Lindsay Powell
speaker
197 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Apr 2025
Lindsay Powell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
They weren't special troops in that way, but they were people that were handpicked that were presumably willing to put their lives on the line for the commander. And then when you get to, for example, Julius Caesar, who's active in Gaul, he actually chooses a particular group of tribesmen in Spain.
who actually are called Cytrorum, I think is the name that probably refers to the tribe that they come from. And he's particularly impressed with them. And he has a bunch of those people with him, but he also has Batavians as well. So he sees the value in having non-Romans serving as close troops to him. And begs the question, well, why would he do that?
And you could speculate, well, they have, in a sense, no vested interest in threatening him. I mean, he's going to pay them, right? He's going to pay them quite handsomely. What's interesting, later in the campaign, he dismisses the Gauls and keeps the Germans, the Batavians. seeming to trust them more.
And again, it points to the fact that it might have caused and ruffled some feathers amongst the Roman legionaries who might think, well, why are we not special enough that we can be chosen for those roles? I imagine it's a sort of threat mitigation strategy. There are cases in modern history as well as ancient history where one of your own people comes and attacks you.
And in fact, during the campaign with the Viriatus in Lusitania, he was finally killed through the treachery of someone who he thought was a friend and actually an employee of the Romans. So, you know, there is the risk that you have to know who's guarding you.
And Caesar then effectively sets up a tradition of having a proper military guard, which his grandnephew Augustus, as we will call him, adopts and formalizes. So there is this tradition of military commanders having a guard.
And even beyond that, there's an element of, if you're a rich individual, like a Licinius Truncratus, for example, you are rich enough to be able to pay for slaves or mercenaries to guard you. And again, there's an optic side to this. Romans of the upper class, the senatorial class, the patrician class, are particularly aware that you need to have a following of clients.
And you will go about your morning duties, and these clients will attend to you in the morning through an occasion called a salutatio. And the intention is there that they will present themselves as their patron. The relationship is described as cliens patronus. So the patron is the man with the influence and the wealth.
But he relies on his clients to give the optics to people in the city that these are wealthy and they are influential. And I think it's the influence rather than the wealth. So adding a personal bodyguard, in a sense, is another dimension to this following that you have. So not everybody can afford one. So if you've got 300 men who are armed, you've got that thing.
Another dimension to this is that by the time you get to the time of Octavian, so this is after the assassination of Julius Caesar, they pass legislation to prevent people carrying weapons in the city because they know that there's this period between Julius Caesar and when Octavian becomes Augustus, where it's very violent. And the way you do that is to disarm people.
So that has implications for the Praetorian cohorts because, of course, they, by definition, are a bodyguard.
So we're already talking about Ides of March, right? So you go back to 44, and this young nephew, grandnephew of his, is actually on the other side of the Adriatic. He's waiting, basically, for Julius Caesar to show up with his retinue, because the plan is they're going to go and fight a campaign against the Sabatai and other people in the East.
Well, of course, news comes on about that his grandnephew has been assassinated, and they're faced with, what are we going to do? So you fast forward by about six months, where he has now made the decision to actually go to Italy, against his mother's advice, by the way. And he quickly recognizes that the situation is very delicate. And he's barely 19.
He's 18 at the time this happens and going into his 19th year, which is really remarkable. I mean, you think, what did you do when you were 18? Well, this man was already planning the destiny of the world.
You must have had a different experience than I had. But I think the key thing here is that he understands a couple of things. One, the place is dangerous. That Mark Antony, Marcus Antonius, who seems to think that he's the natural heir of Julius Caesar, and then they discover in the will that actually that isn't the case. In fact, Octavius, his grandnephew, is the one who's designated.
So Marcus Antonius puts everything in the way to stop him claiming his inheritance. And what Octavian does, this young 18 going on 19-year-old, is to go and appeal to Julius Caesar's veterans, a lot of whom were in Capua in the south of Rome. And these veterans rally around him, presumably with a chest of money to sort of entice them to come along. And these are effectively his first praetorians.
We have no idea how they're organized. They might have naturally divided themselves into cohorts. So we know that between then... And 31 BC, which is the Battle of Actium, he had about 10,000 of these. And they seem to be serving something like 16 years, which caused a bit of a problem, partly because you've got people who are effectively retired from service.
And some of those are going to die through campaigns, obviously, but some of them are just going to be too old and they will withdraw from service. So he has to bring more people in. So there's a certain rotation of people in that. So by the time you get to 31, he's still got this body of what he's calling Praetorian Guard.
And at the battle itself, he gives those people to Marcus Agrippa, who is in charge of his fleet, and they are spread across the different vessels. So what you've got is a bodyguard actually in active combat. So go back to the earlier point I made about these not having particular skills. I mean, they are trained soldiers, and that's how they use the Battle of Actium, which, of course, he wins.
So second going into the 3rd of September 31, the world changes. And the next thing that happens is there's a lot of those troops. Of course, they're a great number. I think by then he had half a million troops, all of which have to be paid for. And this is the big problem.
Showing 21–40 of 197 · page 2 of 10
← Previous
Next →