Dan Snow's History Hit - Mary Beard on Ruling the Roman Empire

Episode Date: June 11, 2026

What did it take to rule an empire that was never meant to have an emperor?In this second episode of our series on the Roman Empire, we're joined by classicist Mary Beard to trace how Roman leadership evolved over a thousand years - from the competitive power-sharing of the Republic, to the carefully constructed one-man rule of Augustus. Why did the republican system buckle under its own success? And what set the empire on the path to fragmentation?Make sure to join us for our third episode next week, when Peter Heather will explain how and why the Roman Empire fell apart.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.We need your help! Let us know what you want from Dan Snow's History Hit by filling in our anonymous survey here: https://forms.gle/PvgayWLkWGjYT4St6Dan Snow's History Hit is now available on YouTube! Check it out at: https://www.youtube.com/@DSHHPodcastSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit history hit.com slash subscribe. How do you rule over one of history's greatest empires? For over a thousand years of Roman history, that answer kept changing, from the fiercely competitive republic through to the age of the Caesars, the emperors. This is our second episode in our series on the Roman Empire, and we're going to trace how leadership in Rome evolved over a thousand years.

We're going to explore how the institutions of the Roman Republic forced powerful men into competition, interbalancing each other, I guess. And then we're going to look at the rise of one-man rule under Augustus, whose reign transformed a republic into an imperial system. And then from then, it keeps changing. The empire itself changed. Rome itself was eclipsed,

and we're going to look at how power fragmented and across much of the empire, it was extinguished. This is the story of how Rome reinvented itself, reinvented power, and how those reinventions shape the fate of an empire. Last week, we looked at the rise of Rome. Next week, we were looking at the empire's fall, so make sure you hit follow and check back in for that.

For today's episode, though, I'm very happy to say we are joined by Britain's most famous classicist, Mary Beard, who specialises in ancient Rome. It's going to be a master class. Her podcast is instant classics, which is well worth checking out for all things about the ancient world. Let's get into it.

Mary, very good to see you. Great to have you here, Dan. I've been in this wonderful library so many times, such a treat to be back. And I feel I'm asking you enormous questions here, so I know you, but I know that you will be able to just distill them so simple for me. First of all, I want to know, we talk a lot about the Roman Empire, the Republic that proceeds it, which kind of is an empire as well. First of all, how's that being governed?

Because we hear about these overmighty men falling out each other, and it's best, how does it work? The principle, the basic principle of the Republic. Republic was, well, it was complicated. It was not a democracy. I mean, I call it a kind of sort of democracy. That's to say the big decisions like passing laws, who to go to war with, if you should go to war at all, that was in the hands of the male citizen body. That looks, if you put it that way, that looks pretty democratic. And there's an element. about that. I think the key about the Republic though is that everything about its organization, its formal rules, gave political advantage to the wealthy.

Okay. This sounds so unfamiliar, Mary. I mean, it's difficult for us to understand this. Look, Dan. Powerful, rich, white men are sort of the whip hand. Look, Dan. We live in a world in which we often think that powerful rich white men have the whip hand. The Ronald Republic is something different because it, formally gave them the whip hand. That's to say the voting system was arranged so that more power went to the individual votes of somebody rich than someone poor. And so that was taken for granted that this was a society stratified by wealth, though ultimately at the hands of these popular assemblers, even if they were biased towards the rich. And I mean, I think a lot of people

have trouble with this and the Romans had trouble with it because a lot of our kind of ideas about governmental, political institutions are drawn from Greece, democracy, aristocracies, oligarchies, kingships, etc. And the Roman Republic doesn't fit into any of those. It's quite difficult for even ancient Greek writers resident in Rome. There's one great, historian called Polybius, who is resident in Rome in the second century BCE. And he struggles. He has to say Rome's a mixed constitution. That means he can't fit it into any of his categories. Sounds a bit like the 90th century in Britain, where even the Brits trying to work out quite what's going on. Who's sort of in general? I think that's right. But I think that what is crucial about

it, particularly when you then think about how it compares to the one-man rule of the emperor, 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 Republic, and they think of it as being invented in order to prevent their being kings ever again. Heaven knows how it was really invented, but that was their story. The absolutely fundamental idea, well, there's two of them. One is that nobody who gets elected to office and there are a series of elected officials from consuls there, elected by these hierarchical assemblies, the absolute key is that nobody ever holds office on their own.

Now, we think of it as, I think often a bit sort of, a little bit quirky that the Romans had two consuls and how many preters and tributes that they had. But that is the point. Nobody holds power individually. And in principle, sometimes broken, but nobody holds power for longer than a single year. So you have a series of elected officials, all of them drawn from the rich elite. And they're elected to offices that they always hold with somebody else. and only for a year. Now, you know, you start to see then that why it's kind of hard to fit Roma into traditional structures because most Romans, not, but most Romans would have been absolutely horrified at the idea that what they were living in was a democracy. I mean, democracy was for many, if not most Romans, an appalling version of mob rule. But there was a sense

of power-sharing communality which divided up power. over time in the end. Nobody. The Roman elite is kind of notionally a group of equals who hold power but share it. Okay, so something must have gone right because this Republic conquers much to the Mediterranean basin. Is it that government? Is it that system? Is it good at getting rid of bad people and promoting good people? Or is it climate? Is it technology? What's going on? How much blame your credit should we give it? It's the big puzzle. It is the real big puzzle about Can you solve it now, please? I'll try.

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

And the other is the political sense of the period when Rome is governed by one man. Now, the puzzle, the really annoying puzzle about this is that the empire, in the sense of the territorial expanse of Rome, was mostly acquired before Rome had an emperor. That's basic rule. Emperors did not make the Roman empire. They inherited it, they didn't make it. So what you find from about the late 4th century BC, onwards during the period of the kind of fully fledged republic is you find a series of successful conquests which don't ever seem to stop until you get to Julius Caesar.

And 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 than other people. Well, 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 to begin with about their navy. I mean, the Romans were supposed to be composed. rubbish at naval warfare. So there is something about the kind of way they're governed, which must, I think, provide a kind of baseline from which to explain this. Partly, I think, is the continual competitiveness of the elite. You know, I've talked about these guys holding office temporarily always with someone else. What that means is that the Roman elite are always going into competitive elections with one another. There's always winners and losers and the elite

is deeply, deeply committed within the power sharing agreement to getting the most honorary for the individual. And that, in a sense, becomes a big fault line in Roman history. And so I think you can see that if, as all Mediterranean cultures do, if you put a quite high premium on military success, in this very odd Roman system, the system itself kind of puts a fire under that because you become consul. Okay, you've got a colleague, but you've only got one year to make your mark. How do you make your mark? You make your mark by conquest. 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 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. And that, I think, it's the hot-houseness of the political system. The way that power-sharing and temporary office holding cranks up the competition. And I think that's quite important. And you've got a clear mechanism for getting rid of someone rubbish. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, you have.

It's very hard to internalise what it would have felt being one of these. guys, with that persistent, insistent desire for success, for military success, for electoral success. And it's all going on every time. You've only got a year, right? I think the other thing is this is really part of why they lost battles but they didn't lose wars. is that at a certain point, sometime in the fourth century, why this happened, we don't know, is that unlike every other early Mediterranean society that we know, what the Romans did was they started to make long-term military alliances with people they conquered. Now, standard form of warfare in the Mediterranean, small scale, the endemic warfare,

is that summer comes and you think, right, it's time for us to go and do some fighting. You fight your usual enemies. You send out some soldiers. You bash them up. You steal their cattle and you say goodbye, right? See you next year. Rome significantly changes that. Because instead of saying, we'll take a cattle bye-bye and see you next year, they start to, and it becomes the absolute norm.

The fourth century BC, they start to make formal alliances with the people they conquer. The basic terms of which was that Rome could use those people's soldiers. Now, what that means is that Rome got enormous manpower at its control. It could call on more soldiers than any other power anywhere could call on. And, you know, that's why they lose battles but win wars, that Romans were defeated quite often in their conflicts with their neighbours and also with the people they were fighting further afield. But they could always come back home and say, right, okay, they've got always more boots on the ground. So this early empire, we can call it, it is not the great European Empire as the 9th century or the German Empire in the second World War. There aren't sort of Roman bureaucrats and governors and building little Roman buildings in all these different places and somehow bedding in an idea of Romaness.

No, I mean, it's actually quite hard to know how far that's true of many modern empires, you know, how far that kind of sense of cultural, religious, military, political control, which is part of our idea of what imperialism is, how far that ever worked. but Rome in its Republican empire is miles away from that, absolutely miles away. And it looks as if they have very few priorities about what they want from the people they conquer. I mean, basically it comes down to they want tax, they want some cash, and they want the guys to do what they're told when necessary. So it's what I sometimes called kind of an empire. of obedience. They're not interested in posing Roman religion. They're not terribly interested in dressing up these places to look like mini-Rombs. They start to do that a bit later. What they want

is they want people to do what they're told when necessary. And they have the beginnings of a system in the Republic of provincial governors. But I have to say the boundaries of these provinces are probably pretty fluid. And they have all kinds of different deals with different people across the map. So there's a whole series of people known as charmingly as client kings. I mean, basically, a client king is someone

who the Romans think they've got under their thumb who is a king of some tribe somewhere, but will tow the Roman line. And basically, it is an empire that takes cash. It's an exploitative empire. Its tax collection is bizarrely privatised. 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 poor province and then hand it over to Rome, meanwhile creaming off their own profit. And there are some truly appalling stories in this Republican empire, a financial

exploitation. But when push comes to shove, the Romans want their subject communities not to make a fuss, not to rebel, not to get out of life. The Romans want them to do what the Romans want. You listen to Dan Snow's history. There's more coming up. And there's no big office block in Rome, full of bureaucrats, organising this empire. This is just, the Senate will send a message to the consuls going, hello, king of Armenia, we require the following. That's right. That's right. That's and it'll probably take three months for the message to get there, right? I mean, you haven't got a Ministry of Foreign Affairs, you haven't got a Roman Army HQ,

and transport is extremely slow, and sending messages are extremely slow. So, in a way, you say, look, if they wanted to have that kind of hands-on control that often comes with our image of an empire, they haven'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 enormous kind of reconstruction of what it is to govern, they can't do that sort of heavy-handed control. all of this period of Rome, I think, none of it from the government of the empire to the politics, none of it quite fits easily into our stereotypes. Now, in part, that's because our stereotypes are correct, but it doesn't. It's quite hard to see where the rough edges are. Certainly, if you were to say, now here we are in 100 BCE, would you like to draw me a map with the boundaries of the Roman Empire? clearly marked on them.

Well, it'd be a damn stupid question to ask because there are all sorts of different mechanisms of control. You wouldn't know whether to include the client kings or not. Rome is there at the centre, but without the kind of administrative control that makes the classic model in our imaginations of an empire feasible. And Mary, you've talked about this before, and I always love hearing from you about this, does that model bring some resilience?

When things go bonkers that one thing people know about Roman history is all the sort of madness that occasion appears to happen in the imperial capital or within the imperial family or it's aristocrats fighting. But does that therefore, light touch, be careful, that light touch empire mean there's a bit of a resilience, there's a bit of built stability when the centre is internal? I think that's probably the case. One thing that is a good example of that, I suppose, is that you don't regularly either in the Republic or later, actually, you don't see opposition to the centre brewing up in the more distant territories. Generals and generals are the same as politicians in Rome. There's no kind of difference between a military man and a political man.

General certainly get a power base from conquest and in the provinces of the empire, but that power base is usually wealth. Pompey the great, so-called the great, in the middle of the first century BC. He is phenomenally wealthy because of his conquests. He's not actually using the politics of empire very much for his own political advantage. And yeah, the metropolis can tear itself to pieces, and the tax farmers in Asia are still sending the cash in, and nothing much is happening. The problem, though, is, and I think that this is,

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

jolly hard to run an empire which stretches from Spain to Syria, basically, and not yet Scotland, but certainly to North Africa. They're trying to run it with the mechanisms of a small city-state. Now, as a jockey way of putting it, it's kind of like trying to run 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, right? They might be nasty, but they're not stupid. And it's pretty clear that they see that there are problems here about, particularly

the temporariness of their office holding, right? The traditional way would have been to take this consul, got one year in office. He can bash up Sicily and come back within a year. You know, he can't bash up Syria and come back within a year. And so there is a clash between the geographical demands of the empire and the power-sharing temporariness of Roman government institutions. And they twig this and they start from really the end of the second century BC onwards to tinker a bit with that temporariness. So they would say, okay, we're going to have a system when if your consul, you won't do what your tradition. he did, which was put on your military kit straight away and go out, you'll basically stay in

Rome for your year of office. But then we'll kind of extend it because you'll become a pro-consul, a kind of a stand-in console, and it's during your pro-consular year that you will go out and do your military campaigning. But of course, what happens is that that opens floodgates in a way. And you find that people, for good military reasons, I mentioned Pompey the Great, well, he would be one, saying, look, if you want me to deal with this now major military crisis in the East, you're going to have to give me more power for longer in order to turn. Can't get Asia here. I mean, give me a break. It's not a month. That's right. Or I'm going to, you want me to clear the sea of pirates. You know, pirates. I mean, when we talk about Romans having problems with pirates, we tend to think. of pugwash and people with parrots on their shoulders. I mean, pirates in the ancient world are terrorists. They are organised crime terrorists. And Pompey is put in charge of trying to get rid of them in the Mediterranean, but he can't just do it on the old-fashioned way. So what happens is that the

governmental institutions start to crumble or to be at least challenge by virtue of the success of the conquests that those governmental institutions underpinned. So Rome is a victim of its own success. It's a city-state government trying to run an empire that that city-state government had acquired. And that becomes, by the time you get really from the end of the second century 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 of break out of the traditional constraints. They take power for longer. They sometimes put it down obediently after a bit, but they're not obeying the usual rules of power sharing. And therefore, they are actually, in a sense, undermining the very structure that the Republican government had been based on, which is people don't whole power for very long and they always share it.

So somehow it's imploded. And that's combined with the idea that particularly with conquests in the East, and as I said, the individual commanders getting very rich, so they've got money to use for their own political ambitions at Rome. Why is there so much generosity in Roman politics, which was a bribery is what we mean. generosity is what the guys themselves would have said. Well, it's because there's a hell of a lot of money around. That's fascinating. There was more than one current pushing us towards solo imperial rule

here. Yeah. I mean, we have to be careful because we're seeing this retrospectively. And I think that I'm sometimes guilty of somehow imagining that one-man rule was kind of inevitable in Rome because of all these problems, and then tracking it and saying, look, you can see that there's these individuals, here it comes, and then Julius Caesar, here it comes. And, well, he's interrupted in mid-flow because he's assassinated in 44 BCE. But in a sense, that is the moment when people kind of think, right, one man rule is probably here to stay. Now, that's not what his assassin said. His assassins also, you know, very, I think the Romans are very aware about these currents and these pressures. The assassins say, right, we want liberty back.

What Julius Caesar represents is the removal of liberty. Now, they meant the removal of liberty from other members of the Roman elite, not from the poor old poor, right? But that's what they're fighting for. But in my retrospective view, there's a suspicion that the writing is already on the wall, honestly. And I think one of the ways you can see that, a brilliant symbol of it, is that one of the signs of one man rule, one of the diagnostic signs of one man rule at Rome, is whether you put your living head on the coins. Now, there's plenty of dead Roman heads on the coins, you know, for as long as you can trace. But we take living heads on coins as something that is part and parcel of monarchy. But the Romans, it was dangerously part and parcel.

of monarchy. And the first person to have their living head on a regular coin issue minted in the city of Rome, Pompey had minted a few coins well away from Rome. But the first person to have their head on the Roman coinage was Julius Caesar. Interesting. And the first issue of this comes out and that's not entirely unconnected, I think, only a couple of months before the guy's assassinated. And in some ways, it's a symbol of that assassination. It's a symbol of what prompts that assassination. They're not putting him to death because they don't like his head on the coins, but they don't like his head on the coins because it symbolises exactly what ceases up to. I think it's actually fascinating that after the assassination, when the Romans try to have a bit of

sort of peace and reconciliation and pretend it's business as usual, the main assassins, Brutus and Cassis, go out to actually take provincial commands in the east. Brutus issues coins because he's going to pay his troops. And one of the major functions of coinage in the ancient world wasn't to give you small change in your pocket, it was to pay the troops. One of these issues of coinage has got Brutus's live head on the coins. As soon as the hero of liberation is putting his living head on the coins, you know that liberation isn't going to be the end result of this.

What's going to be the end result is more or less permanent one-man rule. 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 greatest mysteries, actually, of all of history, not just ancient history, of how Julius Caesar's great nephew and adopted son, the person that we know is the Emperor Augustus, but he started out life as Octavius, how he established one-man rule at Rome permanently.

and successfully for what was actually hundreds of years. His system survived for hundreds of years. Now, people, I think, differ in their explanations of this. And some people think that Augustus, as he became, was a kind of great mastermind who got a great system in his head and he was going to impose it. He eventually stamps out the civil war that had been lingering for years after the assassination of Caesar.

He's victorious over Cleopatra and Mark Anthony in Egypt, which is the kind of final campaign of those civil wars. Some people think that he's got a blueprint, and he comes back to Rome and he thinks, right, okay, I am now going to initiate autocracy, right, my way. And some ancient certainly thought that when they looked back, they couldn't understand how did Augustus manage it? And they thought, well, you know, he worked it out on the back of many envelopes,

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

He doesn't abolish it. He doesn't have a revolution. I think if you think of a kind of Marxian sense of a revolution, it means new governing class comes in, old governing class is excluded in some way, usually violently. There's no change of governing class. The same elite guys are still running the show in Rome, except what Augustus manages to do is put himself at the more or less, we have to be a bit

careful about thinking there was no opposition to this, the more or less undisputed pinnacle of this. And he does that by leaving the structures in place. So you are still consuls, 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 pretas and the ediles and the tribunes. The Senate still meets. And yet what Augustus does is focus the basic decision-making and the basic loyalty onto himself. Now, how he does that in practice, well, we've got hints, I think. Suetonius is writing in the second century, CE, writes a biography of Augustus amongst

his 12 Cesar's. And he gives us some hints, I think, of the new kind of idea of personal power that Augustus manages to wield cleverly. I mean, Suetonius says, when Augustus went into the Senate, as he goes into the Senate, for the discussions with all the other guys, he greets every senator by name. He goes round, as it were, I don't think Romans didn't shake hands, but, you know, he says, hello, Marcus Tullis, how are you? Now, that must have taken hours if it's true, but there's this sense that he has a kind of patronal command of the structures of power. Now, he's also got a military command, because one way of seeing Augustus's regime would be a very, very iron fist in a velvet glove. And one of the things he does is effectively nationalised the army.

The Republican army had been paid full by state funds in ways that we would probably expect. But it nevertheless was an army that was essentially owned by its commanders. Now, Augustus says, every soldier is beholden to me. To me, I'm the state, and he merges me and the state in the way that clever dictators often do manage to merge me and the state. And he effectively buys the loyalty of the army. So that very effectively, there are very few military rebellions for the next couple of hundred years. He does that by fixing a salary for being a soldier. are fixing terms and conditions of service and giving them a retirement pension.

So he has undercut the idea that the soldiers might feel loyalty to their commanders rather than to him. It's still kind of not easy to see quite how that adds up to a new deal in which, as I said, there probably were some. and we know there were a few dissidents who didn't like this, but it looks as if the whole thing was not hugely challenged. He does it in other ways. I mean, I think I've been calling him Augustus, I've said that his original name is Octavius. At some point, when he's come back from defeating Anthony Cleopatra,

he decides he wants a new name. Because Octavius, 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 statesman. He's building himself into the city of Rome. He's investing huge amounts of money in new forums, in statues. He invests in a royal family in a way. For the first time, women and heirs are part of the whole deal of the PR of an elite Roman. He probably gets lucky.

Well, he lives a long time, doesn't he? I mean, I think he is the longest serving emperor ever. He's always, it seems, making a kind of bit of a big deal of a bit of a hypochondria, I think. So he's like, oh, I might die any minute. He lasts. He defeats Anthony Cleopatra and comes back to Rome in 31 BC.E. He lasts more than 40 more years. And to some extent, all this stuff I've been saying about, he rebrands the Republican institutions.

That's right. But also, he gets lucky because he stays. around. Now, when I was a student, some of our teachers used to say it was all a big contric. The Augustan regime, he conned the senators. You know, he said, you can still be consul. And he gave them some extra honours, you know, and they could have better seats at the amphitheatre, all kind of thing. And somehow it was all a kind of Machiavellian con trick. Now, it took me some years to realize, that can't be the case. Roman senators might have been many things, but they're going to be. They weren't thick, right?

Or some of them weren't thick. The idea that they had the wool pulled over their eyes by Augusta saying, don't worry, it's all the same. I'm just living on the Palatine in a proto palace, right? And you're still being consul. This is business as usual. They knew it wasn't business as usual. But he gave them enough of enough of the structure to be able to collude with it.

And in the end, the Roman governmental structure, the empire, 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, presumed 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 a familiar image of it.

I mean, there are governors and a state taxation system underneath financial officials. You can see a fledgling, but very fledgling bureaucracy there. In a way, I think that would have looked quite different from what was going on in the Republic, at least for the elite in the provinces. And frankly, peasants in Roman Britain eventually conquered by Claudius after Augustus, they barely noticed the Roman Empire. But 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 between the centre and the elite of the provinces. And one thing that Augustus really buys into is the incorporation of the elite into the governmental structure of Rome. Now, that wasn't entirely new. It goes back to the idea that when Rome is conquering the cities, Rome incorporates rather than keeps some on the out crowd. 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, what sort of thing. They do, right? And they become members of the Senate and eventually they become empress.

Consciously or not. And again, it's one of those questions of it's hard to know whether there was a grand plan here or a series of improvisations that he is buying the loyalty. He would say winning the loyalty. He's winning the loyalty of the provincial elite, who are actually therefore being part of his intermediaries, and that same would go for his

successors, the intermediaries between the central power and the populace. And he's also, one of Augustus's really smart moves. This does look like it's calculated, not just improvised. He divides the provinces in a kind of systematizing way into provinces which were basically peaceful. No real military activity required. North Africa would be one of those. And he lets the Senate, in the usual way, go on selecting the governors for those provinces. Provincent of Asia, province of Africa and a few others. He, however, makes himself the overall governor of any province where there's a substantial military presence. And he has governors in those provinces

chosen directly by himself and answerable to him. So in a way, he's thought that where there's liable to be trouble, like Germany, for example, that's where you want a direct line of control between me, emperor, and the administration on the ground. Now, I think one's got to be realistic. All the same problems about how long communication takes to get from Rome to the province and back again remain. You can't change the geography of the Roman Empire, but you can change the place where people look to the main authority.

Though I think also even those officials in peaceful provinces chosen by the Senate, I think they're still looking to Augustus. Romans aren't stupid and they are communicating directly with the emperor. 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 ex-slaves within the imperial palace, praised for their grip on imperial finance, for example. So it isn't a bureaucracy in the modern sense of the word. There aren't exams.

There's no career progression. It's not like the British civil service. But there is a sense that there are more people in one place, the imperial palace, as it grows, thinking about the government of the empire, how actively they're canvassing some of these provincial bigwigs to come on. The inside, we don't know. But that's certainly what's happening. the Roman Empire's becoming more Roman. But let's scutche for a couple of hundred years.

You say that Augustus has served this imperial system that endures for almost four centuries so longer. There must be a lot of change there that takes place. I think for 200 years there's not much change. One modern ancient historical joke is to say that if you'd fallen asleep in 1C.E. Towards the end of Augustus's reign. And you'd woken up 150.

years later towards the end of the second century CE, you'd have seen a world around you that was quite recognisable. I mean, there would be changes, but you're in the same world. If you then went back to sleep for another 150 years and you're now not in 175, but 300 and something, the world would look dramatically different. Again, some of the institutions were still there. People were still be consuls. The Senate still existed, but the power structure is looking different and the role of the elite, the traditional elite, looks as if it's changed. It looks as if there's much more power going to a military class by that stage rather than the old senatorial elite. Now, the period of change that people usually fix on is the third century CE, and they talk about the third century

crisis, which is another way of saying things are changing. It's marked by all kinds of different things. One is that there is, for whatever reason, a real problem about imperial succession. that the Augustine system had worked very well, partly through a series of adoptions of successes, not just biological successes, really to the end of the second century CE. Then, for whatever reason, starts to fall apart. You do get a period then of the army backing its favourite candidates.

You get a period when people do appear, unlike what was the case in the first 200 years of the Augustan regime, do appear to be being made emperors without, as it were, any connection with Rome itself. Rome appears to be getting sidelined. In certain respects, it's still the Augustan regime, and it never ceases to be the Augustan regime, but it's a bit battered at that point. It recovers, really, afterwards, but things are never quite the same again.

And in the end, it's geography that's always the enemy for Rome. And one of the things they do is they decide, well, they're going for devolution in our terms. It's devolution. And they have mini-capitals, places like split or Ravenna. They kind of disaggregate the empire. The reason for this is absolutely obvious that you want centers of commands beyond. the centre of command for just a single province, a bit closer to where the action is. The consequences that it kind of undermines the whole geopolitics of the Roman Empire,

and Rome then is becoming more sidelined. Now, there are some emperors who've never been there, and make their first visit to Rome when they become emperor. And there's a sense in which there's an increasing misalignment between Rome and, the symbolic capital of the empire. And Rome is where the decisions are really made. Now, you can add into that all kinds of other factors, if you like. You can add in plague, pandemic, whatever.

And this is what people who've spent the last 200 and something years trying to work out. But things are different once you get to the middle of the third century. But they don't crumble. And look, if you go to the eastern part of the Roman Empire and you talk about, you know, Rome falling in the 5th century CE, you know, nasty barbarian invasions, the Roman Empire, in what we call Byzantium, but it's basically the Roman Empire, last all the 15th century. Mary, I'm going to do a horrible thing to you.

You know more about the Roman Empire than anybody else. Do you also suffer from this little slight internal sense that the fall of the Western Empire let's deal with the Western Empire, Britain, was a sort of bad thing because I do, and I admit it, and I'm sometimes ashamed of. And recently I was told by wonderful Peter Heather, 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 good things of bad. I know you're going to say that. But, you know, and I know what you mean.

I've got colleagues, you know, who will say they'd have given a lot to keep the water supply, you know, that I see that. I think, however, we do suffer from the demonisation of the so-called barbarians, which we've seen through wonderful 19th century pictures of kind of real thugs pulling down Roman statues or whatever, being barbarian in the term. We suffer from that in a way that perhaps misrepresents what was going on. And I think the key players here, the Vandals, right, in Vandal Africa. Now, if you mention the word Vandal to anyone, we know exactly what we think. That said, Vandal North Africa was a place of extraordinary culture. They wrote wonderful poetry, some of which still survives in Latin. and Vandal Africa was also partly responsible for the codification of Roman law, right?

And they're Christians. So I think that as with a lot of ancient history, we're the heirs to other people's prejudices, some of which may have been right. But it's impossible now for us not to see the barbarian invasions, as if 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. Surprise, surprise, surprise. The height of imperialism globally, they were quite fond of the Roman Empire. Surprise, surprise. Well, Mary Bird, thank you so much.

Pleasure. For correcting me and coming on as ever giving us such a wonderful tour of Roman history. Thank you. Thank you. Well, that's it, folks. From the Republic through to the carefully crafted authority of Augustus and the emperors who followed. 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 interested, Well, then next week is all about what happens when that authority really seriously begins to fracture. We got civil wars. We got disease. We got economic strain. We got divided rule.

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

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