Neville Morley
speaker
39 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2026
last heard yesterday
Neville Morley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
He's really, really learnt the lesson of Caesar, that whether or not Caesar did want to become king, people thought he did.
So the thing that Octavian constantly does is avoid any impression that he wants to be king.
Romans, who had traditionally been almost obsessive in their opposition to any one man holding too much power, he persuades the Romans that essentially the best way of being governed is for one man to have most of the power.
And indeed, what we see through his reign is quite often the people of Rome demanding that he should be given.
Even more power.
The mass of the Roman population actually welcomed authoritarian rule.
The idea of Let's give you the name Romulus because you are the second founder of Rome.
You know, you are as important as the guy who began Rome in the first place.
It also relates to the Latin term imperium.
We think of that as referring to empire, but the original idea of imperium is the expectation of command.
Imperium is what a Roman magistrate has, which means everyone should obey them.
It's not so much family as a degree of continuity, that what the Principate does is try to ensure a reasonably orderly transfer of power rather than one person dies and there there is then chaos and civil war until one other person defeats his enemies and takes over.
Part of Augustus' big claim to be putting Rome back together again is that he's restoring religion, he's making sure the neglected temples of the gods are no longer neglected, etc.
The fact that Augustus built his own mausoleum on the banks of the river Tiber.
It's a really interesting building, but it was also, of course, a symbolic statement.
You know, he was going to be buried in Rome.
Antony would have been buried in Alexandria.
I mean, Napoleon Bonaparte is one of the great examples of someone who essentially gets himself painted as a kind of Augustus-like figure who depicts himself as an emperor.
Well, it's Augustus above all who tells you what an emperor should look like and tells you what sorts of buildings you should have, and so on and so forth.
Augustus is kind of the.
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