Mary Beard

But Rome's ambitions and capabilities are not such that without enormous kind of reconstruction of what it is to govern, they can't do that sort of heavy handed control.

All of this period of Rome, I think,

None of it, from the government of the empire to the politics, none of it quite fits easily into our stereotypes.

Now, in part, that's because our stereotypes aren't correct, but it doesn't.

It's quite hard to see where the rough edges are.

Certainly, if you were to say, now here we are in 100 BCE, would you like to draw me a map with the boundaries of the Roman Empire clearly marked on them?

Well, it'd be a damn stupid question to ask because there are all sorts of different mechanisms of control.

You wouldn't know whether to include the client kings or not.

Rome is there at the centre, but without the kind of administrative control that makes the classic model in our imaginations of an empire feasible.

I think that's probably the case.

One thing that is a good example of that, I suppose, is that you don't regularly, either in the Republic or later, actually, you don't see opposition to the centre either.

brewing up in the more distant territories.

Generals and generals are the same as politicians in Rome.

There's no kind of difference between a military man and a political man.

Generals certainly get a power base,

from conquest and in the provinces of the empire.

But that power base is usually wealth.

Pompey the Great, so-called the Great, in the middle of the first century BCE, he is phenomenally wealthy because of his conquests.

He's not actually using the politics of empire very much for his own political advantage.

And yeah, the metropolis can tear itself to pieces and the tax farmers in Asia are still sending the cash in and nothing much is happening.