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
Mm-hmm.
The most famous is, of course, Virgil, partly because he gets acclaimed as the greatest Roman poet, but also because I think that Virgil's work is, in a way, intertwined with politics.
There's the great epic poem The Aeneid, which is Rome's answer to Homer, and it's about the heroic foundation of.
of Rome.
So, you know, it fits very neatly into the notion of Augustan Rome being the triumphant culmination arising from these original myths.
Certainly at the time and still more today through Robert Gray's iClaudius novel, we get the suggestion that these deaths are increasingly unlikely to be natural.
I mean it's the usual problem Roman sources either have women as, you know, dutiful mothers who keep their mouths shut or as scheming witches.
In the case of Livia, I mean it's complicated, we've got no way of telling.
Arguably what we see from Augustus onwards is something that's almost a bit more like a Commonwealth, that the provinces are not having to be controlled with military force.
They become more integrated into the whole.
So, yes, he gets to give his little sort of speech about whether he has played the comedy of life well.
Maybe he did, maybe he didn't.
But this is how it gets told.
And it's clearly important that the man who has lived this long, the man who has brought peace and stability back to the Roman Empire, gets the sort of
peaceful death that he deserves.
You can attribute an awful lot of the legacy of Rome to the fact that Augustus kept the Roman Empire on the rails, gave it stability for centuries to come.
He is also a model for an emperor for the Romans, a model for what an emperor should look like for later would-be emperors.
The power, the display, the almost overwhelming feeling that you're being presented with a program of images telling you Augustus is great, Augustus has brought back the golden age, all worship Augustus.
Gaffsters.
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