Mary Beard

The problem, though, is, and I think that this is perhaps the other way around,

is that the vast expanse of empire, along with the real difficulties of communication.

Consuls are in office for one year.

They wanted to send a message to what we would call the heartlands of, let's say, Turkey.

and get a reply – I mean, sending a message is one thing, but you need a reply – that would probably have taken half their year of office, right?

So, gradually it becomes clear that this sort of Roman system worked well enough when they were exercising control over Italy or southern France or nearby places,

But just practically, it is jolly hard to run an empire which stretches from Spain to Syria, basically, and not yet Scotland, but certainly to North Africa.

they're trying to run it with the mechanisms of a small city-state.

Now, as a jokey way of putting it, it's kind of like trying to run an empire with the mechanisms of a large university student union is really what we're talking about.

They haven't got that administrative infrastructure and they can't communicate when they need, actually, occasionally to come down with a heavy hand.

they can't act quickly because they don't know what's happening.

And the Romans are not stupid.

They might be nasty, but they're not stupid.

And it's pretty clear that they see

that there are problems here about particularly the temporiness of their office holding, right?

The traditional way would have been to take this consul, got one year in office.

He can bash up Sicily and come back within a year.

You know, he can't bash up Syria and come back within a year.

And so there is a clash between the geographical demands of the empire and the power sharing temporiness

of Roman government institutions.