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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Appearances
And the seduction of the fact the old man is away, he's going to die. I have to secure my future. And there's an opportunity here for me and my family to improve ourselves. The problem was he was an equestrian, right? And the imperial family sees them as a component of society to be manipulated and used, but not as a place where they're going to find successors.
Oh, grief. Well, there are two sorts. One, there's Tacitus, and then there's Diocasius, and then they give us slightly different things, but in a nutshell. So we have a situation where Sionis is able to eliminate not only Tiberius' enemies, but his own. And this gives him immense power. And of course, what he can do by eliminating threats, he can begin to consolidate his own power in this.
And what's intriguing is that Antonia, who is the mother of Claudius, the wife of Nero Claudius Drusus, With the old grand dame of the family, if you will. She's a lady quite old in years. But amongst all the family who it seems to be is suspected by Tiberius, he trusts her. So she is able to gather this evidence.
And I wonder whether he was able to use some of the speculators who had this intelligence gathering function. Who knows? These are the sort of details that get lost. But somehow or other, information was collected without Sianos knowing. And this is delivered. She actually is able to get to Capri.
We have to imagine that she has to get permission from Sianos because, of course, they've got to lay on a security detail. And what are you going there for, ma'am? Oh, I'm going to visit my nephew or something. And... That happens. She goes and she presents this dossier, we have to assume. And it's, for Tiberius, devastating. I mean, this man, for 17 years, he has trusted.
But the mindset, from what I've been able to piece together, Tiberius, he is a military man who believes in a mission is given to be completed. And you screw up, there's discipline that goes with that. And that's one of the things you read in Suetonius is that he was a disciplinarian, but the troops liked him for that.
And to find one of his own handpicked men to portray him like that, he has to deal with it. And a bit of garland cunning. And I mentioned earlier where they set up this thing. So rather than sending a guard detailer to arrest him there and then, there's an element of humiliation and public spectacle that he makes out of this. He calls the head macro of the urban cohorts, who is another equestrian.
So you can imagine there's this interesting play because you've got these slightly competitive units. The praetorian cohorts are paid a lot more money than all the other units. So you've actually got men in the camp who are paid half of what their praetorians are, and their prestige is less.
And I know we're going off a little bit of a tangent here, but what's very interesting is, we haven't discussed it yet, there's a promotion structure. To be one of these praefecti praetorio, and there were two under Augustus I with Ser Janus' changes, you had to be an equestrian.
And one way to do that was if you were a centurion in the legions and you rose up to be the primi pilus, the number one centurion, that made you an equestrian and you had enough wealth as well. And you could be eligible to become a tribune, for example, of either the vigiles and then you'd move from there to the urban and then you could actually become a tribune. with the Praetorian cohort.
So there's this pecking order as you rose up. And what you've got in terms of macro is you've got a man who hasn't got quite the same prestige as Sejanus, but the relishing of the fact I'm going to bring him down. And again, to go back to why Clodius is brilliantly played in that particular scene. And they read out this long, you know, long have I trusted this man and so on and so on.
He's been my loyal right-hand man. I'm a partner in government and so on and so on. But And then they start reading out these charges and he is arrested and some are only executed. And it's, for Tiberius, a profound moment, I think, of upset because as an individual, I find him endlessly fascinating. I think history has done him very, very badly. As a young man, he is a loyal commander.
He's a field commander going thither and yon. He actually arranges for the standards to become available and the prisoner exchanges and he brings the standards back from Parthia. So that's a big plus. He does service in Spain as a tribune. He fights through Illyrica many times. He goes to Germany.
He loses his brother, his young brother, Nero Claudius Drusus, which I think for him is personally devastating. He's confident, if you like. And worse, the lady that he loves, Vipsania Agrippina, who is a daughter of Marcus Agrippa, he's told to divorce her to marry Julia, who is now the widow of Marcus Agrippa. So these seminal events in his early years, I think, really tear him up.
And this life of service, I think what he wants is somebody he can look at and rely on. So all those years later, when Sir Janus betrays him, I mean, this is something that for 17 years he'd relied on. He could go to Capri knowing that there was someone who was going to look after his interests. And some people say, well, why Capri?
Well, the great thing is actually it's an island and you can get messages and ships and all over the empire from there. So it's not such a dumb position, but by opening himself up to the whims of another man, who begins to understand the extent of his own power, it puts him at great risk. So along comes Antonio with this file, and let's say, it must have been devastating.
Who did away with him, pretty much. Yeah, again, I think you've got a guy that is a military man and understands the pragmatics, and it must have struck him as being silly that they have... Nine cohorts, and most of them are spread around Italy. So getting the watchword out right becomes a problem. Keeping control of expenses and so on.
And maybe their use in other cities, because the significant thing is Augustus travels a lot. And I mentioned Nero Claudius Drusus. He was active in Germany, for example. His brother was active in Lyricum. And what Augustus would do, he'd go to Aquileia, which were closer to those places without necessarily leaving Italy, to get war reports. He was actually getting field reports from his stepsons.
And under Tiberius, that stops. He doesn't travel anywhere. That's the great complaint that people level at him. He's decided after 14 to 21, I'm done with Rome. I want to leave. And he leaves this other guy in charge. So you can see there's pragmatics here. These people don't need to be where the emperor's going because the emperor's not there anymore. He's an island.
And then Sionis can look at this again. He can justify this, right? I'm bringing them to one place. You can keep an eye on them. We're putting them all in one place. So if necessary, we can seal the gates even, you know, things like that. Because to get a legion that might have to deal with them is going to take days, right? So you've got to work on the control elements of this.
Showing 141–160 of 197 · page 8 of 10
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