The Ancients - Pax Romana

Episode Date: September 4, 2020

Time for a delve into the History Hit ancient history archives! In this podcast Dan Snow sits down with the brilliant Adrian Goldsworthy to ask the big questions surrounding the success of Imperial Rome. Why did the Roman Empire last so long? What were the keys to its success? Why were its soldiers so effective? And so much more. This podcast was initially released on Dan Snow's History Hit, for the publication of Adrian's book 'Pax Romana: War, Peace and Conquest in the Roman World' in 2016. But it has certainly not lost its quality!New Ancients episodes with Tristan and guests will be released every Sunday!

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. I have got another podcast on ancient Rome for you today, and particularly this one is going to be focusing on the Pax Romana and Imperial Rome.

That's right, we are talking big ancient history topic time, because this podcast is going to address some of the huge questions surrounding Imperial Rome. Why did the Roman Empire last so long? What were the keys to its success? Why were its soldiers so effective? And so much more. Now hosting today's podcast is the one, the only, Dan Snow, and his guest is the brilliant Roman historian Adrian Goldsworthy, who has also written extensively about the Pax Romana. This was a brilliant chat and I've no doubt that you are going to absolutely love it. Enjoy. Where shall we even start? I mean, OK, well, let's start. Where does your book start? My book starts actually talking about my own life and the sense that I've grown up in peacetime

because my parents were of the generation, they were sort of a little bit older than average my father had been an apprentice in the merchant navy during the second world war my mother remembered the blitz in Cardiff they talked about the war and I was obviously born after the war and there's a sense that it's been a life of peace and yet every year of my life someone in Britain's armed forces has been killed you know I was born in 69 so that the troubles flare up in Ulster soon after it's it's natural and yet you still consider there is such a difference in terms of the sort of quantity of disturbance and violence between now and either of the world wars and we were a very comfortable generation we've grown up with a lot of the privileges you know better health better life the whole thing. So when people talk about the Pax Romana, which is this famous thing, the achievement of the Roman

Empire that even people who didn't like empire struggle to knock, then you start to think, well, okay, people are now criticizing saying, well, perhaps it wasn't as complete as that. But what do we really mean? When has the world actually been totally at peace? And the answer will sadly be never. But do you get something that's very different in the Roman period that was worth looking at? So it all came from that, really. Yeah, I think you raise a really interesting point there,

which is that people might talk about the Pax Britannia in the 19th century. Britain fought wars every single year in the 19th century. Pax Americana. America has used its armed forces quite a lot in the 20th and early 21st centuries and yet there is something isn't there about hegemonic power that over big chunks of the world can exercise a rule or control

that means there is probably less fighting than there otherwise might have been and I suppose if we start with the Pax Romana when would you say it starts the Pax Romana? It starts very slowly because obviously the Romans conquer an empire. You know, they begin as this little city on the Tiber, and suddenly they own most of the known world. Not that suddenly, because it's over several centuries. So the Romans are conquerors, the Romans are aggressors. They talk quite openly about, you know, Julius Caesar will talk about pacifying Gaul. Areas where the Romans have never been before, but somebody looked the wrong way at his ambassadors, so he sends the legions in and suppresses them by force if they don't submit

to that threat, and that's pacification. And he's quite open as well. He thinks it entirely natural and right for the Gauls to fight for their freedom, but doesn't question his right as a Roman, it's for the good of the Republic, that we should conquer them. So the concept of Roman peace is different from the start. The modern idea is this ideal that somehow peace is the natural state, that countries, nations should live in harmony with each other or at least not actively fighting each other. You go back to the ancient world and the situation is very different, but perhaps it's more of a warning that our own period is actually the unusual one in human history and things we accept as natural as normal are pretty recent creations and fairly precarious as well because again you know I'm British so I've

lived in a very comfortable secure environment all my life and although there have been conflicts with Britain's armed forces nothing has threatened threatened our existence. I mean, the Cold War perhaps very indirectly, but it never really felt that way. Unlike 1940, where there's a threat of invasion, unlike the First World War, back to, you know, we had the 200th anniversary of Waterloo last year. Those major conflicts have occurred. Those threats have been there. They haven't in my lifetime. But if you lived in large parts of the world, you would scarcely describe your experience as a time of peace. So it comes back again to that. We tend to forget in Western democracies how lucky we are and then assume that our life, what we assume is normal, we can just extend to history and the rest of the world. And that's a danger because it means you don't really understand the present day, let alone the past. Right. So let's try and understand the past. And one of the greatest questions really in history,

people are fascinated by it. Why Rome? Why this little city on the Tiber? No superabundance of resources or monopoly on intelligence. Why did Rome, and it took a while, conquer its neighbours and then its further neighbours and then eventually the whole of the Mediterranean basin and most of Western Europe?

The Romans obviously were a very aggressive people. The Roman republican system was designed to encourage its political leaders, were also military leaders. The greatest glory was serving the state by defeating an enemy in battle. And you could win the right for triumph and parade through the centre of Rome. That was the highest honour anybody really could get. So more recently, particularly post-Vietnam, scholars have tended to look and think, well, the Romans, they're just driven to expand. They're just more aggressive

than everyone else. And they have to fight wars. One scholar described it as a biological necessity. Every year you go out and do massive violence to somebody. The problem with that is that we know the Romans won. We know they created an empire. But when you look at the ancient world, everybody is incredibly aggressive. Yes, if we looked at the Etruscans, were they sort of similarly martial valour was highly prized? Absolutely. All the symbols, its armour, its weapons, its heroic stories. There are even those wonderful tomb paintings in Not Far From Rome that show what looked like the Etruscan versions of some of the early Roman legends where they're winning.

So they've got their heroes defeating Romans and Latins and things like that. We don't quite understand it because we haven't got enough of their culture left. Democratic Athens, you know, it's one of the most radical democracies in history, incredibly aggressive, turns a league, you know, defensive league against the Persians into its own empire and then picks on smaller states, utterly ruthless. You know, then you've got to read Thucydides and the debate over what to do with the Mytileneans to see it's this whole session of, well, we can massacre these people

because it'll be for their own good in the long run and for our good, and that's all that matters. So go on then, why Rome then? Why Rome? I think the secret actually comes from, or is hinted at in some of the legends. If you think, the story of Romulus and Renus probably is just a myth, but Romulus gathers the vagrants and outcasts of Rome to form his new city. They steal their wives from the Sabines. Early legends are full of people coming to Rome and becoming Roman, and when the Romans freed a

slave, if his owner was Roman, that slave got Roman citizenship. He had some limits on his rights, but the next generation, fully Roman. By the first century BC, they're openly admitting, well, all of us are descended from slaves somewhere in our ancestry. Nobody else did that. I mean, Athens got far less generous with its citizenship as it became more democratic. The rights of being a voter at Athens were so important that you weren't going to spread them around. Whereas the Romans will come and they defeat somebody in war, very soon they're giving people Latin citizenship, then full Roman citizenship. And your enemies of today help you win the wars of tomorrow. And that capacity to absorb is probably unique in history. You know, anything, you'll eventually have emperors from

Spain, from Africa, from Syria. All of these people are Roman. They've got citizenship, they've got the legal status. St Paul, you know, look at the New Testament. A Jew from Tarsus, as far as we know, didn't even speak Latin. But the family has done something to earn this. He has absolutely different legal rights to everybody else. He is part of that system. So that capacity, not just to win wars, but in a sense to win the peace,

to absorb people and to turn them into Romans who willingly get something out of the system and believe in Rome. And that's something no other empires have done to anything like the same extent. It's more extreme even than, say, the melting pot of America in recent centuries, this capacity to absorb others, but yet keep your identity. So when they conquer someone else in the Italian peninsula, there are obviously rebellions and things like that. But on the whole, you think they're being able to sell these guys an image of Rome they can be part of and involved in and work towards together? Very much so, because the one thing they don't do is intervene in your

day-to-day administration, your day-to-day affairs, because they really can't be bothered and they haven't got the bureaucratic machinery to do it and they're not interested. As long as you toe the line, as long as you turn up when they say, we need so many thousand soldiers to help us in the next war, as long as you don't do anything that's hostile to their interests, they really don't care what you're doing. So it's this odd mixture of bringing them into the system, you become Roman, but if you want to be a voter at Rome, you've got to be physically present. So it's only the rich that can actually bother to do it. But you get the legal privileges. You get, when you go off and fight alongside the Romans in war, you'll get a share of the plunder. You'll get a share of the spoils of victory. And you have that security of belonging, in a sense,

to the biggest gang on the street. There's nobody else who's going to be able to take the Romans down. And it's striking that Hannibal bases his entire strategy, really, on trying to break away Rome's allies. I'll be nasty to you. I'll beat you in battle. I'll show you I'm better. All your allies will leave you because I'm now the strongest. Very few do. Far fewer than you'd expect and far fewer than clearly he expects. They fight on because he's not really offering them very much. And the Romans do. So it's an odd mixture. You've got this aggression, but it's a little bit like the tag from Virgil that the Rome's destiny is to spare the conquered and overcome the proud with war. And it divides the world up into the proud who deserve to be duffed up and the conquered that you've already beaten, so therefore you can be nice to um it's

you know it's a very simplistic view of the world but it's it's the way the romans thought is there a moment after which the roman republic was destined for for greatness in which you can identify okay this is when they leave from being a sort of regional power in central italy to being potentially a continental power it's probably the struggle with Carthage, because that takes them to Sicily in the first place, then it'll take them overseas as well, to Spain, to Macedonia, to Africa. There is a sense it's a little bit like America in the First World War. There's been the potential to be this great superpower, but they haven't flexed their muscles. And suddenly the Romans realise how strong they are. The classic comparison is this. If you look

at Athens, which is by far the most successful, biggest of the Greek cities, its citizen population never numbers more than about 60,000. Very, very generous estimate. Rome, by the time of the conflict with Hannibal, if you include the Allies, has just military manpower of over 700,000. I mean, it's on a scale so much bigger because they've absorbed all these people. Very few of these people are ethnically Roman or Latin even. And then once they can start to expand that and do the same thing further afield with people who are culturally far more different to them, that's really the path. But it's also, it's the time that sees the breakdown of the Roman

Republic as well into civil war. There are lots of strains in trying to do this because they don't like change and they don't adapt terribly well politically. And they don't deal, you know, they send these soldiers off to fight wars in Spain for 10 years and then they don't do anything for them when they come back, even though it's the Senate develops a level of inertia with problems that everybody admits are there. They just don't deal with them because they don't want somebody else to get the credit for it. So it sort of lurches along and then you get the more radical leaders, the demagogues, the Sulla's, the Pompey's, the Caesar's come along. And I guess you get the Pompey's and the Caesar's who, thanks to these great new conquests, are richer than anyone in Roman history has ever been before. So rich that you can actually destabilise the entire

political system. Well you can do. I mean with a lot of them, Caesar in particular, they don't necessarily want to. They've been given the power to do all this. They've made themselves famous, successful. They expect the state to say, well, well done. Aren't you wonderful? And instead, the state says, well, actually, we'd like to put you on trial. It's not the state, but enough of a faction. Again, it's rivalry within the Senate that comes to trump any sense of the national interest. When you think that we're 15th of March today, the Ides of March, Caesar was murdered, Brutus and Cassius go off proclaiming peace, freedom and liberty in Shakespeare's version of pretty much what they said. But it's liberty for the aristocracy to go on screwing the provinces for every penny they can

get, monopolizing senior political office, taking all the glory, all the opportunities. It's not liberty for everybody. They were surprised at the fact that people didn't rally to them because they'd had a better life. Things had started to work again under Caesar, even though he was dictator. And it didn't really bother them that he was dictator because it was no skin off their nose. And they just don't really understand. There's this sense of a small group it's not even the whole senate it's a small group of senate who are at the top very much wanting to stay there and

not letting anybody else get there so it's it's a it's a mixed confused period when the civil wars aren't really fought over ideology it's all about power struggles within the elite and you know you just think if somebody had actually had an ounce of sense, none of this would really be necessary, but it doesn't happen. And then the emperors, the Julio-Claudians, bring a measure of stability. The empire sort of flourishes. But this is the thing I never understand. It flourishes despite what appears to be spectacular dysfunction at the heart of the imperial court,

and people poisoning each other and going mad and plotting and killing Caligula. And yet the provinces and the frontiers in that particular period stay pretty solid. Now, is that because it was a bit lucky and there were no big competitors around at that time? Or that the Romans by that stage had some sort of technological advantage, you know, better steel or something? Or is it just that what happened in court doesn't really matter and the machine rumbles on on the ground on the frontier? It's a bit of everything. You have, obviously, it's a speech that the historian Tacitus made up to give to a general facing rebels on the Rhineland, where he basically said,

okay, there are bad emperors and bad governors, but they aren't there all the time and good ones come along again. If you lived around somebody like Caligula or Nero, then that was a very precarious place to be. But most people would never see the emperor on a coin or a statue. So in the empire, that's the big contrast with someone like Augustus. And the system that emerges probably isn't the one Augustus wanted to create, because Augustus traveled a lot. He spent far more of his life away from Italy and away from Rome than he ever did there. And he visited virtually every province in the empire, most of them several times. He was there, he was available, he listened to local

petitions. Only Hadrian really does this. A few of the others travel a bit, but nothing like the same extent. But bear in mind, it's one of the flukes that this fellow who is great nephew to Julius Caesar, who has made his principal heir and then proclaims that he's been adopted, even though not really legal, and takes on all these older, more experienced people in a civil war, somehow wins. And then in spite of appalling health, you know, he's been thought of as death's door several times, he lives for 44 years after he's become supreme. There aren't many monarchs in history that have a reign that long, and it's centuries before another Roman emperor. You've got to get to the Byzantines

before anybody lasts anything like that sort of time. So by the time he's finished, no one can really remember an alternative. You're used to it. And what you can remember of the alternative is civil war, political violence, confiscations, armies marauding through the provinces, Roman armies destroying towns and cities.

And you don't want that back. So in a sense sense apart from the people immediately around the the emperors in the court and particularly the senate who feel that they have this nostalgic sense we should really be in charge we don't want the emperor's influence by unsuitable people like claudius and his freedmen or his wives or anyone who can influence them so you're not really touched by it the other thing is that it's not really until the later years of Nero and briefly perhaps with Caligula that you get an emperor who is a really bad ruler. Many of the decisions they make, the people they appoint to govern the provinces,

are up to the job. They might not be the most honest around, they might well have got there because they're considered to be loyal rather than capable, but the average is okay. You don't have long spates of military disasters under these emperors. They're not choosing absolute buffoons to go and command the armies. The basic structure of the army of the provinces, the administration goes on, and so much power is devolved that it allows the provinces to just get on with their own business anyway most cities um you know will run their own affairs most tribes will do it in the west they keep doing that every now and again the governor will come along and will answer questions or they can write to the emperor if they've got a petition but they have their own laws most of the taxation is organized locally there's some done by

the imperial officials but only some so worship your own gods yeah exactly you know unless you're doing something that is considered to be hostile to the roman empire then you're not bothered i mean the classic case is um if you look at the christians and they're perceived as atheists they reject all the other gods therefore they threaten our relationship with the gods that makes us so great but there's an exchange of letters between the emperor Trajan and governor of Bithynia a chap called Pliny in the early second century AD and Pliny has had Christians brought before him they've been arrested by one of the cities and he basically adopts this cunning plan of asking them three times whether they're a Christian or not and if they say no I'm not and they revile the

name of Jesus and they make a sacrifice to the emperor they can just go if they don't then't, then his comment is, well, they ought to be killed just for their stubbornness. But when he writes to Trajan, he says, you've done the right thing. That's how you deal with these cases. However, don't go looking for these people. Only try them if they're brought to you by the locals. So if the locals aren't bothered, neither are we. We don't actually consider this to be a subversive group, but what we want are the cities to be happy and the local areas to be content so if they're bothered if they're worried they think this is a problem okay we'll do something about it otherwise yeah so there's it sort of sums up the roman attitude of government that they don't don't go looking for trouble unless it comes to you really they're not trying in the way of modern governments to direct

the the nature of life in the provinces. They pretty much allow people to get on with their own affairs. So you mentioned Trajan there. There are decades of upheaval within the empire, but take Trajan's reign. The empire reached its vast extent. Could you travel from Cumbria to Syria on the roads, enjoying the Pax Romana? Could you buy things on credit? Or how did it work if you're a merchant, if you're a traveller? Cumbria to Syria on the roads, enjoying the Pax Romana. I mean, could you buy things on credit? Or how did it work if you're a merchant, if you're a traveller? The Romans don't really, for trade, develop ideas of corporate law and this sort of thing. But they do arrange systems of banks that allow money transfer

without you physically having to lug all this silver or gold around. Travel is a lot easier than it ever had been before, and you can see that just by the goods that turn up and the people that turn up. You know, when you have, there's the tombstone, you see a castle in the British Museum of Regaena, this woman of the Caccia Valorni, just north of the Thames, whose husband is Barates, a Palmyrene,

from a city out on the Silk Road, and it's all, she's dressed as this sort of, you know, Roman matron, sitting in a chair, even though she's a former slave. All in Latin, apart from the last line at the bottom that's in Aramaic, which says, Regina, the wife of Barates, alas. You know, but this fellow has travelled thousands of miles and is either a soldier or is set up in business,

we're not quite sure, on the northern fringe of the empire. It's amazing. I mean, even today, it would be quite unexpected for someone in that woman's position to marry someone from the deserts of syria even today i mean that's extraordinary it's but it's this is the mixture that you have with the romans and it's i mean you start it's not

just goods which you do see everywhere and you can recognize the same styles of pottery of art hairstyles even people copy the statues of the women in the imperial family and you'll find women in Egypt doing their hair the same way. Jewellery, all of these things, wines, but also ideas. You know, classic cases being religions like Christianity, Mithraism, some of these that move around. But when you think you can find theatres, amphitheatres all over the world, a lot of the big buildings are recognisably the same, whether they're here in Britain or North Africa. And the plays that are being performed,

the mimes in particular, these sort of dances performed to music and song that told mythological stories, the same ones, province after province after province. So you start to wonder, are people actually humming the same tunes upon the time that they're humming out of the Euphrates and that's again it's something that we think of as so modern and with the speed of travel which is still no faster than a ship can

sail or a horse can ride nevertheless that is happening so it is something different that's not to say I mean there are obviously you obviously, you can only, you know, again, read the book of Acts, look at the missionary journeys of Paul and people like that. And he talks about, you know, the perils of storm and bandits and this sort of thing. There was crime. There were natural disasters. There were threats of, you know, Epictetus, the philosopher advised people, well, if you, you know, if you hear this bit of the roads a bit dodgy crime wise, then wait till somebody official comes along and travel along sheltered by their escort.

But the travel doesn't stop. The fact almost that there is this banditry and piracy that pops up now and again is an indication that they could profit the sheer scale of travel, of transport, of trade that's going on. Even to the classic one everyone trots out these days when they analyze the the polar ice caps the pollution levels are higher in the first and second centuries a.d

until the industrial revolution and it's that height of the principate um so you know they can even destroy the planet more quickly than anybody till the modern era it's it's and if you go to the frontier there are you know enemies across that frontier would the people on the frontier have all been sort of roman legionaries or would they have been locals you know working for the for the local elites you know specializing in the perhaps light cavalry in the desert or or you know different kind of slingers and archers recruited locally so sort of with the roman army quote-unquote have looked like quite uh well quite heterodox quite polyglot yes and of course you've got to remember that you know we talk about the Roman army but it's around for an incredibly long period you know um I remember writing a book on

Roman warfare in a series on the history of war and there were about three or four volumes on the second world war I got one to cover a thousand years of Roman military history. It does develop. It does change from the beginning. Almost at any period, at least 50% of a Roman army will be not citizens. There'll be foreigners. There'll be allies. There'll be auxiliaries. And the Romans boast of the fact that if they find an enemy who fights well or has a technology or a tactic that's good, they copy it.

No shame whatsoever. We'll just make more of them and we'll do it back to them on a bigger scale. So, you know, the Gladius sword, the famous short sword of the Roman legionary is the Gladius Hispaniensis, copied from the Spanish. Male armour probably comes from the Gauls. The saddle is copied from perhaps the Gauls or from some of the steppe tribes, we're not quite sure yet. So they take these things on, they recruit lots of people. And it probably is a little bit like the Britain's Indian Army in the 19th century, we would have all these regiments from different groups. But again, their identity changes, you know, a unit might be called originally the Gauls or

the Thracians. But if it gets stationed somewhere for a long time, out in Syria, say, they probably don't bother to recruit people from home and send them over there. So you start recruiting other foreigners who end up merging into this Latin-based system of Roman commands, Roman discipline, Roman orders, Roman routine, living in forts that are like a sort of miniature city, rather than the thatched huts you may well have grown up in. So a lot of Roman ideals come in, and after 25 years, under the Principate, an auxiliary soldier who's honorably discharged becomes a Roman. And sometimes their sons will join the legion, sometimes they'll go back and sort of follow a unit because that's the tradition of the family.

So it's a real mixture. When you look at the frontiers, again, this is a vast, vast area. The fringes of the Roman Empire cover thousands and thousands of miles. Very different terrain, very different cultures you're facing. There's no great rival superpower. The Parthians, later the Persians in the third century AD, are the biggest state you ever face, but they're not the equal to the Romans in terms of resources. And they've got a lot of problems of their own. You know, dynastically, there are constant struggles in the royal family. And what you find is that you get people who've lost out on those various princes and kings and exiled rulers run to Rome and get sheltered there, get put up in a nice villa somewhere, sometimes bringing their attendants who become an auxiliary unit.

Nobody goes the other way. There are no Romans fleeing to Parthia to say, I need sanctuary here but will you help me restore me to fortunes there that just doesn't other than briefly in the civil war period it doesn't happen until Byzantine era much later on so you get a sense of the sheer scale of Rome but there are peculiarities it's not a lot of the the contact over the frontiers is entirely peaceful you've got the people sailing to India Sri Lanka trading in directions. And communities of Romans living in India and communities of Indians living on the Red Sea ports in Egypt, in the Roman province, and probably further afield. You've got contacts with the Garimantes in the deserts of Libya. There's one account of one of

late first century, a Roman official accompanies one of the kings of this this people on a raid that's probably to find slaves down as far as Lake Chad I mean these are huge distances where there are Romans there are trading settlements in Scandinavia although the Romans never formally go there you could find more Roman swords from outside the empire than from inside a lot of them from Denmark and turn up in bogs or graves, this sort of thing. So goods are going everywhere. People are traveling. But there are elements where these are frontiers that are insecure. You've only got to look at Hadrian's Wall and the time, effort, resources put into that. No government's going to spend that money unless there is a real reason for it.

Because Britain has a big garrison in proportion to its size, and a lot of that garrison is concentrated in this small place. So there's clearly a threat, though it's probably not a threat that will conquer the province, but it's a threat of constant raiding of small scale things which will destabilise your territory. I think what's really interesting

about the Romans is how often units get cut off, ambushed, surrounded, massacred. Basically how often the Romans lost, whether it's big battles against Hannibal or just up and down the frontier. And yet they never... Well, it took a long time for Rome to fall.

They didn't mind. They absorbed loss really well, didn't they? And they just came back at it. They take war very personally. It's almost this sense that any war is a fight for survival. The war with Hannibal, you could say, well, it really was. Hannibal probably didn't think that way. He was thinking, well, let's just have a nice negotiated peace. I've showed I'm better than you.

When you think Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire by winning about three big battles and a few sieges, and they said, yep, fair enough, gov, it's a fair cop, you're king. Hannibal inflicted far more serious losses on the smaller state of Rome, and they didn't give in. And he could never understand that. After Cannae, when he'd killed at least 50,000 Romans and Italians in a day, you know, that's more fatalities than the first day of the Somme. He sent an ambassador with the people who were going to negotiate about prisoner exchange, which is the normal thing after a battle. The ambassadors there expecting to think yeah well you know they're going to talk peace now they've got to realize this is not good for them a third of the senate has just died in a day

and yet they romans tell the ambassador that if he isn't off their territory in 24 hours they will he'll lose diplomatic immunity and they'll kill him and no other state would act like that it's just it's it's odd in the ancient world there is something peculiarly roman about this determination it's as i say it's a sense that everything is a life or death struggle so that a war will only end either in your destruction or the enemy's the enemy ceasing to be a threat which might mean you've destroyed them or probably means you've absorbed them and they're now friends and people you can rely on so they keep this mentality until very late when the empire really is crumbling in the 4th and 5th centuries. There's a sense that, in a classic case,

the only province really they lose through a rebellion is the province of Germany between the Rhine and the River Elbe. Arminius in AD 9 rebels, destroys three legions. You've probably got part of the site of the battlefield now at Karl Kreiser in Germany. A governor, three legions are killed in a day, the rest of the garrisons and the civilian settlements in the province are swept away. The Romans launch punitive expeditions for the next few years, beat Arminius but don't really defeat him and he keeps on struggling and they never go back. But a hundred years later the

historian Tacitus talks about their ongoing war with the Germans. And nobody's been trying to prosecute this for generations. But there is this sense, this is a sort of itch somewhere, that eventually the Romans will have to scratch and finish off. So they do have that memory. But they've also got the pragmatism that successive rulers think, well, actually, it's really not worth it. And you do get that sense starts in the early first century AD with Augustus and Tiberius, where they're looking at what's left outside their empire and sort of almost doing an assessment of profit and thinking, well, OK, we could conquer Ireland or we could conquer, occupy all of northern Scotland.

But actually, the money we spend on the garrison is going to be more than anything we'll raise. So let's just sort of make sure they don't do anything we don't like.'s dominate them from a distance let's threaten them but also bribe them let's have diplomatic contact let's make sure they know we're in charge but we don't need to be there physically you know Augustus talks about Parthia as part of his empire because the Parthian king had sent an embassy to submit to him India as part of the empire Britain is part of his empire but they've got nowhere near it but it's that sense that they're not going to mess with us. Therefore, for the Romans, imperium is not a physical thing. Empire, in our sense, it's your power. It's your sort of might in the world. And if people don't do anything to weaken that or do

anything against that, then that's OK. So it's something you had to meet challenges to it but otherwise it never required you to go and physically occupy a place and sort of put up the flag and say right this is now roman okay well let's so let's talk about the end of the pax romana certainly in in the west we're all brought up as as kids in in the old days to be subject um pupils of gibbon and it was because of they all got a bit soft and they all got too luxury-loving and they started squabbling and the Christians made them all pacifists. More recently, I've been reading about the fact they were just defeated on the battlefield.

Why do you think this Pax Romana stretching from northern England right the way up to the walls of Byzantium, why does that come to an end? This is a huge question. This is a monstrous, monstrous question I'm asking you it's a simple answer it was all due to lead water pipes poison everybody now that was one bright idea that came out a few years back

it's actually a very slow process when you think that you know the height of the British Empire is maybe a hundred years two hundred years all told really you can talk about it as a major thing from the sort of middle of the 18th century through to immediately after the second world war augustus and the roman peace last that long and then it's not till 476 so 500 years after augustus has won the civil war

that the last emperor to rule in the western roman empire is deposed it's not much of an empire by then but it's still there byzantine's go on for another thousand years, till the Turks sack Constantinople in, you know, the 1450s. So we are dealing with something that, in terms of its sheer longevity, is completely different. My take on this is that it rots very slowly from the inside. And there are two rather interesting things that, well, one that happens and one that doesn't happen from the early 3rd century AD onwards. The first is from 218 AD, right down to 476 AD. There are only three decades without a civil war. And it becomes very, very easy to become Roman emperor, but extremely difficult to stay Roman emperor. And the enemies you fear are not the Germans or the Persians or anybody from outside. It's another

Roman. Because the outsiders can't really defeat you. Even quite late on, you know, there's never going to be a Persian army turning up on the banks of the Tiber in Rome. But the Romans can march down the Tigris and Euphrates valleys time after time, burn down Ctesiphon, you know, capture the cities of Seleucia, get to the very Persian or Parthian heartland and force them to give in. They just don't have the capacity to do that in return. No German tribe is going to overrun the entire Roman Empire. They just don't have the manpower, the strength, the military ability to do it. The Romans remain bigger than anybody else in the world, right till the late 4th, early 5th centuries. And the world right till the late fourth early fifth centuries

and the combined resources of the two halves the western and eastern empire together should be a match for absolutely anything but you waste your strength fighting yourself all the time and time again there's a very good study of the army in the late fourth fifth century that points out that even in this period when we see the army is in decline, not as efficient as it used to be, not supported by the same infrastructure of bases, of training facilities, pay, promotional, this sort of thing that it had before, it still wins most of the battles that it fights, nearly all. The thing he doesn't say is that most of those battles are in civil war. So it also technically loses most of the battles it fights as well. And even though the losing side will quickly be recruited to the

victors the dislocation to a military system in terms of not just the casualties but the promotion the discipline the sense that you never quite know who's in charge because if there is a rebellion if your general does decide to stand against the emperor you've got to make a quick call well do i follow him and risk getting killed with him? Or do I stand up to him and then risk getting killed by his supporters? Who's going to win? Like the late republic, none of these civil wars are fought about ideology, about different political programs. It's purely about power. So the Rome, Pax Romana, the greatest enemy it faces are the Romans themselves. And it comes to the point where an emperor is far more interested

in staying in power than actually dealing with any problems. So you divide up the command structure, provinces get smaller, authority split between the military and civilian administrations, just to make it difficult for anybody to marshal enough support to stand against you. In the old days, you would have given the entire garrison of Britain, civil authority, supreme military authority to one man, and you trust him to deal with any problems, including major wars. By the late empire, the emperor has to go himself to the place because he won't trust anybody with that much power. So that's an interesting thing. But the striking thing which really tells you about the depth of the Pax Romana is this. In spite of all this chaos, in spite of this system rotting away, there are no independence movements anywhere in the empire. No one rebels saying, right,

they're weak now, I'd like to be a Gaul again, or a Spaniard, or a Syrian. All people want to be is Roman, and they have no sense at all of any identity that's beyond that. You might get a rebellion in Britain where they raise up an an emperor but they want eventually that man to deal with their problems and then be emperor of the roman empire you know compare this to the winds of change sweeping through um the world after the second world war and the different reactions of the various empires but the result being the same in either way where you just had european educated independence movements everywhere that flourished and a strong sense that these empires couldn't last, they would be replaced. It just doesn't happen.

And right the way into the 5th century, even some of the Germans, the Franks, the Visigoths, people like this coming in and creating these kingdoms, they're really trying to get a piece of the action. They want the luxuries and the perks of living in the Roman Empire they just like to be in charge of their little bit of it so that's a measure just of some of its sheer longevity when you think that Britain is one of the the last provinces to be conquered and the Romans are here for 350 years more than that you know that's taking us back to the civil war period here and you know how much do we feel those issues as live today? How much we identify with... People lived a lot less long, so that's generations and generations.

I mean, it's just... They just didn't remember anything else. And Rome has given them a lot. It's given them that culture, that comfort, but it's also that people are used to it. And maybe it hasn't been quite as good, but it's declined so slowly that people haven't necessarily realized just how bad things have got so i mean there's a there's a rather sad story from fifth

century gaul where some travelers are entertained by a local bishop to a roman bath the height of civilization but what this fellow's done is his slaves have gone out to the garden dug a big hole put water in it dropped heated stones in and put a tent over the top as a canopy. And that's their Roman bath. You don't have the technology you used to have, but you want to be desperately civilized and part of this culture because that's, you know, that's that's the best the world has to offer. And even think from the Christian perspective, something like St. Augustine has to write the city of God to sort of reassure Christians. Rome's been sacked, but the world might not be ending straight away.

You know, things can go on because people really struggle to imagine it. You know, with the empire gone, what's left? Now, that's a good question. So what was left? What does the end of the Pax Romana tell us about the Pax Romana? Are you a continuity or change kind of guy? Definitely change. I mean, there is a big problem in that you've only got to look at most archaeological

sites, especially in Britain. Look at the small finds, the little bits of material culture that turned up. Before the Roman period, you'll have a couple of boxes. After the Roman period, a couple of boxes if you're lucky. From the Roman period, you'll have crates of the stuff. Loads of it. Sheer quantity is different. I think it emphasises just how much of an achievement the Pax Romana was because suddenly you're back to a situation where it's little petty kingdoms and little petty I think it emphasises just how much of an achievement the Pax Romana was, because suddenly you're back to a situation where it's little petty kingdoms and little petty chiefs fighting each other, where your enemy is not likely to have come from very far away, but he might well still burn your house down and chop your head off.

We assume that, as I say, the modern idea of peace should be natural, it should just break out where sensible people live together. The experience of the ancient world and a good deal of the modern world is that that's not the case, that you simply get little groups trying to dominate and steal from others, and that, as always with these things, one attack encourages others because you want to get your revenge or you're frightened or you want to make sure that the same thing doesn't happen to you.

The changes are massive. You've only got to say that we have the tiniest, tiniest fraction of 1%, if you don't mind mixing the ways of measuring, of the literature written in the Roman period has survived. It just went. And literacy levels drop immensely. You might find a stylus pen in a site from 5th century, 6th century Britain,

but very few people were actually capable of reading or writing compared to the vast numbers in the Roman period. You're getting goods that you used to have things that have been made thousands of miles away. Everything becomes local. Everything is much more basic. The change is drastic. It is gradual in places, though it can come along with some rather nasty, sharp shocks. It's much slower nearer the Mediterranean, where you're still linked to the Eastern Roman Empire, and where civilisation is rather more deeply entrenched

than it is, say, in Britain anyway. But there is this terrible academic fashion to see the sort of transformation of the Roman Empire into the early medieval world, because we don't see the Dark Ages anymore, because it might upset people. It's a bit like saying somebody's transformed from a living person into a corpse. I mean, this is a very violent, very disturbed process that leaves nearly everybody far worse off than they were before. And particularly in Britain. That's the interesting

thing about the province of Britannia, is it actually is almost the worst case scenario, isn't it? It's the place where roman rule is almost well civilization is almost entirely wiped out well it moves and it's again um migration is a terribly unfashionable thing amongst archaeologists these days the old sort of victorian of view that you've got waves of invaders so you know i can remember there was this marvelous magazine when i was growing up look and learn would have these pictures of sort of saxons and angles storming ashore like um you know gold beach on june the 6th sort of thing. Nowadays they're trying to claim that people sort of just decide to become

German. They adopt an art style and a language it's complete nonsense. It might be that the numbers coming in are very small but they're the numbers of people with weapons with the organisation to dominate a region and you know this is not a voluntary thing. This is all

done by violence, by compulsion, by force. And frankly, you've only got to look at the news today to see the scale of human migration that can just happen. And that wasn't happening a few years ago. You know, we just didn't see this in Europe on that scale. It doesn't happen all the time in the Roman period. You can't explain everything in the Iron Age, the Roman period or post-Roman period as new people arrive, therefore everything changes. And there are probably always plenty of locals who stay there. But groups and particularly political and military elites move around. And so quite large populations. It's a pattern you get from Julius Caesar. It's how he justifies his intervention in Gaul,

this stop migrants coming from Switzerland from coming across the Rhine. He's not making this stuff up. Large scale migrations do happen. People do move around. They just move around in a very different way to how they had in the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire is something closer to the modern sense because it's individuals travelling on business. Or it's also poor devils who've been made slaves

and are just sold off and sent to the other end of the empire. So, I mean, it's not all great. I'm not trying to predict the Romans as this age of wonder, peace, and everybody dancing around happily. A lot of it's grim. But nevertheless, what happens before and after, just to me, emphasizes the scale of that achievement that was far from perfect,

but it was a lot better than anything else that was on offer, because what else was on offer wasn't great. Well, the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, at least from the Greenland ice cap, suggests that the planet breathed the sun out of relief, had a brief period of respite before the 18th century came and gave it a good hammering.

Thank you so much for coming on History. That was fantastic. I hope you'll come on again soon to discuss all things Roman, because everyone's obsessed by it. In the meantime, how can people get your book? What's it called? It's called Pax Romana.

It's out in August, I think the 11th, but I can't quite remember. You can get information on AdrianGoldsworthy.com or on the Orion Books website.