Dr. Alex Imrie
speaker
219 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Dr. Alex Imrie’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Has that kind of ambitious Praetorian identity rubbed off on him? The scheming bureaucrat. Yeah, well indeed, that pencil pusher is there more than meets the eye to the pencil pusher, perhaps. But I think, yeah, I would tend to agree that he may even have had good intentions towards the imperial government. Certainly he wants to make that argument.
but just he entirely underestimates the situation that he faces immediately militarily in the East, politically with the remaining Severans, and in kind of social class structure about just how acceptable somebody with his background will be wearing the purple.
I mean, it's incredible. For somebody like me, this is just a pot of gold. I mean, if you'd asked me a decade ago when I first started studying these as a postgraduate student, would I expect any filmmaker, let alone somebody like Ridley Scott, devote time to the Severn family, I would say, well, I hope so, but I don't expect it. So I am absolutely psyched. It's brilliant.
I mean, I'm sure on the Twittersphere, there's going to be a bunch of historians really already nitpicking, but I am truly excited.
That's exactly it. I mean, I think about my own route into classics, and while I would love to say I was kind of immersed in classical literature from a very young age, that simply isn't the case.
I mean, I started getting into the ancient past through watching things like Spartacus, and you have no idea how distraught I was to learn that there was no I'm Spartacus moment with Kirk Douglas, but that was the kind of vehicle that got me into the ancient past. And so, yes,
Having seen the trailers alone, there will be inaccuracies, there will be points where the directors have made some very interesting choices, but as a piece of mass media, it's worth its weight in gold to ancient historians like us to draw in people, to learn more, because the actual history behind these characters is just as entertaining, if not more so, I'd suggest.
So Caracalla and Gaeta are the two sons of the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus. Septimius Severus is known commonly as the African Emperor. Certainly, he comes from modern-day Libya and is really the only emperor at that point to have come from that part of the Roman Empire to hold the imperial power. So Severus seizes power in a coup in the year 193, and by then he has his two sons.
They're not even 10 years old at that point. Caracalla's born in 188, Geta's born in 189, so only 11 months separate them age, and they are princes from a very early period.
That's correct, yep. It's a common thing in the sources that we might come on to later to infantilize Geta a little bit just because he's that younger brother. But in actual fact, there is only, as I say, about 11 months separating them. They are remarkably close as brothers.
So listeners, if they've dropped into my previous engagements with history and the ancients, this will probably sound like a little bit of a broken record to them, but... Oh, we still do. We've always got to do it, my man. We've always got to do it. Absolutely. I'm always happy to talk about these sources because there's a lot to say.
We have three main sources that we work with for re-establishing the history of Caracalla and Geta as individuals. Ironically, two of them really don't say a tremendous amount about Geta in particular. We will come on to that sort of distinction maybe later. We have, firstly, the historian Cassius Dio.
Now, Cassius Dio was a senator during the sort of later Antonine era under Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, and served as a senator through the early Severan period as well. He writes about his contemporary era in a very dour way. He's not tremendously fond of any of the Severan rulers, it has to be said, and so
We have a fairly negative character portrait of Caracalla built up very early and very little is said about Geta until about midway through that contemporary account. The other source we have that is near contemporary is the author Herodian. He's probably writing a little bit further into the third century.
We get a little bit more maybe of Geta's personality coming through in that source, but the focus tends to be very much on the mutual animosity that builds between the two brothers. Now, ironically, the best source we have for constructing anything that we might have to consider character portraits of these two comes from the Historia Augusta.
Now, this is a very late 4th century, maybe even early 5th century set of Latin biographies, and the calibre or the quality of this set of works is still a huge matter of academic disagreement. Historically, people thought they were just absolute trash. They were fictionalized accounts that just pulled facts and indeed sources out of the air.
There was a bit of a shift back in recent years to think that these might be kind of clever literary games going on within the set of biographies that comprises the H.A., Whereas now, more recently, people are thinking that the author of the Historia Augusta is really reliant on other late Latin historians, such as Aurelius Victor.
There's been a couple of really good publications about that particular relationship in recent years.
We get very clearly defined character pictures of both men, both boys, through these lives, through these biographies. But whether there is much truth to them is another matter.
So when the two boys are born, so 188 and 189, they're born into an empire which is, with hindsight we can see, is coming to the end of one particular era, the Antonine era. This has been the so-called Golden Age, the Pax Romana, where we've had emperors transition power peacefully and stably for the best part of a century at that point.
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