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 he's able to play this game of, I'm Augustus, I have lots of influence, and I can say, I really don't like that piece of legislation. And people would go along with it. But in 23, they said, we're now going to actually officially call you Tribune. So you have these very interesting turning points where things that people saw were happening were officially recognized.
And there are, like I said earlier, there are assassination attempts against him. So if everything is so secure, I wonder whether that's the case. There are no major problems in terms of someone coming forward with an army and challenging him. And you could argue that that was partly because he had these Praetorians there, right?
I mean, who's actually going to do that when there's potentially 3,000 troops on the doorstep? And wherever he goes, there's a whole retinue. Oh, and by the way, there were these big burly Germans. And so by the time you get to Tiberius, what's interesting, again, there is no title emperor. So what's happening is he is already assuming he's given powers.
So by 14, to all intents and purposes, he has the tribunal power. He has a whole series of consuls that he can clock up in his history. He has military commands more than anybody else. So he effectively was emperor even the time of Augustus was dying. It was just that Augustus was alive. So people would have looked at it, I think, differently. And again, there's no magistrate.
There's no position where you can vote for emperor. And it evolves. And what's interesting is the Praetorian cohorts evolved. are, in a sense, the catalyst that makes it more and more like that, because they get to choose this guy in the end. And then Imperator becomes more what we think of. So my take on that, which I discuss in one of my books, is really we have the benefit of hindsight.
We can look back and we can try and draw conclusions and patterns. But at that time, things look very different. They look quite precarious. And what we don't have in the histories, because none of them are really contemporary, are the minutes of meetings. So we don't know what issues are discussed.
I mean, for example, when Augustus becomes Augustus in 27, before that, he was kind of angling to be called Romulus. And there was a feeling, well, no, that sounds a bit too close to a call for comfort. He was recognized as the second founder of the city.
But nobody actually wanted to really give him the full title because that sounded very much like maybe what Julius Caesar was trying to do as first as dictator perpetuo and so on. But the guard becomes important in all of this.
Interestingly enough, there's an inscription that comes from Ostia where there was a fire. And it's a Praetorian who is involved in putting the fire out. Now, you think, hold on, isn't that the job of the Vigilis? Well, you know, actually, this man is in Ostia.
The reason we know about this is that the Ostienses, that the people of Ostia were so grateful, they set up a description and they commemorate this sort of thing. So what that tells you is maybe there was a group of those people working and it would make sense because it's a port, right? And there are supplies coming through and you've got to guard the grain supply and all those things.
things that underpin imperatorial power. But, you know, I think the significance in terms of significant events... What we also don't know, by the way, again, because the historians don't tell us this, is there may have been events that were suppressed but not recorded. And you get hints of things. So, for example, there was actually an attempt to seize the south of Italy...
I discovered this reading by Tacitus a while ago. I'm actually writing a biography of Tiberius right now. And I was reading a German book and there was this mention of an event I'd never heard of before. And it was basically a slave revolt that happened in Italy. And it was a whole series of just chance events.
So these people that were gathered together and they were using their pitchforks and things because they were farm laborers and they were going to cause a revolution. And it was the local, I think the prefect who's in charge of like agricultural surveys and this type of thing, thinks there's something very odd going on.
And the ships coming over from Illyricum into the port of Brindisium, he commandeers those and all of the marines aboard and uses this little army that he's got to go and take on these. And then the message is sent to Rome. And Tiberius immediately sends Praetorians and other people he's got to disposal to deal with this situation, that they defuse it completely.
And I think what's significant about that is that, okay, that's a minor piece, like one paragraph of 300 words or something in Tacitus that comes to us by chance. He chose that because he wanted to illustrate a point. I think his point was to sort of show that he had power and he could see things all over.
I think the other thing it points to me is, much as people tend to think of Tiberius as being deeply unpopular and somewhat incompetent and recluse, living on his island Capri, he could nevertheless deal with things like this. And he dealt with them very quickly. And the force available to him were Praetorians.
Well, and that's where Sergius has a particular role, because he's the person deciding, yes, that can go, no, that one will stay here, and he'll control the visitors that flow to him. I think what's important to put it in context is that Tiberius leaves Rome in 21, and two years later, this Castra Praetoria is built.
And you almost wonder whether there's a situation where Sionis, who's trusted completely to run affairs, can almost make this decision without the need to consult. He just simply needs to, oh, by the way, I've actually arranged for this to happen. And you can almost imagine that Tiberius says, well, you're my right-hand man. I trust your judgment to do this.
And my sense of Tiberius is that he found in Sionis, who was an equestrian, whose father was himself a Praetorian prefect, someone that he recognized as a fellow military man. Significantly, he didn't choose another senator. He chose an equestrian. So this follows very much in Augustus' way of looking at things.
And what's remarkable, again, it's very easy to fall into the trap of watching iClaudius and think that these things all happened very, very shortly. It was 17 years ago. That's a long time. You know, that'd be half a Roman's lifetime in the sort of average sense. So something happened and it must have been, again, it could have been, I see all these people, I have all this power.
Showing 121–140 of 197 · page 7 of 10
← Previous
Next →