Dr. David Gwynn
speaker
906 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 21 Dec
Dr. David Gwynn’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.
Appearances
The tetrarchy focused on stabilizing the frontiers. The Sasanian Persian Empire rose in the early third century and spent the next 50 years hammering the Romans to the east. Diocletian and his tetrarchs finally beat the Persians. The Romans had been trying for 60 years. Finally, they won a battle, stabilized the frontier. Constantine fights on that Persian frontier.
He's also fighting with the Gothic tribes who are beyond the Danube. But there's no intention to push significantly beyond the frontiers. This is basically proactive frontier defense. After all, the best way to protect a frontier isn't to wait for people to come to you. It's to try and keep some control beyond your limits.
That's what Constantine was doing, whereas what Julian is doing, launching a full-scale invasion of the Persian Empire, which is the same scale as the Roman Empire. Sasanian Persia ends in Afghanistan, Pakistan. It's a huge empire. This is a risk that Constantine would not have taken. Constantius was a stable frontier manager, never considered a risk like this.
And after the disaster, none of the subsequent emperors could even consider it.
It's very difficult. It's often called the barbarization of the late Roman army, that they're recruiting more peoples who are not actually Roman and therefore can't be trained to Roman standards. Now, of course, the Roman Empire by the fourth century, everybody in it from Britain to Africa to Syria is a Roman citizen. So the Romans have always recruited people who weren't Romans from Italy.
But it is true they are drawing more units entirely from beyond the frontiers, from people who are not therefore going to necessarily fight according to Roman patterns. So why are they fighting for Rome? The Goths, the Huns, partly for money, because the Romans can, of course, pay very well. Also, it gives you prestige.
Particularly for the Germanic tribes, serving in the Roman army, holding a high Roman military rank, is an important source of legitimacy of your own authority. So Alaric, before he sacks Rome, it's very clear he repeatedly demands certain things. He wants money. He wants food for his people. He wants somewhere they can all live.
He wants a military title, Magister Militum, the commander-in-chief. And famously, the man who's opposing Alaric when Alaric first attacks Italy is Stilicho, the Roman general, the man's half-vandal. because he is the son of a Vandal German who served in the Roman army. Stilicho's a Roman. He's completely Roman by upbringing, by identity. But he's half Vandal because the lines really do blur.
Does it mean the Roman army's actually weaker? One of the oddities of tracing the collapse of Roman power in the West and the survival in the East, the Eastern army never succeeds in winning a really major victory. So the great disaster of Adrianople, where the Goths initially destroy a Roman army, kill a Roman emperor. It's an Eastern emperor who died.
The Huns will raid the Eastern empire for several decades and have to be bought off. Whereas the Western army, when it can concentrate on a battlefield, still actually does its job. So Alaric attacks Italy in 401-402 and Stilicho forces him back. Two battles seem to be fought, Verona and Plantia. Stilicho's army is still a very effective military machine.
Likewise, the next Goth to attack Italy, Radagaisus, will get exterminated. And even as late as 451, when the West really is shattering, it's a Roman army commander, Flavius Aetius, with the core of what's left of the Western army, who can ally with the Goths now settled in France and the Franks and face and beat Attila the Hun.
It's not decisive, the Battle of the Catalonian Fields, but the Huns get driven back. So it is true that the Western army is weakening, particularly in its organisation, but In the fall of the West, it's not that the army lost on a battlefield. What actually happened is the resource structure, the supply structure failed. And so the Western Roman army simply dissolves.
More than there had been previously? That's difficult to argue. It's there. It's emphatically always there in Roman society. After all, we are now experiencing in our modern world a very expanding rich-poor gap. The Roman world has a colossal divide between the senators with their enormous wealth and the vast majority of the population who are a couple of bad harvests away from starving to death.
The third century, this is why it's such a period of disruption. Not everywhere across the empire. Some regions were basically untouched, like Britain, like North Africa. But if you are a farmer and everything is unstable, then you are extremely vulnerable. There's no question, therefore, that Diocletian prioritized stabilizing the economic system, ensuring a greater degree of social harmony.
It never totally succeeds. After all, the army want their supplies. They're going to clash with the local aristocracy, who usually are both the tax collectors and the people trying to avoid paying tax. And then the local populations, who of course we almost never hear about in our sources, are trying to get on with their lives. But we don't see colossal social revolutions.
There are some individual major outbreaks of what look like social violence, famously the Begaldi, who are a Gallic revolt, who get put down under the Tetrarchy. But Christianity does actually help here because Christianity does believe in spreading out wealth. It does believe in charity. much more so than the traditional structures did. So on that score you're getting more support.
The monasteries help here because monasteries, although they're often on the fringes of society, they're also there to provide assistance. So you're getting the rise of hospitals, You're actually getting the emergence of a number of key features that will emerge over the next centuries in the fourth century because they're coming under Christian patronage. Likewise, pilgrimage, major centers.
So it's difficult to say there's a major increase in social tensions. What there always are are major social divisions because there is a massive rich-poor imbalance.
So what you always have, and in a sense, it's the theme that's running through all of these different problems, is it's not that the Roman Empire is going to collapse, but there are fracture lines within it that are going to be drastically exposed if the opportunity really does emerge.
And so what we see during the collapse of the West along social lines is most of the local populations, they're loyal to the emperor if the emperor is protecting them. But if the emperor is not protecting them, Why would they be loyal to the empire?
Showing 581–600 of 906 · page 30 of 46
← Previous
Next →