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
So the second function they can serve is that if there is an insurrection in Italy, he has personal bodyguard that can deal with it. And that hints at the way the Praetorian Guard will be used in future. So I think what that's very interesting is you start to see these peace parts of the Roman army serving different functions and their pay reflects that.
So on the edges, you've got the professional citizen soldiers supplemented by professional non-Romans called the auxiliaries. And then you have the fleets, which are associated with those by and large. And then within Italy, which is supposed to be a non-militarized area. Don't forget, that's what Julius Caesar got into trouble about when he crossed the Rubicon famously with him.
And that causes a civil war. So he was always mindful of the need to actually keep the military units out of sight. But yet people seem to coalesce around the idea it's OK for him to have a bodyguard. And they were always there to help him. And normally what they were doing was guarding his house. All right, so his house on the palatium, hence we get palace. We're here at Fishbourne Roman Palace.
This is the palatium, if you like. Has a central door and it has, I think there's a couple of, I forget, the laurel trees. And there's a couple of the decorations which he's been awarded. But you can imagine there's a contingent of troops probably in the streets as well. And these people over time begin to control who comes in and out of the building.
So now you can see that beyond being a bodyguard, they begin to have this controlling. And I mentioned earlier the salutatio. So he would have had a stream of visitors coming in. There will be people that are friends of the family and obviously have access rights. There will be people who are clients of his. He's the patron.
And effectively, he becomes the patron of the Roman state, if you look at it that way. And there are people who want to appeal to him to push a particular case and have him respond to certain legislation and so forth. And over time, you can see the Praetorian Guard and whoever's in charge of it can have a very powerful role in the day-to-day running of the nation.
Is that fair to say? I think there's a couple of dimensions. So if we see them first and foremost as a personal bodyguard and also, by the way, for the members of the family. And I think what we have to imagine is that when, for example... I guess it would be his adopted son's son, so that would be his adopted nephew, Drusus the Younger.
When he, in AD 14, has to go and deal with the mutiny on the Pannonian River, where the troops are mutinying against paying conditions of all things, he has two cohorts of the Praetorians with him. And up the Rhine, his brother, who's Germanicus Caesar, doesn't. And the reason for that seems to be that because he is the governor of the province, he already has legions, right?
He doesn't actually theoretically lead them. But in subsequent years, when he goes on campaign, then they will assign him praetorian cohorts. So you have to imagine that there's the wider family of the Domus Augusti. There's this family guarding. And they will be fighting groups if necessary. Going back
earlier to where Augustus was Octavian, one of the things that he had arranged was for his sister Octavia to marry Marcus Antonius. And that was a rather unpleasant affair because he basically got into bed with Cleopatra and so he was actually doing a double act. And one of the things to try and placate him, he sends his sister over with two units of Praetorians.
And you can imagine someone saying, right, well, here's your new assignment. You're going to live in Greece. And I wonder how that was met. But it's interesting because people think that moment was also to provoke Antony, who he knew was having this other affair. He basically rejected her. But the point is they could protect her, his sister, a very important person in his life.
So there's that protective element. There's also an element, I think, of intelligence gathering. So these people are in the city, but they're also in the rest of Italy and they can feed G2 back to the Palatium. What's remarkable about all this is that people think of the Roman Empire as being a bit like a modern state with a big bureaucracy.
In fact, what's remarkable is if you look specifically at Augustus, he had like a team of five freedmen. who dealt with correspondence. And he ran the whole thing through this group of people. It was really, really a tiny thing. And the reason he was able to do that, going back to those Legati Augusti, was that everything could be delegated out to the frontiers.
It was a combination of pragmatics that, I mean, you can't email a request for instructions. What he does, he delegates these people his own power, his imperium, to make decisions on the ground. But they have to keep him informed. And they're rotated out every three years. Now, in the case of the Praetorian cohorts, what he has there is a different structure.
So each one of these nine cohorts are headed by a tribune. And every day they're given a watchword personally by him, which begs the question, if there's only three in Rome, how do the others get their watchwords? Are they sending messengers back every day or so? But that's a key thing.
What I'm saying is that Augustus, at this point, after 27, has direct command through these people that he's handpicked. And they're serving like a year. And the other thing to notice is they're equestrians. So they're not a senator or patrician group of people. They're equestrians.
And they become progressively over time the club, if you like, the society club from which officers, administrators will be drawn. And it's significant, for example, Egypt was actually headed by a perfectus, an equestrian officer. who would then report to him.
And the Judea was, and all of the principal guard units in Italy, and we haven't yet covered the, for example, the Vigiles and the Cohortes Urbani, who had other functions. So to set them in context, if you think of the Praetorian cohorts as being the bodyguard and intelligence gathering, well, there's a city that needs functioning too. So one of them, in fact, is a police service.
And in that regard, this is really where the Urbani really play their role. And the Vigiles are a fire service. So it became increasingly obvious that you needed to have them as separate functions. And it was partly, somebody actually wrote in a book recently, it was a bit like the way Hitler set up his state.
So instead of actually having one or two individuals who could be very strong and powerful, who could actually be in opposition to Augustus, he sets up these different heads who are all vying to get his attention and they start competing with each other. So it's an interesting game of deflection, if you will.
Showing 61–80 of 197 · page 4 of 10
← Previous
Next →