Mary Beard on Ruling the Roman Empire

What did it take to rule an empire that was never meant to have an emperor? In this second episode of our series on the Roman Empire, we're joined by classicist Mary Beard to trace how Roman leadership evolved over a thousand years - from the competitive power-sharing of the Republic, to the carefully constructed one-man rule of Augustus. Why did the republican system buckle under its own success? And what set the empire on the path to fragmentation? Make sure to join us for our third episode next week, when Peter Heather will explain how and why the Roman Empire fell apart. Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore. We need your help! Let us know what you want from Dan Snow's History Hit by filling in our anonymous survey here: https://forms.gle/PvgayWLkWGjYT4St6 Dan Snow's History Hit is now available on YouTube! Check it out at: https://www.youtube.com/@DSHHPodcast 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 also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

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• 0:32Speaker 01

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• 1:06Dan Snow?

  How do you rule over one of history's greatest empires? For over a thousand years of Roman history, that answer kept changing. From the fiercely competitive republic through to the age of the Caesars, the emperors. This is our second episode in our series on the Roman Empire and we're going to trace how leadership in Rome evolved over, well, a thousand years. We're going to explore how the institutions of the Roman Republic forced powerful men into competition, into balancing each other, I guess. And then we're going to look at the rise of one-man rule under Augustus, whose reign transformed a republic into an imperial system. And then from then, it keeps changing. The empire itself changed.

• 1:50Dan Snow?

  Rome itself was eclipsed and we're going to look at how power fragmented and across much of the empire. It was extinguished. This is the story of how Rome reinvented itself, reinvented power, and how those reinventions shaped the fate of an empire. Last week, we looked at the rise of Rome. Next week, we're looking at the empire's fall. So make sure you hit follow and check back in for that. For today's episode, though, I'm very happy to say we are joined by Britain's most famous classicist, Mary Beard, who specialises in ancient Rome. It's going to be a masterclass. Her podcast is Instant Classics, which is well worth checking out for all things about the ancient world. Let's get into it.

• 2:40Dan Snow?

  Mary, very good to see you.

• 2:42Speaker 03

  Great to have you here, Dan.

• 2:43Dan Snow?

  I've been in this wonderful library so many times, such a treat to be back. And I feel I'm asking you enormous questions here. So I know you're, but I know that you will be able to just make, distill and make them so simple for me. First of all, I want to know, we talk a lot about the Roman Empire, the republic that precedes it, which kind of is an empire as well. First of all, how's that being governed? Because we hear about these over mighty men falling out each other, and it's best. How does it work?

• 3:04Speaker 03

  The principle, the basic principle of the republic was, well, it was complicated. It was not a democracy. I mean, I call it a kind of sort of democracy. That's to say, the big decisions, like passing laws, who to go to war with, if you should go to war at all, that was in the hands of the male citizen body. Right? And that looks, if you put it that way, that looks pretty democratic. And there's an element of that. I think the key about the republic, though, is that everything about its organisation, its formal rules.

• 3:49Speaker 03

  Gave political advantage to the wealthy.

• 3:52Dan Snow?

  Okay, this sounds so unfamiliar, Mary. I mean, it's difficult for us to understand this.

• 3:56Speaker 03

  Look, Dan.

• 3:57Dan Snow?

  Powerful, rich, white men have the whip hand.

• 3:59Speaker 03

  Look, Dan, we live in a world in which we often think that powerful, rich, white men have the whip hand. The Roman Republic is something different because it formally gave them the whip hand. That's to say, the voting system was arranged so that more power went to the individual votes of somebody rich than someone poor, right? And so that was taken for granted, that this was a society stratified by wealth, though ultimately at the hands of these popular assemblies, even if they were biased towards the rich. And I mean, I think a lot of people have trouble with this, and the Romans had trouble with it,

• 4:40Speaker 03

  because a lot of our kind of ideas about governmental political institutions are drawn from Greece. Democracy, aristocracies, oligarchies, kingships, et cetera. And the Roman Republic doesn't fit into any of those. It's quite difficult. For even ancient Greek writers resident in Rome, there's one great historian called Polypias, who is resident in Rome in the second century BCE, and he struggles. He has to say Rome's a mixed constitution. That means he can't fit it into any of his categories.

• 5:15Dan Snow?

  Sounds a bit like the 90th century in Britain, where we're all, even the Brits, trying to work out quite what's going on, who's sort of in.

• 5:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's right. But I think that what is crucial about it, particularly when you then think about how it compares to the one-man rule of the emperors, which is going to come later, after Julius Caesar and so on. What is crucial is that.

• 5:40Speaker 03

  It's a power-sharing system. The Roman Republic, and they think of it as being invented in order to prevent there being kings ever again. Heaven knows how it was really invented, but that was their story. The absolutely fundamental idea, well, there's two of them. One is that nobody who gets elected to office, and there are a series of elected officials, from consuls down, elected by these hierarchical assemblies. The absolute key is that nobody ever holds office on their own. Now, we think of it, as I think often, a bit sort of, a little bit quirky, that the Romans

• 6:22Speaker 03

  had two consuls and how many pretes and tribunes that they had. But that is the point. Nobody holds power individually. And in principle, sometimes broken, but nobody holds power for longer than a single year. So you have a series of elected officials, all of them drawn from the rich elite. And they're elected to offices that they always hold with somebody else, and only for a year. Now, you know, you start to see then that why it's kind of hard to fit Rome into traditional

• 7:04Speaker 03

  structures, because most Romans, not all, but most Romans would have been absolutely horrified at the idea that what they were living in was a democracy. I mean, democracy was, for many, if not most Romans, an appalling version of mob rule. But there was a sense of power-sharing communality which divided up power over time, in the end. Nobody, the Roman elite is kind of notionally a group of equals.

• 7:36Speaker 03

  Who hold power but share it?

• 7:38Dan Snow?

  Okay, so something must have gone right, because this republic conquers much the Mediterranean basin. Is it that government, is it that system, is it good at getting rid of bad people and promoting good people? Or is it climate, is it technology? What's going on? How much blame, what credit should we give it?

• 7:53Speaker 03

  It's the big puzzle. It is the real big puzzle about

• 7:56Dan Snow?

  Can you solve it now, please?

• 7:58Speaker 03

  I'll try. I will say first that people often think that the fall of the Roman Empire, the fall of Rome's great territorial expansion is what's the puzzle. That's not my bag, but I tell you, more puzzling is why this small city in a not very desirable place on the Tiber with a load of bogs and mosquitoes, why they, over the period of the Republic, basically conquered the whole Mediterranean, right? Now, I need to stop there and say, the terminology here is really confusing, because there are two senses in Roman history of the word empire.

• 8:40Speaker 03

  One is the territorial expanse of the Roman Empire, what is Roman territory across the Mediterranean? And the other is the political sense of the period when Rome is governed by one man. Now, the puzzle, the really annoying puzzle about this, is that the empire, in the sense of the territorial expanse of Rome, was mostly acquired before Rome had an emperor. That's basic rule. You know, emperors did not make the Roman Empire. They inherited it, they didn't make it. So, what you find from about the late 4th century B.C.

• 9:23Speaker 03

  onwards, during the period of the kind of fully fledged Republic, is you find a series of successful conquests which don't ever seem to stop, right, until you get to Julius Caesar. And why were the Romans so successful in conquering other people?

• 9:47Speaker 03

  You know, some people said they were terribly militaristic. They were terribly militaristic, but there weren't any people in the ancient Mediterranean who weren't militaristic. So that's not the answer. People say, oh, they were better at soldiery than other people. Well, sometimes they were, sometimes they weren't.

• 10:07Dan Snow?

  They lost a lot of battles.

• 10:07Speaker 03

  They lost a lot of battle. They didn't lose wars, but they lost battles. And they were a standing joke to begin with about their navy. I mean, the Romans were supposed to be completely rubbish at naval warfare.

• 10:20Speaker 03

  So there is something about the kind of way they're governed, which must, I think, provide a kind of baseline from which to explain this. Partly, I think, it is the continual competitiveness of the elite. You know, I've talked about these guys holding office temporarily, always with someone else. What that means is that the Roman elite are always going into competitive elections with one another. There's always winners and losers, and the elite is deeply, deeply committed

• 11:02Speaker 03

  within the power-sharing agreement to getting the most honour and glory for the individual. And that's, in a sense, becomes a big fault line in Roman history. And so I think you can see that if, as all Mediterranean cultures do, if you put a quite high premium on military success, in this very odd Roman system, the system itself kind of puts a fire under that because you become consul. Okay, you've got a colleague, but you've only got one year to make your mark. How do you make your mark? You make your mark by conquest.

• 11:44Speaker 03

  And so there's a whole series of guys, as we go from decade to decade, whose ambition is in gaining military victory, because that is the kind of, the ultimate idea of what a successful Roman is.

• 12:01Speaker 03

  But they haven't got long to do it. There is absolutely no reason ever for any individual Roman to want to postpone military conquest unless they think that they might be in charge next year, so postponing it would be useful. And that, I think, is it's the hothousness of the political system, the way that power sharing and temporary office holding cranks up the competition. And I think that's quite important.

• 12:33Dan Snow?

  And you've got a clear metagism for getting rid of someone rubbish.

• 12:37Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 12:37Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 12:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, you have. It's very hard to internalise what it would have felt being one of these guys with that persistent, insistent desire for success, for military success, for electoral success. And it's all going on every time. You've only got a year, right? I think the other thing is, this is really part of why they lost battles but they didn't lose wars, is that at a certain point, sometime in the fourth century, why this happened, we don't know, is that unlike every other early Mediterranean society that we know, what the

• 13:21Speaker 03

  Romans did was they started to make long-term military alliances with people they conquered. Now, standard form of warfare in the Mediterranean, small-scale, the endemic warfare, is that summer comes and you think, right, it's time for us to go and do some fighting. You fight your usual enemies, you send out some soldiers, you bash them up, you steal their cattle and you say goodbye, right? See you next year. Rome significantly changes that because instead of saying, we'll take your cattle, bye-bye and see you next year, they start to, and it becomes the absolute norm.

• 14:03Speaker 03

  The fourth century BCE, they start to make formal alliances with the people they conquer, the basic terms of which was that Rome could use those people's soldiers. Now, what that means...

• 14:19Speaker 03

  Is that Rome got enormous manpower at its control. It could call on more soldiers than any other power anywhere could call on. And, you know, that's why they lose battles but win wars. That Romans were defeated quite often in their conflicts with with their neighbours and also with the people they were fighting further afield. But they could always come back home and say, right, okay. They've got always more boots on the ground.

• 14:52Dan Snow?

  So this early empire, we can call it. It is not the great European empires of the nineteenth century or the German Empire in the Second World War. There aren't sort of Roman bureaucrats and governors and building little Roman buildings in all these different places and sort of somehow bedding in an idea of Roman.

• 15:10Speaker 03

  No, I mean, it's actually quite hard to know how far that's true of many modern empires. You know, how far that kind of sense of cultural, religious, military, political control, which is part of our idea of what imperialism is, how far that ever went. But Rome in its republican empire is miles away from that, absolutely miles away. And it looks as if they have very few priorities about what they want from the people they conquer. I mean, basically, it comes down to they want tax, they want some cash, and they want the guys to do what they're told when necessary.

• 15:53Speaker 03

  Right, so it's what I sometimes call the kind of an empire of obedience. They're not interested in imposing Roman religion. They're not terribly interested in dressing up these places to look like mini Rome's. They start to do that a bit later. What they want is they want people to do what they're told when necessary. And they have the beginnings of a system in the republic of provincial governors. But I have to say, the boundaries of these provinces are probably pretty fluid.

• 16:30Speaker 03

  And they have all kinds of different deals with different people across the map. So there's a whole series of people known as charmingly as client kings. I mean, basically, a client king is someone who the Romans think they've got under their thumb, who is a king of some tribe somewhere, but will toe the Roman line. And basically, it is an empire that takes cash. It's an exploitative empire. Its tax collection is bizarrely privatized. It's not a state tax collecting system. There are companies of so-called tax farmers who bid for the contracts to raise the cash

• 17:13Speaker 03

  from some poor province and then hand it over to Rome, meanwhile creaming off their own profit. And there are some truly appalling stories in this republican empire of financial exploitation. But when push comes to shove, the Romans want their subject communities not to make a fuss, not to rebel, not to get out of line. The Romans want them to do what the Romans want.

• 17:42Dan Snow?

  You're listening to Dan Snow's History at There's More Coming Up.

• 17:52Dan 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.

• 18:33Dan Snow?

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• 19:17Dan Snow?

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• 19:48Speaker 04

  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 world's 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.

• 20:35Dan Snow?

  And there's no big office block in Rome, full of bureaucrats organising this empire. This is just, the senate will send a message to the consuls going, hello, King of Armenia, we require the following...

• 20:46Speaker 03

  That's right, that's right. And it'd probably take three months for the message to get there, right? I mean, you haven't got a Ministry of Foreign Affairs, you haven't got a Roman Army HQ, and transport is extremely slow, and sending messages are extremely slow. So, in a way, you say, look, if they wanted to have that kind of hands-on control that often comes with our image of an empire, they hadn't really got the mechanisms to do it anyway. One's tempted to use the word, "it's a light-touch empire", that would probably be a bit misleading, because there is some pretty nasty bits of violence going on.

• 21:29Speaker 03

  But Rome's ambitions and capabilities are not such that, without enormous kind of reconstruction of what it is to govern, they can't do that sort of heavy-handed control. All of this period of Rome, I think, none of it, from the government of the empire to the politics, none of it quite fits easily into our stereotypes. In part, that's because our stereotypes are correct, but it doesn't. It's quite hard to see where the rough edges are. Certainly, if you were to say, now, here we are in 100 BCE, would you like to draw

• 22:09Speaker 03

  me a map with the boundaries of the Roman Empire clearly marked on them? Well, it'd be a damn stupid question to ask, because there are all sorts of different mechanisms of control. You wouldn't know whether to include the client kings or not. Rome is there at the centre, but without the kind of administrative control that makes the classic model in our imaginations of an empire feel...

• 22:40Dan Snow?

  And Mary, you've talked about this before, and I always love hearing from you about this. Does that model bring some resilience? When things go bonkers, that one thing people know about Roman history is all the sort of madness that occasionally appears to happen in the imperial capital or within the imperial family, or aristocrats fighting. But does that therefore light touch, be careful, that light touch empire? I mean, there's a bit of a resilience, there's a bit of inbuilt stability when the centre is internal.

• 23:02Speaker 03

  I think that's probably the case. One thing that is a good example of that, I suppose, is that you don't regularly, either in the Republic or later, actually, you don't see opposition to the centre brewing up in the more distant territories. Generals, and generals are the same as politicians in Rome, there's no kind of difference between a military man and a political man. Generals certainly get a power base from conquest and in the provinces of the empire. But that power base is usually wealth.

• 23:45Speaker 03

  Pompey the Great, so-called the Great, in the middle of the first century BCE, he is phenomenally wealthy because of his conquests. He's not actually using the politics of empire very much for his own political advantage. And, yeah, the metropolis can tear itself to pieces and the tax farmers in Asia are still sending the cash in and nothing much is happening. The problem, though, is, and I think that this is perhaps the other way around,

• 24:23Speaker 03

  is that the vast expanse of empire, along with the real difficulties of communication, and when councils are in office for one year, they wanted to send a message to what we would call the heartlands of, let's say, Turkey, and get a reply. I mean, sending a message is one thing, but you need a reply. That would probably have taken half their year of office, right? So gradually it becomes clear that this sort of Roman system worked well enough when they were exercising control over Italy or southern France or nearby places.

• 25:09Speaker 03

  But just practically, it is jolly hard to run an empire which stretches from Spain to Syria, basically, and not yet Scotland, but certainly to North Africa. They're trying to run it with the mechanisms of a small city-state, right? Now, as a jokey way of putting it, it's kind of like trying to run, you know, an empire with the mechanisms of a large university student union is really what we're talking about. They haven't got that administrative infrastructure and they can't communicate when they need actually occasionally to come down with a heavy hand.

• 25:52Speaker 03

  They can't act quickly because they don't know what's happening. And, you know, the Romans are not stupid, right? They might be nasty, but they're not stupid. And it's pretty clear that they see that there are problems here about particularly the temporiness of their office halting, right? The traditional way would have been to take this consul, got one year in office, he can bash up Sicily and come back within a year. You know, he can't bash up Syria and come back within a year. And so there is a clash between the geographical demands of the empire and the power-sharing temporiness of Roman government institutions.

• 26:37Speaker 03

  And they twig this and they start from really the end of the second century B.C. onwards to tinker a bit with that temporiness. So they would say, okay, we're going to have a system when if your consul, you won't do what you traditionally did, which was put on your military kit straight away and go out. You'll basically stay in Rome for your year of office, but then we'll kind of extend it because you'll become a pro consul, a kind of a stand-in consul. And it's during your pro-consular year that you will go out and do your military campaigning.

• 27:18Speaker 03

  But of course, what happens is that that opens floodgates in a way. And you find that people for good military reasons, I mentioned Pompey the Great, well, he would be one, saying, look, if you want me to deal with this now major military crisis in the East, you're going to have to give me more power for longer in order to do it.

• 27:42Dan Snow?

  I can't get Asia here. I mean, give me a break. It's not a month.

• 27:44Speaker 03

  That's right. Or I'm going to, you want me to clear the sea of pirates, you know, pirates. I mean, when we talk about the Romans having problems with pirates, we tend to think of Pugwash and people with parrots on their shoulders. I mean, pirates in the ancient world are terrorists. They are organized crime terrorists. And Pompey is put in charge of trying to get rid of them in the Mediterranean. But he can't just do it on the old fashioned way. So what happens is that the governmental institutions start to crumble or to be at least challenged by virtue of the success of the conquests that those governmental institutions underpinned,

• 28:27Speaker 03

  right? So Rome is a victim of its own success. It's a city-state government trying to run an empire that that city-state government had acquired. And that becomes by the time you get really from the end of the second century B.C. through to Julius Caesar at the middle of the first century B.C., you find that there are a series of these guys who soar to break out of the traditional constraints. They take power for longer. They sometimes put it down obediently after a bit, but they're not obeying the usual rules

• 29:09Speaker 03

  of power sharing. And therefore, they are actually, in a sense, undermining the very structure that the republican government had been based on, which is people don't hold power for very long and they always share it. So somehow it's imploded. And that's combined with the idea that particularly with conquests in the East, and as I said, the individual commanders getting very rich. So they've got money to use for their own political ambitions at Rome. Why is there so much? Generosity in Roman politics, which was bribery is what we mean. Generosity is what the guys themselves would have said.

• 29:53Speaker 03

  That's because there's a hell of a lot of money around.

• 29:56Dan Snow?

  That's fascinating. I think there was more than one current pushing us towards solo imperial rule here.

• 30:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, we have to be careful because we're seeing this retrospectively. And I think that I'm sometimes guilty of somehow imagining that one man rule was kind of inevitable in Rome because of all these problems and then tracking it and saying, look, you can see that there's these individuals. Here it comes. And then Julius Caesar, here it comes. And, well, he's interrupted in mid-flow because he's assassinated in forty four BCE. But in a sense, that is the moment when people kind of think, right, one man rule is probably here to stay.

• 30:45Speaker 03

  Now, that's not what his assassins said, you know, his assassins also, you know, very, I think. I think the Romans are very aware about these currents and these pressures. The assassins say, right, we want liberty back. What Julius Caesar represented is the removal of liberty. Now, they meant the removal of liberty from other members of the Roman elite, not from the poor old poor, right? But that's what they're fighting for. But in my retrospective view, there's a suspicion that the writing is already on the wall, honestly. And I think one of the ways you can see that, a brilliant symbol of it, is that one of the signs of one man rule, one of the diagnostic signs of one man rule at Rome,

• 31:27Speaker 03

  is whether you put your living head on the coins, right? Now, there's plenty of dead Roman heads on the coins, you know, for as long as you can trace. But we take living heads on coins as something that is part and parcel of monarchy. For the Romans, it was dangerously part and parcel of monarchy. And the first person to have their living head on a regular coin issue minted in the city of Rome.

• 31:58Speaker 03

  Pompey had minted a few coins well away from Rome, but the first person to have their head on the Roman coinage was Julius Caesar.

• 32:07Dan Snow?

  Interesting.

• 32:08Speaker 03

  And the first issue of this comes out, and it's not entirely unconnected, I think, only a couple of months before the guy's assassinated. And in some ways, it's a symbol of that assassination. It's a symbol of what prompts that assassination. They're not putting him to death because they don't like his head on the coins, but they don't like his head on the coins because it symbolises exactly what Caesar's up to. I think it's absolutely fascinating that after the assassination, when the Romans try to have a bit of sort of peace and reconciliation and pretend it's business as usual, the main assassins, Brutus and Cassius, go out to actually take provincial commands in the East.

• 32:52Speaker 03

  Brutus issues coins because he's going to pay his troops. And one of the major functions of coinage in the ancient world wasn't to give you small change in your pocket, it was to pay the troops. One of these issues of coinage has got Brutus's live head on the coins. Now, as soon as the hero of liberation is putting his living head on the coins, you know that liberation isn't going to be the end result of this. What's going to be the end result is more or less permanent one-man rule.

• 33:25Dan Snow?

  This is Dan Snow's History Hit, more after this.

• 33:39Speaker 04

  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.

• 34:27Dan Snow?

  And that is what happens. So how would people have felt that change? It was a very real change. How did they feel it in Rome? And how did they feel it in the provinces?

• 34:34Speaker 03

  If we start with Rome,

• 34:37Speaker 03

  it is one of the greatest mysteries, actually, of all of history, not just ancient history, of how Julius Caesar's great nephew and adopted son, the person that we know as the Emperor Augustus, but he started out life as Octavius, how he established one-man rule at Rome permanently and successfully for what was actually hundreds of years. His system survived for hundreds of years. Now, people, I think, differ in their explanations of this. And some people think that Augustus, as he became,

• 35:21Speaker 03

  was a kind of great mastermind and got a great system in his head and he was going to impose it. He eventually stamps out the civil war that had been lingering for years after the assassination of Caesar. He's victorious over Cleopatra and Mark Antony in Egypt, which was the kind of final campaign of those civil wars. Some people think that he's got a blueprint and he comes back to Rome and he thinks, right, okay, I am now going to initiate autocracy my way. And some ancients certainly thought that. When they looked back, they couldn't understand, how did Augustus manage it? And they thought, well, you know, he worked it out on the back of many envelopes

• 36:05Speaker 03

  and he came home ready to put it into practice. Other people, and I think, I suppose I'm one of them, think that it must have been a strange set of kind of improvisations in concentrating power in his own person. And we don't tend to see the failed bits of the improvisations. We see the successful bits. Effectively, what he does...

• 36:31Speaker 03

  Is he reinterprets the old republican system. He doesn't abolish it. He doesn't have a revolution. I think if you think of a kind of marxian sense of a revolution, it means new governing class comes in, old governing class is excluded in some way, usually violently. There's no change of governing class. The same elite guys are still running the show in Rome. Except what Augustus manages to do is put himself at the more or less, we have to be a bit careful about thinking there was no opposition to this, the more or less undisputed pinnacle of this.

• 37:16Speaker 03

  And he does that by leaving the structures in place. So you are still consul, right? Eventually you're chosen by the emperor rather than elected, but people still want to be consul and they hold it for one year and the other sets of junior offices, they also remain the praetors and the edars and the tribunes. The senate still meets and yet what Augustus does is focus the basic decision making and the basic loyalty onto himself. Now, how he does that in practice? Well, we've got hints, I think.

• 38:00Speaker 03

  Suetonius is writing in the second century CE, writes a biography of Augustus amongst his twelve Caesars. And he gives us some hints, I think of the new kind of idea of personal power that Augustus manages to wield.

• 38:21Speaker 03

  Cleverly, I mean, Suetonius says, when Augustus went into the senate, as he goes into the senate, the discussions with all the other guys, he greets every senator by name. He goes round, as it were, I don't think Romans didn't shake hands, but, you know, he says, hello Marcus Tullius, how are you? Now, that must have taken hours, if it's true, but there's this sense that he has a kind of patronal command of the structures of power. Now, he's also got a military command, because one way of seeing Augustus's regime would be a very, very iron fist in a velvet glove, and one of the things he does is effectively

• 39:05Speaker 03

  nationalise the army. The republican army had been paid for by state funds in ways that we would probably expect, but it nevertheless was an army that was essentially owned by its commanders. Now, Augustus says, every soldier is beholden to me, to me and the state, and he merges me and the state in the way that clever dictators often do manage to merge me and the state, and he effectively buys the loyalty of the army, so that very effectively, there are very few military rebellions for the next couple of hundred

• 39:46Speaker 03

  years. He does that by fixing a salary for being a soldier, of fixing terms and conditions of service, and giving them a retirement pension. So, he has undercut the idea that the soldiers might feel loyalty to their commanders rather than to him. It's still kind of not easy to see quite how that adds up to a new deal in which, as I said, there probably were some, and we know there were a few dissidents who didn't like this, but it looks as if the whole thing...

• 40:26Speaker 03

  Was not hugely challenged. He does it in other ways. I mean, I think I've been calling him Augustus. I said that his original name is Octavius. So he's come back from defeating Antony and Cleopatra. He decides he wants a new name because Octavius, or Octavian, as he's sometimes called, that was a name embedded in the civil war after the death of Julius Caesar. He chooses an invented name.

• 40:55Dan Snow?

  Rebrand.

• 40:56Speaker 03

  It's a complete rebrand. And Augustus is a pretty North Korean style title. You know, it means revered one. So he's putting himself out there after having been a bit of a thug, honestly. He's putting himself out there as revered elder statesman. He's building himself into the city of Rome. He's investing huge amounts of money in new forums, in statues. He invests in a royal family, in a way, for the first time. Women and heirs are part of the whole deal of the PR of an elite Roman. He probably gets lucky.

• 41:38Dan Snow?

  Well, he lives a long time, doesn't he?

• 41:40Speaker 03

  I mean, I think he is the longest serving emperor ever. And he's always, it seems, making a kind of bit of a big deal, a bit of a hypochondriac, I think. So it's like, oh, I might die any minute. He lasts. He defeats Antony and Cleopatra and comes back to Rome in 31 BCE. He lasts more than 40 more years. And to some extent, all this stuff I've been saying about he rebrands the republican institutions, that's right. But also, he gets lucky because he stays around.

• 42:18Speaker 03

  Now, when I was a student, some of our teachers used to say it was all a big con trick. The Augustan regime, he conned the senators. You know, he said, you can still be consul, and he gave them some extra honours, you know, and they could have better seats at the amphitheatre, all this kind of thing. And somehow, it was all a kind of Machiavellian con trick. Now, it took me some years to realise, no, that can't be the case. Roman senators, might have been many things, but they weren't thick, right? Or some of them weren't thick. The idea that they had the wool pulled over their eyes by Augustus saying, don't worry, it's all the same. I'm just living on the Palatine in a proto palace,

• 43:00Speaker 03

  and you're still being consul. This is business as usual. They knew it wasn't business as usual, but he gave them enough, enough of a structure to be able to collude with it. And in the end, the Roman governmental structure of the empire survives because the elite go along with it. Military power, yes. Rebranding, yes. Elite collaborators, yes with a capital Y.

• 43:26Dan Snow?

  Now, in terms of elite collaborators, that's Rome itself, out in the provinces, presumably that's all really important too. It's the desire of people, elite people, to kind of go along with it as well.

• 43:35Speaker 03

  Yes. And the period from Augustus on is where we start to see the Roman Empire looking a bit more like our familiar image of it. I mean, there are governors and a state taxation system underneath, financial officials. You can see a fledgling, but very fledgling bureaucracy there. In a way, I think, that would have looked quite different from what was going on in the Republic, at least for the elite in the provinces. And frankly, peasants in Roman Britain, eventually conquered by Claudius after Augustus, they barely noticed the Roman Empire. But, you know, if we're thinking about

• 44:18Speaker 03

  What this looks like in the towns and amongst the aristocracy of the provinces. We're seeing new sets of connections formed between the centre and the elite of the provinces. And one thing that Augustus really buys into is the incorporation of the elite into the governmental structure of Rome. Now, that wasn't entirely new. It goes back to the idea that when Rome is conquering the cities, Rome incorporates rather than keeps them on the out crowd. There's something already there, but what Augustus does is give that an enormous push.

• 44:59Speaker 03

  So that what you find is that rich provincials, as we might call them, become incorporated into Roman office holding.

• 45:10Dan Snow?

  And they send their kids to Rome to receive education and all that sort of thing.

• 45:13Speaker 03

  They do, right? And they become members of the senate and eventually they become emperors. Consciously or not, and again, it's one of those questions of it's hard to know whether there was a grand plan here or a series of improvisations. That he is buying the loyalty. He would say winning the loyalty, I don't say, he's winning the loyalty of the provincial elite, who are actually therefore being part of his intermediaries. And that same would go for his successors. The intermediaries between the central power and the populace. And he's also, one of Augustus's really smart moves.

• 45:57Speaker 03

  This does look like it's calculated, not just improvised. He divides the provinces in a kind of systematizing way into provinces which were basically peaceful.

• 46:11Speaker 03

  No real military activity required, no. North Africa would be one of those. And he lets the Senate, in the usual way, go on selecting the governors for those provinces. Provinces of Asia, the provinces of Africa and a few others. He, however, makes himself the overall governor of any province where there's a substantial military presence. Okay. And he has governors in those provinces, chosen directly by himself and answerable to him. So in a way, he's thought that where there's liable to be trouble, like Germany, for example,

• 46:55Speaker 03

  that's where you want a direct line of control between me, emperor, and the administration on the ground. Now, I think one's got to be realistic. All the same problems about how long communication takes to get from Rome to the province and back again, remain, you know, you can't change the geography of the Roman Empire, but you can change the place where people look to the main authority. Though I think also even those officials in peaceful provinces chosen by the Senate, I think they're still looking to Augustus. Romans aren't stupid. And they are communicating directly with the emperor.

• 47:39Speaker 03

  And with what by now must be a kind of big staff of people who are sifting the postbag and trying to work out the finances. We have a few glimpses of particularly ex-slaves within the Imperial Palace, praised for their grip on imperial finance, for example. So it isn't a bureaucracy in the modern sense of the word. There aren't exams, there's no career progression. It's not like the British Civil Service. But there is a sense that there are more people. In one place, the Imperial Palace, as it grows, thinking about the government of

• 48:21Speaker 03

  the empire, how actively they're canvassing some of these provincial bigwigs to come on the inside, we don't know, but that's certainly what's happening.

• 48:29Dan Snow?

  The Roman Empire's becoming more Roman, but let's scooch for a couple of hundred years. You say that Augustus set this imperial system that endures for almost four centuries or so longer. There must be a lot of change there that takes place.

• 48:41Speaker 03

  I think for 200 years, there's not much change. One modern ancient historical joke is to say that if you'd fallen asleep in 1 CE, towards the end of Augustus's reign, and you'd woken up 150 years later, towards the end of the second century CE, you'd have seen a world around you that was quite recognisable. I mean, there would be changes, but you're in the same world. If you then went back to sleep for another 150 years, and you're now not in 175, but 300 and something, the world would look dramatically different.

• 49:24Speaker 03

  Again, some of the institutions were still there, people were still being consuls, the Senate still existed, but the power structure is looking different, and the role of the elite, of the traditional elite, looks as if it's changed. It looks as if there's much more power going to a military class by that stage, rather than the old senatorial elite. Now, the period of change that people usually fix on is the third century CE, and they talk about the third century crisis, which is another way of saying things are changing.

• 50:04Speaker 03

  It's marked by all kinds of different things. One is that there is, for whatever reason, a real problem about imperial succession.

• 50:14Speaker 03

  But the Augustan system had worked very well, partly through a series of adoptions of successors, not just biological successors, really to the end of the second century CE. It then, for whatever reason, starts to fall apart. You do get a period then of the army backing its favourite candidates. You get a period when people do appear, unlike what was the case in the first 200 years of the Augustan regime, do appear to be being made emperors without, as it were, any connection with Rome itself. Rome appears to be getting sidelined. In certain respects, it's still the Augustan regime,

• 50:59Speaker 03

  and it never ceases to be the Augustan regime. But it's a bit battered at that point, and it recovers really afterwards. But things are never quite the same again. And in the end, it's geography that's always the enemy for Rome. And one of the things they do is they decide, well, they're going for devolution in our terms. It's devolution, and they have mini capitals, places like Split or Ravenna. They kind of disaggregate the empire. The reason for this is absolutely obvious, that you want centres of commands beyond the centre of command for just a single province,

• 51:42Speaker 03

  a bit closer to where the action is. The consequence is that it kind of undermines the whole geopolitics of the Roman Empire, and Rome then is becoming more sidelined. Now, there are some emperors who've never been there, make their first visit to Rome when they become emperor. And there's a sense in which there's an increasing misalignment between Rome as the symbolic capital of the empire, and Rome as where the decisions are really made. Now, you can add into that all kinds of other factors, if you like. You can add in plague, pandemic, whatever. And this is what people have spent the last

• 52:25Speaker 03

  200 and something years trying to work out. But things are different once you get to the the middle of the third century. But they don't crumble. And look, if you go to the eastern part of the Roman Empire, and you talk about, you know, Rome falling in the 5th century CE, you know, nasty barbarian invasions, the Roman Empire, and what we call Byzantium, but it's basically the Roman Empire, lasted all of 15th century.

• 52:57Dan Snow?

  Mary, I'm going to do a horrible thing to you. You know more about the Roman Empire than anybody else. Do you also suffer from this little slight internal sense that the fall of the Western Empire, well, let's deal with the Western Empire, Britain, was a sort of bad thing? Because I do, and I admit it, and I'm sometimes ashamed by it. And recently, I was told by wonderful Peter Heather, one of your colleagues, that actually, it's possible that archaeology now, other science now says, actually, it might have almost been better for normal people, the release of that central grip. Whereas you're thinking about this at the moment?

• 53:28Speaker 03

  I try not to divide historical events and happenings into good things and bad.

• 53:34Dan Snow?

  I'm sorry, I know you're going to say that.

• 53:35Speaker 03

  But, you know, and I know what you mean. And I've got colleagues, you know, who'll say they'd have given a lot to keep the water supply, you know, that I see that. I think, however, we do suffer from the demonization of the so-called barbarians, which we've seen through wonderful 19th century pictures of kind of real thugs pulling down Roman statues or whatever, being barbarian in the term. We suffer from that in a way that perhaps misrepresents what was going on. And I think the key players here, the vandals, right, in Vandal Africa. Now, if you mention the word vandal to anyone, we know exactly what

• 54:19Speaker 03

  we think. That said, Vandal North Africa was a place of extraordinary culture. They wrote wonderful poetry, some of which still survives in Latin. And Vandal Africa was also partly responsible for the codification of Roman law, right? And they were Christians. So I think that, as with a lot of ancient history... We're the heirs to other people's prejudices, some of which may have been right, but it's impossible now for us not to see the barbarian invasions, as if they were somehow a destruction of noble Roman culture. And it's easy to forget

• 55:04Speaker 03

  that the good old Vandals in Vandal Africa were a great bastion of Roman-ness under their own terms.

• 55:11Dan Snow?

  Yeah, surprise, surprise. 19th century, the height of imperialism globally. They were quite fond of the Roman Empire. Surprise, surprise.

• 55:18Speaker 03

  Surprise, surprise.

• 55:19Dan Snow?

  Well, Mary, but thank you so much for correcting me and coming on as ever, giving us such a wonderful tour of Roman history. Thank you.

• 55:24Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 55:28Dan Snow?

  Well, that's it, folks. From the Republic through to the carefully crafted authority of Augustus and the emperors who followed him. I'm so grateful to Mary for taking me through how Rome kept rising to the challenge of what it meant to rule an ever larger empire. Rome's story isn't just about the beautiful, dilapidated buildings and the far-off names. It's about vivid institutions and personalities colliding over centuries and about how ultimately fragile even the most formidable structures of power can be. If this episode about how Rome built and rebuilt its authority interests you, well, then next week is all about what happens when that authority really seriously begins to fracture. We got civil wars. We got disease.

• 56:13Dan Snow?

  We got economic strain. We got divided rule. We got pressure on the frontiers and eventually the fall of the Western Roman Empire. How did something that dominated that known world for centuries finally collapse? Make sure you're following the podcast so you don't miss that. And if you're enjoying this series so far, share it with someone who loves history as much as you do. Until next time, folks.

• 56:44Dan Snow?

  Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.