Pod Insights Dan Snow's History Hit The Rise of the Roman Empire About this episode How did a cluster of Iron Age huts grow into one of history's greatest civilisations?
In the first episode of our series on the Roman Empire, we're joined by Dr Simon Elliott to trace Rome's rise - from its humble origins on the banks of the Tiber to the moment Augustus became the first Emperor. Why did Rome thrive when so many competitors fell? What were the key battles, the turning points, the extraordinary individuals who shaped the story?
Make sure to join us for our second episode next week, when Dame Mary Beard will shed some light on how this mighty civilisation was ruled.
Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Dan Snow? Hey friends, if you love this podcast and want to decide what history we cover, then you need to become a Dan Snow's History Hit subscriber. Pitch your topic and if I like it, we'll make it into a subscriber exclusive episode. So far, we've covered the English Reformation, the Hudson Bay Company, the Trail of Tears, all of which have been decided by dedicated subscribers. So take the reins of your favourite podcast by heading over to historyhit.com/subscribe or sign up in your podcast player.
0:41 Dan Snow? It's very hard to imagine early Rome, knowing all that would come. It's very hard to imagine it as a smattering of little dwellings perched atop the now famous Seven Hills, clusters of small farming plots, Wattle and Dorb huts, the Tiber River running below. It's Iron Age people just milling about, tending their crops, trading their livestock, harvesting salt and timber down at the water's edge. But then, every great empire has to start somewhere, and Rome started here. These little hamlets villages would become the epicentre of one of the greatest civilisations
1:26 Dan Snow? in history. You'll all be familiar with that joke that men think about the Roman Empire every day. And as a man who does, I say, of course we do. It's not hard to see why. At Rome's height, it encompassed parts of at least 50 modern countries and something like a fifth of the entire world's population at the time. The Romans laid down founding principles that still influences our societies, our law, our governance this day. They forged trade routes across Europe, Africa and Asia, they built the roads that connect us, they gave us a religion still worshipped across all continents.
2:08 Dan Snow? So how on earth did these little villages coalesce and grow to become a mighty empire? So powerful, so influential, so instrumental in building our modern world?
2:20 Dan Snow? Why did it thrive? How did it manage to see off all of those competitors? Well, for next few weeks, every Thursday, we'll be answering some of those enormous, those important questions, some of the greatest Roman historians we know. We're going to be joined by the likes of Dr. Simon Elliott, Professor Peter Heather and Professor Mary Beard. And our first episode, I think it makes sense to go all the way back to the beginning. We're going to trace the rise of that empire from those little huts, that little settlement in the first half of the first millennia B.C. We're going to go right from there to the cusp of Augustus taking power as the first emperor of Rome. We're going to trace the key moments, the big battles, the extraordinary individuals who shaped the story. To do that, I am joined by the one and only, the force of nature that is Simon Elliott.
3:04 Dan Snow? He's a bestselling historian, archaeologist, author and broadcaster, and expert on all things Rome. This is our series on the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. Enjoy.
3:22 Dan Snow? Simon, thanks for coming on the podcast.
3:23 Speaker 01 Absolute pleasure, Dan. It's always lovely to come and join you on History Hit.
3:27 Dan Snow? I'm always fascinated by empires that have the name of, not of a sort of region, a province, a country or a state, as we'd know it today, like the British Empire, Russian Empire, but which have the name of a town. Like this is the Roman Empire, it's not the Italian or the... Why do we associate it with this, well, what must have been quite a small settlement back in the day?
3:43 Speaker 01 Because within a few hundred years of it being founded, it came to dominate its entire, entire known world.
3:51 Dan Snow? And it is true to say, well, you know, it being fact, it was just that little township? That was what conquered the surrounding countryside, then just went on and on and on?
3:58 Speaker 01 Absolutely. But also you get this really beautiful origin story, or I should say, origin stories. So you have Romulus and Remus, who are the sons of a vestal virgin called Rea Sylvia, who is forced to abandon them on the banks of the Tiber and then...
4:13 Dan Snow? I was stopping there, wait a second. Vestal virgin is meant to be a virgin and she's a priestess, effectively?
4:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
4:17 Dan Snow? Right, but she has two sons.
4:19 Speaker 01 And the father is Mars.
4:20 Dan Snow? Mars, god of war.
4:21 Speaker 01 Mars, god of war, yeah.
4:22 Dan Snow? Okay, so it's more a mythological origin story, you'd say?
4:25 Speaker 01 Well, let's go through it, because the key thing is it's important to the Romans. It's very important to the Romans. So Rea Sylvia goes to a sanctuary of Mars and then she leaves and she's pregnant and she's got two sons who are born Romulus and Remus, and she's forced to abandon them on the banks of the river Tiber. And there they're saved by the river god Tyborinus, of course, and then they're raised and succled by a she-wolf, of course. But later in life, they become aware of their origins, they realise that they should have been players in their own world, but then they fall out because they alight on a place where they want to found a city, and this is the city of Rome. And it has seven hills famously, and Romulus wants to found the settlement on the Palatine Hill, which later becomes the site of the Imperial Palace.
5:10 Speaker 01 And Remus wants to use the Avantine Hill, which later becomes one of the fabulous sort of districts for people to live in. So all well and good, but they fall out and ultimately Romulus kills Remus, of course. So there's a first learning experience there about the Roman world, it's gritty.
5:24 Dan Snow? It's violent.
5:25 Speaker 01 It's gritty and it's violent, and they know it, they know it.
5:27 Dan Snow? And they're raised by wolves.
5:29 Speaker 01 They're raised by wolves.
5:30 Dan Snow? Right, so you guys are tough. Okay, well, that's the origin, that's the mythological story, one that the Romans believed. What do we know from the archaeology? What do we know from other texts? What was there before Rome? Were these Greek peoples, Greek settlers coming in? What's going on here?
5:42 Speaker 01 But Dan, there's another mythological story as well.
5:44 Dan Snow? Let's do that one.
5:46 Speaker 01 It's never ending in the Roman world. So the second mythological story is Aeneas, who's a refugee from the Trojan Wars.
5:52 Dan Snow? Yes.
5:53 Speaker 01 Then Aeneas lands somewhere near Anziosa, a precursor of the Second World War invasion.
5:56 Dan Snow? And he's a brother of Paris and Hector, so royal prince, escapes from Troy, okay? Lands at Anji, like the Second World War.
6:02 Speaker 01 And then his son is the one who actually, in this mythological story, founds the town Alba Longa, where Rea Silvia came from. So it's all very confusing. It's confusing for me, I'm sure it's confusing for you and our listeners as well. It was confusing for the Romans. So we have the great Virgil coming up with the Aenid, his astonishing poetic narrative, where he ties them together, and from the point that's written, that's what the Romans go with.
6:26 Dan Snow? Oh, interesting.
6:26 Speaker 01 That's what the Romans go with. And it's important for the Romans, right? This is a very traditional society, a very traditional society. And so they love grounding themselves in the narrative of their history, and this is what they go with.
6:38 Dan Snow? Okay, so they think that they descended from a mixture of wolf-raised brothers, Trojan princes who've come from the east. What do we think? I'm sorry to be a bit sceptical about that, but what is an Italian place, a Greek place? They're settled, they're Phoenicians, where are they coming from?
6:54 Speaker 01 I'm going to talk to you about the Great Roman Bake Off. So it's all about layer cake. So I'm going to give you a geographical slice through the Italian peninsula. And we're looking at about 500 B.C. So at the very tops, this Alpine Gaul, north of the Po Valley, you've got the Gauls living. Okay, this Alpine Gaul. Funnily enough, Transalpine Gaul is the other side of the Alps. That's where the other Gauls live, but the Roman relevant Gauls are in Transalpine Gaul. Below that, you have Etruria, so the Etruscans, who are heavily influenced by Greek culture because they're a mercantile maritime nation. Then you have Latium with a variety of different towns and cities. Rome is only one of them, so it's astonishing that Rome comes to dominate Latium, let alone everything else.
7:36 Speaker 01 Then below that, you've got Magna Gracia, sort of where you have the Greek settlements through the Bay of Salerno, through towards Sicily.
7:43 Dan Snow? So just like New England is in on the East Coast of North America, you have Greater Greece, which is of Greek settlements in southern Italy.
7:49 Speaker 01 Absolutely right. But then, to confuse things, through the spine of Italy, through the Eponine Mountains, you have the Oscan-speaking peoples, which is a very old language actually. And it's from the Oscans that later you get the likes of the Lu Canians, who were the founders of places like Paestum, and also you get the Samnites, who are one of the later Roman major enemies in the Italian peninsula. So it's a layer cake. So at the point when Rome is founded, however it's founded, whenever it's founded, it's one of a number of quite powerful growing towns and cities, sort of in the Tiber area, which we call Latium.
8:24 Dan Snow? So when Rome was founded, and the traditional date is, what, 753 or something? 753. Do you think there's any truth to that?
8:31 Speaker 01 Uh, no.
8:32 Dan Snow? Okay.
8:32 Speaker 01 No, got no, no way of knowing.
8:33 Dan Snow? Okay, so, but when, when it's founded, so roughly speaking, five hundred B.C., six hundred, it was just what, a little mercantile community, people gathered together, and the nearest one could have been a few miles away. Their sort of, you know, nearest competitor or neighbours.
8:48 Speaker 01 Absolutely. And the interesting thing there then is how the Romans came to dominate the rest of the towns in Latium.
8:53 Dan Snow? Yeah.
8:53 Speaker 01 Because they're the same people, speaking the same language. So there's something different about the Romans from early on. And then if you go back to their origin stories, which they believed, there is a grittiness, there's almost a darkness there actually, the willingness to do whatever it takes to win. And this later plays into the psyche of the Roman Republic later, and then the Roman Empire, pre-incubator dominate phase, where I say the Romans had two things which gave them advantage over every other people we're going to talk about today. They had true grit, they always came back, and they never accepted a peace agreement unless it was on their own terms. And that's a big deal, actually. When we talk about the Hellenistic kingdoms, they just didn't understand that at all. They just completely were wrong footed. And the other one, Dan, is that they were
9:38 Speaker 01 great at nicking other people's ideas.
9:41 Dan Snow? Okay.
9:41 Speaker 01 So if we run through a little bit further before we go back, if you look at the classic Caesarian legionary, he's got a Gallic helmet, the clues in the name, he's got a lorica hamata chain mail, that's from the Gauls. He's got a gladius Hispaniensis, that's from the Spaniards. He's got pillum javelins, they're from the Spaniards. He's got a scutum shield, that's from the Samnites. Everything's nicked. But the Romans were very good at nicking ideas and technology, especially if they lost. If they lose, they almost always come back and they're better.
10:09 Dan Snow? Yeah, that is the interesting thing about the Roman Empire, is they're not invincible. They get shooed all the time through their history, but the point is they come back.
10:15 Speaker 01 And we're going to talk about some of the biggest shoeings.
10:17 Dan Snow? Right.
10:17 Speaker 01 On this pod.
10:18 Dan Snow? Well, because greatness is actually forged in defeat. That's the truth, Simon. It's easy to be great when you're winning, but real greatness is when everything has gone disastrously wrong.
10:26 Speaker 01 Exactly right.
10:27 Dan Snow? Okay, so they're a town in Latium, I'm thinking five hundred B.C., so you've got Athens and Sparta, a magnificent building, great big site. Rome would have been what, a collection of mud huts during that Athenian golden age? What are we thinking?
10:39 Speaker 01 Absolutely, yeah, we can, let's run through to 323 B.C. when Alexander the Great dies in Babylon. So the great things happening in the world, building up to the real rise of the Roman Republic, which actually takes place probably as you get into the third and second centuries, the great things happening in the East. So you're having the Greco-Persian wars, you're having the Peloponnesian War, which involves Sicily, you're having the various campaigns of the Greek states against the Persians. Later, you're getting the rise of Macedon, then you're getting Alexander the Great, and Alexander the Great literally conquers his entire known world, truly astonishing feat. That's all happening. So in a way, what's going off in Italy is a backwater. It's almost irrelevant. When Alexander the Great dies, the contemporary sources don't say his next offensive is going to be against
11:24 Speaker 01 Italy, it was going to be Arabia, you know, so why bother with Italy? So in that sense, in actual fact, you can almost see that the Romans, with their grittiness and with their ability to osmosis other people's ideas and technologies and culture, are given a free hand. And so we'll run through to 323, they're fighting various wars against the Etruscans to the north, and they're losing, but then win. They're fighting various wars against the Magna Gracians to the south, but losing and then win. They're fighting their own Latin city neighbours, and they win. They're fighting the various tribes in the Apennine Mountains, and they win. They're losing and winning and losing, but they're always coming back, always coming back. So as you get towards the time when Alexander
12:07 Speaker 01 dies in 323, they're more or less beginning to dominate certainly central Italy, and looking towards the south.
12:12 Dan Snow? So Alexander the Great might have heard of them. Someone might have said, well, you know, there's new lads on the block there in Italy, they're not doing too badly.
12:19 Speaker 01 I have to say, that's a really good question, actually, Dan, because I wouldn't personally definitively say he would think that Rome is important at all. There are much more important cities in the Italian peninsula. So for example, when I'm leading tours in Campania, the place we go to first is Paestum, which was Perseidonia, which was an amazing sort of port with through the best classical temples in the ancient world. You'd have probably heard of Perseidonia, maybe not have heard of Rome. That's a really good question.
12:46 Dan Snow? And again, you said the Romans are adaptable. Great. Is there anything else you can identify in these early days? They just, are they better at mobilising their citizenry? Have they got better? Why are they taking the fight to these other neighbours and why are they winning?
12:57 Speaker 01 They don't like kings.
12:59 Dan Snow? Okay.
12:59 Speaker 01 They really, really, really don't like kings. So the last Etrusco Roman king, Tarquin the Praetor, was overthrown in 509 B.C. and that's when the Roman Republic begins.
13:07 Dan Snow? So 509?
13:08 Speaker 01 509. Now, that runs all the way through to 27 B.C. when Augustus is acclaimed the first emperor by the Senate. So that is the Roman Republic that we're talking about there. And they don't like kings. You can see by analogy, the same thing happening in the States today, where you have campaigns saying, no kings. So it's intrinsically threaded through Roman psyche from the point Tarquins discarded that no more kings.
13:34 Dan Snow? And that's quite energising, because you're taking on kings elsewhere. So it must be quite cool to be that, yeah, we're the guys now of a king.
13:38 Speaker 01 And they're quite clever at sharing power. So let's quickly run through Roman society. Bottom slaves, then freed men who are manymitted slaves, then free men who had never been slaves, and then three classes of aristocrat: curial, so the middle classes, equestrians, the knights, and then the senatorial class at the very top, which is a tiny percentage of the Roman population, even into the empire. Now, the important thing is there that the senatorial classes, although they were teachers of throats all the time, in terms of political unity, for most of the time, they actually worked in the best interests of Rome. So you have two consuls all the time. So there's always someone who can go on campaign and someone who can run things in Rome. You have regular magisterial elections, so everybody gets a say in that kind of thing.
14:19 Dan Snow? And so their politics is part of the reason for their success?
14:21 Speaker 01 Absolutely.
14:22 Dan Snow? So you come up against problems with inherited monarchy. You just, the consul system, you're electing probably people that are reasonably decent at the job, whereas you might be fighting a group with a useless king who's completely incompetent.
14:32 Speaker 01 It provides the stability you need when things go badly. So things do go badly frequently for the Roman Republic. So let's look at examples. We'll move into the third century B.C. So the first time the Romans fight a Hellenistic kingdom is Pyrrhus of Iparus, when Pyrrhus of Iparus invades in the 280s, and you have Pyrrhic victories, and ultimately a Roma victory. The Romans are fighting Pyrrhic fanatics for the first time. They're fighting and they don't like it. They're fighting lance arm shop cavalry for the first time and they don't like it. And they're fighting elephants for the first time and they don't like it, but they're Romans. So they learn and ultimately they win the conflict. Now, the interesting thing is there, we know that Pyrrhus's main objective.
15:14 Speaker 01 He was brought over by the Tarantines from the southeast coast of Italy.
15:18 Dan Snow? So these are Greek descended colonial settlements in southern Italy. They've brought help from home from Greece to take on these Romans.
15:24 Speaker 01 Yeah. So if the first time the Hellenistic kingdoms in the form of Pyrrhus are sort of in this backwater of the Hellenistic world, which is an interesting way of looking at it, because I think there's a degree of truth in that from a Hellenistic point of view. That doesn't go well for the Hellenistic kingdoms, but we'll hold that for later. So Pyrrhus is actually basically trying to pair away the various Roman allied states from Rome. But the Romans win. And again, let's go back to true grit and the ability to nick other people's ideas. There's a line in the contemporary sources that to counter the elephants, the Romans created anti elephant wagons, which had a baluster in the front of the wagon and then two flaming poles.
16:03 Dan Snow? Against a catapult.
16:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, and there's size on the end of poles to hamstring the elephants. Proper Roman ingenuity.
16:09 Dan Snow? And okay, and you're right, the stability of that political system. So if a king loses a battle, his brother knifes him, the whole country collapses as the court all turn to each other and nephews emerge and take over. In the Roman system, the consul finishes, he hasn't been a success, someone else takes over the following year. There's a constitutional process.
16:25 Speaker 01 And also, within that constitutional process, if the consul isn't any good, you can get rid of him before the end of his term by voting to install somebody else to replace him as well. So it's a really, really, compared to the fairly inflexible kingdoms that the Romans are now dealing with, it's actually a much more flexible system. So it gives the Romans an extra string to their bow. They've got the grit and now they've got the flexibility as well.
16:48 Dan Snow? If your king keeps losing battles, you can't get rid of them constitutionally. So you either have to kill him and precipitate a kind of domestic crisis or just let him keep losing battles.
16:56 Speaker 01 Or let him lead a charge from the front.
16:57 Dan Snow? Well, yeah, that's ideal. Yeah, then you get one of his incompetent sons. That's the problem. Okay, that's interesting. So Rome is, so it's expanding through central Italy, it's pushing to southern Italy and well, pushing throughout Italy. When would we say, yeah, Rome is a regional power? This is interesting. This is, we need to keep an eye on this place. What year would that be?
17:13 Speaker 01 Middle of the third century. So here's our layer cake and the Romans are gradually taking slices from the layer cake.
17:19 Dan Snow? Yeah.
17:20 Speaker 01 To the north and to the south.
17:21 Dan Snow? Two fifty B.C. ish.
17:23 Speaker 01 I'm going to go two fifty, yeah. The reason is because it's in the middle of the first Punic War. The first Punic War begins in two six four. The Romans come into conflict with the Carthaginians.
17:30 Dan Snow? Like, these are North Africans. So there's a regional power in North Africa starts crashing into the regional power in the Italian peninsula.
17:37 Speaker 01 Absolutely. And the regional power in North Africa, the Carthaginians, who are originally from the Levant, settled Punic, Carthaginian, Punic Wars. They're gradually expanding their own empire across the Western Mediterranean. So you're looking at the Bellerich Islands, Spain.
17:49 Dan Snow? Spain, Sicily.
17:50 Speaker 01 Sicily crucially. And by this point, the Romans are more or less controlling all of Italy. So they're now crossing into Sicily. This shall not stand in the Roman world. So you get the first Punic War, two six four to two four one.
18:01 Dan Snow? And so the first Punic War is, is their first sort of interregional war? When they're sort of going beyond the sea, they're taking on enemies from quite different linguistic and sort of cultural groups?
18:11 Speaker 01 The wars against Pyrrhus are international, but they're in the peninsula.
18:14 Dan Snow? Right, yes.
18:15 Speaker 01 Whereas now we're outside the peninsula. So they're now going out of their comfort zone. But again, this is a very lengthy war, but again, that Roman ability to learn from your mistakes and then nick your opponent's ideas is absolutely nailed on here.
18:28 Dan Snow? They become a sea power.
18:29 Speaker 01 They do, from absolutely nowhere.
18:30 Dan Snow? Yeah, extraordinary.
18:31 Speaker 01 And they win.
18:32 Dan Snow? What is that culture of learning? Is there a mechanism? Is there sort of a bureaucracy? Why are they, is it something about not having a king that makes you more open to those ideas of politicians going, let's adopt this? And I mean, what's going on there?
18:43 Speaker 01 I think it's been led by the military. This is a very militaristic culture.
18:47 Dan Snow? Okay.
18:47 Speaker 01 A very, very martial culture. If you used to use a modern analogy in popular culture, you'd say they were the Klingons, right? A proper martial culture. And losing is not appropriate.
19:01 Dan Snow? Yeah.
19:02 Speaker 01 So if you lose, you're gone. But the person who comes up, make sure that they don't lose. Give you a great example as well, marching camps. Every Roman military campaign in enemy territory involves the building of marching camps.
19:15 Dan Snow? Every night?
19:17 Speaker 01 Every night. And it begins, it begins in the Pyrrhic Wars because the Romans learned it from Pirus Ipirus.
19:24 Dan Snow? Right. And they're like, that's good. We're doing that.
19:26 Speaker 01 So you've got two examples there within 30 years, haven't you? You've got the marching camps, which are great for me as an archaeologist because it means I can trace their roots for most of their campaigns, but also they become a naval power as well. Now, that's important as well, becoming a naval power and winning the first Punic War because it drags the Romans now properly away from the Italian peninsula into the Western Mediterranean. And suddenly their sights are sort of, you know, going, oh, this is interesting. And you can imagine the Hellenistic kingdoms, oh, this, who's that lot?
19:52 Dan Snow? Yeah.
19:53 Speaker 01 What are they doing?
19:53 Dan Snow? So you've got north, they're into North Africa, they're into Spain, they're, okay, interesting.
19:59 Dan Snow? This is Dan Snow's History. There's more on this topic coming up.
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21:18 Dan Snow? This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery, a detail. But suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialized. Now I wonder what all baffled historians about us. Mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially, it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.
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22:35 Dan Snow? Hi, I'm Matt Lewis, host of Echoes of History, the podcast that plunges you into the ranks of the Knights Templar across ancient Egypt and behind the barricades of history's great revolutions to explore the worlds recreated in Assassin's Creed. In our new series, Chasing Shadows, we're in feudal Japan alongside samurai warlords and shinobi spies. Whether you're gearing up for Assassin's Creed: Shadows or captivated by Japan's rich history, this podcast, brought to you by Ubisoft and History Hit, is a must-listen. Chasing Shadows is out now on the Echoes of History podcast.
23:22 Dan Snow? Right, 250, what's next? The Second Punic War, so the famous one where Hannibal crosses out the big E, this generational struggle against the Carthaginians. Alien versus predator, whoever wins, everyone else loses. Is that the next big stage?
23:34 Speaker 01 It is. It's an absolute classic example of a war of survival. From a Carthaginian perspective in particular, this is not a war of choice. They know the Romans are in a position to beat them on land and sea unless they seize the initiative. So you have the great Hannibal Barker doing his Hail Mary invading Italy, his three great victories in 218, 217 and 216 at Trebia, Trezemen and Cana. The losses at Cana were astonishing.
24:00 Dan Snow? One of the bloodiest days in history.
24:02 Speaker 01 And yet the Romans come back.
24:03 Dan Snow? Yeah.
24:03 Speaker 01 The Romans come back. So the system is secure enough to take that kind of hit and Hannibal's system isn't secure enough to fight a long war. And ultimately, again, he gets defeated at Zama and that's it. That's it for the Carthaginians, the end of the Second Punic War. Third Punic War doesn't really matter because at that point they've absolutely won.
24:22 Dan Snow? Little operation to capture Carthage again.
24:24 Speaker 01 But something happens in the Second Punic War, which is then very relevant to the next part of the story.
24:30 Dan Snow? And what date, Second Punic War?
24:31 Speaker 01 Second Punic War is 218, 202.
24:34 Dan Snow? Right, so almost 200 B.C. now.
24:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
24:36 Dan Snow? They're fighting across the hot western Mediterranean. So they burst out of Italy and they really, yeah?
24:41 Speaker 01 And now the eastern Mediterranean.
24:43 Dan Snow? Oh, okay.
24:43 Speaker 01 Because there's an idiot in Macedon. And this idiot is called Philip V, who is the king of Macedon, is the latest of the Antigone dynasty, founded by Antigonus, the one-eyed, and then with his son Domitius the procedure. So Philip V, at the height of the Second Punic War, while Hannibal's winning in Italy, thinks it's a good idea to side with Hannibal. So it looks like-
25:06 Dan Snow? So he's aware of Rome. He's thinking, actually, we do need to get rid of these Romans.
25:09 Speaker 01 I think he's after loot.
25:10 Dan Snow? Okay.
25:10 Speaker 01 I think basically they all think that the Roman world's about to collapse so that everyone wants to pile in. But his embassy to Hannibal gets intercepted at sea by the Romans. So the Romans now have, in their sights, the Hellenistic world for the first time.
25:24 Dan Snow? The Greek world, okay.
25:25 Speaker 01 There's a difference here, Dan. It's very important for the rest of Roman history. When Alexander the Great defeated Darius III, the last Akhenanid Persian king, he inherited the wealth of the Akhenanid Persian Empire, which is an astonishing amount of money and it dwarfs anything you would get in the Western Mediterranean or Italy, backwaters. This is effectively in this known world, all the wealth.
25:51 Dan Snow? That's it.
25:52 Speaker 01 And then it gets divvied out when he dies in 323 B.C. amongst all of his various commanders who then found the various kingdoms of the Hellenistic world. So you have the Kingdom of Macedon, the Antigenids, you have-
26:03 Dan Snow? Ptolemy in Egypt.
26:04 Speaker 01 Ptolemy in Egypt, the Seleucid Kingdom in Syria and Iraq, et cetera. They're dripping in wealth. They're dripping in wealth. And suddenly, they tapped on the Roman shore and said, hello mate. The Romans go, oh, that's really interesting that is. And that's it. That's the point. That's the point when the draw happens. And that ultimately, I think, leads to the end of the Roman Republic.
26:30 Dan Snow? For reasons that we're going to discuss. So the Romans, they finish off the Carthaginians. So by about 200, they're dominating southern France, but lots of Spain, all the islands, a chunk of North Africa, what we now say Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, that sort of coast. And they start expanding, as with empires, that's what you do. You have a town on the coast and you get a bit of trouble with the tribe in the interior, you conquer them and there's someone else and you've got to keep going, right? So sucked into that whole area. So tell me about, when do they first march east?
26:57 Speaker 01 Very shortly after.
26:59 Dan Snow? Okay.
27:00 Speaker 01 So you get a series of four Macedonian wars. The first Macedonian war happens almost immediately after the end of the Second Punic War. Then you get the Second Macedonian-
27:09 Dan Snow? And they're marching, what, through what is now the Balkans into northern Greece?
27:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, basically, if you're in Rome, you go down the Via Appia to Brindisi and then go across to-
27:17 Dan Snow? You sail across?
27:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, go across to modern Albania.
27:19 Dan Snow? Albania and then you're in?
27:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's right. And so you go, Albania is a pyrrhus and then you're into Macedon itself. So the Second Macedonian War is a biggie because it's when Philip the Fifth leads his field army, his pike phalanxes, and all the other sort of glamorous entities of a Hellenistic army.
27:36 Dan Snow? Yeah, these are the successors of Alexander the Great.
27:39 Speaker 01 And the Romans hammer them at the Battle of Cano-Sofolae, the Battle of the Doghead, which is the name of Two Hills. And the Romans absolutely hammer them. And it's a shock to the Hellenistic world because at that point the Pike Phalanx is thought to be the bee's knees.
27:54 Dan Snow? Unstoppable.
27:54 Speaker 01 And now it's not. I mean, it's a proper hammering. Then we end with the third Macedonian war. And the third Macedonian war, the son of Philip V also picks a fight with the Romans. And in 168, he fights the Battle of Pidna and he gets flattened as well. And I mean, flattened flattened. And that's effectively, there's a fourth Macedonian war, but that's effectively the end of the Kingdom of Macedon, gets broken up into territories and then eventually becomes part of the Roman world. So you get two major battles there. Cano Sopholae, Philip V, Pidna against Perseus, and that's it. The Romans are done. In the middle of that in 190, the Romans also fight the Roman Seleucid War and win another battle against Pike Phalanxes at the Battle of Magnesia around 190, 189.
28:33 Dan Snow? Where's that? Is that?
28:34 Speaker 01 That's western Anatolia.
28:36 Dan Snow? Okay, so they've moved through Masten into what is now Turkey, western Turkey.
28:39 Speaker 01 And you know what's over there? All that money.
28:42 Dan Snow? Loads of cash.
28:43 Speaker 01 Loads of cash. So I have to say, actually, I'm a Roman historian. I love my Romans. I still want the Pike Phalanxes to win.
28:49 Dan Snow? Okay.
28:50 Speaker 01 All those great battles, I still want them to win. But you know what, Dan? They never do.
28:53 Dan Snow? Right. And just while we're here, why is that? Because from my storybooks when I was a kid, it was because those Roman short swords could get in through that hedge of spears and actually get up close to the pike men.
29:02 Speaker 01 The Roman system's more flexible, full stop, much more flexible, full stop, which reflects the fact that Roman society is more flexible compared to a Hellenistic kingdom.
29:09 Dan Snow? Yeah, because all those pike men with their big, very, very long spears, sharp tips, it's great, but they're like a hedgehog. There's not much they can do, but you can't suddenly reform them and point them in a different direction.
29:18 Speaker 01 And going back to my earlier point as well, Dan, about the fact that the Hellenistic kingdoms really couldn't wrap their head around the way the Romans fought. So one of the things that the Hellenistic pike men would do if they'd lost is they'd lift their pike up and that will be their sign of surrender. But the legionaries kept butchering them, kept going and going and going. So they just did not get this Roman grittiness, this inability to accept anything other than total victory on your own terms.
29:42 Dan Snow? So the floodgates have been, so what, we're now in the sort of 190s, 180s, 170s BC? And is that now just Roman conquest starts to really push east?
29:51 Speaker 01 There are other things that are going to happen. So you have towards the end of the second century, the Symbrian Wars, when you get Germans from the far north of Germany, Jutland Peninsula, Frisia, places like that, who come down en masse and actually almost get themselves into the republican centre. Okay. And the Roman armies there lose multiple times before the great Marius comes along, completely reforms the Roman legions in a new form, this is very important, in a new form, and then ultimately is victorious. And here we can start talking about the emergence overtly of the two major political cultures within the Roman Senate. You have the optimates and the pro senate reactionaries, and you have the populares who are the radicals. So Marius is on a populary side, later Caesar's populares, Sulla, an extreme example of somebody who's an optimates.
30:37 Speaker 01 And actually, it's the grinding between those two political classes from the time of the Symbrian Wars through to the end of the Republic in 27 BC that actually sets the scene for what's going to happen. But the key thing with Marius is this. He changes the nature of the Roman legions totally, and he increases the number of legionaries in a legion to 6,000. And the Romans are probably got about 30 at this point. But they're all equipped the same. They're all equipped the same way, two pilums, gladius spaniensis, lorca hamata, Gaelic helmet, scutum shield, all equipped in exactly the same way. 1,800 of them are engineers. Who do things like, they're woodworkers, they are stonemasons, they can do everything. And they're soldiers as well, okay?
31:23 Speaker 01 And in addition, every legionary is also trained to engineer as well. So you have the experts fighting and the Roman legionaries who can be engineers fighting. You don't need a siege train behind you, you don't need a supply chain, it's all within that one unit. And he allows them to be recruited from the poor.
31:40 Dan Snow? Okay.
31:41 Speaker 01 So they become ultra loyal to the warlord, I call them warlords in my books, the warlord who recruits them. So Sulla recruits his own legions, Marius recruits his own legions, Caesar recruits his own legions. They are ultra, ultra loyal. And that's why you effectively get these independent warlords as you cascade into the first century BC, who basically they can do whatever they want.
32:02 Dan Snow? Okay, so as you say, it's so interesting. So the Carthaginians get to the gates of Rome. These Germans almost get to the gates. I mean, even Rome now, as a big Mediterranean power, it's still flirting with disaster quite regularly.
32:13 Speaker 01 It's probably because it's quite thinly stretched. And also, remember, at the same time, the draw of the East. So they've been drawn into Anatolia already. They're going through Asia. They're taking out the various kingdoms now, like Bithynia and Pergamene, which are in Anatolia. And every time they take one out, whoever the warlord is, becomes incredibly rich. And his troops become incredibly rich. So if you're in Rome, and you're an upcoming senator, you can say, I want to go to that. Can I have a go at that, please? And there's a scramble between the populi champions and the optimati champions, all wanting to have a crack at making a name and fortune, absolute fortune.
32:52 Dan Snow? And then also, you might return to Italy. You've got troops loyal to you.
32:56 Speaker 01 Which is an issue, because soldiers need to be kept busy. So you end up with sort of a really vicious series of civil wars, beginning again and again and again, as you cascade all the way through the first century BC. The best known ones are obviously the civil wars of Caesar. But there are many.
33:13 Dan Snow? Plenty more.
33:14 Speaker 01 There are plenty.
33:15 Dan Snow? And so, as the Roman Empire expands, the opportunity of making wealth just blow everyone's mind. And that competition for the spoils starts to tear the Republic apart.
33:24 Speaker 01 It's a bad time, Dan, to be a classical statue in Athens. Because you're not going to stay there very long. You're going to end up in Rome in some posh senator's house.
33:31 Dan Snow? Everything's nicking everything.
33:33 Speaker 01 Everyone's nicking everything.
33:34 Dan Snow? Right.
33:36 Dan Snow? You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. The best is yet to come. Stick with us.
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34:36 Dan Snow? And then people like, so Marius, he defeats the Germans, but he then, he will face a warlord who ends up fighting it out with.
34:42 Speaker 01 Absolutely, yeah. So you can go through the list. There's Marius, there's Sulla, there's Pompey Magnus, there's Caesar, there's Mark Antony, there's Octavian later, and many others as well. And at one stage or another, the popularies are in charge. At one stage or another, the optimates are in charge. At one stage or another, somebody's leading a campaign in Asia, making vast amounts of money. Another stage, somebody else is doing it. And the whole Roman system's been bent, bent to breaking point.
35:10 Dan Snow? So when a guy like Pompey conquers great chunks of Asia, he comes back, he's unbelievably rich, he's got loyal troops. So he, briefly, he will sort of dominate the politics in Rome, almost a dictator in all but name.
35:20 Speaker 01 Until Julius Caesar arrives, caught the Rubicon and he legs it.
35:23 Dan Snow? Right, exactly. So Julius Caesar, though, does the same. He conquers what is now France and bits of Belgium into Germany, all that kind of stuff. So he gets loads of money and loyal followers, and then he comes back to Italy. So it's just inherent, the system becomes unstable.
35:34 Speaker 01 Hugely unstable, hugely unstable. It's interesting with Caesar. When I was doing my research for my biography of Caesar, basically it's called Julius Caesar, Rome's Greatest Warlord. And I came in the book with a series of traits that all these warlords had to a greater or lesser extent. So the ability to communicate with people, high and low, true bravery, leading from the front when you need to, tactical and strategic acumen, various traits. And Caesar's the only one, for me, who has them all.
36:00 Dan Snow? The whole package.
36:01 Speaker 01 And that's why he becomes so, so dominant.
36:04 Dan Snow? We should say, apart from foreign enemies almost toppling Rome, just quick shout out for Spartacus, the slave revolt. People have heard of that. I mean, that shakes Rome to its foundation as well. What date is that?
36:14 Speaker 01 That is early in the first century B.C. And it's the third servile revolt. So it's the third major slave revolt, actually.
36:19 Dan Snow? So gigantic slave revolts that require total mobilization of the Roman states to defeat all these enslaved people.
36:25 Speaker 01 The Romans are absolutely terrified all the time of slave revolts. It's a big deal. That's why in the Roman world, it's very rare to get a ratio of slaves to freed people of any more than about 20%, because they're terrified of slave revolts.
36:37 Dan Snow? It's astonishingly violent, isn't it? I mean, there's just, you're fighting foreign enemies, you're fighting slaves within Italy, and then you also start fighting each other.
36:47 Speaker 01 Klingons.
36:48 Dan Snow? Klingons, right.
36:49 Speaker 01 Klingons, yeah.
36:50 Dan Snow? In the end, all these hyper wealthy, ambitious, like what leaves that republic? So the empire's grown, and yet in the centre, in and around Rome, they're just going after each other. You know, Sulla arrests, executes opponents, Pompey does the same, Julius Caesar famously do the same and become almost a king in all but name. Why is there that astonishing breakdown at the heart? Why did the system break down?
37:16 Speaker 01 Money. It's the Hellenistic wealth. I think the access to the Hellenistic wealth, which Alexander the Great captured from the back of the Persians, was so great. It bent the nature of Roman society at the very top. Because suddenly, if you were able to capture a fairly small kingdom in Anatolia, then you're going to be a multi-trillionaire and anybody associated with you. So your troops are unbelievably loyal to you. No one's going to argue when you get back home unless they are also a multi-trillionaire as well. So the whole nature at the top of Roman society has been bent and changed by this wealth.
37:53 Dan Snow? And then your loyal legions fight their loyal legions.
37:56 Speaker 01 They do, they do. And often what you find is that when the legions are defeated, and usually the leader, Pompey as an example, are killed. A lot of the legionaries will move over to fight for the new guy because he's got all the money, you know? And it's an issue, to be honest, because if you think about when Octavian becomes the last man standing after the Battle of Actium, he inherits 60 legions, 60, and that's 6,000 men legions, which even with the amount of wealth the Romans have got now, they can't afford. He inherits hundreds and hundreds of polyrene galleys in the Mediterranean, and they've got no opponents anymore, so they're useless. So this is why one of the great things Augustus does, he sees the next great reformer of the Roman military after Marius because of that.
38:37 Speaker 01 As you cascade, you go past Caesar being assassinated in 44, you then end up with.
38:44 Dan Snow? Another round of civil wars.
38:45 Speaker 01 Another round of civil wars. And finally, the last man standing is Octavian.
38:49 Dan Snow? Octavian, who is Caesar's great nephew?
38:52 Speaker 01 Yep.
38:52 Dan Snow? So Octavian. Defeats the people that assassinate Caesar, all these other warlords. Then Octavian finally turns on his brother-in-law, Mark Antony. The final clash, the two great warlords for control of the Roman world. Octavian wins and he becomes the Emperor Augustus.
39:08 Speaker 01 It's also, more importantly, control of the Ptolemaic Empire in Egypt.
39:11 Dan Snow? Right.
39:12 Speaker 01 So that's the last vaguely independent Hellenistic kingdom, which is fabulously, fabulously, fabulously wealthy.
39:19 Dan Snow? And it's where all the bread for Rome comes from.
39:20 Speaker 01 Exactly, yeah.
39:21 Dan Snow? Okay.
39:21 Speaker 01 So it's a big deal. And then that's it. And everyone just goes, you know, God, that was tiring, wasn't it?
39:26 Dan Snow? Yeah, because you've now had civil wars rocking the Roman Republic since sort of Marius.
39:32 Speaker 01 Yeah.
39:32 Dan Snow? Right, so well, most of that first century B.C.
39:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
39:36 Dan Snow? You've now got one warlord left standing. And do they deliberately say at that point, look, we've just got to change the system here. This is bonkers. Effectively going to make you emperor for life.
39:44 Speaker 01 They do because he's in such a powerful position. So he's brought peace to the Roman world. And with all that sort of tribulation and the fighting and everything, even though you've got the wealth coming over from the Hellenistic world, it's not good for business. So what the political classes want is stability. They're being assassinated and they're losing all their wealth. And they're being outpaced and outplayed by the Novo Rish, who themselves are leading their campaigns in the east. So the political classes in Rome, the senatorial class, they want basically some stability.
40:14 Dan Snow? Yeah.
40:14 Speaker 01 And so you have the Pax Romana brought in by Octavian and the senator claiming Augustus and say, okay, we'll leave it to you, crack on. And then he begins his reforms with the military. So that's the beginning of the story of the Roman Empire.
40:27 Dan Snow? What's weird is that during that first century B.C., Romans are at each other's throats the whole time. They're at each other's throats because the empire is still expanding. Did they get lucky? There were no massive peer competitors at that time. I mean, if the Persians had sort of re-emerged or the Germans in the north, or presumably they're a bit vulnerable when they're all fighting each other constantly.
40:43 Speaker 01 The warlords are picking their fights. They're picking their fights. So for example, if you're one of these warlords, we'll say Crassus or Mark Antony, you will not choose to pick a fight with the Parthians.
40:54 Dan Snow? Right.
40:54 Speaker 01 Because they did and they lost. And in fact, Crassus actually lost his life.
40:57 Dan Snow? He gets killed, yeah.
40:58 Speaker 01 And his son got killed as well. And Mark Antony, his reputation as military leader was broken by the Parthians. So I think these guys were quite canny at picking fights. And it only becomes brutal when they have to fight. So Caesar forcing the issue, crossing the Rubicon in forty-nine, as an example, Pompey can't ignore that. Can't ignore that. And actually, that's when he bottles it and flees to Greece. But usually, they're very good at picking fights. And you look at Caesar as an example. Caesar fights the fourth Mistradatic War. That's where Veni Vidii Vici comes from, et cetera. But there's effectively no opponent there whatsoever. Very shrewd.
41:33 Dan Snow? Right, okay. So they, while they're having these internal fights, they're careful not to poke anyone on the border who might take advantage.
41:39 Speaker 01 No, or recruit them, or recruit them. So Cassius and Brutus, for example, for their army, which fought against Octavian and Mark Antony.
41:46 Dan Snow? So these are the two of the leading people that assassinate Julius Caesar. They're now fighting Caesar's successors.
41:51 Speaker 01 Yeah.
41:51 Dan Snow? Yeah.
41:51 Speaker 01 And they recruit lots of eastern horse archers.
41:55 Dan Snow? Okay.
41:55 Speaker 01 Into their army as an example. So you can either neutralize them, ignore them, or recruit them.
42:00 Dan Snow? We're now into the Roman Empire proper, the imperial phase of it. But in terms of the red on the map, had most of the conquering taken place by the time Augustus comes to the throne? So what proportion of Rome was yet to be conquered by the time it reached its peak under the Emperor Trajan, a hundred years or so in the future?
42:16 Speaker 01 So the Roman Empire is a Mediterranean empire. That's the first thing to remember. And it becomes a Mediterranean empire, I would think, from, it's all about North Africa, natural fact, because after the end of the Third Punic War, the Roman elites really didn't want Africa to recover. And it's only in the leaders like Caesar where people start reinvesting in the region. So it's as you come into the first century B.C. that the bits of North Africa start getting joined together again. And then ultimately, Egypt joins them, and that's it. That's your Mediterranean Empire. By then, Caesar has already bolted on Gaul.
42:49 Dan Snow? Yeah.
42:50 Speaker 01 Okay. So that's more or less it. And then-
42:53 Dan Snow? So it's the sort of, the people can imagine, it's just the whole red strip all the way around the Mediterranean, including Greece and Western Turkey, down in Lebanon, bits Jordan, Israel, Palestine, I think. That's where we are when Octavius turns into Augustus and becomes emperor.
43:05 Speaker 01 And then there's only one or two other bolt-ons that come along after that. You've got Britain, you've got Dacia, you've got Judea, et cetera. But broadly, it's in place.
43:12 Dan Snow? So for next episode, we're going to be looking at that Roman Empire, as it reaches its territorial maximum extent and just ruling over that empire and how effectively they do it. But in the meantime, Simon, thank you very much for coming back on the podcast.
43:23 Speaker 01 Absolute pleasure.
43:28 Dan Snow? So folks, thanks so much for listening as we've learned the rise of the Roman Empire. One of history's most extraordinary stories, journeys, transformations. It was built on their ambition, on that toughness, on that discipline, on that ability to adapt and innovate, and their unshakable belief that they would eventually win. In our next episode, we are going to find out what that winning really looked like in practice. We're going to be joined by the wonderful Mary Beard to hear about what happened when the empire reached its height, what it took to run a sprawling empire successfully, always with barbarians knocking on the gate. A big thank you to Simon and Eight for joining us. This is the first episode in our series,
44:12 Dan Snow? so make sure you hit follow in your podcast player. Don't miss the next episode, coming next Thursday. And if today's episode gave you a different perspective, or you've got any questions about Rome and the ancient world, then we'd love to hear from you. Leave us a comment on Spotify, or better yet, a review, wherever you get your podcasts. See you next time.
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