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.
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Just to explain as a footnote that Augustus, he's not Augustus yet, he's Octavian at this point, runs very much a deficit campaign. He promises people he'll pay them back. When he's won and he uses his sort of influence and the name of Julius Caesar, which of course is inherited as the guarantee of that.
In the meantime, they've been doing these prescriptions where they've actually bumping off their enemies and taking their houses and their wealth. So they've been paying some of the money back. In contrast to Marcus Antonius, who one is shacked up with Cleopatra, from whom he gets a lot of cash to finance his campaigns.
But in Greece, and Actium is in Greece, off the coast of Epirus, he's actually raiding the Greek cities and stealing the money to pay for his campaign. So you've got two different ways of funding wars. And the big challenge is I've got 500,000 troops and they're not all mine. Some of these are people that I've taken from the other side.
And I think at one point he gets like 19 legions from Marcus Antonius just at Actium who were not engaged in much of the fighting. It was essentially a naval battle. And there had been like a six-month run-up. There was an Actaeon campaign where Marcus Agrippa was just sailing up and down the coast, picking off things, choking off supply lines.
So when these people finally surrender, the first mission that he gives to his right-hand man, Marcus Agrippa, is take these people, demob them, sort out the problem. So then he's able to reduce 60 legions nominally on paper down to some number like 30, which is kind of roughly where it stays. And what you then have is a situation that... fast forwarding into 30, that Octavian captures Egypt.
Now he has money to actually pay off his debts. And by the time you get to 27, he then does this deal with the Senate where he's able to strike an interesting balance. So up to that point, there's effectively one autocrat. whose mission stated under the Triumvirate was to restore the Republic. So effectively, he has done that.
But what he cuts is a deal which effectively gives him control of the provinces on the outer edges of the empire, ones which, I think in Cassius Dio's words, are not pacified but need to be. And then the Senate has its traditional provinces in the center. But cunningly, in the interim, there's a passage, I think, in Cassius Dio where before he sets off from Italy to go to Actium,
He has a meeting where he seems to think, where does the army need to be? And it's almost he's playing a mental game of chess. I mean, this is my supposition to some degree. But this is, I think, the way that Augustus works, is that he's positioning the legions in different places where he will need them.
And ultimately, in 27 BC, the accord is struck where he is able to have a province, which has Illyricum and the Gaul, for example, and other places, where most of the legions are. The Senate basically has one legion, which I think is in Africa. And Egypt is his personal province. The Senate doesn't have anything to do with that. So he has, I think, two legions there.
And there are fleets, of course, around the place. And what's intriguing about all of this, of course, is that his position is quite precarious. There is no magistrate called emperor. It doesn't exist and will not exist for quite a long while. What he is, effectively, is the winner in a long civil war. where he's outsmarted his opponents.
And everybody is basically in fear of what's he going to do next, because he could rule as an autocrat. And he decides that's not the smart thing because his great uncle, Julius Caesar, got assassinated for that very reason. And what he smartly does, he plays this sort of political game opting to divide his spoils with the Senate. And he keeps the bit with the army.
And that's what he does all the way through his reign. And that's what his successors will do for a certain point. But then he manipulates the powers that he has. So gradually over time, he will start accumulating the political powers. So it doesn't matter that he only has part of the empire. He effectively rules it all.
And what's happening with the army is that he professionalizes the army so that the legions, which I think people tend to forget this, even as the civil war was happening, the commanders were still active on the frontiers. And in my book, Augustus at War, when I was researching that, I was quite surprised that there were actions still on the German frontier and still in Pannonia.
Because as far as the enemies of Rome, they're not sitting back. They're actually using this as an opportunity to try and nip at the frontiers. So Octavian has to still negotiate what's happening here.
And gradually what happens over time, and 27 BC seems to be the moment when this comes together, is that he has a command structure of propraetorian legates, who are legati augusti propraetori, as they're called, who are direct reports to him.
They have control of the armies in each one of these provinces, which leads you to think that there is actually, while there is a professionalized army, there's not actually one Roman army. There are armies of the provinces. There's an army of Gaul, there's an army of Germany, there's an army of Syria, and so forth. And the commander is responsible for everything that goes on.
Uniquely, none of those legions are allowed in Italy. The only units allowed are the Praetorian cohorts. And what I find fascinating is at this point is there are something like, I think there are nine cohorts. and only three of them are allowed in Rome. So we were talking earlier about the fact that they couldn't carry weapons, so that instantly creates a problem.
So what you had here was effectively a military unit which is not allowed to wear military uniforms, so they contrive to wear togas. I think they were allowed to wear their military caligae, their boots, and they have to keep their weapons sort of concealed in the toga. But there are assassination attempts against Bino Augustus throughout his reign.
It's quite surprising that a number of them were recorded. And the Praetorians are close, right? So they're available to deal with situations. But the other five or six that remained are actually scattered across Sicily. And what that means is there's two functions. One, he travels quite frequently.
When his two step-sons, Nero Claudius Drusus and Tiberius, are campaigning in the north, he often goes to Aquileia or he goes to Tichinum. And you have to imagine that he's going to have troops there. So my supposition is we know that there was probably a cohort unit based in Aquileia, but there are probably other ones too.
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