Hello, and welcome to Western Sieve. Well today I feel truly blessed as
our guest needs no introduction. Many of us fell in love with the Roman
Empire reading some of his books. I recall the first time that I picked
up a copy of Rubicon and simply couldn't put it down. Well. Tom
Holland has a new book out, this time covering that period of Roman history
that I think sometimes best captures our imagination. Talking about the Golden or Imperial
Age of Rome, from the fall of Nero and six a d through the
end of Hadrian's reign. This is the realm that you know when we were
school children, you'd look on the map and see Roman Empire at its greatest
extent and marvel at what those people could do. At the same time,
you'd look and read about how Rome crafted that empire and feel nothing but terror
and what those people could do. Tom Holland and I talk about this and
many other topics. His new book packs Rome's Golden Age. It's out today.
I probably don't need to tell you where to pick up a copy,
but I have links in the show notes in case you'd like to check it
out. I couldn't recommend the book more. I mean, I couldn't recommend
any of his books anymore than I already do, but this one especially strong
in my opinion. So, without further ado, here's my interview with historian
Tom Holland. All Right, as I mentioned moments ago, I'm sitting down
here with his story in Tom Holland, who needs no introduction. I'm sure
most of you have a copy of one of his books on your shelf at
home. I'm looking at three right now. So his new book packs looks
at the Golden Age of Rome, the High Imperial Period, as I like
to call it sometimes. I think a lot of us who became fascinated with
the Roman Empire at some point looked at the map that I did when I
was a small child, Roman Empire at its height and sort of wondered,
how did these people achieve such an unimaged, sagenable goals in the time.
But one of the things that you talk about early in the book that I
wanted to touch on, and one of I think the most difficult conundrums I
suppose facing somebody trying to learn about the past, or what I'm trying to
talk to someone about the past, is letting go of our modern conceptions of
the world. It's very difficult, I find for some individuals to do that,
and maybe even if we go vice versa would be hard. In the
preface, you write quote, I've sought to portray the Romans in their imperial
heyday, not as our contemporaries, not as straw men either to be emulated
or condemned, but as people who command our fascination. So I wanted to
start out, I suppose with kind of a two part question, which is
a what do you think it is that makes Romans, particularly the Romans of
this Golden era so fascinating? And how should we understand the Romans? You
know, what is the best way to approach of people so distant from us,
but somebody who is so often in the popular imagination. Well, I
think the two questions can be diffused. I think we find the Romans fascinating
both because they seem to be like us and because they are so alien.
And so there's a sense in which the study of the Roman Empire has something
of the fascination of very good science fiction, where it's it's precisely the fusion
of the familiar with the unfamiliar that generates all the tension and the excitement.
I's kind of very amused to see that. This week there's been I think
it was a tweet where a woman said that she'd asked her husband how many
times do you think about the Roman Empire? And he said, oh,
at least five times a day or something. And now it's kind of papers
in the in the US are running features about it and say, you're really
true. I mean, it didn't come as a surprise to me. I
think about the Roman Empire all the time. But that the whole kind of
the joke of it is I suppose that the Romans are a universal object or
fascination, and I think that they fascinate in part because they seem glamorous and
terrifying and thrilling, and we can enjoy that because they are sufficiently distant that
we don't feel implicated in what they are doing. So it obviously it is
identification or fascination. With more recent empires generates much more ideological tension, but
the Raymans seems sufficiently different. And I remember as a child I was obsessed
with dinosaurs, and if I'm honest, it was the pictures that showed predators
savaging sauropods or whatever that I particularly enjoyed, and I kind of I realized
now that I moved seamlessly onto a study of the Romans. And I remember
the very first book of Roman history that I was given. It was Peter
Connolly's book about the Roman Army, and it had an illustration of the Battle
of elasiuses as great Victory and the Gallic wars on the front, and it
showed various people with spears sticking out of their guts, and this seemed very
mesozoic. It's appeal, so I would not want to downplay the fact that
it is the glamor and the frosty of the Romans. I think that is
part of the appeal. And I think it's something kind of there's something primal
there, but equally admiring empires, admiring people who had threw people into arenas
and torture them to death or got them had them fight to death for fun,
who owned slaves, who had sexual sexual morals that to us would seem
unspeakably cruel. You know, there is the question of how you attempt to
understand them is obviously, as you as you said in your instruction, very
live issue. My own feeling is is that it's not the role of historians
to be philosophers or theologians or moralists. So I'm trying not to be any
of those in my handling the Romans. I'm trying to make them, to
bring them alive, to enable readers to see the world through their eyes,
and if not exactly to sympathize with them, at least to understand them.
And I think the understanding part is the key. You know, obviously,
you know during the Imperial Age, whether it's Americas and peeral Age, Great
Britain's and peeral Age Great, you know, the Romans were viewed a little
bit differently than they might have been after said this is the World Wars,
when expansionist empires were viewed maybe a not so favorable light anymore. But I
do find the Romans. I've always found the Romans particularly fascinating when you look
at maps. But then also, I suppose also from that sort of inspirational
yet simultaneously terrifying standpoint that you point out, because they are one of the
great his slave holding societies of all time. And what's interesting is that because
they are distant, I find that it is oftentimes more easy for me to
speak about the Romans critically in that way than it is to speak about,
say, the Antebellum American South. You know, there's there's nerves that get
touched there that don't seem to get touched when I talk about someone that far
in the past. But as I was reading the book, one thing that
sort of struck me as as interesting is the transition of the city of Rome
during this time period. You know, the city of Rome physically changes very
dramatically, whether we're talking about you know, Nero, whether or not he
intentionally burns it to the ground at sixty four eight atc. Whatever you want
to call it is a city that starts to mirror the expansionist power of the
Empire in such a more stark way than it does prior to this Golden Age.
And I wonder if you could talk about that for a second, because
I thought that the transition of Rome was really something powerful. So Augustus in
Stony's sospiography of him, famously says that he found Roman city of brick,
and he left it a city of marble. And the fact that Rome prior
to the Imperial period, prior to the establishment of the autocracy in Rome was
a city of brick, was a reflection of the fact precisely that it wasn't
an autocracy, that there were limits set on the right and the ability of
the city's great men to promote their own image by building kind of a style
of architecture that for the Romans was associated with kings. So the kind of
palaces and temples and public monuments that you would see in Alexandria or Antioch,
which were patronized by kings were anathema to the Romans for or deep ideological reasons.
But with the concentration of power in the hands of Augustus, who comes
to rule as the first emperor, there's obviously enormous scope for him because there's
no one to stop him to beautify Rome in a way that a Greek from
alexandro or Antioch would would admire. What happens the more emperors there are,
the more buildings go up, because every emperor is in a position to beautify
Rome. So you mentioned the fire. One of the reasons why Nero is
so darkly suspected of having been complicit in the fire is precisely that it gets
rid of so much building stock, housing stock, public monuments or whatever that
Nero regarded as not being up to scratch, and so he rebuilds the urban
fabric of Rome in a much more impressive way. And the conceit is that
he is such an enthusiast for architecture that of course he would burned dout stuff
that he didn't like. Of course he would. Now, whether that's true
or not, I think that the very fact that the stories are told gives
you a sense of how it is possible for some people in Rome to find
this desire on the part of the emperors to monumentalize everything oppressive and upsetting and
unsettling. Because Rome is a very ancient city by this point. There are
lots of lots of court as, lots of places that you know, people
have lived there for centuries and centuries and centuries, and they don't want to
see it removed, but you know, the emperors do. They want to
get rid of it, and they have the power to do so. And
Nero's that the fire and Nero's reign, by removing so much of old Rome
does kind of provide scope for the emperors who follow Nero to complete the task
that Augustus had begun, so Vespasian comes back supposedly with the loot that he
is taken from Judea. I think actually that's massively exaggerated. I think most
of the money that he's coming is from tax receipts that he's screwed out of
people in the Eastern Empire. But it enables him to pose as an imperat
or a victorious general in the old sense of the word, and to throw
up these spectacular monuments. But the person who really finishes off the job is
Trajan, who enables the Romans to feel that they still have what it takes
when it comes to being marshall, that they can march out there, and
they can cross great rivers and capture enemies strongholds and defeat head hunting barbarians and
plunder of them of their gold and silver. And this is just like it
was back in the heroic days of the Republic. So Rome still has what
it's got. But at the same time, all that loot, all that
plunder enables Trajan to come fleet the monumentalization of central Rome, and he does
it on such a scale that when two hundred odd years later, an emperor
who's never been to Rome before who's based in Constantinople arrives in Rome. It's
the spectacle of Trajan's Forum that leaves him awe struck. I think there's no
doubt that by the end of Trajan's reign, Rome is the probably the most
spectacular monumental city scape that has ever existed. It's broader, it's larger,
it's wealthier, and that is why the memory of it, I think,
lives so enduringly, even when so much of it has gone. And it's
why the kind of the muscle memory of that endures in the West for as
long as it does, and it explains in part why Washington, DC,
for instance, looks like it does. That kind of image of the classical
city, the capital of a great imperial power, we know what it should
like in the West, and that is largely thanks to the Empress of this
period and perhaps a bubble all to Trajan. Has anybody who's been to Rome,
as I've had the pleasure of doing it, it is hard sometimes to
go to the Forum and imagine what it must have been like. But the
images are spectacular, and yes, if you've been to Washington, DC,
you can It's not hard to look around and think about who they're emulating.
It's pretty obvious they're not hiding. The founding fathers were not hiding the ball,
you know when they designed well they I mean, because otherwise they wouldn't
be a Senate or a Capitol hill. Nope. I tell the I tell
my students over every at the start of every year, why do you think
we have a Senate? Where does that word come from? It's pretty clear
it's not. We didn't make up. So I'm going to ask a little
bit about the empire and its relationship to conquered people's, because of course they
are conquered peoples. And one of the quotations that I thought was really interesting
from the book was you're right, and I have this kind of you know,
not quoted directly, but an implication being that everyone in the empire was
destined to become in the long run. I think is said a kind of
Rome. And I wonder about assimilation in the Roman Empire, and I wonder
about it specifically right now because it's one of my own projects. I'm kind
of digging into the Wars of the Successors right now, and I don't think
assimilation was something that was on the table for them as they were thinking about
how to add different parts to their empires. And for those unfamiliar, I'm
talking about the successors who come after Alexander the Great in really the late third
and into the you know, second century, and so on and so forth.
And I just wonder, I really kind of wonder when we think about
this idea of becoming Roman, was this this is real? Was this aspirational?
Is this something that the Romans had in mind? And to what extent
was it realistic for people to actually go from being a conquered people to go
to feeling as though they're real citizens of the Roman Empire. Well, right
from the beginning, if we trust the legends, Roman is a city of
immigrants. So Romulus, the asylum which is on the on the Capitol Hill,
was a place where people could come if they were criminals, if they
were escaped slaves or whatever. They could go there and they could be integrated
by Romulus into this novel state. And that tradition that it was possible for
people to people who might not have been Roman to become Roman is a part
of the ethos of citizenship. At the same time, of course, there's
there's chauvinism. There's hostility towards that side, as that's that's that's the way
of human societies. But it was viewed with astonishment by Greek outsiders how ready
the Romans were to give away their citizenship as the Greek saw it. For
the Greeks, say, I think they had a much clearer sense of the
division between say, being Greek and being Barbarian than the Romans did. Of
course, you know, going into the Imperial period, when Claudius starts appointing
Gallic leaders as senators, they are all kinds of snobbish jokes about will they
turn up and in their trousers, But Claudius can do it because basically it's
going with the grain of Roman history. Now there's a further dimension, which
you mentioned, slavery. Now, one of the differences between say Antebellum slavery
in the United States and Rome is that there isn't really a color. It's
not about race. Most people in the Roman world who become slaves, who
are taken to Italy to work as slave are from the Mediterranean, and that
means that it's very easy for them to look like Romans, very easy for
them to blend in and the Again, one of the strange things about the
Roman attitudes to slavery, which Greeks comment on, is how ready the Romans
are to liberate their slaves, to free them. If you're a worker in
the fields or in the minds, you're unlikely to be freed. You're going
to be worked to death. But if you're a domestic slave, the likelihood
is is that you will be freed, and your children can get citizenship,
and grandchildren perhaps can become magistrates, and they become richer and more prosperous,
and in time people who had been brought to Italy as slaves might end up
in the Senate. Who knows. And again this is very, very unusual.
And there's a sense in which I think for the slaves who are lucky
in where they serve their terms of servitude, it's like working your passage to
get a green card. It's an entree into Roman society. And the fact
that people are being brought to Italy in such numbers from such different corners of
the world and the only identity really on offer is a Roman one explains again,
I think, how out of this great kind of this great churning of
enslavement and liberation. You do get a kind of again, a kind of
Roman identity. Now, what is happening in the period covered by this book
is a further thing, which is the Greek empires that you were talking about,
how long have you know, by this period have been conquered for about
a century and a half, two centuries, two hundred and fifty years.
Greeks are starting to be integrated into the fabric of the empire. Greek speakers,
native Greek speakers are to the Senate. And what you see, particularly
with the last emperor that I cover in detail, Hadrian, who was a
great lover of Hellenic culture, was known as a boy as the graculous,
as the little Greek, sponsored a kind of Hellenic equivalent of the European Union,
a union of all the various rival Greek cities. And he's very enthusiastic
for the notion that there is no contradiction between being culturally Greek and being a
Roman, because Hadrian himself from the other side in bodies that. And of
course this in a sense is the future for Rome in the very very very
long run. When Constantinople is captured by the Turks, the people who defend
Constantinople in fourteen fifty three are Greek speakers, but they still see themselves as
Roman as Romeoi. Yeah, I think that's fascinating. Slavery in the Roman
world, And again this is one of those situations where we have to be
mindful of the changes that happen over time, because it's very different from American
shadow slavery, you know, in some sense, depending upon whether if you
are a domestic slave, it's it's closer in many ways, I think,
to almost indentured servitude in the New World, where it's it's not it's not
a forever thing, and there's no there's no mark or badge of inferiority,
as the American courts use the term that gets stamped on you over time as
a result. But I want to ask about a different Roman value. So
there's there's assimilation. But then loyalty, as you point out in the book,
is is very is a critical part of being a Roman. And you
talk about having swearing as a soldier, this the sacramentum, this this oath
of loyalty. But you swear it, and this is the interesting part.
You swear it to the Empire, to the Jerome and the emperor. And
those are different things because those two individuals might have adverse interests at some point.
And this all comes to a head in the year of the Four Emperors.
And and I think that's interesting about the Roman Empire too, is how
it goes through different dynasties. You know, this hollomaze, you know,
rule Egypt undisputably until the until Cleopatra's demise, the accummated rule, you know,
the Golden Age of Persia until Alexander the Great shows up in an unbroken
line. The Julio Claudians die off relatively quickly in Roman terms. Well,
I mean part they kill each other off, I saying they kill you.
I mean, you know, that's kind of click clear, and Nero busy
removing anyone who might be their rivals. I think you're right in identifying the
death of Nero, who is the last living descendant of Augustus to die,
meaning that there is no one left with the divine blood of Augustus in his
veins. So the significance of Augustus as the man who had saved Rome,
who had established the monarchy, who had risen up into the heavens on the
readiness of the Roman people to accept the monarchy, I think is overwhelming,
and that means that when Nero dies, the question that has to be asked
is, well, who can legitimately claim now to rule the Roman world?
And the attempt to answer that question sees four emperors in very rapid succession in
the fateful year eighty sixty nine, the year of four emperors succeed each other.
And it points to what you were saying with the sacrament and the say
the foundations of the emperor's power, but also of the stability of the emperor
itself, despite the show of magistracies and civilian life and so on. Ultimately,
it is a military autocracy. Without professional armies, it would be nothing.
And we are so habituated I think to the idea of their being a
Roman army that perhaps we are a little anesetized to how strange this was,
nothing like it had existed before. I mean, it hadn't really existed before
the time of Augustus. It's Augustus who, as the last man left standing
after the terrible cycles of civil wars that had destroyed the republic, he lays
claim to the command of all the legions. In his role as a magistrate
of the Roman people, and that's why the soldiers swear the oath to him
as the ultimate commander in chief. The commanders in station of the of the
of the legions are his legati, his legates, his delegates. That's their
role. So all these are supposedly are loyal to the one man. Of
course, what happens in the ear of the four emperors is that you get
different people in different corners of the empire who have armies that they can get
behind them, and the result is for a year incessant bloodshed. So you
have the armies in Spain backing one guy, you have the armies on the
Rhine backing another guy, you have the armies in the East backing another guy.
And this is such a catastrophic situation for not just Rome, but for
the entire sweep of the world that she rules, that briefly in that year
people are thinking, well, have the gods abandoned Rome? Is the empire
going to fall to pieces? Anarchy going to claim the universe? The fact
that it doesn't, I think shows that actually the challenges facing the Roman order,
even with the extinction of the bloodline of Augustus, are not so great
that all the convulsions of eighty sixty nine, in the long run, serve
only as surface froth. The foundations of Roman power are sufficiently deep that within
a few decades the memories of that terrible year are already starting to fade.
And the winner of the year of the for him hers Vespasian. I'm always
curious about him in that Did he did the best man win that brief period
of civil war? Or did Vespasian just get lucky and everybody else knocked each
other off and then he had the opportunity to take on maybe arguably the weakest
of his opponents. I think both. I think he clearly was lucky.
He was lucky principally in the Judean's rebelled in the final years of Nero's reign,
and he was sent out to suppress the rebellion, which meant that he
had a whole host of battle heart and legions at his back, just as
the ear of the four emperors kicked off, which was obvious, very youthful,
very useful thing to have. But I think he was also by miles
the ablest. He was, I think a very impressive man. He was
the only one of the three of the four emperors in that year who could
properly be reckoned an imperator in both senses of the words, so imperator in
the sense that it gives us the English word emperor, but also imperator in
the original Latin sense of a victorious general, a general who's been triumphant on
the battlefield. Vespasian was both, and he was able to come back to
cast himself as a figure of military rectitude and probity, a kind of throwback.
He himself was from peasants stock, from the hills north of Rome,
so he had no kind of aristocratic pedigree whatsoever. But the very fact that
he was able to cast himself as of peasant's stock enabled him to play a
kind of a figure of republican virtue as well as a very impressive military leader.
And that's what enabled him to rule for ten years, to set rown
back on its foundations, to heal the wounds of peace, and to establish
a dynasty that would last for another twenty years after his death. So I
think he was a very very formidable man. And I think again, of
all of the four men who compete in that year, the most appealing as
well. So it was said of him, that he had an expression like
a man straining for a shit. And anyone who's ever looked at a portrait
bust of Vespasian, we'll see that this was a very very accurate comment.
And the great thing about Vespasian is that when he was told this, he
laughed. He was a man who could take a joke by and large,
and that's always, I think, an appealing quality in an emperor. Yeah,
I guess I've always I've always admired Vespasian because anybody who can come out
of that civil war period and establish that level of stability again must be by
definition in people do get lucky, but no one gets that lucky. I'm
also interested about his two sons, Titus and Demission, because you know,
tightest rules but not very long and dies of the plague. And I sometimes
compare the two of them to almost like you know, in American politics,
JFK and LBJ Lynden Plaine Johnson, because LBJ gets this, gets this good
comparison, he has to follow JFK. Who doesn't. Who doesn't he was
in president very long because he dies and he has this wonderful oh, he's
this wonderful leader, who oh, if only he would have lived, you
know. And to an extent, Demission looks in the sources sometimes terrible by
comparison to Titus. But I wonder he is absolutely terrible. Yeah, Is
that true? Or was he did so? Demission? I think he's laboring
under a number of disadvantages, and the most the greatest of them is the
fact that he is not, as Vespasian had been, and as tight as
had been an imperator in the sense of a victorious general. Because Vespasian had
suppressed the Judean revolt pretty much, and Titus finishes it off by capturing Jerusalem
and of course notoriously destroying the Temple, and this gives them a kind of
a military glamor that no one had really had ruling Rome since the time of
Tiberius. Now, Vespasian and Titus both massively exaggerate their achievements in Judea.
They cast it not as a suppression of a revolt, but as a great
conquest which licensed them to celebrate a triumph. They imply that Judea was a
land teeming with wealth, and that this is what enables them to build,
most famously, the Coliseum. I don't think that's true, there wasn't that
much wealth in Judea. I think most of it, as I said,
was extorted from the Greeks. But it gives both of them a glamor.
And because Titus is younger than Vespasian, he can kind of play the JFK
as you say, the Demission can't really do that, and he comes to
power I think resentful of that. He clearly was not an appealing character.
He was. He seems to have been widely disliked on a personal level,
and I think that that feeds into the sources. There's another reason, however,
why the memory of Demission is a black one that is more flattering,
I think, to his actual achievements, and that is that he was a
committed reformer who was unafraid to break a few eggs to make to make an
omelet. So the Demission very much feels that he's an emperor coming to power
in crisis, and he is, I think understandably convinced that the Romans have
lost the favor of the gods. They've lost it because the era of the
Four Emperors showed how close the Empire was to coming to utter disaster. Because
in the reign of Titus, a succession of disasters had overwhelmed Rome. Its
most significant building, the Temple to Jupiter on the capitol, had burned down
for the second time in a period of ten years. A plague had hit
the city, which, as you said, seems to have carried off Titus,
and most famously and notoriously of all the Vesuvius had erupted an entombed Pompeii
and Herculaneum. And I think that Demission feels that all of these are signs
that something is badly wrong in Rome, and that it's his duty as Caesar
to re establish the bond, the religio as the Romans called it, between
the Roman people and the gods. And he does this in all kinds of
ways. He acts as a moral arbiter. He he sticks his nose into
all kinds of aspects of personal morality that generates all kinds of resentment. He's
also very, very committed to strengthening the currency. So although he is bald,
he always shows himself on his coins with a full head of hair.
And this isn't just I think, out of personal vanity, although I'm sure
that's a bit of it, but because he's using this to illustrate the strength
of the currency that he has restored, and he builds up the military forces
on the frontiers, and all of this is a legacy that he passes on
to the emperors who follow him. When when the mission dies, for the
reasons I've spelled out, he's unpopular and so his statues are trashed, his
memory is blackened. But when we come to Trajan, this man who rebuilds
Rome on the monumental scale, as we would talk discussing, it would have
been impossible for Trajan to do what he did without the legacy that he had
been bequeathed by Demission, the strong currency and the concentration of military parallel and
the Danube that enables him to Conquerdacia, this gold and silver rich land up
in what's now Romania. So I think that Demission is an unsympathetic figure,
button but an impressive figure. And I think it's worth pointing out that reformers
are rarely loved by those who are presently in power, as those who are
presently in power have to sometimes put the bill for said reforms. But you
know, and I've always, I guess I've always I've always admired a more
demission a little bit more than the sources have been willing to give him credit
for. We have to keep in mind who's writing here. You know,
some of his reforms certainly benefited the empire in the long run, even though
they may have been resented by the aristocracy. Who is of course? Were
you were you sympathetic to my portrayal of the I was, I was sympathetic.
I thought that it was a little bit more balanced than a lot of
the portrayals that I've read in the past. I'm very glad I appreciated it.
I mean, and the person who will get to next is Trajan,
and it's it's easy to love him. It's it's much more different. I
didn't like Hadrian, I didn't like Trajan at all, but I mean,
it's easy to admire by him. He's must from the very beginning. You
know, he's called the great before you or the best before he's practically even
done anything. I mean, it's it's interesting, And that's kind of the
question that I wanted to ask about Trajan is you know, he's in so
many histories laid out as the best Roman emperor, and I often wonder about
that, is he really is he the best Roman emperor. There's a lot
to choose from here, and yeah, it's the highest extent, But does
that make him the best I don't know. Well, I mean he impresses
very very stern critics, and I guess the sternest critic would be the great
historian Tacitus, whose portraits of of the various caesars are pretty merciless. But
Tastus seems to admire Trajan because he of Trajan seemed to offer reassurance to Tacitus
that actually the Romans hadn't lost it. Tast Us was paranoid that Rome's greatness
was breeding softness in the Roman people that would make it impossible for them to
have the kind of the record of conquests and military achievement that had been the
Romans back when they were a hardier, lesser people. But the conquest of
Dacia seemed to tast Us say, well, this isn't actually true. The
Romans are still the Romans, hurrah. And the fact, of course that
he Trajan can then use all this loot to beautify Romans. We were discussing,
this is also great. So it looks like you can have your cake
and eat it. You can be incredibly rich and have loads of baths and
all kinds of stuff while simultaneously going out and conquering Dacians, so brilliant.
Everything's wonderful, what we know. What's not to like the problem is that
Trajan goes too far and he does what everyone in twenty one century American knows
you should never do in invades Iraq, and the invasion of Iraq for Trajan,
as for George W. Bush, doesn't end well, and in fact
Trajan has a stroke. There's a massive insurgency going on. Trajan dies,
and it's left to his successor Hadrian to clear up the mess, which Adrian
does with great skill. He basically withdraws from Mesopotamia. But he never blames
Trajan because he knows that Trajan is admired and loved, and he knows also
that his own legitimacy as emperor kind of depends on Trajan being admired and loved.
So no one ever blames Trajan for the fact that he basically screwed up
by pushing too far. The blames, such as it is, falls on
Hadrian, which is very unfair. But I think that the disaster in Iraq
means that that Trajan cannot possibly be reckoned an unmitigated success. I think the
Romans were deluding themselves. They liked what they saw in him. He was
their model of what an emperor should be. But they're enshrining of him as
the optimist prince chips. The best of emperors depended on them closing their eyes
to the disaster that claimed the end of his reign. And does that sort
of get into the question of I mean, does Trajan answer the question of
can the Roman Empire expand forever? And the answers null at the end of
the day. Yeah, I think he does. Yeah, yeah, because
I mean the Romans never acknowledge this. They never acknowledge this. They have
you know, the Romans didn't really have a word for frontier. There are
simply lands that they choose not to conquer. And this is very much what
the perspective that Hadrian brings. So he you know, there are wolves built
along the kind of the desert reaches of Africa bordering this great wooden palisade is
built beyond the limits of the Rind to keep the Germans out, and most
famously of all, a wall is built out of stone in the northern reaches
of the province of Britannia, and that wall is conventionally thought of as a
defensive structure. So the most famous recent evocation of it is in Game of
Thrones. George R. Martin visited Hatred's Wall as a you know, on
a trip to Britain and imagined transfigured it into this great wall of ice with
you know, white walkers and whatever lurking beyond it. That's not the purpose
at all. Hatred's Wall exists as a statement of contempt and for those who
lie beyond it and of Roman power. That's why there are no ramparts on
it. It's not there to keep picks and Scots out. It's akin to
massive gates barring entry, say to a billionaires, a state keeping the riff
raff, the poor that tramps the down and outs they are not worthy of
passing. You know. It's like a massive gated It's like the gates of
a gated community. And what Hadrian is saying by building Hadrian's Wall is this
is the outermost limits of what Rome thinks is worth conquering. Everywhere beyond it
doesn't deserve to be ruled by Rome. Everything south of it, this is
the garden of the world. This is where peace and order exists, and
it is ours and nobody else can have it a part of it. And
that's what those that's what those fortifications are about. Yeah, And Hadrian has
always strike me as as right, quite frankly, that they're they're just okay,
simply isn't if you kind of look at the map of Rome under Hadrian
and you think, well, how much further conquer? What want Scotland?
And I mean, what's what's the point of this? You know's what's in
the deep dark forests of what is today modern day Germany, in Poland and
beyond not mountains of gold. You know, it's it strikes me as you
know, you're right that he is the Hadrian is the most intellectual emperor since
Tiberius. And I don't know, does that make him more reasonable? You
know? How does that? How should we understand him? I think I
think it, I think it it. I think by temperament. You know,
this was noted by by people who wrote about him, that he seemed
to be a compound of paradoxes, that he was capable of being many things
simultaneously. And I suppose the aspect of his appearance that famously illustrates this is
his beard, because he's the first emperor to be portrayed regularly with a beard,
and a beard is a marker of a legionary, and so it establishes
trade. Hadrian, as you know, one of the lads, a vere
militarists, a military man, a man whom the legionaries can identify with,
and Hadrian is massively popular with them. You know when he when he goes
on his great tours of the of the legionary basis he would never expect the
legionaries to do things that he himself what isn't going to do? So he
goes around bear headed, he accompanies them on their marches, he eats their
rations. He's he's much loved by the legionaries. But at the same time,
a beard is is the marker of a philosopher. We already talked about
how Hadrian is a great sponsor of Greek culture, and he in that sense,
he's simultaneously, you know, a working class military man and he is
kind of a foreign style intellectual. You know, it's he drives a truck
and he reads the New York Times. I mean, it's kind of you
know, it's that it's that equivalent. It's spanning Trump's bass and you know,
liberals in Harvard. He's able to present himself simultaneously as both and that's
obviously a tremendous political talent. And I think that he's he's the most remarkable
of emperors since I think Augustus, because he's not afraid of the paradoxes and
the tensions and the complexities within the Empire as it has grown up, but
sees them as things that are worth cultivating. And in a sense, the
you know, the most dramatic illustration of that is his sponsorship as a god
of his dead lover, a boy called Antinous, who is Greek eyes in
mysterious circumstances in the Nile and is raised to the heavens by Hadrian and becomes
a genuine object of cult worship across much of the Eastern Empire. I think
because people in the eastern half of the Empire can look at Antinous and think,
well, he was loved by an emperor. He's closer to us than
than twenty one else, you know, I mean much more than say,
you know, Augustus or someone like that. And in that sense that you
know, it's even a bit of a rival to Christ. And it's telling
that of all the of all the pagan gods that the Church fathers had it
in for, Antinous seems to have been the one they really hated. Yeah,
go figure, go figure. I'm always going to wrap up here in
just a second. But I'm always interested because Hadrian takes this tour of the
Empire, and I'm always struck by the fact that he seems to be the
only one who does it. I don't what is that. I mean,
maybe you've kind of already handed. Augustus had done it. Augustus had done
it, so it was no sutonious notes that. I think it's he.
Of all the provinces in the Empire, I think the only one that Augustus
hadn't visited was Sardinia. Maybe Africa as well, But you know, so
Augustus had had constantly been on the road. But you're right, from that
point onwards, Hadrian is exceptional, and maybe more exceptional. Maybe he's who
do you think is a better emperor? Hadrian or Trajan? I kind of
have a sense which way you're going, Oh, Hadrian. Hadrian is I
think, by miles the better emperor. I think. I think most emperors
are not consequential. I think that what happens would have happened without them at
all. I think Hadrian is a consequential emperor because of the role that he
plays in finessing the integration of the Hellenic into the Roman, creating the great
or Roman. If you like, I'm very good. Well, we've heard
this has been a great conversation. Is there anything that There's a lot more
in the book, obviously, but it's clocks in it. I believe one
page shy of four hundred pages, so it's it's we've got a lot more
to go, but every page ap banger every I'll have to say, we
didn't talk about it at all. But I will say, for the edification
of those listening, I've never read a more gripping description of the eruption of
Mount Vesuvius. I simply can't thank you too much for a few pages.
Thank you. I thought I thought it was phenomenal and oftentimes clossed over,
but but thank you so much for coming on the shank. You're going to
want so much for having And I know the book's going to do well as
all the other books have, and I can't, I can't recommend it enough.
So thank you so much, Thanks so much for having me by way.