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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And one of the consequences is that he never had any serious opposition through his reign. There were assassination attempts and there were a couple of challenges, but they were dealt with and it never came to be anything big. And always he had his praetorians, of course. And even inside the palace, there was this group of German bodyguards, which in a sense goes all the way back to Julius Caesar.
And you have to imagine there, it was the foreignness of it. These must have been pretty intimidating Dutch guys, Batavians, who guarded him personally. And there was this idea that the Romans are on the outside and these barbarian people are on the inside.
But the fact that they were intensely loyal to him, it only changed in 9 AD under Varus, where there was a suspicion that, hold on, these are Germans, aren't they? We have to be careful. So he apparently sends them away and later brings them back. But what you end up with is very interesting. So Italy is very much a special case. So you've got Rome with this triad of forces.
You have the Praetorians, you have the Vigiles, and they also have the urban cohorts who have slightly different functions. And then if we fast forward then to 23 AD, where, say, Arnus, we're going to come to him, I'm sure, one of the things that he does is actually to build the first camp and brings them all together, which is a very important moment.
Up to that point, there have been these tribunes. And again, the pragmatic way that Augustus works is, It's very hard for him to have, with all of these legati he's got to control, and thinking about this for a second, every year he's choosing a vast number of people for particular roles, which hints at him as a man-manager.
If you think about it, he has all the legionary legates that he has to pick on an annual – sometimes it might be three years – basis. So there are 28 of those. So he has to know who those people are because he's going to be trusting them. In charge of them are the governors of his province. So there are something like 13 of those, that sort of number.
And they will control the armies within their areas. He will choose all the prefects in charge of all the auxiliary units. He'll choose for Judea, for Egypt, and for other units he has important. It's a vast number of people he's got to keep track of. if you think. So one way he deals with this is, instead of having nine tribunes, is to have two, what he calls praefecti praetorio.
And we actually know their names. One is Austerius Scapula, which British people will know. The person that came to Britain was a relation of his, so that was different, but it's interesting, Austerius Scapula. And Salvius Aper. So we know these, and it's very interesting when you can actually see history with names. It makes it much more personal.
So I think it's from right about 280, these people come, and they sort of step in between the tribunes. And their job is to, I guess, man-manage and control this whole thing. But that gives them interesting power. And when you fast forward, then, like I said, when you get to 23, and by now Tiberius is the emperor from 14, this camp is built.
Sejanus, Lucius Ilius Sejanus, Sejanus to our friends at home, will remember him, Patrick Stewart, in I, Claudius. I mean, this is part of the problem, by the way. That series was so well done that George Baker, for me, is Tiberius and Patrick Stewart is Sejanus. And it's very hard sometimes as a historian to put those artistic impressions aside.
But that show pretty well, I think, showed the chemistry between those two individuals. And what it meant was for 17 years, this is what people forget, it might have been just two or three episodes in I, Claudius, but it was 17 years, that this man, Sejanus, who in fact was a son of a Praetorian prefect, so it was in the family, another equestrian, was picked by Tiberius to run the whole guard.
And that gave him, he must have realized over time, the immense power this gave him. There's a point, we're talking Augustus has died at 14, Tiberius takes over. In 21, he decides to leave Rome and go to Capri. And he leaves in charge, to all intents and purposes, is Sianus. And you can imagine, like I said, we talked about the salutatio and the filtering of messages. That becomes Sionis' job.
So that gives him immense control. And he has armed troops as well. Now, significantly, it's not until about 10 years later when there are allegations that he was involved in the poisoning, the killing of Tiberius' actual son, Drusus the Younger, who we mentioned earlier in the context of the mutiny on the Danube River. A plot is inferred that he's going to try and take over the state.
And significantly, it's the office in charge of the urban cohorts that is picked to try and actually sort of do the ferreting out. And there's the famous scene where Sionis actually, he goes to the Senate House expecting to be given honours and in fact to be recognised as being the successor. And the statement is read out. And then halfway through, it becomes clear that this is an indictment.
It's not actually a praising. It's not a memorialization and commemoration of this guy's achievements. And the senators who are listening to this start to sort of leave the chamber because they know something's up. And Macro, the famous Macro, who is the head of the urban cohorts. is the person who effectively eliminates his man. And in fact, for the family of Sianus, it's a pretty brutal end.
He executed and so were his kids, as it turns out. But that, unfortunately, hints to the fact that now it's too late because there's one man in charge of the Praetorian cohorts. And he wields immense power at that point.
Do we know where they were recruited from? The evidence points to Italy in the first instance. So Etruria, Latio and Umbria. So good quality sort of middle and north Italian troops. And it points to at that point, about 85 percent of the Praetorian soldiers were recruited from Italy. But over time, they'll become much more widely recruited.
By the time we get to later emperors, it's much more popular. spread out. But there seems to be the implication of that is that we need Italians to be personal in the sense. And in a way, there's another angle you could look at it is these men will be deployed most of the time in Italy. So there are guardsmen in Italy defending the homeland and the man in charge.
So that kind of makes some sense there. It begs the question, were these conscious decisions by Augustus? This is what we don't know. Sometimes these things may have just happened by accident. And that's where his troops came from, because all the other nationalities, if you will, were actually feeding the legions at this point. And Italy is basically a non-military area.
But you have young men who are between 15 and 32 who are eligible to enroll with the proper checks and all the rest of it to join the Praetorian Guards. But they're Italians. That's the point.
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