Adrian Goldsworthy
Appearances
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
You're in this neurotic era where you've inherited because of a family connection, but you haven't got the career of the man who's fought his way to power. So you're there, you're surrounded by a court. The emperor has become so much more distant from...
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
the sort of the principate days, the idea of the Augustan, you're first among equals, you mix with senators, you dine with senators, to the very formalized court where you're admitted to the imperial presence and you might kiss the hem of his garment, this ceremony, this distance, but you're not, you're removed from any sort of political class. You only know what people tell you.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
And you can see that back even in the fourth century when the emperors are stronger, how hard it is for an emperor to know what's actually happening anywhere. because they're not told the truth. And so often your senior officials, whether military or civil, have an agenda of their own and are up to their own things and will tell you what they feel they want you to hear.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
So you are very much a figurehead. And Honorius, perhaps particularly, is a man who doesn't campaign in person, doesn't do things in the field, isn't active in
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
Yes, he moves around a bit, but basically his life is court life, and he has very little sense of what the empire is like other than what people tell him and how he's been raised to think, which compared to a Theodosius or someone like that who's fought their way up is a very different situation.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
And it is generally the pattern that the emperors become much more figureheads during this century than they have been before, and the real power is the military man backing them.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
Everybody is frightened. because Honorius does not know who to trust. And if you're one of these senior commanders, you realize, well, maybe I could persuade the Emperor. You know, he doesn't really know much. If I'm convincing, perhaps I'm right. Perhaps, you know, some of these people you feel with Stilicho and some of the others, they genuinely feel they're doing a good job.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
And it's human instinct. We feel if we're working hard and we're going well, as far as we're concerned, it's going well. Everybody should realize that. And we're a bit shocked if they don't because they don't know all the details. So there's that distance made much worse by the court situation and by this constant competition. Essentially, if you're at that high level, you can't trust anybody.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
Every Roman commander has to look at all his colleagues as rivals, all his juniors as potential rivals. The emperor is looking at these people and thinking, well, if they could find somebody else. Honorius has the strength for a while that there isn't an alternative. There isn't an obvious replacement for him. So that gives you a position of strength.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
If these warlords want to remain commanding the army, effectively running the state, there needs to be an emperor as a figurehead that people will accept. You don't want one with such a dodgy claim that a commander elsewhere can easily find somebody just as good. Again, we tend to focus on the big events and the foreign wars, but civil war is something everybody experiences. It's part of life.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
It's natural in a way that we find in our era very, very alien.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
Well, it hasn't gone as bad as things could in the sense that there's always the potential to mess up. He has a long reign by the standards of this period. He's there a long time and surviving that long, even if much of the time you're a puppet.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
is still an achievement and it's very easy to say you know why doesn't somebody like this really sort things out start getting the empire working again but it's in the same way you know we know from our own system most governments most leaders are dealing with the decisions and consequences of those decisions of their predecessors so you know when things are bad yes they can try and blame them and they try and trade credit for the good things but their degree of control to make things happen quickly
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
is very limited. Everything is slower in the ancient world, and you've got a system that has developed over such a long period and got to this stage. With the other factors, I mean, you've got the impact, the ripples caused by the Huns and the other groups. So there are changes in what the wider world situation is. And ultimately, you know, you are emperor, you are imperator.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
Security is your biggest task, really. That's what you're supposed to provide. You are supposed to make Rome strong and make sure that its enemies don't pick on it. So, you know, you are dealing from it's a stack deck in the first place for something like that. There isn't so much they could do.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
However, they also, it's again, one of those things, looking from a distance, we can see stages of decline. But when you're living through it, all of this is normal. There is the traumatic event like the sack of Rome. But actually, you're not thinking in terms of 100 years ago, 200 years ago, what things were like then, because they've never been like that.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
You might have read about them, but you accept what you have as natural, what you've grown up with. And the tendency is with all ancient governments, they're sort of conservative with the small c, is that they don't try and do as much as modern states do. Part of what they're there for is almost to keep things as they are because, well, that's how we got here and that's why things are so good.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
So apart from the occasional reformers, most people actually don't try and change things. So in a sense, he's following in the pattern of most emperors in not doing very much.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
Obviously, Rome... has rarely seen an emperor for a long time. It's an odd thing. It's one of those things that when I was writing about this period, it didn't really occur to me until I went back and looked at Augustus. Augustus spent most of his reign touring around the empire. He spent more time away from Italy than he was there.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
And if he wasn't touring, then an Agrippa or a Tiberius or a Drusus. For a long time, that changes because you have Tiberius who doesn't want to go anywhere and is too old and fed up. And that sort of sets the pattern. And then you get the traveling emperors like Hadrian. who pop up later on, a century or so later.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
But most of them, unless they're fighting a war, which becomes more common from the third century onwards, but it's already happening. Marcus Aurelius, the man who leaves us his meditations, not thought of as a soldier, spends a lot of his reign supervising a campaign, if not leading in person.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
By the third century, that's pretty much what you're doing a lot of your time as an emperor, and this will remain for a long, long period. That means that you move away from Rome because the wars aren't being fought in Rome. So from the third century onwards, really, Rome rarely sees an emperor and it changes the whole political system, which is to do with other changes as well.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
Then you get the sort of the soldier emperors, the Aurelians, the Diocletians, the Constantine, people like this, again, who are on campaign a lot. And that's when you have the movement to imperial capitals. elsewhere. So you have them in Constantinople, you have them in Trier, on the Rhine.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
And the court is always where the emperor is, but there is a tendency to settle down and keep some of it in a sort of semi-permanent base so that people know where to go to find you. at least to start the process of, I need something from the emperor. This is where I go. So Rome has been marginalized for a long time.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
And when Ammianus in the fourth century writes about Constantius visiting Rome, it's very much a novelty. And the emperor who rides in this chariot like a statue and doesn't look to, you know, doesn't acknowledge the crowds, that's it. So Rome has a symbolic importance.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
And it's still the ideal, but in the same way that being a Roman has for centuries had nothing whatsoever to do with any ethnic Italian, let alone Roman components. So there's always been a danger. And they've moved to Milan because it's a little bit more convenient. It's further to the north. You're more likely to be doing things away from Italy, and that's a base.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
And of course, you go back to the third century where with the Gallic Empire, for a while, it was close to the frontier. So it's coming into that same pattern. they seem to reach the conclusion reasonably enough that even Milan becomes a bit vulnerable because you're no longer so secure.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
And obviously the lesson of the Goths and Honorius is that for years on end, a mutinous part of your army, a rebel group of your army, a group of barbarians, however you choose to describe them, can wander around the empire and nobody can stop them. So Milan starts to look a little bit
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
more vulnerable because by now you've changed from the 4th century soldier emperors however whatever their military capacity they generally went on campaign to the honorius pattern where you have somebody to do that for you And you're not expected to campaign, which means you minimize the risks to the emperor of getting killed, but also disgraced.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
He can blame the commander now instead of himself when things go badly wrong, which was how plenty of other emperors were discredited and quickly murdered or overthrown in the past, which means you need somewhere secure for the emperor and the court to be. Ravenna is a lot more secure because of its position. You've got marshes on various sides of it. It's a little bit off the beaten track.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
It's a lot harder to reach. So it gives the emperor a base. And there's also less there, apart from the emperor, worth taking. So there's a lot to steal in Rome. And even to a fair extent, somewhere like Milan, there's more to make it worth plundering. Because again, the practical element These armies that maraud around, they've got to feed themselves.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
And the leader has to keep the loyalty of the men by giving them rewards. So it's again a shift. But of course, making the emperor more difficult to reach means that his job of being emperor becomes that much harder. Because it is, again, off the beaten track, a little bit harder to access. even when you get there, it's then tightly controlled as to whether or not you can get to the emperor.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
So this idea of the emperor that's pretty fundamental to the Roman system and a lot of other ancient monarchies that You have this person to whom you can appeal. You can ask to sort out your problems, to do you favors. You've got to be able to get there. You've got to be able to reach him. Somebody's got to get through.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
So you're again making the state a bit less efficient by moving the emperor to a place of safety. It's a little bit, in the much earlier case, when Tiberius moves to Capri, he's hard to get to, which means that the people who control the route to him and the access to him get even more control.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
So the balance of power between the emperor and the court, or whoever controls the security of the court and access to the court, has shifted very much in favor of that individual, like Sejanus under Tiberius.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
Again, it's very much the same pattern. You have somebody convenient from the imperial family, succeeds pretty young. So again, that encourages the sense that, oh, well, you know, sir, you need to be guided. You need to listen to your wiser ministers. And then that's always the difficulty for any ruler.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
Do you break away from a sense of these guardians, these regents that are pretty much doing everything? But he does survive. He's again the figurehead. There is an emperor. Real power is with other people, with this succession of commanders. Because the emperor doesn't go out. He doesn't travel. Very rarely. It's mostly locals.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
He's mostly there at Ravenna, waiting for people to ask him to do things and presiding over various ceremonies. He's hearing reports, all this sort of thing. But they're not very active in their roles. So They can involve themselves in church matters and state matters and all these things, but it's very limited. And while this is going on, you have the greater pressure caused by the Huns.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
You've got movements within the empire where there are groups you simply cannot control. So all of these same problems, but the emperor's role in this is distant and and less significant. And you have army commanders who are trying to deal with it, but also to protect their own position, to protect against potential rivals. And
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
The resources at your disposal are being eroded, sometimes fairly dramatically when you lose control of provinces, when the vandals are moving into Spain and then subsequently into Africa, when you've got other groups that are simply in areas which means they're not under control, they're not as settled, prosperous as they were, they're not sending you the food, the money, the men you need.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
So the armies, it's very hard to trace who's actually in the Roman armies at this time. And that's why people like the Goths have such power, because ultimately you'd much rather have them as your soldiers than you would destroy them. And this basic problem, but it means that dealing with bigger threats when they occur tends to be extremely difficult.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
She is. And compared to the women of the imperial family we know about earlier, suddenly she seems a much more independent agent. And that's partly because you've actually, through all the civil wars, you've narrowed down who has some claim to any sort of connection to being a member of the imperial family.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
And because you've moved away from the generals making themselves emperors to trying to keep a dynasty going, then whoever belongs to that, so someone as a daughter and then even more as a mother of a potential emperor, becomes far more significant. And in her case...
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
It shows how at least some people could see the politics of this time, not in the Roman barbarian divisions that tend to jump out to us, but you can negotiate with the Goths and talk to them and ask for help from them. You could be a captive at one point, but how willing is all of this? You can appeal to Attila.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
can do all this sort of stuff and it's very much a case where it shows how you've got to get yourself away from the thought that you have a roman state and a roman army that is this big institution at this time that there are hundreds of thousands of soldiers even tens of thousands of soldiers as permanent units that are fairly efficient that ought at least to obey the emperor and
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
They might not, they might follow a different emperor, but they're there. They are there to deal with these threats. That's no longer the case. That structure is not there. The logistics behind it has gone. You don't have the army bases. You don't have the recruitment patterns. You don't have the training. Most of these units, if they exist on paper, do not exist in reality.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
And that's been very clear, which means that anybody with even a reasonable number of armed men at their command becomes a major player. And they're all part of this. But it comes back to this idea that deep down, it's obviously particularly true if you're a member of the imperial family, but even for most Romans, you still believe the only thing is Rome.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
That's the only state that there's going to be. That's the only empire there's going to be. And that whatever means you use to get power within that is perfectly legitimate. So you can talk to what groups we would consider to be barbarians and are thought of as hostile and seek support from them in a way that, again, simply is not imaginable earlier. It's just not the way it works.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
It is, but it's been a long-term thing. I mean, even in the first century, you see that drop-off of recruits from Italy joining the legions. The legions are still Roman citizens, but you tend to join the Praetorian Guard or something a lot safer and better paid.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
And you don't go into the army and you'll be a Roman, but you'll be from Gaul or from North Africa or from Beirut, one of the big colonies or one of these areas. And there is that trend. There is a big difference. If you look at the infrastructure underlying the army.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
So, you know, I'm in South Wales, not far away is Kylian, big fortress, big base, basically a huge garrison town, base of Legio II Augusta, its depot, all of this sort of thing. By the early fourth century, pretty much all of these are abandoned. And forts stay in some areas. When you build new ones, they're much smaller.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
And this is a big theme from the fourth century that you're starting to billet troops in cities rather than in their own bases. Now, in the short term, that doesn't sound like a bad thing. But when you start to think about the practical element of it, if you have a large army and a provincial army of 15,000, 20,000, a quarter or more of it cavalry, that's a lot of horses.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
Those horses need to be stabled somewhere. If you send them to a city, how many cities have got stabling for a thousand horses, let alone more than that? Where do you break the horses? Where do you train the recruits to ride? Where do you train everybody to fight?
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
All of this stuff that's happened within these, what we just see as bits of stone and laid out and sort of impressive ruins, that's gone. Instead, it becomes a case where you can keep that experience for a while. Basically, you're conscripted into a unit and they teach you. But that will tend to wear away as all those people retire or are lost in defeats. It then becomes much easier.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
If you want soldiers quickly, rather than take some peasant who's not too willing, and probably his landlord isn't too willing, to take him and conscript him into the army and then it's much easier to go and find an Alan or a goth or one of the Alamanni or the Franks who's grown up to fight to a degree.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
He doesn't have the discipline and the way of doing things that you used to have, but he's quite good. It's a better starting place than the raw recruit. Again, you can look generation after generation. Emperors will issue new laws saying that these are the dire punishments for anybody resisting conscription, and the punishments for cutting off your thumb rather than be recruited.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
There's long tradition of this, but the fact that they're repeating it suggests that it isn't working. that people simply don't, because there's a great danger. You end up in the army, you may never come back. And you might well end up fighting Romans as often as anybody else.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
But you also, you're not going to a big depot like Chilean when you enlist to be trained, to be equipped, to learn how to be a soldier.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
Instead, you're drifting into what's effectively a war band that has an itinerant existence, isn't settled anywhere, or is the garrison that lives in a few houses in a city, you know, like that group that crops up in the fifth century that's sort of after the empire's gone, that's still wondering where their pay's coming from and this sort of thing. But it's very small.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
It's easy to think of armies just in terms of, well, you've got this weapon, you know how this tactic works, and it'll just happen. But again, as you can see in the modern day, if you cut all the bits that support it, that produce that end result, then you don't get to the end result. It doesn't just happen.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
And with all armies, the danger is you cannot keep them permanently in the highest readiness for war. and ready to fight. So instead, you're having to improvise and keep going. And mostly, you still have the advantage that you can train yours to be a bit better than the enemy. And they're a bit more organized.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
They're at least as good to start off with, because basically, you're recruiting the same sort of people you're fighting. And you've got a slightly more... You've got a better road system. You've got at least some idea of how to supply this army. But it's all harder to do. And it's simply...
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
You will read studies that claim that in the late antiquity, and if you take the Notitia Dignitatum at face value, that the army is still huge and you've got hundreds of thousands of men. The problem is they're just not visible in any of the accounts of any of the campaigns. It's much more improvised.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
It's much more short term, which means that a Stilicho or a Rissoma or any of these can build up quite a good force, an Aetius, another of these people, who again is relying on connections with other groups, with, you know, foreign groups to bring in your soldiers. But it's a bit like Hannibal's army.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
It's a distinct thing that can become very good, can become very efficient, but it doesn't naturally extend to the next generation and the next generation. You've got to keep on rebuilding it from scratch. Whereas the older way was having this bigger system within the empire that supported that and made it happen. So it's not that the soldiers are any less brave.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
It's not that sometimes they're not as efficient. It's just that it's much harder for them to be efficient, much harder for them to stay there and then to keep doing this year after year, decade after decade.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
They do in some respects, but the warlords that follow are less strong than the warlords you'd had before, than a Stilicho, than a Rissoma, than an Aetius, partly because what they're drawing on is less. You've lost Africa. That's gone. The Vandals are there now established. They can plunder Rome on a larger scale than the Goths had done. You've lost most of Spain.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
You've lost control of large parts of Gaul. It's being run by kings who are in theory, part of the empire and like to feel they are, but also are not supplying you with all the money, all the resources you might want. So you're scratching together from a smaller and smaller pile the manpower, the money to pay them, to feed them, to do all of these things.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
But it's this problem that you have an emperor who is dependent upon a figure like Aetius, but also that figure is a threat. And It again becomes, from the emperor's perspective, the empire is quite narrow and it is simply the court they see around them. They hear reports of what's going on elsewhere, but it's about that day-to-day, how am I perceived? How am I obeyed? How safe am I?
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
And you've got to remember as well, one thing, it's hard to do because the sources are so poor, but logic tells us you have all the personality clashes you'd get in an office today, the university department, whatever it might be, let alone in government within the cabinet, where some people just don't like each other and see someone else's success as almost a failure for them, or certainly as diminishing their own status and reputation.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
So in every respect, things are getting weaker. The emperor is in many ways more distant, but the commanders that the emperor requires and relies upon but also fears, because they're effectively the kingmakers. They're the ones that can get rid of you. If they are confident enough they can replace you, they might.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
And you are trying to play one off against another because you don't want one man to have basically had a sword over your head saying, well, you know, obey me or you're gone. But again, that competition is disruptive. It's again, the perspective of the emperor is staying alive, which means staying emperor. That is the priority.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
It isn't about the other things you might feel are good things about governing well, keeping the empire prosperous, but you are so removed from that and the empire is so small. And there is so little you can really do by this time because your warlords, yes, you can repulse Attila in a confused battle.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
You can hold things together, but it's a question of patching up the cracks and then moving to the next one. and then hoping that the first crack hasn't broken out again before you've had time to come back and deal with that again. You are fighting fires at every stage. So they are struggling to do their job. They have less with which to do it.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
And they're weaker as is this more removed, more distant, more symbolic emperor.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
Yeah, in many respects. I mean, you can see, even if it's very limited success, Honorius, Valentini III, they are successful because they live a long time and they stay in power a long time. Some of their favorites, their generals rise and fall, and that allows them to continue. But when you have The system sort of running wild where nobody's lasting a long time. The Embrace aren't lasting.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
The Favorites aren't lasting. People like Rissom are pulling the strings, but they're not achieving too much. Their main aim does seem far more about staying in control and power. You can see more of a serious effort to do things in a Mastilico or some of these earlier leaders, Aetius even.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
Whereas it's more about, again, it's a little bit like the emperor thinking, well, the only way for me to stay alive is to have power. And to do that, I must dispose of, or at the very least, weaken any potential rival and I must control the emperor. And once you, again, with all of these things, it's the same way when you get earlier patterns of the third century crisis, the
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
rebellions, usurpations, lots of people declaring emperors. It tends to encourage more very quickly. The longer someone like Honorius or Valentinian lasted, the harder it is to say, well, I'd be a better alternative or this favorite of mine, because that's generally what it is. It's the strong man. As you say, Majorian is a little bit of an exception where he actually does things on his own.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
But in the main, these are puppets and they're very short-lived puppets. because the all the resources you've got the basis of power is smaller it's much easier for the balance to change between one man being having enough to be dominant and then somebody else being able to challenge him so there's this rapid succession because it's again it's like over correcting
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
And obviously there's, you know, there's an element of chance in all of this in that things go worse. They miscalculate about levels of trust, but also enough people think there's an opportunity. It's much harder. The longer somebody lives, in a sense, they become more secure because you've got to get a stronger reason for disposing of them, getting rid of them.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
Once it's happened once, once there's been that, it's much easier to have another revolution, another usurpation, get rid of this, because on the one hand, they're a lot less secure. They're still trying to prove themselves, which means it's much easier to fail or be discredited. The longer you are, you can cope with failure. So Honorius can cope with the sack of Rome. He's not
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
fully discredited and destroyed by this. He's still around for a decade or more afterwards. But if you're new, if you've got a more questionable claim to power and something goes badly wrong, then it's much easier either for you to try and blame the army commander you've trusted, which might mean he might turn against you, or for him to blame you and get rid of you. So you have Rissomar
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
in the background pulling the strings over quite a long period. And... That's an element where you've got somebody who's got enough power to make and break emperors, but also the fact that they can do that shows how weak you are.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
And again, it's remind ourselves that even compared to where we started with Honorius, what he controlled as Western emperor, at least in theory, now the empire has shrunk so much by this time. Britain has gone early on. In theory, you're saying they're still appealing and all this sort of thing, and it's still...
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
Romano-British, it's still trying to live as a Roman, but it's not something from which you're going to get any help. They might want it from you, but they're probably not going to get that either. Most of Gaul is not under your control. All the Rhineland provinces, all that area, that's gone. Spain, largely gone. North Africa, largely gone. you can only be sure of Italy.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
And to some extent, there's often treaties, there's often the kings that have set themselves up are at least paying lip service to you to some extent. But in terms of getting money, resources, manpower from any of these, so everything is getting closer to home. And because it's smaller, again, that magnifies the impact of any failure. And to some extent, it's the reverse.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
And if you have a success, it seems like a really big success. But Again, the problem is there's going to be another problem very soon, and you can't keep doing that. So everything's combining to make this much, much less stable. And it's a reflection of that wider weakness, that wider collapse. But also, it's encouraged by that.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
Because again, there have been so many failures, and there's just less to go around. So the overall strength of what you control... By this stage, you are not much more in practical terms than one of these Gothic or Vandal kings in terms of the area you really control and the sort of money you have. You've got a more sophisticated system to deal with it. You've got a longer tradition.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
You've got that prestige. You know, you are still the Caesar, the Augustus. You have all of that grandeur and you've got this association with the bigger, still stronger Eastern Empire, but it's much less close. You can't really rely upon them.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
And also your officials, as well as the emperor yourself, you don't want too much interference from them because they've probably got other ideas of who should be in charge. So you can't even ask for help and expect to get it on your terms from them.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
Well, the clearest proof of this is that when Romulus Augustulus, the last emperor, is deposed, who has been the figurehead of all figureheads, he's never done anything, he's just a boy, he's not even worth killing. You know, you can send him off to be a priest and to live that life because he just does not matter. And that shows early on you had to kill your Roman opponents.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
That's the way it works. That's why these civil wars have been so brutal, because there wasn't any negotiation or dealing with this. You would be dead, either by your own hand or they would sort it out for you. You've really become such a local power by this time. The decisions that are being made, the struggles that are going on, you really are not in full control, even in all of Italy.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
It's become very much focused in the north and more widely, why should anybody listen to you? because you have no power to back this up. And it's that cumulative... Decline, there's really no other word for it. You've shrunk. The Western Empire has just got smaller and smaller, less and less of it under control, which means that you're getting fewer and fewer resources.
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The Last Roman Emperors
Many of these areas that you've lost were really big deals in terms of the money you got from them, the food you got from them. North Africa in particular, that's perhaps the biggest single blow of all. losing that area to the Vandals. And that's why they make repeated attempts over the next century or so to get it back, but can't until Justinian. And even then, it's precarious.
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The Last Roman Emperors
Because you can only be an empire if you've got the money, the might to enforce it, ultimately. Empire imperium, it means power. That's what it's all about. And that has just gone. It's shrunk to nothing. You really are a local figure. And You have to negotiate with these, inverted commas, barbarian rulers that have set themselves up in various parts of your empire. You can't go and destroy them.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
You do not have the capacity to do that. And yet there is no evidence for there having been vast hordes of hairy German warriors sweeping in and taking over and expelling the population. What you've got is a warrior elite and a warlord who's taken control.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
And when, again, you can see a sign of it jumping on into the next century, but when Justinian does send the likes of Belisarius round to reconquer North Africa, Sicily, and Italy, he does it with very small numbers of soldiers because there aren't big armies there. That's never been the case.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
It's just a reflection of, again, it's sort of foreshadowing the Middle Ages in terms of the scale of warfare, the scale of what was a big army, what you need to control, how power works. That transition has been occurring in the course from where we start 400-ish right the way through to the point where, again, to the people experiencing it, it may not be so obvious. A lot of this is natural.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
It is gradual with these sudden steps down when something really bad happens, but it doesn't work anymore.
The Ancients
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He is in many ways. So again, it's gradual. And to characterize them as barbarian, what does that really mean? in this period in that, yes, you have these men who set themselves up as kings and have already done so and are various types of Goths and the like.
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The Last Roman Emperors
But for such a long period, you have had senior leaders in the Roman army who are described as an Alan or a Frank or a Goth or whatever it might be. They don't seem to act any differently from anybody else who has a senior command role in the Roman army. And in many cases, it's a clumsy term, but they're Romanized. They're part of the system. They are not this very alien foreigner standing there.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
They are part of it. They're part of how it works. I think the final decision is really what is the point of these puppets rather than They've been changed, particularly in that rapid period. We've talked about in this last phase where you get quick succession, lots of emperors, compared to earlier where they've lasted a long time and there's been that level of stability.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
They've actually shown that they can be hard to control. And, you know, that's why you get, end up with the end with you're putting a nephew, a relative as emperor, because you think, well, okay, he's young. I can definitely control him.
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The Last Roman Emperors
The warlords have been making most of the key decisions and they're the only ones that can keep a level of, of defense of military capability that you need because you are threatened on all sides. And just to assert yourself and to make some, you know, the point of anybody listening to you at all. So the emperor has become, wholly a figurehead. You know, there is really nothing they do.
The Ancients
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Their personality hasn't mattered beyond do they turn against a general and try and get rid of him or provoke somebody else? Do they favor another one? This sort of thing. Well, that's all they're doing. Anything practical is being done by the man in charge of the army, and the only basis of his power is keeping control of that army.
The Ancients
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So there is a clear logic, the point of view of Odoacer, to just do it. Let's put the two jobs together and let's do this.
The Ancients
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anything like this comes into the what-ifs of history. If people had acted differently, if they'd got their act together a generation or so earlier, they could have sorted it out. If Valens had made a few better decisions and been a bit less hasty at Adrian Opel, would all sorts of problems have been avoided in the future? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe there would have been different problems. But
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
Human history is made up by human beings making decisions, and often they get things wrong or they do things that prove to be catastrophic. That's there. You can't remove that element. So simply to put it into terms of long-term trends against this, to see it as, well, this is a system that could flourish in the economic system of a Mediterranean-based agricultural economy, that sort of thing.
The Ancients
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There's truth in that, but it doesn't answer everything. These are people living their lives and making decisions. A lot has changed. And you can also make the other point that for many of the people living in the Western Empire, even the bit that was still acknowledged itself as part of the Western Empire, the deposition of Romulus Augustulus made no difference at all to their daily lives.
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There's still a warlord in charge who's now calling himself a king, but he's where you go if you've got a problem, if you need protection, if you need help, this sort of thing. The laws are the same. There's not this sudden, oh, let's do everything, you know, the good old German way of Even to the point where, think about it in that basic level, you get the Romance languages developing.
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You're not changing culturally anything, not in a deliberate way. Most of it changes because the system that the empire was able to support of movement of people, of goods, of ideas over such long distances, that goes. That's not there. That's declined for a long time. The big difference is that
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
Particularly in the north, if you look at a site from height of the empire, the amount of small finds are massive. There's just lots of it. And most of it, a lot of it has been made hundreds, even thousands of miles away from where it's found. Afterwards, there's much less of everything.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
There's much less stuff, and it's locally made, apart from the very occasional high-prestige object, which you would have had in the pre-Roman Iron Age as well, that's come a long way and is maybe part of diplomatic exchange as well. But that's all gone. There is a difference. The closer you are to the Mediterranean, the better things are, the less things change.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
And for a lot of these communities, especially from the archaeological viewpoint, you can look at bits of southern Spain, Portugal, Italy, Very little difference, which again shows how unimportant the empire had become by this time. So I think there's a lot of difference in the change. And there's a lot of, because it's so gradual,
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
The big thing is there's no alternative waiting to step into the place of the Roman Empire that people want. And everybody's still desperate to be Roman and to live that nice, comfortable Roman lifestyle, including the Vandal Kings, the Visigothic Kings, the others. They are trying to run a little Roman Empire as their kingdom. And they'd like to be rich and they'd like to have the luxuries.
The Ancients
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It's just that they can't do it. It doesn't work on that scale. And so much of the wider system has gone. So you cannot look at this from a long point of view and not see a decline and not see a change. At what point it became inevitable is difficult to say because we don't know what could have been done, what might have happened.
The Ancients
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And there's an element where the later you get, obviously, the harder it is.
The Ancients
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But even then, the fact that Honorius Valentinian just lived that long, for whatever reason, if they'd caught the fever and died much younger, in the same way if Augustus had actually died on all those occasions when he was despaired of, people thought he was going to early on in his reign, would you have got the Principate as it was or anything resembling it or something completely different?
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that the role of the individual still matters at each point. So it's a combination somewhere in between all of this in this complex mixes the truth. But I don't think, you know, you could look and say, well, Augustus never really sorted out succession of emperors. Therefore that was going to be a problem. It would lead to civil war. That's why centuries later, the empire goes.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
Now that's a big step between those two points. There are problems. There are things they maybe could have done better, but on the whole, The success of Rome was something that nearly everybody seems to want to continue. It just...
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
doesn't happen but again it would be marvelous if we had the the data that meant we could measure the impact of successive plagues you know from the antonine one through to the third century ones what that's done just what that means whereas you know you can look at the black death in britain or europe in the 14th century and get a sense of the impact and consequences of it there are so many other factors in the same way when people will start to say oh you know the climate's changing all this sort of thing things are less favorable for the agricultural system well maybe but
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
We don't know. We don't have enough data yet. We probably never will to measure most. So a lot is going on. I think we should come back. We should flip the question and say, isn't it remarkable that the Roman Empire lasts as long as it does? And it's as big as it is for so long because other people haven't done this.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
So in the same way, Achaemenid Persia, take that, you know, it's destroyed by Alexander the Great, but it isn't half incredibly successful for a very long time. So you can't, in the same way, if we live a healthy life and do and achieve things, we will eventually die. So you come to all these questions whereby nothing is going to be forever. but it could have been different.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
I mean, there's a sense that's the sort of the fluffy view of the early medieval period rather than the Dark Ages, where, yes, it's just transformation. Okay, yeah, there's some violent bits along the way. But the problem is, again, you look at what had been before and what's there, standards of literacy, prosperity, even to the extent, I mean, look at someone like Vindolanda.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
From the writing tablets and from the archaeology, you can see that even at the end of the first century, on the very fringe of the empire, all the goods, all the ideas of that imperial economy are available to you there.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
That your ordinary soldier owns several pairs of shoes and has a pair to go to the bathhouse, has his boots, has his indoor shoes, and can afford when he loses one to throw the other one away, which we tend to find, and get some new ones.
The Ancients
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A lot of people in the Middle Ages are going to be wearing their one pair of shoes until they fall apart and then getting another pair because that's all they've got. There are big, big differences. You could say somebody at the end of their life transforms from a living person into a corpse.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
There is still something remarkable about that achievement, for good or for ill, of the Roman Empire, the Roman government, empire on that scale for so long. And the lifestyle that it created, you know, there's a fair bit of truth in Gibbon looking at the, you know, from the perspective of the later 18th century and talking about, you know, the best time to be alive is under the Antonines.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
It's exaggerated, but if you look at the road systems, you know, that are not yet created in most European countries, people are still using the Roman roads. Nothing like that. There's so much about the Roman, even, I mean, a favorite one I would say is the bathhouse. where the Romans have devoted all that technology.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
It's one of the most complicated things they design just to making life more pleasant. And this is something that goes. You see, it's the bathhouse that when villas are occupied in the post-Roman period in Britain, it's the bathhouse that first falls into disrepair and nobody can put it back again.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
You can keep an aqueduct going, plugging it sort of to keep it serviceable, but you can't build a new one. So much of that knowledge, that learning, again, it comes back to this literacy, this ability to pass things on, has gone. That it is a pretty drastic change.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
And this is, you know, it's hard to see this as a terribly good one, because it will be the best part of a millennium or more before things start to pick up. And Again, the whole idea of the Renaissance of rediscovering this rebirth, going back to this lost knowledge. Now, it hasn't been lost everywhere in the world, but nevertheless, society's taken a very different route. So...
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
I still can't help thinking of it as a decline. I still can't help thinking of it as a bad thing. I know I'm a bit of a pro-Roman nut, but nevertheless, there is change. There is big, big change. And characterizing that as transformation does rather ignore the scale of it, the extent of it, and the violence of a lot of it.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
And the old Roman peace, however much you may say it's not perfect, compared to what follows, to the risk of being raided and having a house burned down by your neighbor, things have changed a lot.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
Well, the big deal, obviously, is that there are two empires, although, again, there's a common system of law, to most respects. And if an emperor issues a ruling on a law in one half of the empire, it's normally respected and held to be valid in the other. So they're separate and they're not separate. They're culturally much the same. So there are differences.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
The big deal that has happened is that the West is crumbling in a way that is not happening to the East. So the emperors in Constantinople are still that much more secure. They haven't lost a lot of territory. Whereas in the West, you're getting to the point where
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
There's this wonderful document called the Notitia Dignitatum that lists all the offices in the Roman Empire around about this time, around about 400-ish, that sort of era. And it lists all these commanders of units that are supposed to exist, and some of them are tied to frontier defense. Some of them are the mobile field armies that scholars like to talk about, but they're not very mobile.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
They're not in the field, and they're often not armies at all, as the later says. And that's the problem. What should be there doesn't correspond with what's really there. So there's a weakening of central authority. What the emperor can do, the power he has is much, much less than it had been even 50 years before, let alone centuries before. It's a very different environment.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
It's much more complicated because whereas in the East, to a great extent, you're dealing with one big neighbor, the Sasanian Persians. In the West, you've got lots of different groups of broadly Germanic peoples that are, some of them within the empire, some of them fighting for you, but they might change their minds. Different leaders, different warlords appearing.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
So it's a very dynamic situation. And the ability of the emperor in Italy to say, you should do this and make this happen is much, much less than it has been. So everything is a different setup, but there is still this sense that everybody wants the empire to go on and everybody wants the empire to work.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
So when you have early on in the fifth century, you know, the tradition is that those in Britain are being told sort of get on with it themselves, deal with their own problems. It isn't that sense that, oh, well, we're really abandoning the province in a formal sense. It's just we can't get around to you at the moment. So, you know, you should be able to.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
And in the past, there was an element where provinces could run a lot of their day-to-day affairs. There's been, in one sense, a move towards centralization of the bureaucracy and the government over the last century or two. But at the same time, there's a devolution as well where local powers are appearing, where local warlords, army commanders, whatever, are more significant.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
So it's an odd mixture of it's much... In some ways, you have, in theory, more direct power, but actually in practice, you have a lot less. So it's a precarious thing. But we know that by 476, the last emperor in the West is going to go. Nobody at the time knows that. And if you think... It's taking us back to, well, beginning of Charles I's reign, 400 years or so.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
There has always been an emperor. There's always been a Rome. All of these areas, nothing here is recently conquered. Even if you're in Britain, you've been Roman for 350 years. You cannot imagine anything else. And there are no independence movements like the winds of change that swept through the European empires of the 20th century.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
Post-Second World War, we've got VE Day today when we're recording. You think of that incredibly rapid change. that occurred where nationalism was so strong, countries wanted to govern themselves. That just isn't there because nobody can really remember an identity that is not Roman in some respect.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
You might have kept lots of your traditions, some of your languages, some of your cults, this sort of thing, but it's so vague and distant. And the only good life is Roman life. That's civilization. That's prosperity. That's what you expect. And you don't really have an alternative that's waiting there.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
As with a lot of these people, it's actually hard to get to the person. You know, they're a title, they've got these ranks, events happen. But you're dealing with an era where you don't have good narrative sources at all. You know, you've had that wonderful blip in the fourth century where Ammianus Marcellinus comes along. And for a few couple of decades, you've got detail.
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And you get some sense, prejudice sense, but nevertheless, of what just Julian was like. what Valens, Valentini, what these people were like, how they acted, how they behaved. It's much, much harder to say with those later. And we're dealing with very prejudiced sources of people who liked them or didn't like them. And of course, these disasters.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
The sack of Rome in 410, on the one hand, you can put it down as something minor. It's just a group of your own army that is in a bad mood. Yes, there are a load of goths, primarily, or at least they're identified as goths. What they actually were and how many other people have accumulated along the way and joined this group is anybody's guess.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
a version of traditional tribal gothic structure i mean it's changed because it's in a different environment but there's at least some sense of that identity so you're dealing with that sort of danger now you know it's easy to play this down and say oh well you know not much of rome was actually affected rome's a big big city there's still half a million people here at least maybe more
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
plundering for a day or two. There's not a lot that you can actually do. It focuses on particular areas. The city's still there. Life resumes fairly quickly. That's true up to a point, but the big thing is the shock that this could happen. It's happened in the past when a Roman army in what is clearly a Roman civil war has turned up.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
And they've done things way back in 68, 69, the year of four emperors after Nero's death. And that's very alien. That's rather traumatic. But this is someone who does seem foreign, does seem utterly alien. And the emperor cannot stop them and cannot do anything about them. And yet knows the leader in question. He's supposed to be one of his own men and yet cannot control him.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
So you're very much with Honorius. You've got one of these people who has the prominence, has the power, has the titles, but actually can't do very much and can't control in a way. So it's probably worth thinking of him more in those terms than trying to pin him down and blame him. There are certainly very bad decisions made at this, as is so often the case throughout human history.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
These moments of crisis, people react in what appears to be the worst possible way, which is very easy for us observing with hindsight to see. But it's essentially a misjudgment. And there is also... It's very hard if you're the emperor to take the Goths or a group like this seriously, deep down, because you know there's not that many of them. You know they've been your soldiers before.
The Ancients
The Last Roman Emperors
They probably will be again, or they might be somebody else's. They're not trying to overthrow you, kill you, and take your throne. And that, for such a long time, is the deep fear of every emperor, because that's how most of them die, is at the hands of other Romans. So...