they really do endure.

• 11:46Speaker 04

  And this is a topic where definition genuinely matters. Edward Gibbon famously called his book "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". But the Roman Empire as a whole didn't fall in the 5th century in any case, because the Eastern Empire will survive for another 1,000 years. Is it decline? That is a value judgment, depending on whether you believe that the Old Roman Empire was the greatest civilization, or whether you prefer the energy, dynamism, and occasional brutality of the early Germanic kingdoms. And if we're going to pinpoint a fall, 476 is the classic date. After that date,

• 12:29Speaker 04

  there is no Western Roman Emperor, not until Charlemagne will attempt to reclaim the title. But- A lot of those Roman elements that continue do blur the lines. All the Gothic kings who emerged in Italy, southern France, Spain, continued Roman elements. So did the Franks. The great anomaly, to a significant extent, being Britain, where there is a much more clear cut-off, partly because the Anglo-Saxons were much less interested.

• 13:00Tristan Hughes?

  Is there a sense then, and actually with some of those, we say post-Roman kingdoms today, don't we? But were they maybe not have even considered themselves successors, but actually just the next in line?

• 13:11Speaker 04

  It's always difficult. Every major written source from any of the post-Roman kingdoms was written by someone of Roman ancestry and distinct Roman Christian bias. Isidore of Seville in Spain, Cassiodorus in Ostrogothic Italy, Gregory of Tours in Francia. So our evidence is skewing us towards continuation. There was clearly also significant change. There's an awareness that these are new rulers. But there's also a genuine attempt in a lot of those writers to bring these new peoples into an overall Roman story, to show where they fit in, to make their rulers a continuation, not emperors. They're usually very clear on that.

• 13:56Speaker 04

  It is not a Roman empire anymore, but it is now a series of kingdoms with Roman elements.

• 14:03Tristan Hughes?

  It's these people who hadn't known of a time before Rome as well. So I'm guessing it's almost like after the death of Alexander the Great, how that memory just endures and is actually very influential and important to those kingdoms, isn't it?

• 14:16Speaker 04

  Exactly. All this background, it's part of their legitimacy, it's part of their identity. But it is interesting that many of the most fascinating sources we can read, Isidore of Seville, Gregory of Tours, they're actually writing a couple of generations after the kingdoms took shape. So they're emphasizing a continuity in a very different world.

• 14:37Tristan Hughes?

  Very different world indeed. Well, you mentioned sources there and you also touched on earlier that very important work that was Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Now, when was he writing that? When did he write that?

• 14:50Speaker 04

  Gibbon began writing his masterpiece in seventeen seventy six.

• 14:53Tristan Hughes?

  Okay, so we're almost approaching the two hundred and fifty year mark.

• 14:57Speaker 04

  Yes, and I spend much of my time when I'm working on this criticizing elements of Gibbon, but I always do try and begin by saying, if someone's arguing with me two hundred and fifty years from now, I did my job well.

• 15:11Tristan Hughes?

  They've done pretty well, haven't they? He's done pretty well with the evidence he had at the time and the thoughts at the time.

• 15:15Speaker 04

  Exactly. Gibbon was a very good historian as well as a brilliant writer, which is why his account's still well worth reading. He knew most of the textual sources we know now. Archaeology is where there have been massive changes since Gibbon's time. But also, of course, like any other modern historian today, Gibbon has his own biases. He's got his own vision. He doesn't like the Eastern Roman Empire. He doesn't much like Christianity, and it makes his story very interesting to read. But more than anything else, that title, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, did significantly skew English scholarship because it's not the fall of the Roman Empire,

• 15:58Speaker 04

  it's the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and decline is a judgment. Doesn't make it wrong, but it does mean it needs to be argued, not claimed.

• 16:07Tristan Hughes?

  Because I was going to ask you next, not even argue, the fact that now in the twenty first century, we're sitting down here in twenty twenty five, how influential that book remains to people down to the present day, at least maybe not in scholarly circles, but at least in the popular perception of this idea of a complete collapse of the Roman Empire. Can we say that Edward Gibbon's book, it still holds considerable influence for everyday, I mean, just people wanting to learn more about this and maybe have heard one or two things in the past about it?

• 16:36Speaker 04

  Yes, and they'll hear Gibbon's name, they'll hear his title. They may read his general observations on the fall of the empire, which is a little sandwich he inserted into the wider book, even if they'll probably never read the massive work. It's interesting, it's an English language bias. I remember meeting a number of Greeks who were very unhappy that people thought Gibbon was a starting point, because Gibbon didn't really much like later Byzantine Greek culture. So other linguistic, other scholarly traditions, perhaps not so much. But yes, in the English-speaking world, he is still influential, not because I don't think any modern academic historian would defend the exact interpretation Gibbon gives,

• 17:20Speaker 04

  but he raises the questions that matter.

• 17:22Tristan Hughes?

  So today, we're going to be exploring the origins of the fall of Rome. So largely actually going to be covering events that occurred more than 100 years before that canonical date of 476 AD. The sources that we have for this and the various topics we're going to explore, what types of sources are we going to be looking at?

• 17:41Speaker 04

  One of the problems studying this world of the 4th, 5th centuries AD is very few detailed narrative histories actually survive. Writing narrative history is a Greek creation. It's a Greek and Latin tradition in the Western world. And yet there is a marked gap where we have no intact historical narrative that covers the 3rd century and none that covers the first half of the 4th century. The only great narrative historian to survive from the later 4th century, which is where events really begin to accelerate, is a man named Amianus Marsalinas, a Greek from somewhere near Antioch who actually wrote in Latin.

• 18:23Speaker 04

  And he is our key source on the arrival of the Goths and the first warnings of the Huns. But his work, which originally covered the entire period from AD 96 to AD 378, is lost until the year 353. So all we've got is the last, probably biggest block of his history, but not his summary of the events before. Then we've got a lot of Christian historians, but the ecclesiastical historians know their job and their job is primarily to tell the history of the church, not to tell the history

• 19:01Speaker 04

  of the empire. And then you've got an incredible array of individual texts, panegyrics, speeches given for a particular moment, orations that were written for circulation, letter collections, and then we've got the inscriptions, the artwork, the architecture, the archaeology, which is so crucial for economic affairs, for example.

• 19:23Tristan Hughes?

  The coinage there, yeah.

• 19:25Speaker 04

  Exactly, the coinage, it shows ideology. We only know about trade and how widespread it was because of the material finds, texts don't tell us. So it's not that we don't have evidence, but it's got some notable gaps and inevitably it's got some clear biases.

• 19:44Tristan Hughes?

  You mentioned in passing there panegyrics as well, and these are, these are big praises of a particular figure, aren't they? So once again, in regards textual evidence, take it with a pinch of salt, I'm guessing, because the whole objective of those panegyrics is to praise a particular figure who they're addressing and just lord them with praise too.

• 20:03Speaker 04

  Exactly. They're statements of ideology. It actually makes them enormously valuable, just not for what happened. You can normally assume someone giving a speech in praise of someone won't blatantly lie, if only because it would just make the audience laugh. But these are set piece speeches. They follow set patterns. They always use many of the same images. And yet they do tell us how individual emperors, for example, wish to be perceived. So in the case famously of Constantine, we've got a panegyric from before his Christian commitment, which talks about the old gods like Apollo. Then we've got a panegyric written after 312.

• 20:46Speaker 04

  And suddenly they, all the old gods have disappeared.

• 20:49Tristan Hughes?

  What an amazing contrast to have in the surviving evidence there, David. And you mentioned Constantine. To start this off, we're going to cover briefly that incredibly turbulent period before the rise of Constantine, which is also a topic that we've explored in detail in our previous episode together, which is this third century crisis. Now, we could do a whole series on the third century crisis. But David, very briefly, what is this period? And how turbulent was it? How close did Rome come to falling during this 50 years or so in the third century?

• 21:23Speaker 04

  If you study classics at school or university, there's a tendency to stop in the year 200. The reason for that is the third century crisis, which is when the old classic Roman Empire very nearly did break apart. At the worst moment of the third century crisis, when the frontiers are crumbling and emperors are being murdered. The Roman Empire, which traditionally spans from Hadrian's Wall in Britain to the Sahara Desert, out towards the Crimea and the Euphrates River, the Roman Empire actually broke into three parts. Britain and Gaul had broken away. Syria, the Persian frontier, had broken away. It really did look

• 22:05Speaker 04

  like the Roman Empire, which, remember, dominated the Mediterranean from the second century B.C. onwards, was actually going to fall apart. What's perhaps the most remarkable feature of the third century crisis is that it didn't happen. And indeed, one of the great questions, why didn't the Roman Empire collapse in the third century, when in the fifth century, the West will go under? But crucially, in the third century, while there are major threat pressures on the frontiers, there aren't huge migrations moving into the Roman Empire. And over a long, hard-fought period, particularly between 250 and 275, the Roman emperors Gallienis Aurelian in particular, managed to retake all the lost territories, stabilise the frontiers.

• 22:53Speaker 04

  So the Roman Empire looked like shattering, and yet it emerges from the third century, still basically intact.

• 23:00Tristan Hughes?

  And some have argued that actually by the end of that crisis, when you get to the beginnings of the fourth century, that the Roman Empire, although transformed and different in its appearance, was actually stronger than it had been before. I mean, how do you, do you buy into that?

• 23:15Speaker 04

  Yes, I do. My primary area of research is the world of late antiquity, the world of the later Roman Empire. And the date we traditionally use is 284, because in 284 A D, the Emperor Diocletian begins the reorganization, drawing on things that had happened in the third century crisis. Diocletian's reorganization was then actually continued by Constantine. They are religiously completely different. Diocletian, the emperor responsible for the last great persecution of Christians, Constantine, the first Christian emperor. But actually, in terms of military, political, administrative concerns, they form a unity. And what took

• 23:58Speaker 04

  shape in that 50 years, from Diocletian's accession in 284 to Constantine's death in 337, restructured the Roman Empire, gave it a new, stronger bureaucracy, a well-organized tax system. The frontiers were once again reinforced, the army was reorganized. Whether it's stronger than, say, the High Empire of the second century A D, it's a very difficult judgment to make. It is certainly not obviously weaker.

• 24:30Tristan Hughes?

  So is it covering all those big issues you highlighted there, military restructuring, economic restructuring? Of course, with Constantine, you have religious restructuring as well. So how does first Diocletian and then Constantine, how do they go about making these great, I guess you could say repairs to the Roman Empire, but going beyond that at the same time?

• 24:49Speaker 04

  Diocletian's solution was in order to achieve significant wide-ranging reorganization. He needed help. The Roman Empire is vast, and this is a world without modern communications, without radio, without the internet. So Diocletian shares power, first with one co-ruler, then with two others to make what's famously called the tetrarchy.

• 25:10Tristan Hughes?

  The tetrarchy, yes.

• 25:11Speaker 04

  The rule of four, because it means there's one imperial figure in every major region. And once that's secure, what Diocletian set out to do was firstly, they needed a better administration system, above all because the purpose of administration is tax collection. You need the tax collection to pay for the army. It's always worth remembering, one key thing that sets the Roman Empire apart from the later medieval kingdoms. The Roman Empire of Diocletian had a standing army of around 400,000 men. No one's coming near that figure in a thousand years, a thousand years later, because it's got a tax system to pay for it.

• 25:52Speaker 04

  But that meant dividing the provinces, so making individual provincial blocks smaller and easier to control, trying to reorganise the financial system, not always successfully, and making the tax collection a combination of money and kind. So collecting taxes in food, for example, because if you're collecting taxes to pay and supply the army, you can just recruit the supplies and send them to the army. And the tax system, provincial system Diocletian put in place is still there under Justinian. Indeed, Justinian in the sixth century is the first emperor to significantly consider trying to revise it.

• 26:33Tristan Hughes?

  So that's more than 200 years after the time of Diocletian. So that once again emphasises just how long lasting it is.

• 26:38Speaker 04

  Exactly. It was clearly a solid structure. I mean, did it work brilliantly? No. Tax collection will always have the problem that people don't want to pay taxes. And it's not that the Roman Empire was ever some massive bureaucratic machine. By a famous older estimate, the Chinese Empire, same rough period, same rough size, had 10 times as many bureaucrats as the Roman Empire did. The Roman emperors rely on their local aristocracies to do a lot of the heavy lifting of administration. So it's not that it's isn't a flawed system, it definitely is. But it did seem to work remarkably well, and the proof is the Tetrots did stabilise the frontiers.

• 27:22Speaker 04

  They campaigned successfully in every direction. The tetrarchy as a division of power is inherently unstable. Four emperors are going to come into conflict eventually. But they delivered stability at the end of that period of crisis. And Constantine, who's actually the destroyer of the tetrarchy.

• 27:40Tristan Hughes?

  I was going to ask that next, yes.

• 27:42Speaker 04

  Is the beneficiary, in a sense, of that stability. After Diocletian stands down, the tetrarchy's instabilities come to the fore. You end up with a rolling series of civil wars until Constantine, who's originally hailed emperor in York in the year 306. It takes him until 324 to win the last of the great civil wars. And then from 324 to 337, Constantine sole rules the entire empire. He's reunited the whole thing. And what he simply does is keep Diocletian's political taxation systems rolling.

• 28:23Speaker 04

  The great change, of course, is that now Christianity is receiving imperial patronage and the church begins playing a role as well.

• 28:30Tristan Hughes?

  Constantine's wars with his fellow rulers before he becomes sole emperor, and I think he does some more external fighting as well. Although, of course, today Constantine is largely associated, as you say, with that conversion to Christianity. But can it be also said that his policies sow the seeds for a gradual decline of the Roman Empire over the following decades and ultimately more than 100 years later?

• 28:53Speaker 04

  This is the great difficulty. Constantine left a well-organized, relatively secure empire. The only major change he's introducing is Christianity. Christianity is both a strength and a weakness. It adds great emphasis to charity, to community. Christian bishops are very important in the later administration. On the other hand, Christians are divided amongst themselves. So there's an ongoing conflict over how to define Christianity, who should be included. But overall, the empire that Constantine left in 337 is not about to collapse. Indeed, my own emphasis would be, the Roman Empire of the 4th century was not about to collapse.

• 29:36Speaker 04

  It had definite flaws, in many ways it always had had flaws. But it's not on some path to decline. It's got the structures in place, it can manage its frontiers. They can have an emperor, Julian the Apostate, the last pagan emperor, who can find an army of 65,000 men, march into Persia and lose it. And yet the Roman Empire manages to basically recover. It certainly didn't help, but the very fact Julian could do that, and the empire could then restore stability over the next decade, suggests that 360s, 370s, the Roman Empire is not going to fall.

• 30:18Speaker 04

  Not unless it gets hit, and hit very hard.

• 30:22Tristan Hughes?

  But in regards to being hit very hard, do you get internal conflict at that time? You mentioned Julian the Apostate. I must admit, for me personally, the emperors that follow Constantine the Great, I always struggle to remember all of the names of, because some of them are quite similar, like Constance and so on. But do some of these emperors, do the biggest challenges they sometimes face be from other Romans, high-standing Romans, who want a chance at seizing the purple for themselves?

• 30:49Speaker 04

  And the Roman Empire has always been vulnerable to civil war and usurpation. Not least because technically it was never a dynastic empire. Succession was always a problem. In Constantine's case, having fought so hard to reunite the empire, what does he do when he dies? Splits it between three sons, very unhelpfully, named Constantine II, Constantius II, and Constance. And it is perhaps helpful that both Constantine II and Constance die quite early, partly in a civil war between the brothers. Constance is murdered in a usurpation. Constantius, who's Constantine's longest surviving son, is an interesting figure simply because all our sources hate him.

• 31:32Speaker 04

  He actually seems to have been a solid, if not particularly imaginative emperor. His problem is Amianus Marsolinus, our one narrative historian, is a pagan supporter of Julian. And Julian revolted against Constantius. But Constantius, in Christian tradition, is remembered as a heretic. So the Christian sources don't like him either. But overall, Constantius left a relatively stable empire in three sixty one. Julian was marching to attack Constantius and then Constantius died. It does genuinely seem to be of natural causes. So a civil war that would have happened didn't. After Julian's disaster, what you then get is a very short-lived emperor named Jovian. But then, once again, the empire is divided.

• 32:17Speaker 04

  Because everybody has been aware, ever since the third century crisis, one man ruling the empire, if there's any kind of problems, can't cope.

• 32:26Tristan Hughes?

  Does it feel like Constantine the Great was almost a special case in the fact that he was able to manage it for that period of time? But as you say, maybe because he wasn't hit with a big dose of plague hitting the empire or a Honeck invasion or something like that?

• 32:40Speaker 04

  Exactly. Sole rule, so one emperor, is actually very rare from the heart of the third century crisis onwards. Constantine manages it for thirteen years. Constantius is the sole emperor after he kills the usurper responsible for the death of his last brother. But again, for less than a decade. Julian only rules for eighteen months. Jovian, six months. Then you have two emperors named Valentinian and Valens, their brothers, and they promptly split the empire again. Because Julian's disaster with the Persians has caused problems on the eastern frontier, but there's also problems on the Rhine. The other great frontiers, then you've got the Danube as well, the two great European rivers.

• 33:24Speaker 04

  So Valentinian goes westward, leaves Valens to deal with the east. And the empire is only actually going to be reunited again once. And that's in the aftermath of, again, a series of civil wars by Theodosius the First. Theodosius the Great.

• 33:41Tristan Hughes?

  The Great, yes.

• 33:42Speaker 04

  Who actually only ruled the entire united empire for a couple of years.

• 33:48Speaker 04

  And when he died in the year 395, he split the empire between his sons, exactly what Constantine did. So it can't have surprised anybody at the time. What we know, hindsight being brilliant, is 395's the last division. The empire will never reunite again. But there's no way anyone could have known that at the time.

• 34:10Tristan Hughes?

  It's funny that we've barely, if at all, mentioned the place, the city, the old capital of Rome in our chat so far. Does it feel that ever since Diocletian and the tetrarchy, that Rome's importance has declined in this period? The Roman Empire might be as strong as it ever has been, but actually, when you look at the city of Rome itself, can we say that actually that city has lost its importance?

• 34:37Speaker 04

  To a degree, yes, and actually it's before Diocletian. It happened during the third century crisis. The great Roman frontiers, so the Rhine and Danube rivers, the Persian frontier, you can't manage those from Rome. It's too far away. So more and more, the soldier emperors of the third century don't even come to Rome. It is a fascinating feature of the tetrarchy of Diocletian. None of the four rulers use Rome. Actually, they hardly ever even visited. And yet, Rome remains symbolically, psychologically important. It is the old imperial city. The tetrarchs built monuments there. One of Constantine's most famous surviving monuments is still standing next to the Colosseum, the arch of Constantine.

• 35:21Speaker 04

  Constantius II, Constantine's longest surviving son, who was mainly based in the east, made a famous entry into Rome. With his army, an adventus, an imperial procession, Amianus Marsolinus, who doesn't like Constantius, nonetheless loves Rome, the city, and gives us a brilliant description of that adventus.

• 35:43Speaker 04

  So Rome still psychologically mattered. And that, of course, is exactly what we'll see in the sack of Roman 410. The Gothic sack of Rome didn't cripple Roman power. It wasn't attacking the heart of government. But the shockwave that the sack of Rome in 410 sent across the Mediterranean, you see in Jerome declaring that the end of the world must be coming. Augustine in Africa is going to write the city of God. So Rome symbolically does matter. But no, it is not the political, military, government heart of the empire. And indeed, already wasn't by the time of the Tetra.

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• 38:50Tristan Hughes?

  Let's explore a topic that I know is one of your pet favorites, which is the rise of Christianity, particularly in the fourth century. And you've already mentioned figures like Constantine the Great and Theodosius the Great have a big impact on, I guess it's the spread of Christianity, isn't it, within the Roman Empire? But what impact does this spread have on the whole outlook, on the makeup? We could look at the administrative and more of the Roman Empire in this period.

• 39:16Speaker 04

  And the rise of Christianity in the fourth century is one of the great transition points, indeed, for later Western history. In AD 300, during the Tetrarchy, Christians are a small minority, perhaps 10% of the empire's 60 million population. So around 6 million Christians. And they're about to suffer an attempted, failed, empire-wide persecution.

• 39:40Tristan Hughes?

  The Great Persecution.

• 39:41Speaker 04

  Exactly, of Diocletian. Then in 312, so less than a decade after the Great Persecution began in 303, Constantine, for whatever reason, because it will always be debated, begins to support Christianity. By the end of the fourth century, Christians are the clear-cut majority of the Roman population. So they have gone from six million to give or take perhaps forty million in the space of two, perhaps three generations.

• 40:09Tristan Hughes?

  That's an amazing stat right there. I mean, it it's supercharged on steroids.

• 40:14Speaker 04

  Exactly. I mean, it should be said, the fact that Christians actually got from naught to six million in the first three hundred years, actually makes them the fastest-growing religious movement the ancient world had ever actually seen. Islam is going to change the scale considerably, but the very fact Christianity even grew before Constantine is actually remarkable. And Christianity expanded notably in the third-century crisis. Christians promote charity, promote community. Famously, they're repeatedly, it's complained by their opponents that they'll help people who aren't Christians. Christians will help the sick, and plague is a recurring problem. They'll look after you.

• 40:55Speaker 04

  So Christians, as a movement, the Christian movement grows when there's times of conflict. But what you then get from Constantine onwards is money, legal privileges pouring into the church. Whether that's good for the Christian religion is something that, for example, the Reformation is going to take serious issue with. I don't think we'll discuss it here. But what you do see with Constantine, there had never been huge churches. Constantine built the original Vatican, so the original Church of St. Peter's out on the Vatican Hill. He built the original St. John's Lateran. He builds the original Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Constantinople, of course, has multiple churches from the beginning.

• 41:37Speaker 04

  So just physically, the prominence of Christianity's greatly increased. But money is pouring into the church. Constantine wrote a famous letter to one bishop, just saying, here is a large sum of money. If it's not enough, I've told my treasurer to give you what you ask for. So money is going to the church. Bishops now matter. So a bishop can contact the emperor directly. Bishops can therefore influence imperial policy, famously true of Ambrose of Milan, the great bishop in the late fourth century, who has a love-hate relationship with Theodosius the First, two very strong-willed men, both of whom are devout believers, but with different priorities. So bishops matter.

• 42:23Speaker 04

  Is this strengthening or weakening the overall empire? It's doing both.

• 42:27Tristan Hughes?

  You read my next question, yes.

• 42:29Speaker 04

  I, there's no question, this support for charity in a world that doesn't have much welfare support matters, so Christian community matters. Bishops are very important to Roman government, not least because the Roman Empire is split into these small provinces and there's a governor in charge of each, but a governor is not usually in office for more than one, perhaps two years. A bishop is for life once they're appointed. So the bishop of Alexandria, for example, the great city in Egypt, can be a much more influential figure than the annual governor. Because a bishop like Athanasius of Alexandria, who's a bishop for forty-five years,

• 43:11Speaker 04

  has a degree of support structures that the government system can't necessarily manage. So it can be a major asset, but only of course if church and empire are working together. And the problem there is that Christianity, in this post-process of enormous growth, also had to re-decide what it was. This is the great age of Christian definition. All the questions that Christians had been debating before Constantine suddenly became much more important. What books should be in the New Testament? Still had to be finally decided. What do Christians believe is orthodoxy, right belief?

• 43:55Speaker 04

  What's going to happen to heretics, wrong believers, now that the Roman emperor is a Christian and therefore has a divine injunction to enforce the correct form of Christianity? So there's going to be divisions within the Christian church, but those divisions are going to impact on wider history.

• 44:15Tristan Hughes?

  I mean, to answer the question, Christianity, in some senses, it does strengthen the Roman Empire with bishops and how long they endure in their posts, but can also weaken it at the same time, particularly with this almost civil war, this division within the Christian church that emerges at this time, when all these questions are being asked. David, let's move on to the army, because for so many of us, when we think of Imperial Rome, you might think of the famous movie Gladiator, or images of legionaries in their Lorica segmentata and their small gladius stabbing swords and large scutum shields and getting this idea that it was the most professional and best army of the ancient world. How different is the Roman army by the time of the fourth century? And can we say it's weakened in any way?

• 44:59Speaker 04

  It's always very difficult comparing armies from multiple periods because in some levels, say, the sheer strength of its infantry. Yes, the fourth century army is weaker than, say, its first century AD counterpart. It's not as uniformly recruited or equipped, although they still have imperial factories. So the equipment's been altered. It doesn't have the sheer density of the legions. On the other hand, during the third century crisis, the Romans did learn a number of military lessons. That included firstly, cavalry now matters much more than it did before. So the third century and then the fourth century army has a much stronger cavalry arm

• 45:44Speaker 04

  than the earlier empire did. Big block legions, 5,500 men, work fine on the certain conditions, but when you're trying to protect a very wide frontier, more smaller groups work more easily. So one feature that seems to emerge with Diocletian and Constantine is you get an increase in the number of legions, which used to be argued to mean, oh, look, the army's getting much bigger. But what the archaeology of the army camp suggests is that the legion size dropped from around 5,500 to more like 1,000.

• 46:23Tristan Hughes?

  Wow, that's, oh, that's like four fifths of the strength gone.

• 46:26Speaker 04

  So, so in reality, you've still got the strength because the number of legions is dramatically multiplying. But you've got smaller blocks because that way you can spread out across the frontiers. Not least because the earlier empire of the first, second century wasn't so focused on frontier defence. It was more about when do you advance beyond the frontiers? Whereas in the third century crisis, they were reacting. They had to react.

• 46:51Tristan Hughes?

  And that is because of the different types of enemies that you've got. You've got a reinvigorated Persia in the east with the Sasanians. You've got larger groups of people beyond the Danube and the Rhine. So is it no longer a case of the Roman Empire being completely dominant and there's just not enough unity in the people that they face? It's the fact that it's had to adapt and change in its outlook because the nature of its opponents has changed.

• 47:15Speaker 04

  How far the Romans were actually ever clear-cut dominant is one of those interesting questions. The Romans lose a remarkable number of major battles in their history. Famously, the Roman Republic has a remarkable ability to lose battles. The Pyrrhic War, they lost two, won one. Fighting Hannibal, lose three, win one. The pattern's consistent. You lose, but you win the last one and come out still standing.

• 47:41Tristan Hughes?

  You keep coming back.

• 47:42Speaker 04

  Exactly. The Romans always had that strength. And in many ways, that's their greatest military advantage. It's not utter brilliance on the battlefield. It's not a clear-cut technological advantage. But it is consistent technology, reserves, the ability to re-recruit armies, re-train them, bring them back into the field. The third-century crisis, they had to make it up as they were going along. The Romans had never come under this level of pressure before. The Persians, for example, used heavily armoured cavalrymen, catafracts. They don't move that fast, but they are very heavy cavalry.

• 48:19Tristan Hughes?

  They're like tanks, aren't they?

• 48:20Speaker 04

  Exactly. And the Romans don't have an obvious response to that. So how do you adjust? The Germanic tribes, which largely, of course, have the advantage of energy, enthusiasm, but aren't good at having reserves. Julian the Apostate, as described in detail by Ammius Marsolinus, wins us basically a set-piece battle. Battle of Strasbourg in the early 350s is actually a good demonstration of what the Romans can still do. Which is simply Germans charge, Roman frontline holds. Then the Romans send in the reserves and the Germans haven't thought of that. And it's basically this is how the Romans have been managing the frontier. But when you get towards the late fourth century, where you get much larger groups moving,

• 49:04Speaker 04

  and crucially, the addition of the Huns, who clearly do not fight according to the same pattern that the Romans are used to, and the Romans do not have an answer to the nomadic horse archers with their much better bow, their much more fluid tactics, the Roman army is going to be at a serious disadvantage.

• 49:22Tristan Hughes?

  Because this time of massive Roman armies in the many tens of thousands, marching beyond its borders and launching an aggressive campaign, it feels like that time is over. But you did mention earlier Julian the Applesstate and his invasion into Persia with 60,000 men, and the complete catastrophe that that is. But is that almost an outlier for the period when looking at military strategy of the Romans at that time?

• 49:44Speaker 04

  The Tetrarchy focused on stabilising the frontiers. The Sassanian Persian Empire rose in the early third century and spent the next 50 years hammering the Romans to the east. Diocletian and his Tetrarchs finally beat the Persians. The Romans had been trying for 60 years. Finally, they won a battle, stabilised the frontier. Constantine fights on that Persian frontier. He's also fighting with the Gothic tribes who are beyond the Danube. But there's no intention to push significantly beyond the frontiers. This is basically proactive frontier defence. After all, the best way to protect a frontier isn't to wait for people to come to you, is to try and keep some control beyond your limits. That's what Constantine was doing.

• 50:27Speaker 04

  Whereas what Julian is doing, launching a full-scale invasion of the Persian Empire, which is the same scale as the Roman Empire. Sassanian Persia ends in Afghanistan, Pakistan. It's a huge empire.

• 50:41Speaker 04

  This is a risk that Constantine would not have taken. Constantius was a stable frontier manager, never considered a risk like this. And after the disaster, none of the subsequent emperors could even consider it.

• 50:54Tristan Hughes?

  There's also sometimes this feeling that with the army and how it is transformed by this period, that there is a decline in training and discipline with the Roman army. I mean, how far would you agree with that?

• 51:07Speaker 04

  It's very difficult. It's often called the barbarisation of the late Roman army, that they're recruiting more peoples who are not actually Roman and therefore can't be trained to Roman standards. Now, of course, the Roman Empire by the fourth century, everybody in it, from Britain to Africa to Syria, is a Roman citizen. So the Romans have always recruited people who weren't Romans from Italy. But it is true, they are drawing more units entirely from beyond the frontiers, from people who are not therefore going to necessarily fight according to Roman patterns.

• 51:44Tristan Hughes?

  So why are they fighting for Rome?

• 51:46Speaker 04

  The Goths, the Huns, partly for money, because the Romans can of course pay very well, also it gives you prestige. Particularly for the Germanic tribes, serving in the Roman army, holding a high Roman military rank, is an important source of legitimacy of your own authority. So Alaric, before he sacks Rome, it's very clear, he repeatedly demands certain things. He wants money, he wants food for his people, he wants somewhere they can all live, he wants a military title, Magister Militum, the commander in chief. And famously, the man who's opposing Alaric when Alaric first attacks Italy is Stilicho, the Roman general, the man's half-vandal, because he is the son of a vandal German

• 52:30Speaker 04

  who served in the Roman army. Stilicho's a Roman, he's completely Roman by upbringing, by identity, but he's half-vandal, because the lines really do blur. Doesn't mean the Roman army's actually weaker. One of the oddities of tracing the collapse of Roman power in the West and the survival in the East, the Eastern army never succeeds in winning a really major victory.

• 52:55Speaker 04

  So the great disaster of Adrianople, where the Goths initially destroy a Roman army, kill a Roman emperor, it's an eastern emperor who died. The Huns will raid the eastern empire for several decades and have to be bought off. Whereas the western army, when it can concentrate on a battlefield, still actually does its job. So Alaric attacks Italy in 401, 402, and Stilicho forces him back. Two battles seem to be fought, Verona and Plantea. Stilicho's army is still a very effective military machine. Likewise, the next Goth to attack Italy, Radagysus, will get exterminated. And even as late as 451, when the West really is shattering, it's a Roman army commander,

• 53:40Speaker 04

  Flavius Aetius, with the core of what's left of the western army, who can ally with the Goths now settled in France and the Franks, and face and beat Attila the Hun. It's not decisive, the battle of the Catalonian fields, but the Huns get driven back. So it is true that the western army is weakening, particularly in its organisation. But in the fall of the West, it's not that the army lost on a battlefield. What actually happened is the resource structure, the supply structure failed, and so the western Roman army simply dissolves.

• 54:17Tristan Hughes?

  I'd like to go back then to the fourth century and explore another topic now, which is class tension and economic instability. Now, is there a case at this time, is there more tension emerging between the aristocracy, the military, and the common people, this unholy triangle in a way?

• 54:37Speaker 04

  More than there had been previously? That's difficult to argue. It's there, it's emphatically always there in Roman society. After all, we are now experiencing in our modern world a very expanding rich-poor gap. The Roman world has a colossal divide between the senators with their enormous wealth and the vast majority of the population, who are a couple of bad harvests away from starving to death. The third century, this is why it's such a period of disruption, not everywhere across the empire. Some regions were basically untouched, like Britain, like North Africa. But if you are a farmer and everything is unstable, then you are extremely vulnerable.

• 55:16Speaker 04

  There's no question, therefore, that Diocletian prioritized stabilizing the economic system, ensuring a greater degree of social harmony. It never totally succeeds. After all, the army want their supplies. They're going to clash with the local aristocracy, who usually are both the tax collectors and the people trying to avoid paying tax. And then the local populations, who of course we almost never hear about in our sources, are trying to get on with their lives. But we don't see colossal social revolutions. There are some individual major outbreaks of what look like social violence, famously the Bagaldi, who are a Gallic revolt, who get put down under the Tetrarchy.

• 56:01Speaker 04

  But Christianity does actually help here, because Christianity does believe in spreading out wealth, it does believe in charity, much more so than the traditional structures did. So on that score, you're getting more support. The monasteries help here, because monasteries, although they're often on the fringes of society, they're also there to provide assistance. So you're getting the rise of hospitals, you're actually getting the emergence of a number of key features that'll emerge over the next centuries, in the fourth century, because they're coming under Christian patronage, likewise pilgrimage, major centres. So it's difficult to say there's a major increase in social tensions.

• 56:40Speaker 04

  What there always are are major social divisions, because there is a massive rich-poor imbalance. So what you always have, and in a sense it's the theme that's running through all of these different problems, is it's not that the Roman Empire's going to collapse, but there are fracture lines within it that are going to be drastically exposed if the opportunity really does emerge.

• 57:05Speaker 04

  And so what we see during the collapse of the West along social lines is most of the local populations, they're loyal to the emperor if the emperor is protecting them. But if the emperor is not protecting them, why would they be loyal to the empire?

• 57:20Tristan Hughes?

  But even with this, you know, great gap, as you say, between rich and poor, I found it very interesting because my mind immediately goes to things like the peasants revolt or something like that. Are there not many cases where they're saying, we can't do this, like we're going to rise up in revolt because we can't do this anymore?

• 57:35Speaker 04

  No, and interestingly, the Roman Empire does have mechanisms for if a community can prove they are exhausted and cannot pay, we do actually have imperial laws saying, right, for 10 years, this region is not paying taxes. There's no question, there must have been a series of local incidents that we very rarely hear about. Our best glimpse is Egypt. That's basically just because of the Egyptian papyri that survives in the desert. But that's where you find complaints, for example, being sent to a local army commander, that the sheep are being shared in the night. So someone's breaking into farms and stealing the wool just before the sheep will be shared. So they complain to the local army commander, because he's

• 58:20Speaker 04

  the one who's supposed to be maintaining law and order. It's entirely possible it was the army commander who sent his soldiers to do it. So there's not going to be a lot of justice here. And yet, while there is ongoing, therefore, tension, no, there are no really major social revolutions. Because overall, the Roman system did work. It didn't work brilliantly. But most people, of course, can't see a better solution. And crucially, thanks to Diocletian and Constantine, across most of the empire, life is relatively stable.

• 58:59Tristan Hughes?

  Are there big attempts then by the Roman administration and these various emperors to address something which had been a massive issue in the third century crisis and we've covered it in the past, which is the devaluing of coinage, of currency? Is this a big issue in the following century, even if from the outlook it looks as if the Roman Empire is not falling, it's stronger than ever?

• 59:19Speaker 04

  The coinage is one of our key markers for imperial prosperity. Now, a lot of the empire didn't actually need to worry much about coinage. After all, a lot of local economic transactions can continue in kind, you just do it as barter. The key purpose of the coinage is the emperors mint it to pay the army, the army spend it and the tax system brings it back. Very crudely, that's the cycle. Now, in the third century, the coinage, above all the quality of the gold and silver coinage, collapses. The silver coinage in particular goes from above 50% silver to less than 5%. And then we do have decrees that tell us that people were refusing to use it.

• 1:00:04Speaker 04

  Because a Roman coin, of course, differs from a modern 50p piece. Our money is not worth what it's made of. A Roman coin is worth its metal content. So debasement, taking the precious metal out, they're very good at noticing when that's been done. This is why you bite a coin or you try and bend it. In the third century, the coinage did basically collapse. The result was major inflation. That's going to particularly disrupt long-distance exchange and the elite attempts to spend large sums of money. In local communities, what seems to have happened is a reversion to barter, because then you can manage it to a degree.

• 1:00:49Speaker 04

  Diocletian and the Tetrarchy set out to try and fix it. Now, there were two options there, you could stabilize the coinage by giving it proper metal content, and you can try and control inflation. The problem with trying to control inflation, which is what they did by passing an edict called the edict of maximum prices, so laying down this is the maximum anyone can legally charge for a particular good or service, is that totally ignores supply and demand and basically failed almost immediately. The problem with stabilizing the coins is you need gold and silver for that. And the problem, of course, is now that the Roman Empire is no longer conquering anywhere,

• 1:01:31Speaker 04

  Trajan was the last person to bring in a flood of treasure from outside the empire. Where's the gold and silver going to come from? The result is the Tetrarchy can't succeed.

• 1:01:42Tristan Hughes?

  It's the thing, isn't it? They give up one of those key territories which the Romans do lose is Dacia, isn't it? Which is modern day Hungary, Romania area, north of the Danube, which was famous for its gold mines, and now it's lost that, that income of gold from that area.

• 1:01:55Speaker 04

  Exactly, and all the great Mediterranean gold and silver mines have been largely played out. So Philippa Maston used the ones in the northern Aegean. Spain, it's always ironic because anyone who's been studying late history thinks of Spain as bringing in gold and silver from the Americas, but actually in the ancient world, Spain was a good place to go to to find those metals. The person who actually solves the problem is Constantine. Because Constantine does have access to gold and silver that the Tetrarchs didn't. That's because there's no way that the Tetrarchs, who were devout pagan emperors, would touch pagan temples. Constantine will.

• 1:02:35Speaker 04

  There are gold and silver statues of the ancient gods and goddesses, and we don't have them today because most of them get plundered. But Constantine uses that source of gold and silver and uses it to create a new gold coin.

• 1:02:52Speaker 04

  Interestingly, you can do a chemical analysis on gold and silver coins to try and work out where the gold may have been originally mined. A number of Constantine's coins and the coins of his successors, the gold seems to have come from the northern Aegean. These are Hellenistic temple treasures. They're the ones that Philip and Alexander, that's where they got their gold from. So these are Hellenistic statues of gods and goddesses being reused for coinage. But the result is Constantine stabilizes the gold coinage. The solidus, the solid bit, is simply the name for the gold coin. It will remain basically at the same rough level of gold and the rough weight unchanged for centuries to come.

• 1:03:37Speaker 04

  So the gold coinage is actually basically stabilized in the fourth century.

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• 1:04:42Tristan Hughes?

  This whole chat, it's been very much one of the fourth century, Rome's recovering from a crisis. It looks like it's stronger than ever. However, having explored various parts of it, you can look a bit beneath the water almost and see that actually there's a bit more fragility there. Do you think that is actually similar with the economy and the coinage? This last question before we move on to our next section is the fact that although these various emperors do these measures to try and fix the economy, to make it healthier. That still, it feels as if the economy is quite fragile with that great gap between the rich and the poor, with the differences in the coinage now and so on.

• 1:05:20Speaker 04

  It's true actually of the Roman Empire right through its history. When everything's working as smoothly as they can manage, it's a relatively stable structure with major inbuilt inequalities. But it's not designed to cope with shock. They don't have those reserves in place. And if the shock comes, the fracture lines can all open up. The Eastern Empire, of course, in the fifth century, is going to solve a lot of its problems by minting lots of gold coins and paying them off. So Attila the Hun gets 6,000 pounds of gold in one go. And yet the East could afford to do that. Whereas in the West, as the economic structures break down, you can't pay the army, you can't

• 1:06:05Speaker 04

  pay off enemies. So all these different elements, they'll cope as long as things are relatively stable, as they are by the end of Constantine's reign. They can just about cope with the disruption caused by Julian's disaster, although it forced a reallocation of resources to the Persian frontier that weakened the others. But they are vulnerable if the shock comes.

• 1:06:29Tristan Hughes?

  We'll explore several of those big shocks in the next episode with the likes of the Vandals, the Goths, the Huns, the Saxons, the Franks and so on, the barbarian invaders. But I would like to focus on one other shock, another external enemy that you've already highlighted and you mentioned them again right there, which is the threat from the East, the Sassanian Persians. How big an impact would you argue that the Sassanian Persians have? And that continual fractious relationship they have with the Romans and Roman disasters like that of Julian the Apostate? How much of an impact do you think that threat has with a weakening of the Roman Empire in the fourth century?

• 1:07:12Speaker 04

  The Persian Empire is the greatest single enemy the Romans ever have to face. It's the only other world scale empire. So the Persian frontier always had to be a primary focus of attention.

• 1:07:28Speaker 04

  The usual estimate is roughly forty percent of the Roman army needs to be watching the Persian frontier. And if you take troops away from it, as for example Justinian will do in the sixth century, the Persians will wait to see if it's a definite movement and then smash through your defences. So the Persians are playing a key role of leverage. In the story of the fall of the Roman Empire, what's arguably the key factor is that after Julian, there's actually around a hundred years of stability on that frontier. And one of the oddities about the whole story of the fall of the Western Empire, the Roman Empire has three great frontiers, the Rhine, the Danube and Persia.

• 1:08:12Speaker 04

  Well, the East has to cover two of them, to the West's one. Technically, the East is facing worse enemies than the Westers. But crucially, if you can keep the Persian frontier stable, then all you have to do is watch the Danube and the defences of Constantinople will prevent anyone breaking the Danube and pushing further east. So perhaps one of the great questions of the survival of the eastern half is how did they manage to keep stability on the Persian frontier? And the key factor that seems to have been at play is the Persians, of course. It's another big empire. That means this isn't their only frontier.

• 1:08:52Tristan Hughes?

  Internal troubles as well, civil war factions.

• 1:08:55Speaker 04

  Exactly. The Persians have their own problems. There is a tendency, particularly for historians like me, to mainly just look at the Persians when they're facing the Romans, not think about the Persians as their own entity. But the Persians have two major problems. One is a very powerful local aristocracy, which means a weak Shah, a weak ruler, is vulnerable to immediate usurpation. But the other is that the Persians have a very long northern frontier. And that's on the Russian steppe. That's where the nomads come from.

• 1:09:26Tristan Hughes?

  It's the white Huns, isn't it? And so the Huns groups, yeah.

• 1:09:28Speaker 04

  Exactly. So whereas the Romans only get the Huns, the Persians are fighting nomads their entire history. And every powerful nomad group hits the Persians before they hit the Romans. So critically, in the fifth century, when the Roman Empire is having so much trouble on the Rhine and Danube. The fifth century is the most peaceful period in the entire history of Roman Persian relations. And it's quite clear, it's because the Persians are much more worried about the Kidderite Huns, the Hephylites, sometimes known as the White Huns. My personal favourite is a peace treaty that was signed in the year four hundred and sixty four.

• 1:10:08Speaker 04

  What that peace treaty said was the Persians asked the Eastern Roman Empire to pay for a Persian fortress manned by Persian soldiers on the Caspian Sea. So this is a fortress deep inside Persian territory. Why should the Romans pay? Because, as the Persians said, we're stopping the nomads.

• 1:10:31Tristan Hughes?

  They're doing the Romans a favour then, basically, saying, we're helping you stop the tide of these people coming in.

• 1:10:36Speaker 04

  Exactly. And this is the great advantage. Two great empires can talk to each other. And in the fifth century, they were actually aware that there were greater risks at stake. And so you get this, you know, it's a good, great, one of the greatest examples of, you know, high state imperial relations. But this is why it stayed quiet. If it had gone wrong, the Eastern Empire would have been in horrible trouble. And that, of course, is exactly what happens under Justinian and even more in the early seventh century. This is a very dangerous frontier.

• 1:11:07Tristan Hughes?

  It sounds like you don't buy the argument that, let's say, in the fourth century, that more resources are then diverted to the Eastern Empire. And so that because of that, there was less focus on the Danube and Rhine rivers and less focus on fortifying those frontiers when those large groups of people ultimately do cross those rivers. It doesn't sound like that sounds holds much weight.

• 1:11:30Speaker 04

  And to a degree, it does. It's always, you know, one of those qualifying arguments. Constantinople, as it becomes more important, is going to draw further eastern resources. The peace treaty after Julian's disaster handed over key fortresses to the Persians that destabilised the entire Roman frontier network. So the Emperor Valens, when the Goths first came to the Danube in 376, there's a reason Valens isn't anywhere near. He's in Antioch, he's looking at the Persian frontier, that's where he had to be focusing. So there is that significant shift. But the Rhine and the Danube frontiers for most of the fourth century seem to be broadly stable. So Julian wins this battle at Strasbourg.

• 1:12:14Speaker 04

  That's for destabilising the Rhine. Constantine is successful against the Goths. There's ongoing occasional conflicts, but there's also peace treaties with the Goths in the 360s. So the Rhine and the Danube aren't heavily fortified, but in a sense, how can they be? These are huge rivers. The Roman frontier structures are about as stable as they're likely to be. The division between east and west, they are still one empire and they think of themselves as one empire. So east and west don't usually work against each other, they try and cooperate, not always well. In a sense, I suppose what's my recurring theme is the weaknesses are emphatically there.

• 1:12:57Speaker 04

  And the way they'll play out in the fifth century is going to expose the West. But the Roman Empire was not about to collapse in, say, 370. Its structures are still intact, its basic east-west balance, the east is the stronger of the two halves. But not by such a clear-cut margin that you can see clearly this is what will happen. It's going to take a lot of shocks and a lot of very bad Roman mismanagement to cause the eventual Western collapse.

• 1:13:30Tristan Hughes?

  It almost feels like you've answered my question that I was going to ask then for me, which was that would an everyday Roman living through the fourth century have thought, this is an empire that's weakening, this is an empire that's in decline? It seems like the answer at that stage is no.

• 1:13:46Speaker 04

  It is no. Amianus Marsolinus, who's the historian who tells us of the arrival of the Goths, their Gothic victory at Adrianople, knows the Huns are coming, isn't a defeatist. He deliberately didn't end his history with Adrian Opel. He actually ended it with the Goths turning away from Constantinople and a Roman massacre of Gothic mercenaries as a sign that the empire will continue to fight. The first person who we are aware of, who can really conceive of a world where there might not be a Roman Empire, is Augustine of Hippo, writing The City of God. But Augustine is a unique intellectual, capable of this kind of visionary thought that separated

• 1:14:28Speaker 04

  what was going on around him from his vision of the divine plan of history. No other Christian writers are doing that. They're still seeing the Roman Empire as expressing Christianity. The East, of course, will carry on doing that for the next thousand years. They still believe very strongly that, yes, there may be threats on the frontiers, but there always have been. They'll absorb them if they have to. The empire will continue.

• 1:14:53Tristan Hughes?

  Which is why so many are so shocked when Rome is ultimately sacked in 410, isn't it? This is almost like the end of the world feeling for lots of them because they couldn't have fathomed it. They couldn't have believed it would be possible.

• 1:15:02Speaker 04

  I mean, the last time Rome was sacked before AD 410 was by the Gauls, 800 years previously.

• 1:15:09Tristan Hughes?

  David, with hindsight, do you think Rome's fall and decline, do you think it was unavoidable?

• 1:15:14Speaker 04

  Emphatically, no. Gibbon famously said that the fall of the Roman Empire was inevitable and the reason is simple and obvious. We should just be surprised it survived so long. It was the inevitable consequence of immoderate greatness. Gibbon's so good at using language. Basically, an empire that big will eventually collapse. I don't agree with Gibbon. The problem is the Romans have recovered from so many shocks before. It's what makes this series of shocks unique. It's why whenever you're trying to understand the fall of the West, you've got to think about the survival of the East. Because the fact that in eastern half of the Empire with the same core structures of government organisation,

• 1:15:57Speaker 04

  and if anything, more Christians and more Christian infighting, managed to survive. That means it can't simply be an internal explanation for the collapse of the West. Could it have been averted? Yes. There are several moments where the Romans, if they'd just handled it better, there hadn't been so many stupid civil wars.

• 1:16:19Speaker 04

  If they'd actually negotiated rather than trying to fight with people like Alaric, it could have turned out very differently indeed. So I do not regard it as an inevitable story. But Brian Ward Perkins in Oxford wrote a very good book called The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization. And as Brian said, the Romans of the late 4th century were certain that their world wouldn't significantly change. They were wrong. We might want to remember that as well.

• 1:16:51Tristan Hughes?

  Absolutely. I won't say the history repeats itself, but you can definitely see similarities through history. And it therefore seems unfair to ask if there is one single moment that you personally would pinpoint that laid the foundations or paved the way for the fall of Rome. Do you think there could be any one moment that you could say, well, that probably sealed the empire's fate?

• 1:17:10Speaker 04

  It is brutally difficult because, you know, even as late as 468, they're still fighting. For me, it's not actually the division of the empire in 395, it's the civil wars of the very early 390s. Because those civil wars firstly badly weakened the Western Roman army in particular, which made them particularly vulnerable. It's the first time a major civil war is fought when there is an independent Germanic people already inside the frontier, the Goths. And crucially, it was the massacre of the Goths at that battle that helps trigger Alaric's entire attitude, that the Goths must break free of Roman control. That concentrated

• 1:17:55Speaker 04

  period, which is also of course the period where the anti-pagan laws get passed, it's also a crucial period in the Christianization story. It's not that they're doomed at that point. But after Agenopla in 378, it can still be managed. After the disasters of the early 390s, you're moving into a decade that saw renewed migrations, the failure of the Rhine frontier, and of course leads to the Sack of Rome. All I'd emphasise is even then, even I would certainly argue as late as the 450s, you can see a recovery possible.

• 1:18:29Tristan Hughes?

  Well, I'm glad we finished off with you mentioning the likes of Alaric, the Goths, the Basset, the Frigulus, the Sac of Rome and so on, because we're going to be covering all of that in detail with Professor Peter Heather in our next episode. But David, wow, what an episode this has been. It's so insightful, so interesting. And it just goes for me to say, as always, thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast.

• 1:18:50Speaker 04

  My pleasure.

• 1:18:54Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was Dr David Gwynn returning to the podcast for the first episode in a brand new series on the fall of the Roman Empire, looking at the origins and internal pressures that set the stage for one of history's most dramatic collapses. I hope you enjoyed it. For more of David on the ancients, do go back and listen to his episodes on Rome's third century crisis and on the Goths. Now, if you want to dip into the next chapter of Rome's fall, then make sure to check out the next episode in the series. We'll be diving into the so-called barbarian invasions and asking how much of Rome's fate really lay in the hands of outsiders. Thank you for listening to this episode of

• 1:19:36Tristan Hughes?

  the ancients. Please follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and will be doing us a big favour if you leave us a rating as well. That would be greatly appreciated. Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 1:20:13Speaker 03

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