Matilda Brown
speaker
55 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Matilda Brown’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, it's wonderful to be back, Tristan. Thank you so much for having us both. And of course, I know you from my uni undergrad days. This really all is coming full circle. I've had the pleasure of having Alex as a colleague now for years, in addition to being taught what I know on the third century by him. So You know, I'd like to push that compliment back.
Any excellence I have is purely due to him.
Yeah, hopefully we'll manage to stay cool. We've got this.
Certainly. I mean, I think that Macrinus is sort of the meeting point of my and Alex's work. Alex is really a Caracolin expert and I have, you know, done my work really beginning with the later Severan Empresses. And so we kind of meet in this middle ground. And for me, at least, this was sort of the last person I would expect to see dramatized on the silver screen.
But, you know, there's so much to do with him because we don't really know that much about him except for what we'll tell you today. So.
Well, sure. I think that one of the really critical things that we see happen in this period during Caracalla's sole reign is his mom steps in, Julia Domna, who has been Empress of the Roman Empire for the past however many years that Severus reigned, was there at the moment of assassination when the elder son kills the younger. And after Gaeta's death,
or even before Gaeta's death, she's granted all of these extravagant titles. She's granted more honorary titles than any empress had previously been given. She's named mother of the army camp, of the senate, of the fatherland. She's named Pia Felix. These are titles that have only, those last two had only previously been given to emperors before.
So we're seeing these honors lavished upon her, and we don't really know what those mean. There's some debate in the scholarships But we do get a sense that she's kind of stepping into almost an admin role for Caracalla. She's answering imperial letters. She's traveling across the empire with him and eventually ends up in Antioch as this eastern imperial center. She's answering letters.
She's receiving petitions. She is holding public receptions for all of the most prominent men. The actual text of the dio passage where this comes from the Greek, it says these are imperial receptions. These are official public events. And she's sorting through all of the mail. She's kind of the main admin on board. She's included in letters sent to the Senate.
This looks like a sort of official position. And this is a more, I would say, official recognition from the sources of a role held by an empress like this than we have seen before. So Caracalla is making this movement eastward. He's a military emperor. We see him doing all All of these sort of incredible and horrible things.
And we know that there's got to be sort of a gaggle of administrators around him that are helping him rule this empire as he is leading the army. And his mom is one of them, which is incredible and becomes important to the Macrinus story.
It really is. And it's brutal to think about. Our sources talk about it a lot. How does she cope with this? We are told that she's pushed out of the public eye. And I've never really known how I feel about that description of her sort of disappearance from the public face of the Imperial family following Gaeta's death.
I don't know if it's that Caracalla says, Mom, you got to get the hell out of Dodge because I don't want you here and I need to do this myself. I'm a big boy now. Or if it's really that she needs time to grieve. And we get a little bit of both from the source tradition. But in the end, she kind of steps up and does what she has to, I suppose, for her last remaining son.
The one thing that I guess I would add is just my quick review of the sources this morning. Macrinus is really pushed as the legal nerd Praetorian prefect, along with his co-prefect, who is sort of the military commander. So even under Caracalla,
he's viewed as this kind of pencil pusher, dorky lawyer, which stands very much in stark contrast from the Macrinus figure that I've seen in these Gladiator trailers. And I just can't get enough of it. It's been cracking me up. But yeah, I mean, that legal history, that's really what we know of him.
And I think the thing that has been interesting to me thinking about sort of the interaction with women is whether this bureaucratic role that he's always had
puts him in any contact with the imperial women earlier in the reign and there's no way that we can tell but it would make sense if they sort of ended up working on some of the same objects maybe they certainly would have known one another but they're helping with the bureaucracy and all of that so funny like the legal nerd of the two and of course you've highlighted there's you know there are two praetorian prefects aren't there which is a nice interesting other factor to highlight
I would say about that much. My favourite, I can't remember which source it's in specifically, but we get this very detailed narrative of Caracalla's ultimate demise. There's a lot that kind of begins to boil under the surface. We get in Dio, we get a letter from Rome is sent to Julia Domna reporting a prophecy that Macrinus and his son, Diadumenianus, will take the purple.
And another letter simultaneously sent by Julianus from Rome to Macrinus. So we have these two letters speeding across the empire. And Domna, who was sorting the mail like a good mother administrator in Antioch, opens this letter and goes, my God, my son is going to get assassinated and she is too late. Caracalla meets his fate. He's traveling and I believe this is in the dio.
Alex, you'll have to correct me here. He stops and says, I need to relieve myself and then gets stabbed in the back, which is a hell of a way to go.
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