Mary Beard

is putting his living head on the coins, you know that liberation isn't going to be the end result of this.

What's going to be the end result is more or less permanent one-man rule.

If we start with Rome, it is one of the greatest mysteries, actually, of all of history, not just ancient history, of how Julius Caesar's great nephew and adopted son, the person that we know as the Emperor Augustus, but he started out life as Octavius,

how he established one-man rule at Rome permanently and successfully for what was actually hundreds of years.

His system survived for hundreds of years.

Now, people, I think, differ in their explanations of this.

And some people think that Augustus, as he became, was a kind of great mastermind who got a great system in his head and he was going to impose it.

He eventually stamps out the civil war that had been lingering for years after the assassination of Caesar.

He's victorious over Cleopatra and Mark Antony in Egypt, which was the kind of final battle.

campaign of those civil wars.

Some people think that he's got a blueprint and he comes back to Rome and he thinks, right, okay, I am now going to initiate autocracy, right, my way.

And some ancients certainly thought that when they looked back, they couldn't understand how did Augustus manage it?

And they thought, well,

You know, he'd worked it out on the back of many envelopes and he came home ready to put it into practice.

Other people, and I think I suppose I'm one of them, think that it must have been a strange set of kind of improvisations in concentrating power in his own person.

And we don't tend to see the failed bits of the improvisations.

We see the successful bits.

Effectively what he does is,

is he reinterprets the old Republican system.

He doesn't abolish it.