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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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For over a thousand years of Roman history, that answer kept changing, from the fiercely competitive Republic through to the age of the Caesars, the emperors. This is our second episode in our series on the Roman Empire, and we're going to trace how leadership in Rome evolved over, well, a thousand years.
We're going to explore how the institutions of the Roman Republic forced powerful men into competition, into balancing each other, I guess. And then we're going to look at the rise of one-man rule under Augustus, whose reign transformed a republic into an imperial system. And then from then, it keeps changing. The empire itself changed. Rome itself was eclipsed.
And we're going to look at how power fragmented and across much of the empire it was extinguished. This is the story of how Rome reinvented itself, reinvented power, and how those reinventions shaped the fate of an empire. Last week, we looked at the rise of Rome. Next week, we're looking at the empire's fall. So make sure you hit follow and check back in for that.
For today's episode, though, I'm very happy to say we are joined by Britain's most famous classicist, Mary Beard, who specialises in ancient Rome. This is going to be a masterclass. Her podcast is Instant Classics, which is well worth checking out for all things about the ancient world. Let's get into it. Mary, very good to see you. Great to have you here, Dan.
I've been in this wonderful library so many times, such a treat to be back. And I feel I'm asking you enormous questions here, but I know that you will be able to just distill and make them so simple for me. First, I want to know, we talk a lot about the Roman Empire, the republic that precedes it, which kind of is an empire as well. First of all, how's that being governed?
Because we hear about these overmighty men falling out each other.
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Chapter 2: How did Roman leadership evolve from Republic to Empire?
At its best, how does it work?
The principle, the basic principle of the republic, well, it was complicated. It was not a democracy. I mean, I call it a kind of sort of democracy. That's to say the big decisions like passing laws, who to go to war with, if you should go to war at all, that was in the hands of the male citizen body. That looks, if you put it that way, that looks pretty democratic.
And there's an element of that. I think the key about the Republic, though, is that everything about its organisation, its formal rules, gave political advantage to the wealthy.
Okay. This sounds so unfamiliar, Mary. I mean, it's difficult for us to understand this.
Look, Dan, we live in a world in which we often think that powerful, rich white men have the whip hand. The Roman Republic is something different because it formally gave them the whip hand. That's to say the voting system was arranged differently. so that more power went to the individual votes of somebody rich than someone poor.
So that was taken for granted, that this was a society stratified by wealth, though ultimately at the hands of these popular assemblies, even if they were biased towards the rich. And I mean, I think a lot of people have trouble with this and the Romans had trouble with it because a lot of our kind of ideas about governmental political institutions are drawn from Greece.
democracy, aristocracies, oligarchies, kingships, etc. And the Roman Republic doesn't fit into any of those. It's quite difficult for even ancient Greek writers resident in Rome. There's one great historian called Polybius who is resident in Rome in the second century BCE, and he struggles. He has to say Rome's a mixed constitution. That means he can't fit it into any of his categories.
Sounds a bit like the 19th century in Britain, where even the Brits are trying to work out quite what's going on, who's sort of in general.
Yeah, I think that's right. But I think that what is crucial about it, particularly when you then think about how it compares to the one-man rule of the emperors, which is going to come later after Julius Caesar and so on, what is crucial is that... It's a power-sharing system. The Roman Republic, and they think of it as being invented in order to prevent there being kings ever again.
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Chapter 3: What were the principles of governance in the Roman Republic?
small scale, the endemic warfare is that summer comes and you think, right, it's time for us to go and do some fighting. You fight your usual enemies. You send out some soldiers. You bash them up. You steal their cattle and you say goodbye. Right. See you next year.
Rome significantly changes that because instead of saying, we'll take a cattle, bye-bye, and see you next year, they start to, and it becomes the absolute norm, the 4th century BCE, they start to make formal alliances with the people they conquer, the basic terms of which was that Rome could use those people's soldiers. Now, what that means is is that Rome got enormous manpower at its control.
It could call on more soldiers than any other power anywhere could call on. You know, that's why they lose battles but win wars, that the Romans were defeated quite often in their conflicts with their neighbours and also with the people they were fighting further afield. But they could always come back home and say, right, OK, They've got always more boots on the ground.
So this early empire, we can call it, it is not the great European empires of the 19th century or the German empire in the Second World War. There aren't sort of Roman bureaucrats and governors and building little Roman buildings in all these different places and sort of somehow bedding in an idea of Romans.
No, I mean, it's actually quite hard to know how far that's true of many modern empires, you know. how far that kind of sense of cultural, religious, military, political control, which is part of our idea of what imperialism is, how far that ever worked. But Rome in its republican empire is miles away from that, absolutely miles away. And it looks as if
they have very few priorities about what they want from the people they conquer. I mean, basically it comes down to they want tax, they want some cash, and they want the guys to do what they're told when necessary. So it's what I sometimes called kind of an empire of obedience, right? They're not interested in imposing Roman religion.
They're not terribly interested in dressing up these places to look like mini-Romes. They start to do that a bit later. What they want is they want people to do what they're told when necessary. And they have the beginnings of a system in the Republic of provincial governors, but I have to say the boundaries of these provinces are probably pretty fluid.
And they have all kinds of different deals with different people across the map. So there's a whole series of people known as, charmingly, as client kings. I mean, basically, a client king is someone who the Romans think they've got under their thumb, who is a king of some tribe somewhere, but will toe the Roman line. And basically, it is an empire that takes cash. It's an exploitative empire.
Its tax collection is bizarrely privatized. It's not a state tax collecting system. There are companies of so-called tax farmers who bid for the contracts to raise the cash from some poor province and then hand it over to Rome, meanwhile, creaming off their own profit. And there are some truly appalling stories in this Republican empire of financial exploitation.
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Chapter 4: How did the Roman Republic achieve military success?
So that what you find is that rich provincials, as we might call them, become incorporated into Roman office holding.
And they send their kids to Rome to receive education and that sort of thing.
They do, right? And they become members of the Senate and eventually they become emperors, consciously or not. And again, it's one of those questions of it's hard to know whether there was a grand plan here or a series of improvisations. that he is buying the loyalty He would say winning the loyalty.
He's winning the loyalty of the provincial elite who are actually therefore being part of his intermediaries. And the same would go for his successors, the intermediaries between the central power and the populace. And he's also one of Augustus's really smart moves. This does look like it's calculated, not just improvised. He divides the provinces.
in a kind of systematizing way, into provinces which were basically peaceful, no real military activity required. Now, North Africa would be one of those. And he lets the Senate, in the usual way, go on selecting the governors for those provinces, province of Asia, province of Africa, and a few others. He, however,
makes himself the overall governor of any province where there's a substantial military presence. And he has governors in those provinces chosen directly by himself and answerable to him. So, in a way, he's thought that where there's liable to be trouble, like Germany, for example, That's where you want a direct line of control between me, emperor, and the administration on the ground.
Now, I think one's got to be realistic. All the same problems about how long communication takes to get from Rome to the province and back again remain. You can't change the geography of the Roman Empire, but you can change the place where people look to the main authority.
Though I think also even those officials in peaceful provinces chosen by the Senate, I think they're still looking to Augustus. Romans aren't stupid and they are communicating directly with the emperor.
And with what by now must be a kind of big staff of people who are sifting the postbag and trying to work out the finances, we have a few glimpses of particularly ex-slaves within the Imperial Palace praised for their grip on Imperial finance, for example. So it isn't a bureaucracy in the modern sense of the word. There aren't exams. There's no career progression.
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