Paul Cooper
speaker
254 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 5 Jun
Paul Cooper’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 Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's raided by Picts from the north, Atagotti from Ireland, who are rumoured to eat human flesh, by the way.
But it wasn't only a military threat coming from outside.
It was also the collapse of the British economy.
The entire economy in Britain was predicated on the situation of 40,000 armed Roman soldiers there.
Entire industries were built around mining metal, smelting it, forging it into useful things, nails, hobnails, swords, spears, etc.
And feeding this vast force as well, of course.
The moment these people depart, nobody in these industries is getting paid and you get a freefall economic collapse that affects every part of Britain.
Well, this is what he does eventually.
Severus travels to Britain.
He campaigns north of Hadrian's Wall for a while.
He seems to trample some poor peoples he encounters, but doesn't achieve any kind of lasting strategic success.
He eventually withdraws, sickens, and actually dies in York.
So in some sense, Britain also ended up defeating Severus.
Now, this story of British economic collapse, of military failure on the mainland, is one that Magnus Maximus, 180 years later, should have learned, because it's a pattern that he repeats almost exactly.
Yeah, so this emperor is one of the most colourful figures, I think, from Roman history, which is saying a lot.
He's the emperor Gratian, who's a young man who has a fascination for all things barbarian.
He begins hanging out with a group of Scythian archers.
These are men from what's now Ukraine, but at the time, the Romans considered them to be barbarians.
They're like horse-riding people.
And Gratian begins dressing like a Scythian in the kind of typical pointed cap and
Showing 141–160 of 254 · page 8 of 13
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