The Last Roman Emperors

No grand battle. No final blaze of glory. In 476 AD, the Western Roman Empire collapsed not with a roar, but with a quiet abdication. A boy emperor - Romulus Augustulus - handed over the regalia of power in Ravenna, signalling the end of an empire that had once ruled the known world. But how did it come to this? In this episode, the finale of our Fall of Rome miniseries, Tristan Hughes is joined by historian and bestselling author Adrian Goldsworthy to chart the chaotic final decades of the Western Roman Empire. From puppet emperors and ruthless kingmakers like Ricimer to the meteoric rise of Odoacer, discover how political infighting, military mutiny, and foreign ambition brought the Roman West to its knees - and ushered in the age of kings. MORE: Roman Emperors with Mary Beard: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7C7wRHjSPeif9pLD2UZJyY?si=5226c8e7f9584336 Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on 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.

• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

  Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Teutoburg Forest? What secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland? Or what made Alexander truly great? With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week, covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  There are two types of business owners: those who are busy and those who want to be busy. Toast is designed for both, with tools to keep you humming and help turn grind into growth. That's how you turn busy into business. Toast: Built for Busy.

• 0:48Speaker 02

  The Quarter Pounder with Cheese is made with 100% fresh beef, cooked when you order it. Add hot crispy fries and an ice cold Coke, and hopefully, a lot of napkins. All for $8. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba.

• 1:04Tristan Hughes?

  This episode is sponsored by Smart Travel, a new podcast from NerdWallet. Now, you know that one friend who always finds the best travel deals, picks the right cards, and somehow ends up in first class for the price of coach? Smart Travel is like that friend, but in podcast form. They cover all things travel finance, so you can stop stressing and actually start enjoying your trips. I'm lucky enough to travel a fair bit. You might have heard me talking about being on tour with The Ancients in Australia and New Zealand quite recently. Well, Smart Travel Podcast from NerdWallet was a great help. They dig into which airport lounges are really worth it and which are just an airport gate with better snacks and worse lighting,

• 1:49Tristan Hughes?

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

• 2:28Tristan Hughes?

  In the end, there was no fanfare, no epic clash of armies, no desperate last stand amidst the ruins of the forum when the Western Roman Empire breathed its last. Instead, it fell with a whimper, and the muted ceremony of a bloodless abdication. The year is 476 A.D. In the city of Ravenna, up in the northern reaches of the Italian peninsula, a mere boy, barely a teenager, surrenders the symbols of imperial authority: a golden crown gleaming in the fading sunlight, the regal cloak of office dyed a deep and shimmering purple,

• 3:10Tristan Hughes?

  the sceptre and orb adorned with Rome’s once triumphant eagle now brought to heel. The boy’s name is Romulus Augustulus, and his resignation brings a long and storied age to an end, for he is the last to bear the title of Emperor in the West. It’s The Ancients, I’m Tristan Hughes, your host. This is it, the finale of our special miniseries about the fall of Rome. Over the past two weeks, we have embarked on the most epic of adventures, chronicling the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.

• 3:52Tristan Hughes?

  From highlighting the initial origins of decline in the third and fourth centuries, to unpacking the lasting impacts of barbarian invasions and devastating plagues, we have traversed the contours and causes of Rome’s ultimate fate. If you haven’t had a chance to listen yet, do go and check them out. And now, to the final chapter in this gripping saga of decline and collapse: the twilight of Rome’s last emperors. The story ends with the boy Emperor Augustulus renouncing his imperial throne, but what set this seismic moment in motion? How was it that a teenager came by the authority to sign away an empire that had lasted for half a millennium?

• 4:35Tristan Hughes?

  To find an answer, we must delve into a period coloured by violent anticipation and chess-like manoeuvring, to a time where puppet emperors danced to the tune of formidable barbarian overlords.

• 4:49Tristan Hughes?

  When Emperor Valentinian III, who had ruled for some thirty years, was assassinated in 455, the Western Roman Empire was seized by a frenzy. An irrepressible power vacuum greedily sucked in one pretender after another. Emperor followed emperor followed emperor, with each achieving little of note, the exception being Majorian, who briefly managed to reverse the empire's decline before he too fell from power. But the one constant in this time of tumult was the Gothic kingmaker behind the throne, a supremely skilled military commander by the name of Rissima. For two decades he lurked in the shadows, pulling the strings of power

• 5:32Tristan Hughes?

  as four ill-fated emperors rose at his whim, only to be cast aside when the winds of change turned against them, none lasting more than a fleeting five years each on the imperial throne. The pattern continued after Rissima's death in 472, as described by the Byzantine historian Procopius:

• 5:53Speaker 03

  There were moreover still other emperors in the West, but they lived only a short time after attaining their office and accomplished nothing worthy of mention.

• 6:04Tristan Hughes?

  That is, until the coming of Arestes, a celebrated Hunnic general from the distant plains of Pannonia. A former envoy at the fearsome court of Attila, Arestes was no stranger to the inner workings of Rome's weakened power structures. And when he saw the maelstrom that now engulfed it, he took a chance to seize the empire for himself. Marching on the imperial capital of Ravenna from across the freezing snow-capped Alps, Arestes convinced the latest in the line of puppet emperors to flee and installed his own son on the imperial throne. That boy's name was Romulus.

• 6:42Tristan Hughes?

  He would take the title of Augustus when he became emperor, although that was soon ridiculed. He became known as Romulus Augustulus, Little Augustus, because of his young age. Arestes' intention was to rule in the manner of his Gothic predecessors, as the power behind the throne. His son meanwhile would be a mere pawn in the brutal game of thrones that devoured the remnant of Rome's western dominions. But the imposition of Augustulus as emperor and Arestes' ascent to the reins of total power did not prove to be the masterstroke he intended it to be. The bulk of the army which Arestes had used to depose the rightful emperor

• 7:23Tristan Hughes?

  was little more than a collection of disparate barbarian bands, loyal only by the promise of plunder and land. And when Arestes refused to grant these mercenaries the lands they demanded, he was met with turmoil and unrest. The chaos was whipped in toward Odoaca, one of Arestes' subordinates, who united the soldiers with a promise to find them the land they sought. It was a daring gambit. Odoaca was in no real position to offer what he promised, but by stoking the fires of rebellion and inciting a civil war, he managed to defeat Arestes on the plains of Placentia under a waning August sun. Odoaca was victorious, but at what cost?

• 8:06Tristan Hughes?

  It is only with hindsight that we can say his lightning uprising sounded the death knell for an already withering empire. A month after his victory, Odoaca met with Arestes' son, the boy Emperor Romulus Augustulus, and compelled him to stand down as emperor. But Odoaca did not succeed him. Instead, he took the mantle of king, and in so doing revived a title that had lain dormant since the defeat of the ancient Roman monarchy in 509 B.C., nearly a millennium before. Here are the words of the 6th century chronicler Marsalinas:

• 8:46Speaker 03

  "Odoaca, king of the Goths, took control of Rome. With this, the western empire of the Roman people perished, which the first Augustus Octavian had begun to rule in the 709th year from the foundation of the city. This happened in the 522nd year of the reign of the departed emperors, with Gothic kings subsequently holding Rome."

• 9:11Tristan Hughes?

  The dismemberment of the Western Roman Empire was complete. Its territory fractured between Goths, Saxons, Franks and Vandals. New houses were emerging, carving out their own domains in the West from the husk of a decaying corpse. The age of empire was over, the time of the kings had come.

• 9:35Tristan Hughes?

  To help us unpack this journey into oblivion and the emperors who ruled the Roman West as the sun set on their dominion, I'm thrilled to be joined by historian and bestselling author Adrian Goldsworthy. He's been on the podcast before, most recently to talk about Rome's great enemy to the East, the Parthians, and is the author of The Fall of the West: The Death of the Roman Superpower.

• 10:03Tristan Hughes?

  Adrian, it is a pleasure to have you back on the podcast today.

• 10:07Speaker 04

  Thanks for inviting me again.

• 10:08Tristan Hughes?

  Now, I know yourself with the research that you do, you go from 5th century BC Greece to Alexander the Great, to the height of the Roman Empire, and now we're bringing you to the end of the Western Roman Empire, so I hope you don't mind us bringing you so far forwards in ancient history. To kick it all off, can you set the scene, what we should be thinking of, particularly with the Western Roman Empire, as we get to the beginning of the 5th century AD?

• 10:33Speaker 04

  Well, the big deal obviously is that there are two empires, although again, there's a common system of law, to most respects, and if an emperor issues a ruling on a law in one half, the empire is normally respected and held to be valid in the other. So they're separate, and they're not separate, they're culturally much the same, though there are differences. The big deal that has happened is that the West is crumbling in a way that is not happening to the East. So the emperors in Constantinople are still that much more secure, they haven't lost a lot of territory, whereas in the West, you're getting to the point where... Now, there's this wonderful document called the Notitia Dignitatem that lists all the offices in the Roman Empire around about this time, around about four hundred-ish, that sort of era.

• 11:16Speaker 04

  And it lists all these commanders of units that are supposed to exist, and some of them are tied to frontier defence, some of them are the mobile field armies that scholars like to talk about, but they're not very mobile, they're not in the field, and they're often not armies at all, as the later says, and that's the problem. What should be there doesn't correspond with what's really there. So there's a weakening of central authority. What the emperor can do, the power he has, is much, much less than it had been even fifty years before, let alone centuries before. It's a very different environment. It's much more complicated, because whereas in the East, to a great extent, you're dealing with one big neighbour, the Sassanian Persians, in the West, you've got lots of different

• 11:58Speaker 04

  groups of broadly Germanic peoples that are, some of them within the Empire, some of them fighting for you, but they might change their minds, different leaders, different warlords appearing. So it's a very dynamic situation, and the ability of the emperor in Italy to say, you should do this and make this happen, is much, much less than it has been. So everything is a different setup, but there is still this sense that everybody wants the Empire to go on, and everybody wants the Empire to work. So when you have, early on in the fifth century, you know, the tradition is that those in Britain are being told, sort of, get on with it themselves, deal with their own problems, it isn't that sense that, oh, well, we're really abandoning the province in a formal sense, it's just we can't get around to you at the moment.

• 12:43Speaker 04

  So, you know, you should be able, and there, in the past, there was an element where provinces could run a lot of their day-to-day affairs. There's been a, in one sense, a move towards centralisation of the bureaucracy and the government over the last century or two. But at the same time, there's a devolution as well, where local powers are appearing, where local warlords, army commanders, whatever, are more significant. So it's an odd mixture of its much, in some ways, you have, in theory, more direct power, but actually, in practice, you have a lot less. So it's a precarious thing, but we know that by four seven six, the last emperor in the West is going to go. Nobody at the time knows that, and if you think...

• 13:25Speaker 04

  It's taking us back to, well, beginning of Charles the First reign, four hundred years or so, there has always been an emperor. There's always been a Rome. All of these areas, nothing here is recently conquered. Even if you're in Britain, you've been Roman for three hundred and fifty years. You cannot imagine anything else. And there are no independence movements like the, the sort of winds of change that swept through the European empires of the twentieth century. You know, post Second World War, we've got B E day to day when we're recording. You're thinking of that incredibly rapid change that occurred where nationalism was so strong, countries wanted to govern themselves. That just isn't there because nobody can really remember an identity that is not Roman in some respects.

• 14:10Speaker 04

  You know, you might have kept lots of your traditions, some of your languages, some of your cults, this sort of thing, but it's so vague and distant and the only good life is Roman life. That's civilization, that's prosperity, that's, that's what you expect and you don't really have an alternative that's waiting there.

• 14:27Tristan Hughes?

  I think that's important to highlight straight away, Adrian, especially as we're going to be covering several big names from this period as we kind of go all the way to that canonical date of four, seven, six, especially as some of those figures as we'll highlight are so-called barbarian generals. And yet, as you say, the importance of Roman culture to them is so, so high. As we're focusing on the Western Empire and we're going to be going through these big figures, these emperors and the key generals next to them, it feels like we should start with the man at the beginning of the fifth century, Adrian, this figure of Honoreus, because he seems to loom large quite infamously, I guess. You've got the sack of Rome in four, ten. I mean, I mean, how significant a figure is he? Tell us about Honoreus.

• 15:06Speaker 04

  As with a lot of these people, it's actually hard to get to the person. You know, there are titles, they've got these ranks, events happen, but you're dealing with an era where you don't have good narrative sources at all. You know, you've had that wonderful blip in the fourth century where Amianus Masalinas comes along and for a few, couple of decades, you've got detail and you get some sense, prejudice sense, but nevertheless of what just Julian was like, what Valens, Valentini, you know, what these people were like, how they acted, how they behaved. It's much, much harder to say with those later and we're dealing with very prejudiced sources of people who liked them or didn't like them. And of course, these disasters. You know, the sack of Rome in four, ten, on the one hand, you can put it down as something

• 15:51Speaker 04

  minor, it's just a group of your own army that. Is in a bad mood. Yes, they're a load of Goths primarily, or at least they're identified as Goths. What they actually were, and how many other people have accumulated along the way and joined this group is, you know, anybody's guess. But their basic identity, their leader, is based around a version of traditional tribal Gothic structure. I mean, it's changed because it's in a different environment, but there's at least some sense of that identity. So you're dealing with that sort of danger. Now, you know, it's easy to play this down and say, oh, well, you know, not much of Rome was actually affected. Rome's a big, big city. There's still half a million people here at least, maybe more. plundering

• 16:34Speaker 04

  for a day or two. There's not a lot that you can actually do. It focuses on particular areas. You know, the city's still there. Life resumes fairly quickly. That's true up to a point, but the big thing is the shock that this could happen. It's happened in the past when a Roman army in what is clearly a Roman civil war has turned up. And they've done things way back in 68, 69, the year of four emperors after Nero's death. And that's very alien. That's rather traumatic. But this is someone who does seem foreign, does seem utterly alien, and the emperor cannot stop them and cannot do anything about them, and yet knows the leader in question. Now, he's supposed to be one of his own men, and

• 17:16Speaker 04

  yet cannot control him. So you're very much with the Norus. You've got one of these people who has the prominence, has the power, has the titles, but actually can't do very much and can't control in a way. So it's probably worth thinking of him more in those terms than trying to pin him down and blame him. You know, there are almost certainly very bad decisions made at this, as is so often the case throughout human history. You know, these moments of crisis, people react in what appears to be the worst possible way, which is very easy for us observing from with hindsight to see. But it's, it's essentially a misjudgment. And there is also, it's very hard if you're the emperor to take the Goths

• 18:00Speaker 04

  or a group like this seriously, deep down, because you know there's not that many of them. You know, they've been your soldiers before. They probably will be again, or they might be somebody else's. They're not trying to overthrow you, kill you and take your throne. And that for such a long time is the deep fear of every emperor, because that's how most of them die, is at the hands of other Romans. So you're in this neurotic era where you've inherited because of a family connection, but you haven't got the career of the man who's fought his way to power. So you're there, you're surrounded by a court, the emperor has become so much more distant from the sort of the principate days, the idea of

• 18:45Speaker 04

  the Augustan, you're first among equals, you mix with senators, you dine with senators, to the very formalized court where you're admitted to the imperial presence and you might kiss the hem of his garment, this ceremony, this distance, but you're not, you're removed from any sort of political class, you only know what people tell you. And you can see that back even in the fourth century, when the emperors are stronger, how hard it is for an emperor to know what's actually happening anywhere. Because they're not told the truth, and so often your senior officials, whether military or civil, have an agenda of their own and are up to their own things and will tell you what they feel they want you to hear. So you are very much a figurehead. And Honoreus perhaps particularly is a man

• 19:28Speaker 04

  who doesn't campaign in person, doesn't do things in the field, isn't active. Yes, he moves around a bit, but basically his life is court life, and he has very little sense of what the empire is like, other than what people tell him and how he's been raised to think, which compared to a Theodosius or someone like that who's fought their way up, is a very different situation. And you, it is generally the pattern that the emperors become much more figureheads during this century than they have been before. And the real power is the military man backing them.

• 20:00Tristan Hughes?

  So that context was really important, isn't it, Adrian? Because in past episodes, we've already covered the general Stilicho at his importance, but then how Honoreus, another person gets in his ear, Stilicho is kind of blamed for one of too many incursions and not being able to defeat them, and then he's assassinated. So as you say, it's almost, who can get the ear of the emperor that will determine, you know, kind of policy? And also, as you say, the generals who are around him, one of them might have his favor at a time, then they might lose his favor, but then that general might react in a bad way if they feel that the emperor has then just betrayed them. So you see all of that happening.

• 20:39Speaker 04

  Everybody is frightened. Because Honorius does not know who to trust. And if you're one of these senior commanders, you realise, well, maybe I could persuade the emperor. You know, he doesn't really know much. If I'm convincing and perhaps I'm right, perhaps, you know, some of these people you feel with Stilicho and like, and some of the others, they genuinely feel they're doing a good job. And that, you know, it's human instinct. We feel if we're working hard and we're going well, as far as we're concerned, it's going well. Everybody should realise that. And we're a bit shocked if they don't, because they haven't, they don't know all the details. So there's that distance made much worse by the court situation and by this constant competition. Essentially, if you're at that high level, you can't trust anybody.

• 21:21Speaker 04

  You know, every Roman commander has to look at all his colleagues as rivals, all his juniors as potential rivals. The emperor is looking at these people and think, well, if they could find somebody else. Honorius is, has the, the strength for a while that there isn't an alternative. There isn't an obvious replacement for him. So that gives you a position of strength. If these warlords want to remain commanding the army, commanding, effectively running the state. There needs to be an emperor as a figurehead that people will accept. You don't want one with such a dodgy claim that a commander elsewhere can easily find somebody just as good. You know, again, we tend to focus on the big events and the foreign wars, but civil war is something everybody experiences. It's part of life.

• 22:05Speaker 04

  It's natural in a way that we find in our era, very, very alien.

• 22:09Tristan Hughes?

  So if we move on to the death of Honorius in four hundred and twenty-three, Adrian. Aside from, as you say, being this character who seems quite aloof. It's whoever's by the emperor and whispering into his ear and it said all that, that paranoia that's around as well. But are there any other, any significant legacies trying to leave Honorius on a positive note that he leaves to the rest of Roman Empire?

• 22:33Speaker 04

  Well, it hasn't gone as bad as things could. In the sense that there's always the potential to mess up. He does, it has a long reign by the standards of this period. He's there a long time and surviving that long, even if much of the time you're a puppet, is still an achievement. And it's very easy to say, you know, why doesn't somebody like this really sort things out, start getting the empire working again? But it's in the same way, you know, we know for our own system, most governments, most leaders are dealing with the decisions and consequences of those decisions of their predecessors. So, you know, when things are bad, yes, they can try and blame them and they try and trade credit for the good things, but their degree of control to make things happen quickly is very limited.

• 23:16Speaker 04

  Everything is slower in the ancient world and you've got a system that has developed over such a long period and got to this stage with the other factors. I mean, you've got the, the impact, the ripples caused by the Huns and the other groups. So there, there are changes in what the wider world situation is. And ultimately, you know, you are emperor, you are imperator. Security is your biggest task, really. That's what you're supposed to provide. You are supposed to make Rome strong and make sure that its enemies don't pick on it. So, you know, you are dealing from it's a stacked deck in the first place for something like that. There isn't so much they could do. However, they also, it's again, one of those things, looking from a distance, we can see stages of decline.

• 24:01Speaker 04

  But when you're living through it, all of this is normal. There is the traumatic event like the sack of Rome. But actually you're not thinking in terms of a hundred years ago, 200 years ago, what things were like then, because they've never been like that. You might have read about them, but you accept what you have as natural, what you've grown up with. And the tendency is with all ancient governments, they're sort of conservative with a small C is that they don't try and do as much as modern states do. Part of what they're there for is almost to keep things as they are because, well, that's how we got here and that's why things are so good. So apart from the occasional reformers, most people actually don't try and change things. So in a sense, he's following in the pattern of most emperors in not doing very much.

• 24:50Speaker 05

  Most AI knows data. Toast IQ knows restaurants. It helps turn Detroit 75's numbers, plus what works across thousands of restaurants, into insights we can actually use. That's AI that's worked a double without a lunch break. Visit toastapp.com to learn more. Pay testimonial from an actual Toast customer.

• 25:09Speaker 02

  The Quarter Pounder with Cheese is made with 100% fresh beef, cooked when you order it. Then comes the melted cheese, the slivered onions, the pickles, the ketchup, and the mustard. Add hot crispy fries and an ice cold Coke, all for $8. And if things go well, one loose fry at the bottom of the bag. The Quarter Pounder with Cheese meal, now $8. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba.

• 25:39Speaker 06

  Hi, this is Mark Bittman from the podcast Food with Mark Bittman. Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of the higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high-fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a Berry Chantilly cake. Ready-to-cook pizza? No antibiotics ever chicken wings? And sushi made fresh daily? Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3rd at Whole Foods Market.

• 26:14Speaker 07

  Are you sure we don't want to do gifts this year?

• 26:16Tristan Hughes?

  Yeah, don't worry about me. Bombas.

• 26:18Speaker 07

  Sorry, did you just say Bombas?

• 26:20Tristan Hughes?

  No. Bombas Cozy Socks.

• 26:23Speaker 07

  Totally. Bombas Slippers, size 8.

• 26:26Tristan Hughes?

  Wow, so you're just...

• 26:27Speaker 07

  Pilates Socks. Underwear.

• 26:29Tristan Hughes?

  Hokey doke, got it.

• 26:31Speaker 07

  Bombas, the perfect gift for when you're not doing gifts. Visit bombas.com/audio and use code AUDIO for 20% off your first purchase. That's B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash AUDIO. One purchased equals one donated, always.

• 26:58Tristan Hughes?

  Should we then highlight very briefly, Adrian, I guess, one of the big movements, which does seem to be around defence, but please correct me if I'm wrong. This move away from places like Rome, maybe even Milan as well, and you see the rise of Ravenna at this stage, which seems important all the way down to IV, VII, VI and after.

• 27:16Speaker 04

  Obviously, Rome has rarely seen an emperor for a long time. It's an odd thing, it's one of those things that when I was writing about this period, it didn't really occur to me till I went back and looked at Augustus. Augustus spent most of his reign touring around the empire away from, he spent more time away from Italy than he was there, and if he wasn't touring, then an Agrippa, or a Tiberius, or a Druusus. For a long time, that changes because you have Tiberius, who doesn't want to go anywhere and is too old and fed up. And that sort of sets the pattern, and then you get the travelling emperors like Hadrian, who pop up later on, a century or so later. But most of them, unless they're fighting a war, which becomes more common from the third century onwards, but it's already happening, you know, Marcus Aurelius, the man who leaves us his meditations, not thought of as a soldier, spends a lot of his reign supervising a campaign,

• 28:01Speaker 04

  if not leading in person. By the third century, that's pretty much what you're doing, a lot of your time as an emperor, and this will remain for a long, long period. That means that you move away from Rome, because the wars aren't being fought in Rome. So from the third century onwards, really, Rome rarely sees an emperor, and it changes the whole political system, which is to do with other changes as well. Then you get the sort of the soldier emperors, the Aurelians, the Diocletians, the Constantine, people like this, again, who are on campaign a lot, and that's when you have the movement to imperial capitals elsewhere. So you have them in Constantinople, you have them in Tria, you know, on the Rhine, you've

• 28:44Speaker 04

  got somewhere where, and the court is always where the emperor is, but there is a tendency to settle down and keep some of it in a sort of semi-permanent base, so that people know where to go to find you, at least to start the process of, I need something from the emperor, this is where I go. So Rome's been marginalised for a long time, and when Ammianus in the fourth century writes about Constantius visiting Rome, it's very much a novelty. And the emperor who rides in this chariot like a statue and doesn't look to, you know, doesn't acknowledge the crowds, that's it. So Rome has a symbolic importance. And it's still the ideal, but in the same way that being a Roman has for centuries had nothing whatsoever to do with any ethnic Italian, let alone Roman components.

• 29:27Speaker 04

  So there's always a danger and they've moved to Milan because it's a little bit more convenient. It's further to the north. You're more likely to be doing things away from Italy and that's a base. And of course, you know, you go back to the third century where with the Gallic Empire, for a while it was close to the frontier. So it's, it's coming into that same pattern. They seem to reach the conclusion reasonably enough that even Milan becomes a bit vulnerable because you're no longer so secure. And obviously the, the lesson of the Goths and Eunctius is that for years on end, a mutinous part of your army, a rebel group of your army, a group of barbarians, however you choose to describe them, can wander around the empire and nobody can stop them.

• 30:09Speaker 04

  So Milan starts to look a little bit more vulnerable because by now you've changed from the fourth century soldier emperors, however, whatever their military capacity, they generally went on campaign to the Eunctius pattern where you have somebody to do that for you and you're not expected to campaign, which means you minimize the risks to the emperor of getting killed, but also disgraced. He can blame the commander now instead of himself when things go badly wrong, which was the, how plenty of other emperors were discredited and that quickly murdered or overthrown in the past, which means you need somewhere secure for the emperor and the court to be. Ravenna is a lot more secure because of its position.

• 30:54Speaker 04

  You've got marshes on various sides of it. It's a lot, it's a little bit off the beaten track. It's a lot harder to reach. So it gives the emperor a base and there's also less there apart from the emperor worth taking. So, you know, there's a lot to steal in Rome and even to a fair extent somewhere like Milan, there's more to make it worth plundering because again, the practical element, these armies that maraud around, they've got to feed themselves and the, the leader has to keep the loyalty of the men by giving them rewards. So it's, it's again a shift, but of course, making the emperor more difficult to reach means that his job of being emperor becomes that much harder because it is again off the beaten track, a little bit harder to access.

• 31:36Speaker 04

  Even when you get there, it's then tightly controlled as to whether or not you can get to them. So this, this idea of the emperor that's, that's pretty fundamental to the Roman system and a lot of other ancient monarchies that you have this person to whom you can appeal, you can ask to sort out your problems, to do you favors. You've got to be able to get there, got to be able to reach it, somebody's got to get through. So you're, you're again making the state a bit less efficient by moving the emperor to a place of safety. It's, it's a little bit in the much earlier case when Tiberius moves to Capri. He's hard to get to, which means that the people who control the route to him and the access to him get even more control. So the balance of power between the emperor and the court,

• 32:20Speaker 04

  or whoever controls the security of the court and access to the court, has shifted very much in favor of that individual, like Sejanus under Tiberius.

• 32:28Tristan Hughes?

  Well, yes, exactly. And I think maybe we'll be able to explore more of that in time, maybe with figures like Rikima and so on. So Huenorius dies in four hundred and twenty-three. The next emperor I've got in my list is Valentinian the Third. So what do we know about Valentinian the Third? It looks like he also reigns for quite a long while.

• 32:47Speaker 04

  Again, he's, it's very much the same pattern. You have somebody convenient from the imperial family, succeeds pretty young. So again, that encourages the sense that, oh, well, you know, sir, you need to be guided, you need to listen to your wiser ministers. And then that's always the difficulty for any ruler of, do you break away from a sense of these guardians, these regents that are pretty much doing everything. But he does survive, you know, he's, he's again the figurehead. There is an emperor, real power is with other people, with this succession of commanders. Because the emperor doesn't go out, he doesn't travel, you know, very rarely, it's mostly local. So he's mostly there at Ravenna, waiting for people to ask him to do things and presiding over various ceremony.

• 33:33Speaker 04

  He's hearing reports, all this sort of thing, but they're not very active in their roles. So. They can involve themselves in church matters and state matters and all these things, but it's it's very limited. And while this is going on, you have the, say, the greater pressure caused by the Huns. You've got movements within the empire where there are groups you simply cannot control. So all of these same problems, but the emperor's role in this is distant and less significant. And you have army commanders who are trying to deal with it, but also to protect their own position, to protect against potential rivals.

• 34:13Speaker 04

  And your, the resources at your disposal are being eroded, sometimes fairly dramatically when you lose control of provinces, when, you know, the the vandals are moving into Spain and then subsequently into Africa. When you've got other groups that are simply in areas, which means they're not under control, they're not as settled, prosperous as they were, they're not sending you the food, the money, the men you need. So the armies, it's very hard to trace who's actually in the Roman armies at this time. And that's why people like the Goths have such power, because ultimately you'd much rather have them as your soldiers than you would destroy them. And this basic problem, but it means that dealing with bigger threats when they occur tends to be extremely difficult.

• 34:58Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there's one figure in regards to these people, as you say, with emperors just being figureheads and Valentinian, it seems was very much similar. I'm pretty sure he assumes the throne very, very young. And one of the first people, it seems, is really significant in his reign. Now, it's not a general, although they're probably there as well, but it's his mother, Galaplexidio, well, Galaplaquidi, I mean, she, she's an extraordinary figure from this time, Adrian.

• 35:20Speaker 04

  She is, and compared to the women of the imperial family we know about earlier, suddenly she seems a much more independent agent. And that's partly because you've actually, through all the civil wars, you've narrowed down who has some claim to any sort of connection to being a member of the imperial family. And because you've moved away from the generals making themselves emperors to trying to keep a dynasty going, then whoever belongs to that, so someone as a daughter and then even more as a mother of a potential emperor, becomes far more significant. And in her case, It shows how at least some people could see the politics of this time, not in the Roman

• 36:02Speaker 04

  barbarian divisions that tend to to jump out to us, but you know, you can negotiate with the Goths and talk to them and ask for help from them. You could be a captive at one point or but you know, how willing is all of this? You can appeal to Attila, you know, you can do all this sort of stuff. And it's very much a case where it shows how you've got to get yourself away from the thought that you have a Roman state and a Roman army that is this big institution at this time, that there are hundreds of thousands of soldiers, even tens of thousands of soldiers as permanent units that are fairly efficient, that ought at least to obey the emperor. They might not, they might follow a different emperor, but they're there. They are there to deal with these threats. That's no longer the

• 36:44Speaker 04

  case. That that structure is not there. The logistics behind it has gone. You don't have the army bases. You don't have the recruitment patterns. You don't have the training. Most of these units, if they exist on paper, do not exist in reality. And that's been very clear, which means that anybody with even a reasonable number of armed men at their command becomes a major player. And they're all part of this. But it comes back to this idea that deep down, it's obviously particularly true if you remember the imperial family, but even for most Romans, you still believe the only thing is Rome. That's the only state that there's going to be. That's the only empire there's going to be. And that whatever means you use to get power within that is perfectly legitimate. So you can talk to

• 37:27Speaker 04

  what groups we would consider to be barbarians and are thought of as hostile and seek support from them in a way that again, simply is not imaginable earlier. It's just not the way it works.

• 37:38Tristan Hughes?

  Keeping on that kind of thematic part of this chat now, Adrian, if we if we focus on the Roman army, as you say, you've got big figures like Attila at at the same time, which is naturally going to to weaken the military forces that you have and so on. But is there, as you say, contrasted to centuries earlier, where Italians and Romans are very eager to sign up to the army and do their part? Has that feeling now gone? Is it very much for the emperor or his generals that they are calling in these barbarian groups to do the fighting for them?

• 38:10Speaker 04

  It is, but it's been a long term thing. I mean, even in the first century, you see that drop off of recruits from Italy joining the legions. The legions are still Roman citizens. But you tend to join the Praetorian Guard or something a lot safer and better paid. And you don't go into the army and you'll be a Roman, but you'll be from Gaul or from North Africa or from, you know, Beirut, one of the big colonies or one of these areas. And there is that trend. There is a big difference. If you look at the infrastructure underlying the army. So, you know, I'm in South Wales, not far away as Cilean, big fortress, big base, basically a huge garrison town, base of Legio II Augusta, its depot, all of this sort of thing. By the early fourth century, pretty much all of these are abandoned.

• 38:55Speaker 04

  And forts stay in some areas. When you build new ones, they're much smaller. And this is a big theme from the fourth century that you're starting to billet troops in cities rather than in their own bases. Now, in the short term, that doesn't sound like a bad thing. But when you start to think about the practical element of it, if you have a large army, in a provincial army of fifteen, twenty thousand, a quarter or more of it cavalry, that's a lot of horses. Those horses need to be stabled somewhere. If you send them to a city, how many cities have got stabling for a thousand horses, let alone more than that? Where do you break the horses? Where do you train the recruits to ride? Where do you train everybody to fight? All of this stuff that's happened within these, what we just see as bits of stone

• 39:38Speaker 04

  and laid out and sort of, you know, impressive ruins, that's gone. Instead, it becomes a case where you can keep that experience for a while. You know, basically you're conscripted into a unit and they teach you. But that will tend to wear away as all those people retire or are lost in defeats. Or it then becomes much easier. If you want soldiers quickly, rather than take some peasant who's not too willing, and his, probably his landlord isn't too willing, to take him and conscript him into the army, then it's much easier to go and find an Alan or a Goth or one of the Alamanian or the Franks who's grown up to fight to a degree. He doesn't have the discipline and the way of doing things that you used to have, but he's quite good.

• 40:23Speaker 04

  It's a better starting place than the raw recruit. When you've had, again, you can look generation after generation. Emperors will issue new laws saying that these are the dire punishments for anybody resisting conscription. And, you know, you have, and the punishments for cutting off your thumb rather than be recruited. And, you know, there's long tradition of this, but the fact that they're repeating it suggests that it isn't working. That people simply don't, because there's a great danger, you end up in the army, you may never come back. And you might well end up fighting Romans as often as anybody else. But you also, you're not going to a big depot like Calean when you enlist to be trained, to be equipped, to learn how to be a soldier.

• 41:04Speaker 04

  Instead, you're drifting into what's effectively a warband that has an itinerant existence, isn't settled anywhere, or is the garrison that lives in a few houses in a city, you know, like that group that crops up in the the fifth century, that's sort of after the empire's gone, that's still wondering where their pay is coming from and this sort of thing, but it's very small. It's easy to think of armies just in terms of, well, you've got this weapon, you know how this tactic works, and it'll just happen. But again, as you can see in the modern day, if you cut all the bits that support it, that produce that end result, then you don't get to the end result. It doesn't just happen. And with all armies, the danger is you cannot keep them permanently in the highest readiness for war and ready to fight. So instead, you're having to improvise and keep going.

• 41:48Speaker 04

  And mostly, you still have the advantage, you can train yours to be a bit better than the enemy, and they're a bit more organized, they're at least as good to start off with, because basically you're recruiting the same sort of people you're fighting. And you've got a slightly more, you've got a better road system, you've got at least some idea of how to supply this army, but it's all harder to do. And it's simply, you will read studies that claim that in the late antiquity, and you know, if you take the notitia dignitatum at face value, that the army is still huge and you've got hundreds of thousands of men. The problem is they're just not visible in any of the accounts of any of the campaigns. It's much more improvised, it's much more short term, which means that a stillico or a risima or any of these can build up quite a good force, an itius, another of these people,

• 42:33Speaker 04

  who again is relying on connections with other groups, with with, you know, foreign groups to bring in your soldiers. But it's a bit like Hannibal's army. It's a distinct thing that can become very good, can become very efficient, but it doesn't naturally extend to the next generation and the next generation. You've got to keep on rebuilding it from scratch. Whereas the older way was having this bigger. System within the empire that supported that and made it happen. So it's not that the soldiers are any less brave. It's not that sometimes they're not as efficient. It's just that it's much harder for them to be efficient, much harder for them to stay there and then to to keep doing this year after year, decade after decade.

• 43:17Tristan Hughes?

  If we let's say go to about four hundred and fifty five Adrian, which is when Valentinian the third is assassinated. And you mentioned Aetius there in passing, obviously, the general, the Catalonian planes against Attila does so well, then Valentinian has him murdered, I believe, but then Valentinian himself is murdered in turn. I would like to ask a bit, Adrian, then about what happens next, because if these emperors are already quite distant, puppets like, following Valentinian's death, do you see the rise of more of those warlords and do the emperors become even more puppets like?

• 43:53Speaker 04

  They do in some respects, but the warlords that follow are less strong than the warlords you'd had before, than Estilicho, than Erisima, than Aetius, partly because what they're drawing on is less. You know, you've lost Africa, that's gone. The vandals are there now established, they can plunder Rome on a larger scale than the Goths had done. You've lost most of Spain, you've lost control of large parts of Gaul. It's being run by kings who are, in theory, part of the empire and like to feel they are, but also are not supplying you with all the money, all the resources you might want. So you're scratching together from a smaller and smaller pile, the manpower, the money to pay them, to feed them, to do all of these things.

• 44:37Speaker 04

  So, but it's this problem that you have an emperor who is dependent upon a figure like Aetius, but also that figure is a threat. And it again becomes you, from the emperor's perspective, the empire is quite narrow and it is simply the court they see around them. You know, hear reports of what's going on elsewhere, but it's about that day to day. How am I perceived? How am I obeyed? How safe am I? Is this person now going to decide? And you've got to remember as well, one thing, it's hard to do because the sources are so poor, but logic tells us you have all the personality clashes you'd get in, you know, an office today, a university department, or whatever it might be, let alone in government,

• 45:20Speaker 04

  within the cabinet, where some people just don't like each other and see someone else's success as almost a failure for them, or certainly as diminishing their own status and reputation. So in every respect, things are getting weaker. The emperor is in many ways more distant and the, but the commanders that the emperor requires but also and relies upon but also fears, because they're effectively the kingmakers, they're the ones that can get rid of you. If they are confident enough, they can replace you, they might. And you are trying to play one off against another because you don't want one man to have basically had a sword over your head saying, well, you know, obey me or you're gone.

• 46:03Speaker 04

  But again, that competition is disruptive. It's again, the perspective of the emperor is staying alive, which means staying emperor. That is the priority. It isn't about the other things you might feel are good things about governing well, keeping the emperor prosperous, but you are so removed from that and the empire is so small and there is so little you can really do by this time because your, your warlords, now, yes, you can repulse a tiller in a confused battle, you can hold things together, but it's a question of patching up the cracks and then moving to the next one. And then hoping that the first crack hasn't broken out again before you've had time to come back and deal with that again. You are fighting fires at every stage.

• 46:46Speaker 04

  So they are struggling to do their job, they have less with which to do it, and they're weaker as is this more removed, more distant, more symbolic emperor.

• 47:00Tristan Hughes?

  And do you get also, it seems, because I've got in my notes after 455, you get the rise of people like Rissima that I've already mentioned, and it almost feels like you've got this very quick succession of Roman emperors. You've got the likes of Avisus, then you've got Majorian, who seems to be more of a military man, and does seem to reconquer large parts of it, but then he ultimately fails. You get this quite quick succession, and Rissima is there in the background almost as well, all the way to Anthemius. Because it's in quite a small timeframe, if I remember correctly, it's about 10, 15 years or so. Does that add more to the instability of the Roman Empire at that time? And you have very different

• 47:42Tristan Hughes?

  natures of Roman emperors as well, with Rissima also there in the background?

• 47:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, in many respects. I mean, you can see, even if it's very limited success, Honorius, Valentini III, they are successful because they live a long time, and they stay in power a long time. Some of their favourites, their generals, rise and fall. And that allows them to continue. But when you have the system sort of running wild, where nobody's lasting a long time, the emperors aren't lasting, the favourites aren't lasting, people like Rissima are pulling the strings, but they're not achieving too much. Their main aim does seem far more about staying in control and power. You can see more of a serious effort to do things in a Mastilico, or some of these earlier leaders, Aetius even.

• 48:27Speaker 04

  Whereas it's more about, again, it's a little bit like the emperor thinking, well, the only way for me to stay alive is to have power. And to do that, I must dispose of, or at the very least weaken, any potential rival, and I must control the emperor. And once you, again, with all of these things, it's the same way when you get earlier patterns of, you know, 3rd century crisis, the rebellions, decoratiusipations, lots of people declaring emperors.

• 48:54Speaker 04

  It tends to encourage more very quickly. The longer someone like a Norius or Valentinian lasted, the harder it is to say, well, I'd be a better alternative. Or this favorite of mine, because that's generally what it is. It's the, it's the, the strong man. As you say, Majorian is a little bit of an exception where he actually does things on his own. But in the main, these are puppets and they are very short-lived puppets. Because the, all the resources you've got, the basis of power is smaller. It's much easier for the balance to change between one man being, having enough to be dominant and then somebody else being able to challenge him. So there's this rapid succession because it's again, it's like over correcting.

• 49:42Speaker 06

  Hi, this is Mark Bittman from the podcast Food with Mark Bittman. Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of the higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a berry chantilly cake. Ready to cook pizza? No antibiotics ever chicken wings and sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3rd at Whole Foods Market. Hi, this is Mark Bittman from the podcast Food with Mark Bittman. I've been writing about food and restaurants for almost 50 years, my whole career, really.

• 50:27Speaker 06

  And what I know is that the good restaurants all have something in common. They're busy, genuinely, chaotically busy. And somehow in the last few years, the best of them have begun to make it look easy. And do you know why? Because they're running on Toast's technology. Toast is built for restaurant owners who understand that Toast's tools keep the line moving and keep their customers happy with fewer mistakes and hiccups in ordering and paying. For owners, that turns busy into business. To learn more, head to toasttab.com. That's T-O-A-S-T-T-A-B, toasttab.com. Toast, built for busy.

• 51:25Tristan Hughes?

  It is interesting, isn't it, Adrian, how, as you've highlighted, in one way, even though they're seen as weak and still they are far away from the action and they have their favourites doing their military battles and stuff for them, the fact that Honorius and Valentinian have quite long reigns is in stark contrast to the rest of the Western Roman Empire for that next 20 years or so after Valentinian's death, where Maggiore in a part, where, as you say, he seems to be a bit of an exception, like, most of them, they still don't live long, and, you know, they aren't very successful at all.

• 51:58Speaker 04

  And obviously, there's, you know, there's an element of chance in all of this, in that things go worse. They miscalculate about levels of trust, but also enough people think there's an opportunity. It's much harder when, the longer somebody lives, in a sense, they become more secure because you've got to get a stronger reason for disposing of them, getting rid of them. Once it's happened once, once there's been that, it's like, you know, it's much easier to have another revolution, another usurpation, get rid of this, because, on the one hand, they're a lot less secure, they're still trying to prove themselves, which means it's much easier to fail or be discredited. The longer you are, you can cope with failure. So, Honorius can cope with the sack of Rome, he's not fully discredited and destroyed by this, he's still around for, you know, a decade or more afterwards.

• 52:43Speaker 04

  But if you're new, if you've got more questionable claim to power, and something goes badly wrong, then it's much easier, either for you to try and blame the army commander you've trusted, which might mean he might turn against you, or for him to blame you and get rid of you. So you have, you know, Rissima in the background pulling the strings over quite a long period, and...

• 53:09Speaker 04

  That's an element where you've got somebody who's got enough power to make and break emperors. But also the fact that they can do that shows how weak you are. And again, it's remind ourselves that even compared to where we started with the Norius, what he controlled as Western Emperor, at least in theory. Now the empire has shrunk so much by this time, you know, Britain has gone early on. In theory, you're saying they're still appealing and all this sort of thing. And it's still Romano-British, it's still trying to live as a Roman, but it's it's not something from which you're going to get any help. They might want it from you, but they're probably not going to get that either. Most of Gaul is not under your control. All the Rhineland provinces, all that area, that's gone. Spain largely gone. North Africa largely gone.

• 53:55Speaker 04

  You can only be sure of Italy. And some, to some extent, there's often treaties, there's often, you know, the the kings that have set themselves up are at least paying lip service to you to some extent. But in terms of getting money, resources, manpower from any of these. So everything is getting closer to home. And because it's smaller, again, that magnifies the impact of any failure. And to some extent, it's the reverse, and that you have a success, it seems like a really big success. But again, the problem is there's going to be another problem very soon, and you can't keep doing that. So everything's combining to make this much, much less stable. And it's a reflection of that wider weakness, that wider collapse. But also it's encouraged by that.

• 54:40Speaker 04

  Because again, there have been so many failures and there are, there's just less to go around. So that the overall strength of what you control. By this stage, you are not much more in practical terms than one of these Gothic or vandal kings. In terms of the area you really control and the sort of money you have. You've got a more sophisticated system to deal with it. You've got a longer tradition. You've got that prestige. You know, you are still the Caesar, the Augustus. You have all of that grandeur and you've got this association with the bigger, still stronger Eastern Empire, but it's much less close. You can't really rely upon them. And also

• 55:20Speaker 04

  your officials, as well as the emperor yourself, you don't want too much interference from them because they've probably got other ideas of who should be in charge. So you can't even ask for help. And expect to get it on your terms from them.

• 55:33Tristan Hughes?

  So that is the big problem, isn't it, Adrian, with the loss of territory and I guess the growing confidence of those neighbouring powers alongside the always kind of stronger, stable Eastern Roman Empire is that they will think, oh, I would like my candidates now in control of this empire, which is getting noticeably weaker within my lifetime. As you say, Majorian exception, maybe for a bit, and I will do an episode specifically on Majorian in time, it's something, a person I really want to cover. As you say, you just all gradually see Roman France, Roman Gaul, going to the Bucundians and the Visigoths. You've got Spain with the Visigoths and the Swabbe as well. And by the time of 472, Adrian, it feels like this is almost the last chapter of it. I mean, this is like

• 56:18Tristan Hughes?

  the last crisis that we get between 472 and 476.

• 56:22Speaker 04

  Well, the clearest proof of this is that when Romulus Augustulus, the last emperor, is deposed, who has been, you know, the figurehead of all figureheads, he's never done anything, he's just a boy, he's not even worth killing. You know, you can send him off to be a priest and to, you know, live that life because he just does not matter. And that shows, early on, you had to kill your Roman opponents. That's the way it works. That's why these civil wars have been so brutal, because there wasn't any negotiation or dealing with this. You would be dead, either by your own hand or they would sort it out for you. You really become such a local power by this time. The decisions that are being made, the

• 57:03Speaker 04

  struggles that are going on, you really are, you're not in full control, even in all of Italy. It's become very much focused in the north and more widely, why should anybody listen to you? Because you have no power to back this up. And that's, it's that cumulative...

• 57:24Speaker 04

  Decline, there's really no other word for it. You've shrunk. The Western Empire has just got smaller and smaller, less and less of it under control, which means that you're getting fewer and fewer resources, you know, and many of these areas that you've lost were really big deals in terms of the money you got from and the food you got from North Africa in particular. That's perhaps the biggest single blow of all, losing that area to the vandals because, and that's why they make repeated attempts over the next century or so to get it back, but aren't until Justinian, and even then it's precarious. Because you can only be an empire if you've got the money, the might to enforce it ultimately. Empire imperium, it means power. That's what it's all about, and that has just gone.

• 58:09Speaker 04

  It's shrunk to nothing. You really are a local figure and you have to negotiate with these, inverted commas, barbarian rulers that have set themselves up in various parts of your empire. You can't go and destroy them. You do not have the capacity to do that. And yet, there is no evidence for there having been vast hordes of hairy German warriors, you know, sweeping in and taking over and expelling the population. What you've got is a warrior elite and a warlord who's taken control. And when, again, you can see a side of it jumping on into the next century, but when Justinian does send the likes of Belisarius round to reconquer North Africa, Sicily and Italy, he does it with very small numbers of soldiers. Because there aren't big armies there. That's never been the case. It's just

• 58:54Speaker 04

  a reflection of, again, it's sort of foreshadowing the Middle Ages in terms of the scale of warfare, the scale of what was a big army, what you need to control, how power works. That transition has been occurring in this, in the course from where we start four hundred-ish right the way through, to the point where, again, to the people experiencing it, it may not be so obvious. It may, a lot of this is natural. It is gradual with these sudden steps down when something really bad happens. But it doesn't work anymore.

• 59:26Tristan Hughes?

  Do we think Odouacce's revolt, which ultimately ends in the deposition of that last Roman emperor in 476, the very young Romulus Augustulus, and just to clarify before him, 472 to 476, so you've got very short-lived emperors like Licarius, Julius Nipos, then he's pushed out by Orestes, who then installs Romulus Augustulus. So it's all very quick succession. Julius Nipos hangs about in the Balkans for a bit, and some argue that he's actually the last emperor, but that's another story. But you've still got those barbarian generals in the background, installing these figures. With Odouacce's revolt and him actually deposing the emperor, how much is he kind of following a trend? Or is he following a trend, but is

• 1:00:08Tristan Hughes?

  he going to the next level by actually deciding, I'm not now just going to pick who I want to be the next emperor, I'm actually going to now remove the emperors entirely and declare myself king? So I mean, how different is Odouacce in what he does?

• 1:00:21Speaker 04

  He is in many ways, though again, it's gradual. And to characterize them as barbarian, you know, what does that really mean in this period? In that, yes, you have these men who set themselves up as kings and have already done so, and are, you know, various types of Goths and the like. But for such a long period, you have had senior leaders in the Roman army who are described as an Alan, or a Frank, or a Goth, or whatever it might be. They don't seem to act any differently from anybody else who has a senior command role in the Roman army. And in many cases, it's a clumsy term, but they're Romanized. They're part of the system. They are not this very alien foreigner standing there. They are part of

• 1:01:05Speaker 04

  it. They're part of how it works. I think the final decision is really, what is the point of these puppets? Rather than

• 1:01:16Speaker 04

  They've been changed, particularly in that rapid period, well, you know, we've talked about in this last phase where you get quick succession, lots of emperors compared to earlier where they've lasted a long time and there's been that level of stability. They've actually shown that they're, they can be hard to control. And, you know, that's why you get, end up with the end with you're putting a nephew, a relative as emperor, because you think, well, okay, he's young, I can definitely control him. The warlords have been making most of the key decisions and they're the only ones that can keep a level of, of defence, of military capability that you need because you are threatened on all sides. And just to assert yourself and to make some, you know, the point of anybody listening to you at all.

• 1:01:58Speaker 04

  So the emperor has become wholly a figurehead, you know, there is really nothing they do. Their personality hasn't mattered beyond, do they turn against a general and try and get rid of him or provoke somebody else? Do they favour another one? This sort of thing, well, that's, that's all they're doing. Anything practical is being done by the man in charge of the army and the only basis of his power is keeping control of that army. So there is a clear logic, the point of view of Ola Asa to just do it. Let's, let's put the two tropes together and let's do this.

• 1:02:30Tristan Hughes?

  It's really, in a way, quite sad that ultimately the end of the Western Roman Empire is figures deciding, well, with the emperors at least, with that canonical four, seven, six, eight, what's the point? What's the point of continuing this any further? I mean, would you argue that the Western Roman Empire's fate had long been sealed before that point? It's such a difficult question to answer to kind of put a particular point, or what could you say to that?

• 1:02:54Speaker 04

  Anything like this comes into the what ifs of history, you know? If people had acted differently, if they'd got their act together a generation or so earlier, they could have sorted it out, you know? If, if Valens had made a few better decisions and been a bit less hasty at Adrianople, would, you know, would all sorts of problems have been avoided in the future? Maybe, maybe not, maybe there would have been different problems. But human history is made up by human beings making decisions and often they get things wrong or they do things that prove to be catastrophic. That's there, you can't remove that element. So simply to put it into terms of long-term trends against this, to see it as, well, this is a system that could flourish in the, you know, the economic system of a base of Mediterranean based agricultural economy, that sort of thing.

• 1:03:37Speaker 04

  There's truth in that, but it doesn't answer everything. These are people living their lives and making decisions. A lot has changed. And you can also make the other point that for many of the people living in the Western Empire, even the bit that was still acknowledged itself as part of the Western Empire, the deposition of Romulus Augustulus made no difference at all to their daily lives. There's still a warlord in charge who's now calling himself a king, but he's where you go if you've got a problem, if you need protection, if you need help, this sort of thing. The laws are the same. There's not this sudden, oh, let's do everything, you know, the good old German way of, even to the point where, you know, think about it in that basic level, you get the Romance languages developing.

• 1:04:20Speaker 04

  You're not changing culturally anything unless, you know, not in a deliberate way. Most of it changes because the system that the empire was able to support of movement of people, of goods, of ideas over such long distances, that goes, that's not there. That's declined for a long time. You know, the big difference is that particularly in the North, if you look at a site from height of the empire, that the amount of small finds are massive. There's just lots of it. And most of it, a lot of it has been made hundreds, even thousands of miles away from where it's found. Afterwards, there's much less of everything. There's much less stuff and it's locally made, apart from the very occasional high prestige object that's, that's been, which, which you would have had in the pre-Roman Iron Age

• 1:05:04Speaker 04

  as well, that's, that's come a long way and is maybe part of diplomatic exchange as well. But it's, that's all gone. There is a difference. The closer you are to the Mediterranean, the better things are, the less things change. And for a lot of these communities, especially from the archaeological viewpoint, you can look at bits of southern Spain, Portugal, Italy, very little difference, which again shows how unimportant the empire had become by this time. So I think there's a lot of difference in the change and there's a lot of, because it's so gradual. The big thing is there's no alternative waiting to step into the place of the Roman Empire that people want. And everybody's still desperate to be Roman and to live that nice,

• 1:05:46Speaker 04

  comfortable Roman lifestyle, including the vandal kings, the Visigothic kings, you know, the others. They are trying to run a little Roman Empire as their kingdom. And they'd like to be rich and they'd like to have the luxuries. It's just that they can't do it. It doesn't work on that scale. And so much of the wider system has gone. So there's, you cannot look at this from a long point of view and not see a decline and not see a change. At what point it became inevitable is difficult to say. And because we don't know what could have been done, what might have happened. And there's an element where the later you get, obviously, the harder it is. But even then, the fact that Honorius Valentinian

• 1:06:29Speaker 04

  just lived that long, I know, you know, for whatever reason, if they'd caught the fever and died much younger, in the same way if Augustus had actually died on all those occasions when he was, you know, despaired of, people thought he was going to, early on in his reign, would you have got the principate as it was, or anything resembling it, or something completely different? That, the role of the individual still matters at each point. So it's a combination, somewhere in between all of this, in this complex mixes the truth. But I don't think, you know, you could look and say, well, Augustus never really sorted out succession of emperors, therefore, that was going to be a problem, it would lead to civil war, that's why centuries later the empire goes. Now, that's a big step between those two points. There are problems,

• 1:07:14Speaker 04

  there are things they maybe could have done better. But on the whole, the success of Rome was something that nearly everybody seems to want to continue. It just doesn't happen. But again, it would be marvelous if we had the data that meant we could measure the impact of successive plagues, you know, from the Antonine one through to the third century ones. What that's done, just what that means. Whereas, you know, you can look at the Black Death in Britain or Europe in the 14th century and get a sense of the impact and consequences of it. There are so many other factors, in the same way when people will start to say, oh, you know, the climate's changing, all this sort of thing, things are less favorable for the agricultural system. Well, maybe, but we don't know. We don't have enough data

• 1:07:56Speaker 04

  yet. We probably never will to measure most. So a lot is going on. I think we should come back, we should flip the question and say, isn't it remarkable that the Roman Empire lasts as long as it does?

• 1:08:07Tristan Hughes?

  Yes.

• 1:08:07Speaker 04

  It's as big as it is for so long, because other people haven't done this. So in the same way, Achaemenid Persia, take that, you know, it's destroyed by Alexander the Great, but it isn't half incredibly successful for a very long time. So you, you, you can't, in the same way, if, you know, we live a, a healthy life and do and achieve things, we will eventually die. So that there's, you, you come to all these questions whereby nothing is going to be forever, but it could have been different.

• 1:08:34Tristan Hughes?

  I guess it's the fact, isn't it, Adrian, that the Roman Empire had suffered all those shocks in the past, like the third century crisis, but had emerged from it, transformed. And I guess with all the continuity and, and transformation that there even is there at the end of the fifth century, you could almost argue that the Roman Empire, it endured that, but in a different form. It emerges from it in a different form, but all of it, like you said, its laws, Christianity is still there, so many of the things that have been central to it, that these successes, that Theodoric and so on, they continue. You could argue that it is almost like another third century crisis, but what was the Roman Empire has emerged from it, but just very different looking.

• 1:09:11Speaker 04

  It, it, I mean, there's a sense, that's the sort of the fluffy view of the early medieval period, rather than the Dark Ages, where, yes, it's just transformation. Okay, yeah, there's some violent bits along the way, but the problem is, again, you look at what had been before and what's there, standards of literacy, prosperity, even to the extent, I mean, look at somewhere like Vindalanda, from the, the writing tablets and from the archaeology, you can see that even at the end of the first century, on the very fringe of the empire, all the goods, all the ideas of that imperial economy are available to you there, that your ordinary soldier owns several pairs of shoes and, you know, has a pair to go to the bath house, has his boots, has his indoor shoes, and can afford, when he loses one, to throw the other one away, which is what we tend to

• 1:09:56Speaker 04

  find, and get some new ones. A lot of people in the Middle Ages are going to be wearing their one pair of shoes till they fall apart and then getting another pair, because that's all they've got. There are big, big differences. This isn't, it's, you know, you could say somebody at the end of their life transforms from a, a living person into a corpse. There is still something remarkable about that achievement, for good or for ill, of the Roman Empire, the Roman government, empire on that scale for so long.

• 1:10:25Speaker 04

  And the lifestyle that it created, you know, there's, there's, there's a fair bit of truth in Gibbon, looking at the, you know, from the perspective of the later 18th century and talking about, you know, the best time to be alive is under the Antonines. It's exaggerated, but if you look at the road systems, you know, that are not yet created in most European countries, people are still using the Roman roads. Nothing like that is a, there's so much about the, even, I mean, a favorite one I would say is the bathhouse, where the Romans have devoted all that technology. It's one of the most complicated things they designed just to making life more pleasant. And this is something that goes, you see, it's the bathhouse that when villas are occupied in the post-Roman period in Britain, it's the bathhouse that first falls into disrepair and nobody can put it back again.

• 1:11:10Speaker 04

  You can keep an aqueduct going, plugging it sort of to keep it serviceable, but you can't build a new one. So much of that knowledge, that learning, again, it comes back to this literacy, this ability to pass things on, has gone. That it is a pretty drastic change and this is, you know, it's hard to see this as a terribly good one, because it will be best part of a millennium or more before things start to pick up. And again, you know, the whole idea of the Renaissance of rediscovering this, this rebirth, going back to this lost knowledge. Now, it hasn't been lost everywhere in the world, but nevertheless, society's taken a very different route. So I still can't help thinking of it as decline. I still can't help thinking of it as a bad thing.

• 1:11:51Speaker 04

  I know I'm a bit of a pro-Roman nut, but nevertheless, there is change, there is big, big change and characterizing that as transformation does rather ignore the scale of it, the extent of it and the violence of a lot of it. And that, you know, the old Roman peace, however much you may say it's not perfect, compared to what follows, to the risk of being raided and having your house burned down by your neighbor, things have changed a lot.

• 1:12:16Tristan Hughes?

  This has been a really interesting chat, going through those last emperors and the state of the Roman Empire in the 5th century until that date of 476. Adrian, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast.

• 1:12:30Speaker 04

  Thanks for inviting me again.

• 1:12:35Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. That was bestselling historian Dr Adrian Goldsworthy wrapping up our Fall of Rome series with a look at the final emperors of the West. From Honoreus to Romulus Augustulus, we trace the last desperate decades of imperial rule and ask what the very end really looks like. I hope you enjoyed it. If you want to hear more from Adrian, be sure to check out his past episodes on The Ancients, covering everything from the Parthians to Alexander the Great. We will also be putting out a poll on Spotify for this episode, asking which late Western Roman emperor that we mentioned in today's episode you would like us to dedicate an entire in-depth episode to.

• 1:13:16Tristan Hughes?

  Honoreus, Valentinian III, Majorian, or Romulus Augustius? We will do an episode on the winner. If you've missed any of the episodes in this Fall of Rome series, now's a great time to go back and catch up, whether it's to find out more about the internal crises, the so-called barbarians, or the plagues that helped unravel an empire. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Ancients. Please follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour if you leave us a rating as well. We'd really appreciate that. Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 1:14:08Speaker 08

  Hey, I'm Pablo Torre, host of Pablo Torre Finds Out, and I have chased down a lot of strange stories, but nothing quite like what's inside a McDonald's Quarter Pounder with cheese. Hundred percent fresh beef, cooked right when you order it, hand-topped onions, plus cheese and pickles in every bite, and right now, you can get one with medium fries and a drink for just $8, only at McDonald's. For a limited time only, prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska, and California. And for a delivery, fresh beef not available in Alaska and Hawaii. Offer not valid for delivery.