Third Century Crisis and Devolution

Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up 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 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 history. com slash subscribe How do you rule over one of history's greatest empires For 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 thousand years. We're going to explore how the institutions of the Roman Republic forced powerful men into competition inter 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 Rublic into an imperial system. And then from then it keeps changing. The empire itself changed. Rome itself was eclipsed. and mean look at how power fragmented and across much of the empire was extinguished This is the story of how Rome reinvented itself, reinvented power, and how those reinventions shape the fate of an empire Last week we looked at the rise of Rome. Ne 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 classist, Mary Beard who specializes in ancient Rome. There's going to be a masterclass Her podcast is Instant Classics, which is well worth checking out for all things A the ancient world Let's get into it Mary, very good to see you. Great to have you. I' 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 but I know that you will be able to just make distill the make them so simple for me First, I want to know we talk a lot about the Roman Empire, the repepublic that precedes it, which kind of is an empire as well First of all, how's that being governed? Becauseuse we hear about these overmighty men falling out your head at its best, how does it work? 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 B decisions passing laws to go to war with if you should go to war at all was in the hands of the male citizen body Right that looks, if you put it that way, that looks pretty democratic and there's an element of that The key about the Republic though, is that Everything about its organisation, its formal rules gave political advantage to the wealthy. This sounds so unfamilar,ary. I mean it's difficult for us to understand this. Look D. Pful, rich white manner of the w. Look done 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 M 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. mean, I think a lot of people had trouble with this and the Romans had trouble with it because a lot of our kind of ideas about governmental Political institutions are drawn from grace democracy, aristocracies, oligarchies, kingships, etc. And the Roman Rublic 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 Polybius who is resident in Rome in the second century BCE. He struggles. He has to say Rome's a mixed constitution. That means he can't fit it into his categories. Sounds bit like the ninth century in Britain where we're all even the Brit' trying to work out quite what's going on, who's sort of. I think that's right. What is crucial about it, particularly when you then think about how it compares to the one man rule of the emmperors, which is going to come later after Julius Caesar and so on What is crucial is that It's a power sharing system The Roman Republican 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. Absolutely fundamental idea but there's two of them One is Nobody who gets elected to office and there are a series of elected officials from consuls there. elected by these hierarchical assemblies. The absolute key is that nobody ever holds office on their road We think of it I think often a bit sort of bit quirky that the Romans had two consuls and how many praets and tribes 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 elected officials, all of them drawn from The rich lead. and They're elected to offices that they always hold with somebody else and only for a year. You know, you start to see then that why it's kind of hard to fit Ram into traditional structures because Most Romans, not, but most Romans would have be absolly horrified at the idea that what they were living in was a democracy. I mean Dmocracy was for many, if not most Romans, an appalling version of mob ru there was a sense of How are sharing communality? which divided up power over time Yeah. Nobody. The Roman elite is kind of notionally a group of equals Hold power but share it Okay, so Something must have gone right because this repepublic conquers much of the Mediterranean basasin 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 credit should we give it? It's the big puzzle. It is the real big puzzle about rev. Can you solve it now 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'll tell you more puzzling is why this smallm city in a not very desirable place on the Tiber with a load of bgs and mosquitoes why they over the period of the Republic basasically conquered the whole Mediterranean, right? 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 One is territorial expanse of the Roman empres. 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 puzzle the really annoying puzzle about this is that empire in the sense of the territorial expanse of Rome was mostly acquired before Rome had an emperor That's basic rule.. Emperors did not make the Roman Empire. They inherited it, they didn't make it What you find? from about the late fourourth century BC onwards during the period of the kind of fully fledged republic, is you find He series of successful conquests we don't ever seem to stop, right? until you get to Julius Caesar Why were the Romans so successful in conquering other people 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 Sometimes they were, sometimes they weren't. They lost a lot of battles. They lost a lot of battle. They didn't lose wars, but they lost battles and they were a standing joke begin with about their navy. I mean, the Romans were supposed to be complete rubbish at naval warfare So There is something about kind of way they're governed, which must, I think provide baseline. from which to explain this. ye, I think is the continual competitiveness of the elite. You know, I've talked about these guys holding office temporily 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 within the power sharing agreement to getting the most honor and story for the individual, and that's in a sense becomes a big fault line Roman history. And so I think you can see that if C on. Mediterranean cultures do if you put a quite Premium. on military success in this very oldd Roman system The system itself kind of puts a fire under that because you become consul OkayK, 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. 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 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. That I think is it's the hoth houseness of the political system the way that power sharing temporary office holding cranks up the competition. And I think that's quite important. And you've got a clear metchanism for getting rid of someone rubbish Yes. ye. Yeah, you have It's very hard to and internalise what it would have felt being one of these guys with that persistent, insistent desire the success for military success, for electoral success And it's all going on every time. You've only got a year, right And the other thing is This is really part of whyy 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 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, S you next year R significantly changes that Because instead of saying, we'll take a cattle buy byy and see you next year they start to and it becomes the absolute norm The fourth century BCE, they start to make formal alliances. with the people they conquer basic terms of which was that Rome could use those people's soldiers. What that means is that Rome got enormous manpower at its control P on N soldiers any other power anywhere could call on. And you know that's why they lose battles but win wars that the Romans were defeated quite often in their conflicts 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 grout. So this early empire, we can call it It is not the great European empires in the ninth century or the German emmpire in the Secondorld War. There aren't sort of Roman bureaucrats and governors and building little Roman buildings in all these different places and sort of somehow bbedd in an idea of Roman 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, have ever ever worked R in its repepublican 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.? So it's what I sometimes call kind of an empire of obedience They're not interested in imposing Roman religion terribly interested in dressing up these places to look like mini Romes. They start do that a bit later What they want is they want people to do what they're told when necessary they have the beginnings of a system in the Republic of provincial governors say the boundaries of these provinces probably pretty fluid and They have all kinds of different deals with different people across the map. so that 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 tow the Roman line Basically it is an empire that takes cash. It's an exploitative empire It's 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 contract to raise the cash from some port province. and then hand it over to Rome, meanwhile dreaming 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 to rebel, not to get out of line. The Romans want them to do what the Romans want You listen to Dan Snows History, there's more coming. And there's no big office block in Rome full of bureaucrats organizing this emperor. This is just the Senate will send a message to the consuls saying, Hello King of Arenia, we require the vin. That's right. And it probably takes 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 two And transport is extremely slow And seending 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 ha 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. But Rome's ambitions And capabilities are not such that without enormness 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 emmpire to the politics, none of it quite fits easily into our stereotypes. becausecause 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 one hundred BCE Would you like to draw me a map? with the boundaries of the Roman Empire clearly marked on them Let be a dumn 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 Wout the kind of administrative control that makes cllassic model in our imaginations of an empire 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 occasia appears to happen in the imperial capital or within the imperial family or its 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 inbuilt stability When the center is interned. 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 center. brewing up in the more distant territories. Genals And generals are the same as politicians in Rome, isn's no kind of difference between a military man and a political man Genal certainly get a power base from conquest and in the provinces of the Empire. But that power base is usually wealth and Pompey the Great, so called the G 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 and Asia are still send you the cash in and Nothing much is happening Problem, though is And I think that this is Perhaps the other way around is that the vast Exense Empire along with seat The real difficulties of communication. when counuls 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 half their year of office, right? So Gradually it becomes clear that This sort of Roman system What well enough when they were exercising control over Italy or southern France or nearby places. It is Jolly hard. to run an empire which stretches 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 They can't act quickly because they don't know what's happening. And you know, the Romans are not stupid They might be not stupid, they're not stupid. And it's pretty clear that they see that there are problems here about, particularly the temporiness. Theyir office halting The traditional way would have been to take this console gotot one year in office He can bash up Sicily and come back within a year. You know he can 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 temporariness of Roman government institutions. and they tweig this and They start from really the end of the second century BC onwards. 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 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 up pro consonsul a kind of a stand in consul and it's during your pro consonsular year that you will go out and do your military campaigning. Of course what happens is that That opens floodgates in a way. and you find that peopleople for good military reasons, I mentioned Pomy the Great Well he would be one, saying, look, if you want me to deal with this now major military Cisis. in the East. You're going to have to give me more power for longer in order to do.' to conquer Asia here. I mean, give me a break. It's not a m. 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 pirates on their shoulders. I mean, pirates in the ancient world are terrorists They are organized crime terrorists And Pompy is put in charge of trying to get rid of them in the Mediterranean. You 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 underpinn.? So Rome is a victim of its own success It's a city state government tryrying to run an empire that that city state government had acquired and becomes By the time you get really from the end of the second century, BC through to Julius Caesar at the middle of the first century BC, you find that there are a series of these guys who sort and break out of the traditional constraints they take power for longer. I sometimes put it down obediently after a bit. They're not obeying the usual rules of power sharing. And therefore, they are actually In a sense undermining the very structure that the Republican government 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 commander is 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 It's because there's a I'll have a lot of money around That's fascinating. I there was more than one current pushing us towards solo imperial rule here. Yeah. We ought 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 king 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 midflow because he's assassinated in forty four BCE, but in a sense is the moment when people kind of think O man rule probably here to stay 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 Assassinse, right? We want L liberty back What Julus Cesar represents is the removal of liberty. 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 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 mangule, one of the diagnostic signs of O man rule at Rome is whether you put your living head on the coins Now there's plenty of dead Roman heads on the coins, for as long as you can trace We take living heads on coins as something that is part and parcel of a monarchy For the Romans, it was dangerously part and parcel of monarchy and the first person to have their living on a regular coin issue minted in the city of Rome. had minted a few coins well away from Rome the first person to have Their head on the Roman coinage was Julius Caesar. Interesting And the first issue of this comes out and it's not entirely unconnected, I think, only a couple of months before the guysy 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 symbolizes exactly what Cees is up to I think it's absolutely fascinating But after the assassination, where the Romans tryed to have a bit of sort of peace and reconciliation and pretend it's business as usual The main assassins, Brutus and Casses go out to actually take provincial commands in the East Brutus issues coins because he's going to pay his troops onene of the major functions of coinage in the ancient world wasn't to give you a small change in your pocket. It was to pay the truth. One of these issues of coinage has got Brutuses liive coins. Now as soon as The hero of Lberation 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 Pman in oneind room This is Dan Snow's history here. more after this. And that is what happens. So how would people have felt that change? It was a very real change. How do they feel it in Rome and how do they feel it in the provinces? If we start with Rome It is one of the It is mysteries actually All of history, not just ancient history Oh Julius Caesar's great nephew and T son The person that we know is the Emperor Augustus, but He started out life as Octavius How he established O man rule at Rome permanently andsccessfully for what was actually Hundreds of years, his system survived hundreds of years No peopleople I think differ their explanations of this. Some people think that Augustus as he became was a great mastermind and got a great system in his head. and he was going to impose it. He eventually stamps out the civil warar that had been lingering for years after the assassination of Caesar. He's victorious over Cleopatra and Mark Antony in Egypt 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 Thankinks right. Okaykay. I am now going to initiate Autocracy, My way Some ancients certainly thought that when they looked back, they couldn't understand it. How did Augustus manage it? And they thought know he worked it out on the back of many envelopes 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 cononcentrating 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. is he reinterprets the old Republican system He doesn't abolish it It doesn't have a revolution. I think if you think of a kind of Marxian sense of a revolution, it means newew governning class comes in old governing classes 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 to be a bit careful about thinking there was no opposition to this. The more or less undisputed Hinnick of this. and he does that Be 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 Eediles and the tribunes The Senate still meets And yet what Augustus What does is focus Be sick deceision making Basic Loyalty onto himself How he does that in practice, Well, we've got hints, I think. Suetomius is writing in the second century CE, peraps a biography of Augustus amongst his twelfth Caesars. gives us some hints. think of The new kind of idea of personal power Augustus manages to wield cleleverly. I mean, S your ton me 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 goes round as it were. I don't think Romans didn't shake hands, but you know it says, Hello Marcus Talas, how are you That must have taken hours, if it's true, but there's this sense that he has a kind of Cona. command of the structures of power. Now he's also got a military command because One way of seeing Augustus's regime be a very, very iron fist in a velvet glove and One of the things he does is effectively nationalize the army. The Republicans Oh me. Bing 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 me under the state and he merges me and the state in the way that clever dictators often do manage to merge M the state and he effectively buys the loyalty the army so that very effectively there are very few military rebellions for the next couple of hundred years. He does that Bye fixing a salary for being a soldier, fixing terms and conditions of service and giving them a retirement pension So he has undercut the idea The soldiers might feel loyalty to their commanders rather than to h It's still kind of not easy to see White have that adds up? So a newew deeal 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 was not hugely challenged. He does it in other ways. I mean, I think calling him August as I' said that H original name is Octavius. So I''s come back from defeating Antony Cleopatra He decides he wants a new name Because Octavius or Octavian as he sometimes called, that was a name embedded in the Civil War after the death of Julius Caesar. He chooses an invented name. Rebrand? 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 statesmen He's building himself into the city of Rome, he's investing huge amounts of money and new forums in statues, invest in a royal family in a way. For the first time, women and heirs are part of the whole deal of the PR. an elite roome probablyrobably gets lucky Well, he lives a long time, doesn't he? I mean, I think he is the longest serving emperor ver and These always It seems making a kind of bit of a big deal a bit of a hyperchondria, I think, I was like, Ohh, I might die in any minute. He lasts. He defeats Antonine Cleopatra and comes back to Rome in thirty one BCE last More than forty more years And to some extent all the stuff I've been saying about he rebrands the Republican institutions. That's right but also He gets lucky because he stays around When I was a student, some of our teachers used to say, It was all a big con trick The Augustine regime. he calmed 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 that kind of thing. And somehow it was all a kind of machiavellian contrry It took me some years to realize No that can't have been 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 world 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. And you're still being consul. This is business as usual. They knew it wasn't business as usual But he gave them aough enough of the structure to be able to collude with it. And in the end The Roman governmental structure, the emmpire survives because the elite go along with it Military power? yes Rebranding, yes elite collaborators Yes with a capital Y. 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. Yes. And the period from Augustus on is where we start to see the Roman Empire looking a bit more like. familiar image of it. I mean there are governors and a taxation system underneath financial officials. You can see it fledgling but very fledgling Chrissy. 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 what this looks like in the towns and amongst the aristocracy of the provinces We're seeing new sets of connections formed We 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 keepeps them on the outcowd There's something already there, but what Augustus does is give that an enormous push so that what you find is that Rich provincials, as we might call them, become incorporated into Roman office holding and they send their kids to Rome to receive education and all that sort of thing. They do, right? become members of the Senate and eventually they become emperors obiously or not and again, it's one of those questions of it 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' not say, he iss winning the loyalty of the provincial elite to are actually therefore being part of his intermediaries sameame would go for his successors. The intermediate is between the central power and the populace and is also One of Augustus's Re smart moves This does look like it's calculated, not just improvised See divides the provinces. in a kind of systematizing way, into provinces which were basically peaceful No real military activity required. No No. North Africa would be one of those and he Let's The Senate, in the usual way, go on selecting the governors for those provinces conservation, Pince of Africa, and a few others He, however makes himself overall governor of any province where there's a substantial military presence and he has goovernors in those provinces chosen directly by himself and answerable to him So in a way, he's thought that Were this liable to be trouble like Germany, for example That's where you want a direct line of control between me 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 Pople look to the main authority. Though I think also even those officials in peaceful provinces chosen by the Senate They're still looking to Augustus Romans aren't stupid And they are communicating directly with the emperor. and with what by now must be a kind of big staff of people who are sifting the post bag and trying to work out the finances. We have a few glimpses of particularly 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 immperial palace grows Thinking about the government of the Empire how actively they're canvassing some of these provincial bigig wigs to come on the inside, we don't know, but that's certainly what's happening The Roman Empire is becoming more Roman But let'sooch for a couple of hundred years, you say that August is set up this imperial system that endures for almost four centuries or so longer. There must be a lot of change there that takes place.. think For two hundred years there's not much change one modern ancient historical joke is to say that And if you'd fallen asleep in one CE towards the end of Augustus's reign And you you know, woken up one hundred and fifty years later, towards the end of the second century CE, you'd have seen a world around you that was quite recognized. I mean, there would be changes You're in the same world. If you then went back to sleep for another one hundred and fifty years and you're now not in one hundred seventy five but three hundred and something, the world would look dramatically different Again Some of the institutions were still there People were still being consols The Senate still existed O 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 the period of change people usually fix on. ' the third century CE and they talk about the third century crisis, which is another way of saying things are changing It's marked by all kinds of different things. One is that there is For whatever reason, a real problem about imperial succession the Augustine 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 favorite candidates. You get a period when people do appear unlike What was the case in the first two hundred years of the Augustine regime do appear to be being made emmperors without As it were, any connection with Rome itself, Rome appears to be getting sidelines In certain respects, it's still the Augustine regime and it never ceases to be the Augustine 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 sppllit or ravenna. They kind of disaggregate. the emmpire The reason for this is absolutely obvious. that you want centers of command beyond the center of command for just a single province, a bit closer to where the action is The consequenceces that it kind of undermines The whole geopolitics the Roman Empire And Rome then is becoming more sidelined No there are some emmperisers who haveve never been there and make their first visit to Rome when they become em And there's a sense in which there's an increasing misalignment between Rome as the symbolic capital of the emmpire and Romas where the decisions are really made. that 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 two hundred and something years trying to work out But Things are different. onnce you get to the the middle of the third century But they don't crumble and If you go to the eastern part of the Roman Empire and you talk about you know Rome falling in the fifth century CE, you know nasty barbarian invasions Revenant part in what we call Byzantium, but it's basically the Roman empire Last all of fifteenth century. Mary I'm going 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, let's deal with the Western Empire, Briten for was a sort of bad thing Be because I do, and I admit it, and I'm sometimes ashamed by. And recently I was told by wonderful Peter He, one of your colleagues that actually there'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. Where is your thinking about this at the moment? I try not to divide historical events and happenings into things I know you're going to say that But you know, I don't know what you mean understand I've got colleagues, you know who say they'd have given a lot to keep the water supply, you know, I see that. I think however We do suffer from the demonization of the so called barbarians seen through wonderful nineteenth century pictures of kind of real fugks pulling down Roman statues oratever, being barbarian in the term. We suffer from that in a way that misrepresents what was going on. And I think the key players here are the vandals right in Vandal Africa. Now if you mention the word vandal to anyone, we know exactly what we think. say it Vandal North Africa was a place of extraordinary culture. They wrote wonderful poetry, some of which still survives in Latin And Bandal Africa was also partly responsible for the codification of Roman law, right? And they' 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 there was somehow a destruction of noble Roman culture. And it's easy to forget that The good old vandals in Vandal Africa were a great bastion of Romanness under their own terms. Yeah sururprise, surprise, nineteenth century, the height of imperialism globally They were quite fond of the Roman Epire, sururpriseprise.ur surpriseprise. Mararyaba, thank you so much. Thank for correcting me and coming on as ever, giving us such a wonderful tour of Roman history, than you. Thank you Well that's it, folks from the Republic to the carefully crafted authority of Augustus and the emperress 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 interestnterests you, Well then next week is all about what happens when that authority really seriously begins to fracture