Professor Rob Collins

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696 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 28 May

Professor Rob Collins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Ancients · The Fall of Hadrian's Wall · 28 May 2026 podcast

In terms of military rank, he's two tiers below the emperor.

He'll report to the magistrate militum, effectively the MOD of the Roman Empire, and they report to the emperor.

And Stilicho was a magistrate militum and kind of a de facto emperor, you might say.

To get a sense of the idea of the hierarchy, yeah.

So the frontier generals, the duquets, were slightly lower in status than the field army generals, the comité, the countens.

But he's still an extremely powerful and important person.

We think he's based in York.

And he has command not just of Hadrian's Wall, but basically all the military forces in what are now northern England.

and maybe even into Northern Wales, we don't know.

But that's really important because we know we've got a general that is in charge of all those forces and is meant to oversee

everything around them.

So make sure that they're doing their job in terms of defense, to make sure that they're getting their supplies, to make sure that they're maintaining their fortifications.

He's also a judge.

He is at the top of the food chain for judging matters of military law.

And he will also be the person who effectively is going to be negotiating ultimately with those barbarian chiefs.

When he's having to talk to the civilian governor of Britannia Secunda, the province of Roman Britain that we're based in, when he's not getting the supplies, he's got to go argue with the governor of my men need that grain.

Why are you not sending the grain?

It's his job to make sure this frontier is functional in the round.

And we know that very clearly from a whole bunch of late Roman laws that tell the other duches what they're supposed to be doing or clarifying their responsibilities.

Archaeology as a discipline can be really difficult for us to get to the individuals, but what archaeology is fantastic at is identifying systems and relationships.

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