Mary Beard on Ruling the Roman Empire

Summary

Podcast Summary: Dan Snow's History Hit

Episode: Mary Beard on Ruling the Roman Empire
Host: Dan Snow
Guest: Mary Beard
Date: June 11, 2026

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Overview

In this episode, acclaimed historian and broadcaster Dan Snow sits down with celebrated classicist Mary Beard to explore how power, leadership, and governance evolved across the Roman Republic and Empire. Beard masterfully guides listeners from Rome's early days of elite power-sharing and competitive office-holding through the seismic shift to autocratic imperial rule under Augustus—and on to the eventual transformation and fragmentation of imperial authority. The conversation is rich in detail, candid in tone, and peppered with Beard’s signature wit, debunking myths and drawing parallels with modern preconceptions about empires and bureaucracy.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Governance of the Roman Republic

Timestamps: 04:04–08:37

• The Republic was not a democracy as we imagine it. Political power was in the hands of the male citizen body, but the system was deeply biased towards the wealthy.
• Votes of rich individuals carried more weight than those of the poor, and the elite monopolized elected offices.
• Power Sharing Principle: No individual ever held office alone or for more than a year—consuls, praetors, and other officials were always paired, and turnover was rapid.
  • Mary Beard: “Nobody ever holds office on their own… nobody holds power for longer than a single year.” (06:20)
• The Republic’s constitution was a hybrid system, difficult even for ancient commentators to classify.

2. Why Was the Republic So Successful in Conquests?

Timestamps: 08:37–15:52

• Rome’s aggressive expansion was not due to unique militarism or superior tactics; all Mediterranean societies were militaristic.
• Mary Beard: “They lost a lot of battles. They didn’t lose wars, but they lost battles.” (11:06)
• The Republic’s competitive, power-sharing system created a “hothouse” environment: ambitious elites sought military glory in brief tenures, fueling repeated campaigns.
• Rome’s approach to conquered peoples was unusual: they formed military alliances, incorporating the soldiers of conquered communities into Roman armies, vastly increasing manpower reserves.

3. Nature of Early Roman Imperialism

Timestamps: 15:52–18:42; 21:55–24:00

• The early Roman “empire” (in the sense of territory) was not tightly administered.
• Mary Beard: “It’s an empire of obedience… they're not interested in imposing Roman religion. What they want is people to do what they’re told when necessary.” (16:10)
• Tax collection was privatized: companies of “tax farmers” bid for regional contracts, often exploiting local populations.
• There was little hands-on bureaucracy: the Senate might send a message to a “client king,” but communication was slow and administrative infrastructure minimal.
• Mary Beard: “If they wanted to have that kind of hands-on control… they haven’t really got the mechanisms to do it anyway.” (22:06)

4. Flexibility and Limits of Republican Rule

Timestamps: 24:00–31:15

• The decentralized, “light touch” style allowed for some resilience but also created cracks as the empire expanded.
• Problems arose because the mechanisms designed for a city-state couldn’t handle the complexities of governing a vast, multi-continental empire.
  • Mary Beard: "It's kind of like trying to run an empire with the mechanisms of a large university student union." (24:22)
• The need for longer military commands led to erosion of temporary office-holding; powerful generals gained extended authority.
• Mary Beard: “So Rome is a victim of its own success. It's a city state government trying to run an empire that that city state government had acquired.” (29:05)

5. Transition to One-Man Rule—Julius Caesar and Augustus

Timestamps: 31:15–36:38

• The pressures of expansion led some elite figures (e.g., Pompey, Caesar) to stretch or break republican rules, accumulating power and wealth.
• The symbolism of power shifts: Julius Caesar was the first to mint coins with his living head—long a royal prerogative, and a harbinger of monarchy.
  • Mary Beard: “The first person to have their head on the Roman coinage was Julius Caesar.” (33:27)
• Caesar’s assassination (44 BCE) was framed by his killers as a defense of elite liberty, but the structures enabling republican equality were irrevocably damaged.

6. Augustus & the Birth of the Empire

Timestamps: 36:38–45:30

• Augustus (formerly Octavius) succeeded in establishing a permanent form of autocracy, though he maintained some republican offices and forms.
  • Mary Beard: “He reinterprets the old republican system. He doesn’t abolish it. He doesn't have a revolution... Same elite guys are still running the show in Rome.” (36:38)
• Augustus merged personal rule with state power (“I’m the state”), buying the army’s loyalty through fixed salaries, terms, and retirement pensions.
• He rebranded: choosing a new name (“Augustus”—the Revered One) and investing in public works and a dynastic image, including the role of women and heirs.

7. Roman Provincial Government and the Incorporation of Elites

Timestamps: 45:30–50:34

• After Augustus, the Empire starts to display more characteristics of familiar imperial bureaucracy, though still rudimentary by modern standards.
• Augustus cleverly incorporated local elites from the provinces—who could aspire to Roman offices, even Senate membership and emperorship.
• Mary Beard: “He’s buying the loyalty. He would say, winning the loyalty of the provincial elite, who are actually, therefore, being part of his intermediaries.” (47:17)
• Augustus distinguished between provinces: peaceful regions remained under Senate-appointed governance, while military provinces were under direct imperial control.

8. Transformation and Fragmentation Late in the Empire

Timestamps: 50:34–55:01

• For 200 years, Augustus’s system seemed stable. Dramatic change set in after around 200 CE (“Third Century Crisis”):
  • Problems with imperial succession led to more army-driven appointments, diminished role for Rome itself, and the rise of military over senatorial elite.
    • Mary Beard: “There does appear to be being made emperors without… any connection with Rome itself. Rome appears to be getting sidelined.” (50:46)
  • Geographical vastness forced decentralization—new “mini-capitals” diluted Rome’s centrality.
  • In the East, the Roman Empire endured as Byzantium until the 15th century.

9. Was the Empire’s Fall “Bad” for the West?

Timestamps: 55:01–57:16

• Dan Snow expresses a lingering sense that the fall of the Western Empire was “bad.”
• Mary Beard challenges this, urging skepticism of inherited narratives about barbarian destruction.
  • Mary Beard: “We do suffer from the demonization of the so-called barbarians… [but] Vandal Africa was a place of extraordinary culture. They wrote wonderful poetry… and were partly responsible for the codification of Roman law.” (55:40)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Mary Beard, on Republican office-holding: “Nobody ever holds office on their own… that is the point. Nobody holds power individually and in principle, sometimes broken, but nobody holds power for longer than a single year.” (06:20)

• Mary Beard, on the paradox of Roman expansion: “Emperors did not make the Roman Empire. They inherited it. They didn’t make it.” (08:57)

• Mary Beard, on Roman resilience (and weakness): “Rome is a victim of its own success. It's a city state government trying to run an empire that that city state government had acquired.” (29:05)

• Mary Beard, on Augustus’s PR: “He chooses an invented name, Rebrand. It's a complete Rebrand. And Augustus is a pretty North Korean style title, you know, it means revered one.” (43:44)

• Mary Beard, on the demonization of the “barbarians”: “We do suffer from the demonization of the so-called barbarians… Vandal Africa was a place of extraordinary culture… Vandal Africa was also partly responsible for the codification of Roman law.” (55:40)

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Timeline of Important Segments

• 04:04 – Republican government: elite bias, power-sharing, and aversion to monarchy
• 08:37 – Why/how the Roman Republic conquered the Mediterranean
• 15:52 – Roman imperialism and “empire of obedience”; tax farming
• 22:06 – Bureaucratic shortfalls and decentralization
• 24:22 – The strengths and cracks of “light touch” governance
• 29:05 – Expansion forces governmental adaptation; beginnings of longer commands
• 33:27 – Symbolism and reality of imperial monarchy (Julius Caesar)
• 36:38 – Augustus’s consolidation of power; innovations and PR
• 47:17 – Provincial elite incorporation and the rise of proto-bureaucracy
• 50:46 – Third-century changes: military over senatorial power, empire’s fragmentation
• 55:40 – Challenging the claim that Rome’s fall was “bad” and reevaluating barbarian achievements

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Tone & Language

• Mary Beard combines scholarly authority with accessibility and wry humor, often pausing to clarify nuanced terms or point out modern misconceptions.
• Dan Snow maintains an enthusiastic, curious, and sometimes self-deprecating tone, acting as an engaged layperson and sometimes challenging Mary to “solve” big historical puzzles in real-time.

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Conclusion

This episode delivers an energetic masterclass on the dynamics of power in Rome, highlighting how ancient institutions adapted—and often failed—to meet challenges of conquest, expansion, and internal ambition. Mary Beard’s explanations demystify the stranger aspects of Roman governance, while her historical skepticism invites listeners to question familiar narratives about empire and decline. The story of Rome’s rule is revealed as one of continual reinvention, shaped as much by improvisation, chance, and individual ambition as by grand design.

Next episode: The Empire’s fracturing and fall.

Transcript

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[Mary Beard]

Yes.

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[Dan Snow]

How do you rule over one of history's greatest empires? 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, 1,000 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 shape 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 classist, Mary Beard, who specializes 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.

[Mary Beard]

Great to have you here.

[Dan Snow]

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. So I know you're. But I know that you will be able to just distill them, 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 over mighty men falling out each other at its best. How does it work?

[Mary Beard]

The principle, the basic principle of the republic was. 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. Right. 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.

[Dan Snow]

Okay, this sounds so unfamiliar, Mary. I mean, it's difficult for us to understand this. Look, Dan, powerful rich white man has the whip hand.

[Mary Beard]

Look, Dan, we live in a world in which we often think that powerful, rich white men have the whip hand. Their own republic is something different because it formally gave them the whip hand. That's to say the voting system was arranged so that more power went to the individual votes of somebody rich than someone poor. Right. And 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, et cetera. 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.

[Dan Snow]

Sounds a bit like the 9th century in Britain where we're all, even the Brits trying to work out quite what's going on, who's sort of in.

[Mary Beard]

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. Heaven knows how it was really invented, but that was their story. The absolutely fundamental idea. Well, there's two of them. One is that nobody who gets elected to office and there are a series of elected officials from consuls down elected by these hierarchical assemblies. The absolute key is that nobody ever holds office on their own. Right now we think of it as, I think often a bit sort of, a bit quirky that the Romans had two consuls and have many praetors and tributes that they had. But that is the point. Nobody holds power individually and in principle sometimes broken, but nobody holds power for longer than a single year. So you have a series of elected officials, all of them drawn from the rich elite and they're elected to offices that they always hold with somebody else and only for a year. Now, you know, you start to see then that why it's kind of hard to fit Rome into traditional structures. Because most Romans, not all but most Romans, would have been absolutely horrified at the idea that what they were living in was a democracy. I mean democracy was for many if not most Romans an appalling version of mob rule. But there was a sense of power sharing, commonality which divided up power over time. In the end, nobody. The Roman elite is kind of notionally a group of equals who hold power but share it.

[Dan Snow]

Okay, so Something must have gone right, because this Republic conquers much of the Mediterranean basin. Is it that government? Is it that system? Is it good at getting rid of bad people and promoting good people? Or is it climate? Is it technology? What's going on? How much blame or credit should we give it?

[Mary Beard]

It's the big puzzle. It is the real big puzzle about ravages.

[Dan Snow]

Can you solve it now, please?

[Mary Beard]

I'll try. I will say first that people often think that the fall of the Roman Empire, the fall of Rome's great territorial expansion is what's the puzzle? That's not my bag. But I tell you, more puzzling is why this small city in a not very desirable place on the Tiber, with a load of bogs and mosquitoes, why they, over the period of the Republic, basically conquered the whole Mediterranean. Now, I need to stop there and say the terminology here is really confusing because there are two senses in Roman history of the word empire. One is the territorial expanse of the Roman Empire. What is Roman territory across the Mediterranean. And the other is the political sense of the period when Rome is governed by one man. Now, the puzzle, the really annoying puzzle about this is that the empire, in the sense of the territorial expanse of Rome, was mostly acquired before Rome had an emperor. That's basic rule. You know, emperors did not make the Roman Empire. They inherited it. They didn't make it. So what you find from about the late 4th century BC onwards, during the period of the kind of fully fledged Republic, is you find a series of successful conquests which don't ever seem to stop right until you get to Julius Caesar. And why were the Romans so successful in conquering other people? Some people said they were terribly militaristic. Well, they were terribly militaristic, but there weren't any people in the ancient Mediterranean who weren't militaristic. So that's not the answer. People say, oh, they were better at soldiery than other people. Well, sometimes they were, sometimes they weren't.

[Dan Snow]

They lost a lot of battles.

[Mary Beard]

They lost a lot of battle. They didn't lose wars, but they lost battles. And they were a standing joke to begin with about their navy. I mean, the Romans were supposed be complete rubbish at naval warfare. So there is something about the kind of way they're governed which must, I think, provide a kind of baseline from which to explain this. Partly, I think it is the continual competitiveness of the elite. I've talked about these guys holding office temporarily, always with someone else. What that means is that the Roman elite are always going into competitive elections with one another, there's always winners and losers. And the elite is deeply, deeply committed within the power sharing agreement to getting the most honour and glory for the individual. And that's in a sense becomes a big fault line in Roman history. And so I think you can see that if, as all Mediterranean cultures do, if you put a quite high premium on military success in this very odd Roman system, the system itself kind of puts a fire under that because you become consul, okay, you've got a colleague, but you've only got one year to make your mark. How do you make your mark? You make your mark by conquest. And so there's a whole series of guys as we go from decade to decade whose ambition is in gaining military victory. Because that is the kind of the ultimate idea of what a successful Roman is. But they haven't got long to do it. There is absolutely no reason ever for any individual Roman to want to postpone military conquest unless they think that they might be in charge next year. So postponing it would be useful. And that I think is it's the hothouseness of the political system, the way that power sharing and temporary office holding cranks up the competition. And I think that's quite important.

[Dan Snow]

And you've got a clear meticulous for getting rid of someone. Rubbish.

[Mary Beard]

Yes. Yeah, you have. It's very hard to internalize what it would have felt being one of these guys with that persistent insistent desire for success, for military success, for electoral success. And it's all going on every time. You've only got a year. Right. I think the other thing is this is really part of why they lost battles, but they didn't lose wars. Is that at a certain point, sometime in the 4th century, why this happened, we don't know, is that unlike every other early Mediterranean society that we know, what the Romans did was they started to make long term military alliances with people they conquered. Now, standard form of warfare in the Mediterranean, 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 that Rome Got enormous manpower at its control. It could call on more soldiers than any other power anywhere could call on. And, you know, that's why they lose battles but win wars. That Romans were defeated quite often in their conflicts with their neighbors and also with the people they were fighting further afield. But they could always come back home and say, right, okay, they've got always more boots on the ground.

[Dan Snow]

So this early empire we can call it, it is not the great European empires in the 9th 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.

[Mary Beard]

No, I mean, it's actually quite hard to know how far that's true of many modern empires. 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. 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 that 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 contract 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. But when push comes to shove, the Romans want their subject communities not to make a fuss, not to rebel, not to get out of line. The Romans want them to do what the Romans want.

[Dan Snow]

You listen to Dan Snow's history. There's more coming up.

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[Dan Snow]

And there's no big office block in Rome full of bureaucrats organizing this emperor. This is just the Senate will send a message to the consuls going, hello, King of Armenia, we require the following sign.

[Mary Beard]

That's right. Yeah, that's right. And it probably takes three months for the message to get there. Right? I mean you haven't got a Ministry of Foreign affairs, you haven't got a Roman army hq. And transport is extremely slow and sending messages are extremely slow. So in a way you say, look, if they wanted to have that kind of hands on control that often comes with our image of an empire, they haven't really got the mechanisms to do it anyway. One's tempted to use the word it's a light touch, empire, that would probably be a bit misleading because there is some pretty nasty bits of violence going on. But Rome's ambitions and capabilities are not such that without enormous kind of reconstruction of what it is to govern, they can't do that sort of heavy handed control. All of this period of Rome, I think none of it, from the government of the empire to the politics, none of it quite fits easily into our stereotypes. Now in part that's because our stereotypes are correct, but it doesn't. It's quite hard to see where the rough edges are. Certainly if you were to say, now here we are in 100 BCE, would you like to draw me a map with the boundaries of the Roman Empire clearly marked on them? Well, it'd be a damn stupid question to ask because there are all sorts of different mechanisms of control. You wouldn't know whether to include the client kings or not. Rome is there at the center, but without the kind of administrative control that makes the classic model in our imaginations of an empire feasible.

[Dan Snow]

Now Mary, you've talked about this before and I always love hearing from you about this. Does that model bring some resilience when things go bonkers? That one thing people know about Roman history is all the sort of madness that occasion appears to happen in the imperial capital or within the imperial family or as aristocrats fighting. But does that therefore light touch or be careful, that light touch empire? I mean, there's a bit of a resilience, there's a bit of inbuilt stability when the centre is internal.

[Mary Beard]

I think that's probably the case. One thing that is a good example of that, I suppose, is that you don't regularly, either in the Republic or later actually you don't see opposition to the center brewing up in the more distant territories. Generals and generals are the same as politicians in Rome. There's no kind of difference between a military man and a political man. Generals certainly get a power base from conquest and in the provinces of the empire, but that power base is usually wealth. Pompey the Great, so called the Great in the middle of the first century bce, he is phenomenally wealthy because of his conquests. He's not actually using the politics of empire very much for his own political advantage. And yeah, the metropolis can tear itself to pieces and the tax farmers in Asia are still sending the cash in and nothing much is happening. The problem though is, and I think that this is perhaps the other way around, is that the vast expense of empire along with the, the real difficulties of communication and with councils are in office for one year. They wanted to send a message to what we would call the heartlands of, let's say Turkey and get a reply. I mean sending a message is one thing, but you need a reply that would probably have taken half their year of office. Right. So gradually it becomes clear that this sort of Roman system worked well enough when they were exercising control over Italy or southern France or nearby places. But just practically it is jolly hard to run an empire which stretches from Spain to Syria basically and not yet Scotland, but certainly to North Africa. They're trying to run it with the mechanisms of a small city state. Right now, as a jokey way of putting it, it's kind of like trying to run an empire with the mechanisms of a large university student union is really what we're talking about. They haven't got that administrative infrastructure and they can't communicate when they need actually occasionally to come down with a heavy hand. They can't act quickly because they don't know what's happening. And you know, the Romans are not stupid. They might be nasty, but they're not stupid. And it's pretty clear that they see that there are problems here about particularly the temporiness of their office. Halting, right. The traditional way would have been to take this consul, got one year in office, you can bash up Sicily and come back within A year. You know, he can't bash up Syria and come back within a year. And so there is a clash between the geographical demands of the empire and the power sharing temporariness of Roman government institutions. And they twig this and they start from really the end of the 2nd century BCE onwards to Tinker a bit with that temporiness. So they would say, okay, we're going to have a system when if you're consul, you won't do what you traditionally did, which was put on your military kit straight away and go out. You'll basically stay in Rome for your year of office, but then we'll kind of extend it because you'll become a pro consul, a kind of a stand in consul. And it's during your pro consular year that you will go out and do your military campaigning. But of course what happens is that that opens the floodgates in a way and you find that people, for good military reasons. I mentioned Pompey the Great. Well, he would be one saying, look, if you want me to deal with this now major military crisis in the east, you're going to have to give me more power for longer in order

[Dan Snow]

to conquer Asia here. I mean, give me a break. It's not a month for free job

[Mary Beard]

or I'm going to. You want me to clear the sea of pirates? You know, pirates. I mean, when we talk about the Romans having problems with pirates, we tend to think of pugwash and people with pirates on their shoulders. I mean, pirates in the ancient world are terrorists. They are organized crime terrorists. And Pompey is put in charge of trying to get rid of them in the Mediterranean. But he can't just do it on the old fashioned way. So what happens is that the governmental institutions start to crumble or to be at least challenged by virtue of the success of the conquests that those governmental institutions underpinned. Right. So Rome is a victim of its own success. It's a city state government trying to run an empire that that city state government had acquired. And that becomes by the time you get really from the end of the second century BC through to Julius Caesar at the middle of the first century bc, you find that there are a series of these guys who sort of break out of the traditional constraints. They take power for longer, they sometimes put it down obediently after a bit, but they're not obeying the usual rules of power sharing. And therefore they are actually in a sense undermining the very structure that the republican government had been based on, which is people don't hold power for very long and they always share it. So somehow it's imploded. And that's combined with the idea that particularly with conquests in the east, as I said, the individual commanders getting very rich so they've got money to use for their own political ambitions at Rome. Why is there so much generosity in Roman politics? Which was a bribery is what we mean. Generosity is what the guys themselves would have said. Well, it's because there's a hell of a lot of money around.

[Dan Snow]

That's fascinating. I didn't. There was more than one current pushing us towards solo imperial rule here.

[Mary Beard]

Yeah, I mean, we have to be careful because we're seeing this retrospectively. And I think that I'm sometimes guilty of somehow imagining that one man rule was kind of inevitable in Rome because of all these problems and then tracking it and saying, look, you can see that there's these individuals, here it comes. And then Julius Caesar, here it comes. And well, he's interrupted in mid flow because he's assassinated in 44 BCE. But in a sense, that is the moment when people kind of think, right, one man rule is probably here to stay. Now, that's not what his assassins said. You know, his assassins also, you know, very. I think the Romans are very aware about these currents and these pressures. The assassins say, right, we want liberty back. What Julius Caesar represents is the removal of liberty. Now, they meant the removal of liberty from other members of the Roman elite, not from the poor old, poor. Right, but that's what they're fighting for. But in my retrospective view, there's a suspicion that the writing's already on the wall, honestly. And I think one of the ways you can see that a brilliant symbol of it is that one of the signs of one man rule, one of the diagnostic signs of one man rule at Rome is whether you put your living head on the coins. Now, there's plenty of dead Roman heads on the coins, you know, for as long as you can trace. But we take living heads on coins as something that is part and parcel of monarchy. For the Romans, it was dangerously part and parcel of monarchy. And the first person to have their living head on a regular coin issue minted in the city of Rome. Pompey had minted a few coins well away from Rome, but the first person to have their head on the Roman coinage was Julius Caesar.

[Dan Snow]

Interesting.

[Mary Beard]

And the first issue of this comes out, and it's not entirely unconnected, I think only a couple of months before the guy's assassinated. And in some ways it's a symbol of that assassination. It's a symbol of what prompts that assassination. They're not putting him to death because they don't like his head on the coins, but they don't like his head on the coins because it symbolizes exactly what Caesar's up to. I think it's absolutely fascinating that after the assassination, when the Romans try to have a bit of sort of peace and reconciliation and pretend it's business as usual, the main assassins, Brutus and Cassius, go out to actually take provincial commands in the East. Brutus issues coins because he's going to pay his troops. And one of the major functions of coinage in the ancient world wasn't to give you small change in your pocket, it was to pay the troops. One of these issues of coinage has got Brutus's live head on the coins. Now, as soon as the hero of liberation is putting his living head on on the coins, you know that liberation isn't going to be the end result of this. What's going to be the end result is more or less permanent. One man rule.

[Dan Snow]

This is Dan Snow's history here. More after this.

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[Dan Snow]

And that is what happens. So how would people have felt that change? It was a very real change. How do they feel it in Rome and how do they feel it in the provinces?

[Mary Beard]

If we start with Rome, it is one of the greatest mysteries actually of all of history, not just ancient history, of how Julius Caesar's great nephew and adopted son, the person that we know is the Emperor Augustus, but he started out life as Octavius. How he established one man rule at Rome, permanently, unsuccessfully, for what was actually hundreds of years. His system survived for hundreds of years. Now people, I think, differ in their explanations of this. And some people think that Augustus as he became, was a kind of great mastermind who'd got a great system in his head and he was going to impose it. He eventually stamps out the civil war that had been lingering for years after the assassination of Caesar. He's victorious over Cleopatra and Mark Anthony in Egypt, which was the kind of final campaign of those civil wars. Some people think that he's got a blueprint and he comes back to Rome and he thinks, right, okay, I am now going to initiate autocracy right my way. And some ancient certainly thought that when they looked back, they couldn't understand how did Augustus manage it? And they thought, well, you know, he'd worked it out on the back of many envelopes and he came home ready to put it into practice. Other people, and I think, I suppose I'm one of them, think that it must have been a strange set of kind of improvisations in concentrating power in his own person. And we don't tend to see the failed bits of the improvisations, we see the successful bits effectively. What he does is he reinterprets the old republican system. He doesn't abolish it. He doesn't have a revolution. I think if you think of a kind of Marxian sense of a revolution, it means new governing class comes in. Old governing class is excluded in some way, usually violently. There's no change of governing class. The same elite guys are still running the show in Rome. Except what Augustus manages to do is put himself at the more or less to be a bit careful about thinking. There was no opposition to this, the more or less undisputed pinnacle of this. And he does that by leaving the structures in place. So you are still consul, right? Eventually you're chosen by the emperor rather than elected, but people still want to be consul and they hold it for one year. And the other sets of junior offices, they also remain the praetors and The Aediles and the tribunes, the Senate still mates, and yet what Augustus does is focus the basic decision making and the basic loyalty onto himself. Now, how he does that in practice. Well, we've got hints, I think Suetonius is writing in the second century CE, writes a biography of Augustus amongst his 12 Caesars. He gives us some hints, I think, of the new kind of idea of personal power that Augustus manages to wield cleverly. I mean, Suetonius says when Augustus went into the Senate, as he goes into the Senate for the discussions with all the other guys, he greets every senator by name. He goes around, as it were. I don't think Romans didn't shake hands, but, you know, he says, hello, Marcus Tullis, how are you? Now, that must have taken hours if it's true. But there's this sense that he has a kind of patronal command of the structures of power. Now, he's also got a military command because one way of seeing Augustus's regime would be a very, very iron fist in a velvet glove. And one of the things he does is effectively nationalize the army. The republican army had been paid for by state funds in ways that we would probably expect, but it nevertheless was an army that was essentially owned by its commanders. Now, Augustus says, every soldier is beholden to me. To me, I'm the state. And he merges me and the state in the way that clever dictators often do manage to merge me and the. The state. And he effectively buys the loyalty of the army so that very effectively there are very few military rebellions for the next couple of hundred years. He does that by fixing a salary for being a soldier, fixing terms and conditions of service and giving them a retirement pension. So he has undercut the idea that the soldiers might feel loyalty to their commanders rather than to him. It's still kind of not easy to see quite how that adds up to a new deal in which, as I said, there probably were some, and we know there were a few dissidents who didn't like this, but it looks as if the whole thing was not hugely challenged. He does it in other ways. I mean, I think I've been calling him Augustus. I said that his original name is Octavius. At some point when he's come back from defeating Antony and Cleopatra, he decides he wants a new name, because Octavius, or Octavian, as he's sometimes called, that was a name embedded in the civil war after the death of Julius Caesar. He chooses an invented name, Rebrand. It's a complete Rebrand And Augustus is a pretty North Korean style title, you know, it means revered one. So he's putting himself out there after having been a bit of a thug, honestly, he's putting himself out there as revered elder statesman. He's building himself into the city of Rome. He's investing huge amounts of money in new forums, in statues. He invests in a royal family in a way, for the first time, women and heirs are part of the whole deal of the PR of an elite Roman. He probably gets lucky.

[Dan Snow]

Well, he lives a long time, doesn't he?

[Mary Beard]

I mean, I think he is the longest serving emperor ever. And he's always, it seems, making a kind of bit of a big deal, a bit of a hypochondria, I think so saying, oh, I might die any minute he lasts. He defeats Anthony and Cleopatra and comes back to Rome in 31 BCE. He lasts more than 40 more years. And to some extent, all the stuff I've been saying about, he rebrands the republican institutions. That's right. But also he gets lucky because he stays around. Now, when I was a student, some of our teachers used to say it was all a big con trick, the Augustan regime. He conned the senators, you know, he said, you can still be consul and he gave them some extra honors, you know, and they could have better seats at the amphitheater, all this kind of thing. And somehow it was all a kind of Machiavellian contract. Now, it took me some years to realize that can't have been the case. Roman senators might have been many things, but they weren't thick. Right. Or some of them weren't thick. The idea that they had the wool pulled over their eyes by Augustus saying, don't worry, it's all the same. I'm just living on the Palatine in a proto palace and you're still being consul. This is business as usual. They knew it wasn't business as usual, but he gave them enough, enough of the structure to be able to collude with it. And in the end, the Roman governmental structure, the empire survives because the elite go along with it. Military power. Yes. Rebranding? Yes. Elite collaborators. Yes. With a capital Y.

[Dan Snow]

Now, in terms of elite collaborators, that's Rome itself out in the provinces, presumably, that's all really important too. It's the desire of people, elite people, to kind of go along with it as well.

[Mary Beard]

Yes. And the period from Augustus on is where we start to see the Roman Empire looking a bit more like our familiar image of it. I mean, there are governors and a state taxation system underneath financial officials, you can see a fledgling but very fledgling bureaucracy there. In a way, I think that would have looked quite different from what was going on in the Republic, at least for the elite in the provinces. And, frankly, peasants in Roman Britain, eventually conquered by Claudius after Augustus, they barely noticed the Roman Empire. But, you know, if we're thinking about what this looks like in the towns and amongst the aristocracy of the provinces, we're seeing new sets of connections formed between the center and the elite of the provinces. And one thing that Augustus really buys into is the incorporation of the elite into the governmental structure of Rome. Now, that wasn't entirely new. It goes back to the idea that when Rome is conquering the cities, Rome incorporates rather than keeps them on the outcrowd. There's something already there. But what Augustus does is give that an enormous push, so that what you find is that rich provincials, as we might call them, become incorporated into Roman

[Dan Snow]

office holdings, and they send their kids to Rome to receive education, all that sort of thing.

[Mary Beard]

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 that 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. 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 know, 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 post bag 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, it's not like the British civil service. But there is a sense that there are more people in one place, the Imperial palace, as it grows. Thinking about the government of the empire, how actively they're canvassing some of these provincial bigwigs to come on the inside, we don't know. But that's certainly what's happening.

[Dan Snow]

The Roman Empire is becoming more Roman. But let's scooch for a couple of hundred years. You say that Augustus set up this imperial system that endures for almost four centuries or so longer. There must be a lot of change there that takes place.

[Mary Beard]

I think for 200 years, there's not much change. One modern, ancient historical joke is to say that if you'd fallen asleep in one CE towards the end of Augustus's reign, and you woken up 150 years later, towards the end of the second century CE, you'd have seen a world around you that was quite recognisable. I mean, there would be changes, but you're in the same world. If you then went back to sleep for another 150 years and you're now not in 175 but 300 and something, the world would look dramatically different again. Some of the institutions were still there, people were still being consuls, the Senate still existed. But the power structure is looking different. And the role of the elite, of the traditional elite, looks as if it's changed. It looks as if there's much more power going to a military class by that stage, rather than the old senatorial elite. Now, the period of change that people usually fix on is the third century ce, and they talk about the third century crisis, which is another way of saying things are changing. It's marked by all kinds of different things. One is that there is, for whatever reason, a real problem about imperial succession, that the Augustan system had worked very well, partly through a series of adoptions of successors, not just biological successes, really, to the end of the second century ce, it it then, for whatever reason, starts to fall apart. You do get a period then of the army backing its favorite candidates. You get a period when people do appear, unlike what was the case in the first 200 years of the Augustan regime, do appear to be being made emperors without, as it were, any connection with Rome itself. Rome appears to be getting sidelined in certain respects. It's still the Augustan regime and it never ceases to be the Augustan regime. But it's a bit battered at that point. And it recovers really afterwards. But things are never quite the same again. And in the end, it's geography that's always the enemy for Rome. And one of the things they do is they decide, well, they're going for devolution. In our terms, it's devolution. And they have mini capitals, places like Split or Ravenna. They kind of disaggregate the empire. The reason for this is absolutely obvious, that you want centers of command beyond the center of command for just a single province, a bit closer to where the action is. The consequence is that it kind of undermines the whole geopolitics of the Roman Empire. And Rome then is becoming more sidelined. Now there are some emperors who've never been there, make their first visit to Rome when they become emperor. And there's a sense in which there's an increasing misalignment between Rome as the symbolic capital of the empire and Rome is where the decisions are really made. Now, you can add into that all kinds of other factors if you like. You can add in plague, pandemic, whatever, and this is what people have spent the last 200 and something years trying to work out. But things are different once you get to the middle of the third century. But they don't crumble. And look, if you go to the eastern part of the Roman Empire and you talk about Rome falling in the 5th century CE, nasty barbarian invasions, the Roman Empire in what we call Byzantium, but it's basically the Roman Empire lasts till the 15th century.

[Dan Snow]

Mary, I'm gonna do a horrible thing to you. You know more about the Roman Empire than anybody else. Do you also suffer from this little slight internal sense that the fall of the Western Empire, let's deal with the Western Empire, Britain was a sort of bad thing, because I do, and I admit it, and I'm sometimes ashamed by it. And recently I was told by wonderful Peter Heather, one of your colleagues, that actually that's possible, that archaeology, now other science now says actually it might have almost been better for normal people the release of that central grip. Where is your thinking about this at the moment?

[Mary Beard]

I try not to divide historical events and happenings into good things and bad things.

[Dan Snow]

I know you're gonna say that, but

[Mary Beard]

you know, and I know what you mean. I've got colleagues, you know, who'll say they'd have given a lot to keep the water supply. You know that. I see that. I think, however, we do suffer from the demonization of the so called barbarians, which we've seen through wonderful 19th century pictures of kind of real thugs pulling down Roman statues or whatever. Being barbarian in the term. We suffer from that in a way that perhaps misrepresents what was going on. And I think the key players here, the vandals, right. In Vandal Africa. Now, if you mentioned the word vandal to anyone, we know exactly what we think. That said Vandal North Africa was a place of extraordinary culture. They wrote wonderful poetry, some of which still survives in Latin. And Vandal Africa was also partly responsible for the codification of Roman law. Right. And they're Christians. Right. So I think that as with a lot of ancient history, we're the heirs to other people's prejudices, some of which may have been right. But it's impossible now for us not to see the barbarian invasions as if there was somehow a destruction of noble Roman culture. And it's easy to forget that the good old vandals in Vandal Africa were a great bastion of Roman ness under their own terms.

[Dan Snow]

Yeah. Surprise, surprise. 19th century, the height of imperialism globally. They were quite fond of the Roman Empire.

[Mary Beard]

Surprise, surprise, surprise, surprise.

[Dan Snow]

Well, Marybourne, thank you so much.

[Mary Beard]

Pleasure.

[Dan Snow]

For correcting me and coming on as ever giving us such a wonderful tour of Roman history. Thank you.

[Mary Beard]

Thank you.

[Dan Snow]

Well, that's it folks. From the Republic through to the carefully crafted authority of Augustus and the emperors who followed him. I'm so grateful to Mary for taking me through how Rome kept rising to the challenge of what it meant to rule an ever larger empire. Rome's story isn't just about the beautiful dilapidated buildings and the far off names. It's about vivid institutions and personalities colliding over centuries. And about how ultimately fragile even the most formidable structures of power can be. If this episode about how Rome built and rebuilt its authority interest to you? Well then next week is all about what happens when that authority really seriously begins to fracture. We got civil wars, we got disease, we got economic strain, we got divided rule, we got pressure on the frontiers. And eventually the fall of the Western Roman Empire. How did something that dominated that known world for centuries finally collapse. Make sure you're following the podcast so you don't miss that. And if you're enjoying the series so far, share it with someone who loves history as much as you do. Until next time, folks.

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[Mary Beard]

Every Style, Every Home While every other

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[Dan Snow]

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