Dan Snow's History Hit - The Legacy of Rome

Episode Date: September 4, 2023

Rome has attracted aspiring conquerors and leaders for millennia, not just as a great metropolis, but as an idea. It has long been a symbol of military might and universal power, defined by political and religious authority as well as great feats of engineering that would leave indelible marks on the regions it conquered, and overshadow empire builders for centuries to come. Dan is joined by Simon Elliott, a historian, archaeologist and author of 'The Legacy of Rome', to discuss how the experience of being part of the Roman world is still felt in the modern day.This episode was produced by Beth Donaldson and edited by Dougal Patmore.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world-renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hits. Today I'm talking about Rome. Rome, the empire, but Rome also the idea. The idea that's haunted us ever since its disappearance, which happened in the western part of Europe in the 5th century. A subject of lively debate we also talk about on this podcast and on other episodes. Rome has proved to be an irresistible force. It's drawn in. It's like a tractor beam for would-be Caesars, whether it's England's Plantagenet kings, Charlemagne, of course, who set himself up as an emperor, holy Roman emperor, the Ottomans in the East, and even up to more recently, the Kaisers and the tsars both of those words derived from caesar there's been something about their military might something about the universality of their empire

the conformity i think of their bureaucracy of their religion their roads their fortifications that led subsequent generations of empire builders to sort of hanker for Rome. And they always saw themselves, by the way, needless to say, as that ruling, dominant Roman class, rather than feeling any empathy for the conquered peoples of the empire. Our Roman past here in Britain is very visible. It's visible in our road layout, the way we still move around this country, our cities where we live, our language, of course, but also the fault lines that run through our isles. I think the fact that Ireland and Scotland were never conquered remains very important,

even in the 21st century. And the same is true of Europe and the Middle East and North Africa, as you're about to hear. Because in this episode of Dan Snow's History, I talked to Simon Elliott. He's been on the podcast before. He's written lots of books about Rome. He's travelled all around the Roman Empire, as you'll hear. He's just recently come back from Algeria to look at Roman sites. He's been on History Hit TV. He and I did a tour of Hadrian's Wall together on a programme coming up for History Hit TV soon. He's just written a new book about the legacies of Rome. He's here to share some of his ideas with me and all of you. Enjoy. never to go to war with one another again.

And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Simon Elliott, welcome back on the podcast. Dan, it's a huge honour to come and talk to you again. I love working with history here, and especially coming on your pod. It is an extraordinary empire, because unlike China, unlike the Russian Empire of the Steppe or what preceded it, nothing really ever like it has followed it, has it? It's an extraordinary geographical entity, the Roman Empire.

Does that make it hard to think about in terms of its broad legacy? It's a really, really good point, actually, Dan. I mean, sort of a couple of points there. Firstly, I mean, the payoff line at the end of the book is really precinct, actually, for anybody studying the world of Rome, in that I say the world of the Roman Republican Empire is still very much with us, alive and a key companion as we negotiate the trials and tribulations of modern life. We don't just walk in the footsteps of the Romans, great and small. We walk side by side with them.

That shouldn't be surprising, Dan, because in actual fact, if you think about it, the Roman Empire, the empire, not the republic, the empire lasted probably for, let's say, 500 years years which is a quarter of the last 2000 years so it's a big chunk of our sort of like recent history in terms of 2000 years anyway also and usually because you've referenced china very accurately and usually it was a european empire broadly it was pan-continental it was in africa and it was in Asia as well. But broadly, it was a European empire, which hasn't really been followed until the modern era, with anything remotely approaching it. So we shouldn't be surprised about that.

And also, because it's a very successful empire, as we tend to record it historically, until the collapse of the empire in the West in 476, it's been culturally appropriated, that's the best phrase to use, by any king, dinas, despot ever since wanting to have a template. So, I mean, a lot of what we talk about with the Roman Empire ourselves is through cultural appropriation, sort of in the late 18th and 19th and early 20th centuries in British history, in the context of the British Empire. So none of this should be surprising to us. It's just something that people don't tend to think about. Yes, that's true. So the legacy on subsequent generations, obviously, has been enormous in our architecture and the way that we think about our politics,

the way that we think of this sort of idealised lost past in which men were strong and valiant and women were diligent. And I mean, that's haunted us through the rest of history, hasn't it? Absolutely. You can draw threads. I've been really fortunate in my research over the last decade to find, I mean, I've traveled, as you know, the length and breadth of the Roman Empire. I mean, this year, in the last six months, I've been so fortunate. I've been to the southernmost fort and fortress in the Roman Empire on the Sahara Fringe and the northernmost fort and fortress in Scotland.

And the parallels are astonishing. That's one of the threads that I pull through today when you look at the world of Rome as a template for the modern world. The Roman Empire was a holistic entity. And although it was probably ruled with a fairly light touch, given the technology available to them

and given the distances involved, it was nevertheless a homogenous empire. And you go to the Sahara fringe or you go to Scotland today and you can see exactly the same. In fact, Dan, I saw in Scotland a place called Strathacro, which is near Montrose.

It's the most northerly fort in the Roman Empire. And there sitting in the church wall today, built in the middle of the fort, was a beautiful piece of Roman tile, which came from one of the buildings within the fort. You think about that, that's the most northerly piece of Roman tile, which came from one of the buildings within the fort. You think about that, that's the most northerly piece of tile, ceramic building material in the Roman world. And there it is. So all these direct threads, whether they're physical, you've mentioned them

yourself in terms of architecture. Whether they're cultural, you've mentioned yourself in terms of politics. They're all there for us. And that's the broad picture, not the narrow picture. Yeah, let's come on to the narrow picture. Although I should say for everyone listening, people might not be familiar with the Romans in Scotland. They did invade Scotland a few times, raids and attempts to settle. You will hear about those on previous episodes of this podcast with Simon Elley, who talked about one of the great attempts to conquer Scotland. And Simon and I visited a site on the South Bank of the Tyne that was, well, briefly, the capital of the Roman Empire. It was amazing. What an amazing thought, Simon.

Almost the de facto capital of the Roman Empire was in South Shields, just outside Newcastle today on the Tyne. That's bonkers, isn't it? I love it. You bring us very elegantly on to Britain and Britannia. I mean, if it's all right with you, Dan, why don't I just pull out two or three of these threads of the Roman Empire of Britannia? Let's go. Well, there are three key ones, okay? So the first one actually is very relevant to the world in which we live today. Whatever one's for you on Brexit and Britain leaving the European Union. Britain's first Brexit was in the context of Britain leaving the Roman Empire, or rather

Britain ceasing to be part of the Roman Empire, whether it was an official event or not. The way that Britain left the Roman Empire was very different to the way that the Roman Empire ceased to function in the rest of the continent. So Britain was different to France and Germany and Spain and Italy, and it was different in this sense. In Britain, the Classical Britannica regional fleet disappears in the middle of the third century. And after that, apart from a few occasions when the Romans build a temporary fleet, there's no fleet to control the open ocean. So increasingly in the fourth century, you get predating raiding taking place down the East Coast and along the South Coast, which leads eventually towards the end of the fourth and early fifth century to a major depopulation event all along the east coast and along the south coast

there's no evidence there's anyone living in the walls of Roman London after 410. It's amazing isn't it it's such a mystery that. Think about that there's nobody living in the provincial capital after 410 they're gone so wherever they've gone if you can afford it you've gone either to the west or you've gone to the Amorican peninsula which becomes known from that point as Brittany Little Britain so you have a depopulation. And then when the Germans start settling in the 5th century, these Germans aren't from along the Rhine and Danube frontiers, who knew the Roman ways, the Franks and various Goths, etc. They're actually from the far north of Germany. So as we grew up, we were educated as Angles and Saxons and Jutes, whether they were or not, they're effectively, to my mind, proto-Vikings.

And when they start settling, because they're from the far north of germany they don't know the roman ways so even if there was any roman infrastructure left for them to take over they wouldn't know what to do with it but there wasn't anyway so you end up with a completely different vector for britain and over the next 200 years these germans whoever they were from the far north scour east to west and we have England. That's not the case on the continent. We'll come to later when we talk about the imperial center. So that means that from that point onwards, Britain is a place of difference. And some people believe that still resonates in the world today. So there's number one. Number two is in the urban

landscape in modern Britain. When the Romans conquered Britain, it took them over 40 years to go from the southeast to the line of the Tyne, Solway Firth, where we were, on what was later Hadrian's Wall. It took Caesar only eight years to conquer Gaul, but it took them 40 years

to conquer, allegedly conquer, up to the line of Hadrian's Wall in Britain. And therefore, because it took so long and it was difficult, the landscape is marked by stop lines,

which include forts, which later become towns, and also the roads which join them. So the modern urban and transport infrastructure of England, certainly, largely is based on the Roman conquest period for that 40, 50-year period. So if you go southwest to northeast, you can name the towns, which were originally Roman forts, Exeter, Gloucester, Cardiff, Chester, York, Lincoln.

You've got Leicester, you've got Manchester, you've got Newcastle, you've got Carlisle, all Roman, Roman forts, which became towns. And then the road infrastructure, Watling Street, the line of the A2 and the A5, Deer Street going into the far north, the extension of the A1, Irming Street, the A1 itself. So therefore, the modern urban and transport landscape of Britain is based on the Roman conquest period. And finally, the political settlement of Britain today is based on the Roman conquest as well, because you've referenced yourself, Scotland. The Romans never conquered Scotland. They tried hard twice with the Crickler

and Severus, failed twice ultimately. For whatever reason, they failed. And therefore, Scotland is a place of difference compared to England today geographically, because the Romans didn't build a stone-built urban landscape in Scotland. And also the Romans never conquered the island of Ireland. And in not conquering the island of Ireland, that didn't become part of the Roman world either. We believe Agricola considered it as part of his campaigns in the far north and was told by Domitian the Emperor emperor don't do it so therefore based on just the hard facts there we know the Romans didn't conquer Scotland and it's a place of difference compared to England today the Romans didn't conquer Ireland and it's

a place of difference compared to England today so there you have a key part of the political settlement of the British Isles all because of the Roman conquest period. This is Dan Snow's History Hit. More after this. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings,

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wherever you get your podcasts. Let's slide across the channel and talk about, well, you tell me, what we might roughly call the Low Countries, France, bits of Germany that were incorporated into the Roman world. What are the legacies there for us? What do we see around us today? They're even more obvious, Dan. The smack people in the face are so obvious.

And I call this the imperial center, and I talk about the right frontier of Germany, Gaul, Italy, and Spain. And firstly, the language. I mean, the Romance languages are Vulgar Latin, so they are directly related to the Roman world. That language, Vulgar Latin, wasn't spoken in any of those regions until the Roman conquests outside of Italy, and therefore that's a direct relevance to the Roman world. In fact, bizarrely, actually, Dan, if you look at the parts of the world where the Romance language spoken today is closest to Vulgar Latin than anywhere else, it's Romania,

which largely was the salient province of Dacia, where the Romans only stayed there from the reigns of Trajan to the reign of Aurelius. That's what 150 years. And even after that 150 year period, still the language spoken there is, it could almost be Roman. That's how close it is to Volga Latin. Then you have the Catholic Church, of course, used by later Roman emperors as a force of political coercion, as well as the actual church of choice, so the Catholic Church. And also you have law codes in all those regions, which still today are based on Roman law. They're originally going all the way back to the 12 tables of the Roman Republic. Really so obvious, provided you're looking for it, it smacks you in the face.

Well, you've moved down the Danube a bit there, Dacia, north of the Danube, famously. But does that remain, do you think, an important fault line today? Again, we can pick a specific moment in history when a decision was made by a Roman emperor which set in train a geographic settlement which still exists today and in our living memory has caused friction and conflict and war and death and destruction because of this Roman geographic settlement. And the emperor's Diocletian becomes the emperor in AD 284, dragging the empire, kicking and

screaming out of the crisis of the third century, which almost brought the whole Roman empire down. In so doing, he changes the very nature of the empire from the principate phase to the dominate phase. And one of the things he realizes is that he can't actually physically control the lot. And he admits it for the first time. Other emperors, Nervus I, try to, but don't think it's as important as Diocletian realizes it is. Given the distances involved, the size of the Roman Empire, the troubles they have externally, he realizes he can't do the lot himself. So he divides the Roman Empire into two halves and appoints Maximian as his Western emperor. He stays in the East. The dividing line for that is broadly still the dividing line through the Balkans, which separates a Western

facing Catholic, Croat, German facing world world, and a Serbian-dominated, Greek Orthodox, Eastern-facing world. And you can see that in the Balkan conflict in the 1990s. That all has its roots all the way back to the Diocletianic Reformation. Again, a gigantic thread from the Roman world coming through us today, which if you didn't know about it, you just wouldn't know. Let's move on to the Balkans, Turkey, the Middle East. What do you see out there? Again, actually, it's interesting. As you go further east, the examples, the threads become more geopolitical because the events from the Roman period, again, is set in train events in our world, which largely involve conflict. And one of the key examples is about Iran and the West. And funnily enough, Dan, I'm writing a book

at the moment called Echoes of Alexander, where I'm looking at the legacy of Alexander the Great today, so who he is, not who he was, in the parts of Alexander's empire. And I'm literally right now writing the chapter about Alexander the Great, how he was remembered in Iran. And actually that's really helped firm up my views about the Roman period. Because if you look at the Achaemenids against the Hellenistic kingdoms, and then the Sassanid periods of Persian history,

the Sassanids against the Romans, the West is the enemy. And we're not helped by the last 200 years of sort of Western imperial expansion, where we've been perceived as bringing Western enlightenment to the Eastern world, which has just firmed up the view in the region that actually the conquest of Alexander the Great there, in terms of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, was a bad thing. And the conflicts, never-ending conflicts, between the Eastern Roman Empire and the Sasanid Persian Empire were again a bad thing. And ultimately you see in Iran today, them viewing the West as a bad thing, I certainly think through the prism of their history. And for Iran today, when they look to the West and they look for the equivalent of either Alexander the Great or the Romans,

they look at the United States. That's a direct parallel in the way that they view their world. And then, if you think that's controversial, I then look at Israel. So if we were to be completely objective, I'm sure we'd agree that one of the most destabilizing events in the Middle East in the last hundred years, for good or bad, but factually, was the creation of the state of Israel, simply because it's an ongoing source of conflict, for good or bad. And if you go all the way back to the way that Hadrian crushed the final sanguineous, messianic Bar Kokhba Jewish revolt in the 130s, he effectively set in place, he'd locked in place what had begun much earlier, the Jewish diaspora. He completely rebranded the name of the province Judea, Resilia, Palestina, completely renamed Jerusalem as Aelia, as in Hadrian,

Capitolinea. He executed many of the Jewish religious community and scholars who'd survived, and there weren't many, by the way, after three Jewish revolts. He banned the teaching of the Torah and the calendar. This is Hadrian, by the way, who we think is one of the most enlightened of the Roman emperors. And he banned anybody surviving of the Jewish faith, and there weren't many, from living in sight of what used to be called Jerusalem. And also there was a massive depopulation event, because the Jewish revolts, especially the last one, were very, very, very sanguineous. So effectively, it locks in place the Jewish diaspora. And then I agree in the book, if you look at the narrative of Zionism in the 19th and 20th centuries, it's effectively trying

to set right what was done wrong there to recreate a Jewish homeland. And that, again, has a massive, massive link thread all the way back to the Roman Empire and Hadrian, one of the most enlightened emperors as we perceive him. I mean, it's really interesting how heavy a lot of these topics are, actually, when you think about it. And that's before you even factor in the influence that empire exerted over the Holy Roman Empire, Napoleon Bonaparte, and of course, the Ottomans in the East and North Africa.

Let's go on to North Africa now, Egypt and points further west. You spent some time there recently looking at all those Roman sites you mentioned. What do you feel the legacies are there? Again, they're geopolitical. So one of the examples I use is Leptis Magna to look at Roman building techniques physically, which we still use today, which is interesting, but in focusing on the big picture geopolitical events is really interesting because it's so relevant to the world in which we live today. And the example I use there is the Arab conquest. So if you go back to the beginning of the 7th century,

you have this massive punch-up between the Byzantine Empire with Heraclius ultimately and the Sunni Persian Empire. They fight each other to a standstill over a 20-odd year period at the beginning of the century. Unbelievable story. It's truly astonishing. You take 10 pods to go into the detail. The key for us here is that they basically fight so hard that

they're both punch drunk. And then they also get hit by a big wave of plague. So they're vulnerable and the vulnerability is to the Arab conquest. So the Arab conquest emerges out of the Arabian Peninsula, surprises everybody, turns out to be incredibly successful. I'm not surprised it is actually having researched it because I really do think that these two mighty empires, the Byzantine Empire and the Sassanid Persian Empire, really did wear each other down to the ground. And I think the people living in the Levant were sick to death of them. They're sick to death of having their cities continually changing hands, etc. And they thought, let's give the new lot a try.

And I think largely a lot of the Byzantine and Sassanid troops and generals joined the Arab conquest. There's a very interesting theory, Dan, that the Arab conquest actually, instead of initially being largely peoples from the Arabian Peninsula, increasingly incorporated people from the Conqueror regions, almost actually like Attila the Hun used the peoples in his wider empire, joining him in a homogenous army. So you can imagine these quite skilled soldiers

from the Byzantine and Sassanid Persian armies joining the Arab conquest as they now look towards North Africa. And the conquest of North Africa is done at lightning speed over a 40-year period from a dead start in Egypt, zooming all along. Mighty cities fall, Alexandria, Leptis Magna, mighty cities fall, Alexandria, Leptis Magna, Carthage, Caesarea, they all fall to the Arab conquest. And one of the most amazing experiences I've had this year, being very fortunate to travel in Roman Algeria, is traveling absolutely to the Saharan fringe and visiting. I was very fortunate and honored to visit the oldest mosque in Algeria on the Saharan fringe. So this is south of the Aris Mountains, you're on the fringe of the desert. fringe. So this is south of the Ares Mountains. You're on the fringe of the desert. And there they have the tomb of the martyr. And when you look into

who this martyr is, and it is his tomb, it's in the middle of the mosque. He's the general who conquered North Africa. And on the way back was killed by Berbers in an ambush. And he's a first generation Arab conquest general, one of the most successful generals in history. Now, imagine this, he would have clearly been speaking Arabic to lead an Arab conquest army, but he may originally have been Byzantine as an officer or Sasanid as an officer. So he may have originally spoken Greek or Persian. And there he is having conquered North Africa and his tombs on the Saharan fringe. Absolutely astonishing. And why were they so successful in conquering North Africa, Dan? They were so successful because basically the gates were thrown open to a lot of them because the peoples there again were fed up with the Byzantine rule. But instead of eviscerating everything below the level of the elites,

they just took over the elite level and managed things for about 100 years as they were. Very, very clever, very shrewd. And therefore, North Africa isn't today part of the European world. It's part of the Islamic world. That is a massive thread back to the Roman Empire. So stepping back, finishing up, what do you think the biggest legacy of Rome is on us? Is it on our imaginations? Is it on our politics and our culture? Or is it these geographical fault lines that you've laid out? Probably language, actually, Dan, thinking about it. It's language, just because such a vast

chunk of today's world, I've only been talking about the Roman Empire, by the way. You earlier on touched on cultural aspects of the Roman Empire, which are visible politically across the world, the American Senate, an obvious example. When I'm leading my tours of Roman London, I go past an all-bar one in Tower Hill, which has got columns based on classic sort of Roman columns, Corinthian columns, you know, in an all-bar one. So it's all around you in that sense. But language for me is a very unifying thing. And a vast chunk of the world today speaks a language based on vulgar Latin. And think about the etymology that we use in the world today, Dan,

in terms of naming every living species, whatever it is, it's in Latin. So crazily, we live in a world which is framed by an empire, which in the West collapsed in AD 476. It's bonkers, isn't it? It's bonkers. framed by an empire which in the west collapsed in AD 476. It's bonkers isn't it? It's bonkers. Simon thank you for that absolute gallop around the empire and just some thinking about some of its legacies really appreciate that. What is the new book called? The new book is called The Legacy of Rome published through the History Press available on all good website platforms and in all good bookshops. Brilliant okay Simon thanks so much for coming on the pod.

Always a pleasure now thank you for having me. you