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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From what I've read, I don't think so. I think that it involved Julian and Claudian, so we're talking about up to the time of Nero, so that reign of five emperors. Not a lot of change. The big change is really Sejanus, who brings them all together.
And I think it goes once again to the pragmatic mindset of Augustus, is to say that theoretically you're not supposed to have armed troops in Rome, but the precedent had been set when the triumvirs, the Lepidus, Marcus Antonius, and he, they celebrated their achievements. by actually having their troops march in the city. And of course, they set the precedent.
And the great thing about the Republic, or like any Republic, is that once you've done it once, you can say, well, it's been done before. So now you have these Toga-clad men, three cohorts. Sayana brings the remainder into the city. And in addition, they're also sharing the same space with the Vigiles and Urbani. So what you have to imagine that...
Up until Tiberius, these people are very dispersed. And the ratios of people, I saw one estimate where they were saying just by looking at the numbers, you get one praetorian for, let's say, 500 Roman citizens. So they're not very obvious a lot of the time. And they're going to be parading in their field camps or whatever. And the rest are distributed around Italy.
And it's much different when you bring them into a single place. And then they become much more obvious from that point on. And you could argue the optics was partly part of maybe Sionis' game, right? That they'll say, well, you know, the palace is here and the army camp's up there.
But interesting too, the building itself is big enough to occupy a house of about 15,000 troops, but it doesn't have a principia. It doesn't have a headquarters building. And the implication of that is, well, if the headquarters is not there, where else must it be? And the probability is it's actually in the palace, in the palatium.
Where it would be, because the office has to be near the commander-in-chief, right? I mean, the bodyguard has to be able to deal with the crisis right now, so you're relying on runners and horsemen to go back and forth. And to that point, by the way, we didn't mention this, is that not only was the Praetorian cohort an infantry unit, it had cavalry too.
So you see some coins where they talk about decursio, which is a sort of military riding event, and that's where these cavalrymen would have been part of that. So you look at that from the point of view of evolution and change. What we can infer is that Augustus formalized the organization and Tiberius' band and Sir Janus then took it to the next and concentrated it into one place.
And that fundamental change changed the destiny of the guard completely. Because in a sense, and another thing just occurred to me, is that when these people are dispersed, they don't know their strength. But when you bring them into the same building and you go, gee, we're all this many people. And this was interesting. There was a revolt in Illyricum.
the Broice, one of the tribes, and Dizediades with the other, there were two chieftains who were preparing for one of Tiberius' campaigns into Pannonia to deal with Marboduus, who was a big threat, or at least in their eyes he was. He was living in Bohemian Bohemia in that time. So they bring together all of these cohorts of local Illyrican troops, and they realize how many there are.
And the way that the Roman historians write this is they say... We're defending their stuff. Why are we defending ours? There's so many of us and they rebel. So you can imagine there's an angle you could look at by bringing the Praetorians all into one place because most of them have been spread out in other places. They begin to realize we have power.
You're going to challenge it? I am, yes. Go for it. This is why history is interesting. I think there's a misconception in a sense that, and I hinted at it earlier, that the Somehow that there's this idea of emperor, right? Emperor comes from imperator, which simply means commander.
And it was an old idea going back into the Republican days where the citizen soldiers would acclaim their commander for bringing them victory and they would thump the sky and say imperator and they'd say our way and so on. And they would take that title and Imperator would be added after the name of the person. So, in fact, there are coins of Marcus Antonius Imperator.
And you're thinking, but he was an emperor. No, that's a different thing. And, in fact, what was clever in the case of Augustus, if we keep using his name, is from around about the middle 30s BC, he cunningly takes the name Imperator as his first name. That has not been done before. So what he's cheekily doing, he's actually calling himself Commando Julius Caesar as his official name.
That's why when you see inscriptions, it's Imperator, Kaiser Augustus, etc. Because it goes back to when he cheekily took that as his first name. So effectively, he chose it to be his and prevented other people from using it. So I want to make that point. So we think of emperor, they thought of commander in chief. So there's a military overtone in that.
The other aspect of it is, is that really this guy's referred to either as princeps, which is to say like the first, and that can be the first man in Rome as opposed to the Roman Empire, but it also means the first man in the Senate, and that gives him the ability to convene the meetings and speak first and so on. So this idea really of him being unassailable
I think is flawed because it's very clear all the way when you actually look at the way that the activities and responses, they point to a sense of precariousness about it. So what you have to also remember is going back to 23 B.C., not 80, but B.C., where his powers came together were he had already been declared Augustus, which had no any particular significance other than the meaning revered.
But what it hinted at to people was that this man had influence, auctoritas is the latter name, authority. And just by him being there, things could get done. There didn't need to be a necessary power for that basis of activity and action. In 23... The game was up in the sense that the Senate gave him the official title of Tribune of the People, which meant that he could overrule everybody.
The Tribune was a special role to protect the interests of the plebeian members of society. The bulk of the population was plebeians with the senatorial group at the top. And there had been a war centuries before where the plebeians had felt that they were being abused. and they wanted something changed.
And the way of dealing with that was to create these, I think there were seven or nine of them, who had the ability to offer veto power. Veto meaning, I forbid. So if there was a piece of legislation coming through, they could say, veto. And these men actually defended them. The trick was that Augustus wasn't supposed to have that. So what they gave him without the title were the powers.
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