Hello, and welcome to Western SIEV. In this bonus author interview, I
sit down with a repeat guest, Adrian Goldsworthy. He's probably one of the
premier ancients and classical historians in today's society. You may recall last time we
chatted about Philip and his son. Maybe you've heard of him, Alexander the
Great. This time we talk about the relationship that dominates the East West split
really up to the rise of Islam, Rome and Persia Persia through its various
permutations. The link to buy the book is in the show notes. But
of course the relationship between Rome and Persia is one of the most important relationships
in all of antiquity, at least when looking at the West. Today,
I sit down with historian Goldsworthy and we talk about that relationship in great detail,
and why it was so different from Rome's relationship compared to other kingdoms and
states that it came into contact with, why one never could truly conquer the
other, why this was to an extent a symbiotic relationship. We'll talk about
all that and more in the interview right now. So back with historian Adrian
Goldsworthy. As I mentioned moments ago, author of many many books that are
sitting on my shelf right now. We did Philip and Alexander last time several
years ago, and now we're back in the era of ancient Rome classical history.
Are all of our favorites talking about Roman Persia's new book out, Roman
Persia the Seven hundred Year Rivalry. And this is one of my favorites to
talk about because Rome and Persia, and we could talk about the Parthians versus
the Persians later on, but they sort of define this East West rivalry for
such a massive period of time that is so important. But I wanted to
start out by asking about something that you bring up at the very beginning of
the book, which is that the story of Roman Persia is so frequently told
through Roman eyes and from the Roman perspective. And I wanted to ask you,
first of all, why is that, although I think we all know
the answer, But then secondly, more importantly, how does that maybe change
how we understand this relationship in general? It's the old problem that you get
the story from whoever chose to wrote it, to write it down, and
then those manuscripts survived, so essentially nearly everything about the ancient world is told
from a Greco Roman perspective. So you're talking about Alexander the Great conquering the
Persian Empire. You never get in any meaningful way the Persian perspective, let
alone that of Indian rulers and communities that he encounters when he's getting to the
far eastern extent of his campaigns and conquests. So we always it's always told
by the Greeks and the Romans. You know, the odd variation you'll get
in Roman history is where you might get the Jewish perspective. So Josephus is
really the only person who writes in detail about what it's like to fight against
the Roman army. Otherwise there's no one whoever does that. Even and you
know there aren't surviving Greek sources. Polybius writes about the Romans on campaign,
but he never writes of his own experiences. He's always looking from the Roman
sidelines, from the Roman camp when he was physically present, So it's always
told from the Greeks Roman's point of view. It's nearly always told from the
Roman point of view once you get to the dominance of Rome, so that's
inevitable. There are at least some sources that give you a sense of primarily
Sicanian rather than Parthian memories of these conflicts, though much of it is filtered
through tradition that isn't written down for centuries. So you have the medieval Islamic
tradition that sometimes look back and remembers great Sasanian kings of kings. You have
the Armenian tradition, which is a little older but is obviously naturally focused on
Armenia and its issues rather than the empires in their own rights. So you
know you're there, You're caught between them. They are useful to you,
they are threats to you, and a mix of both. But it's so
that's interesting. And then there are a few documents that survive a few inscriptions.
It is still, though overwhelmingly told from the Roman perspective and by authors
writing in Latin or in Greek, occasionally later on in Syriac of these other
languages as you get further on, But primarily it's that viewpoint. So that's
a big, big problem. You are looking at a rivalry and a series
of conflicts overwhelmingly from one person's point of view or one side's point of view,
and it's much easier to trace the changes in perceptions of things on that
side, how the Roman Empire alters and therefore how its attitudes change over the
centuries. I think the only approach you can try to do that's fair is
to ask the same questions of both sides, even if the evidence will often
leave you unable to answer them fully from the point of view of the Parthian
or the Sesanians. So you look at them, you don't begin by saying,
okay, it's it's I mean, you know, it's the age old
thing. If you look at Thucydides and it's normally presented as the Peloponnesian War,
the war of Athens against the Peloponnesians, well that's not how the Spartans
are thinking about this. For them, it's the Athenian War. So you
have to remind yourself at every stage that we shouldn't automatically think the Romans are
right, or the Romans are stronger, or the Romans are more sophisticated.
We shouldn't also be looking for answers to why do the Romans lose on occasions
any more than we should be looking for a wider the Parthians or the Persians
win and vice versa when depending on the fortunes of the particular battle or campaign,
whatever it might be. So I think it comes down to trying to
understand these are two empires that are incredibly successful by any standards of human history.
They are around for a very long time, they are very large.
Yes, the Roman Empire is physically bigger, has more people, more resources
than the Party and Sicanian Empire. But the Party in Sesenian Empire is still
massive by any ancient standards. And when you think it's around for over eight
centuries and it's in contact with the Romans for about seven hundred of those years,
then this is success. You know, this is a sophisticated, efficient,
successful ancient power, ancient regime, and rather like the Romans. That
doesn't mean you have to think they're nice or they're wonderful, but it means
they are worth understanding, they are important, they have done something right by
their standards to be so successful. So I think that's the only way that
I felt you could approach it is to view them very much in that sense
as two rivals, as too more or less equals, at least in the
sense that they are the great powers around there's nothing else like them that either's
in contact with. You've got China off further to the east. But although
they have some contact with the parthy Ins Sesanians, they're not rivals, you
know, They're never close enough to be a real challenge to each other.
So it is down to these two and there is no one else out there
in their world that can come anywhere close to them. So it's starting with
that level of equality of similarity, the fact that both were aggressive expansionist empires,
and then trying to understand each one in its own right, but particularly
in the relationship with the other. And I think that that makes a lot
of sense. You know, reading the Western sources, which of course is
what I grew up with, you know, you would you'd see you know,
Crassis as disaster at the Battle of Kerry, for example, and that's
that's portrayed as an unmitigated defeat and disaster. It's not portrayed as a magnificent
Parthian victory, which perhaps is how would have been portrayed if we had more
sources from the other side. I think the other thing that's worth pointing out.
I like the word rivalry in this book, and I kept coming back
to it for two reasons. First of all, Rome doesn't really have another
rival, and neither do the Parthian Persians on it. You know, we'll
just we can use all the terms, but they just don't like they there's
no one else. Yes, of course, ultimately various Germanic kingdoms are going
to bring down the West, but that's not really a rivalry. There's not
really a back and forth. And the other thing I think is important here
is that this isn't this is not an ideological conflict, and I think it's
kind of a mistake to put it in that way. Like we tend to
view the conflict, especially in modern terms between sort of West and maybe Islamic
East, is as one that's driven by ideology, and that's not the case
back then, is I can't you can't really say that the Romans are the
good guys in this, you know practice, the Romans practiced slavery on an
unprecedented scale. It's horrifyingly brutal culture. Yeah, there's a lot to that
we can admire about them, but they're not. It's not it's not the
same thing as looking at sort of the axis versus the allied powers in World
War Two. I don't. I don't think you could paint it that way.
So that's why I think the word rivalry really makes a lot of sense.
I guess the first question that I wanted to ask, because I have
a bunch of questions kind of about this idea, and the first one is
when did like both sides recognize that the other was different, different in terms
of, Okay, this is a rival that may we're just simply not going
to be able to conquer and we're going to have to learn to coexist with
them. At some point did they come to that understanding simultaneously at about the
same time? Was there back and forth? Like when did that sort of
mutual existence develop? I mean, it's most obvious in the age of Augustus,
So you're talking end of the first century BC, early first century AD.
Because Augustus, in spite of all the things that poets like Horace and
others are talking about, these great parthy and victories, the conquest. You
know, you're going to go to India, You're going to be the new
Alexander or one of your children will be all this sort of thing never does.
It makes no serious attempt whatever to launch even the war that Julius Caesar
was supposed to be planning and preparing when he was murdered, this great expedition
against the Parthians, and we don't really know because it didn't happen what he
planned. So I think there is an element. But one thing to remember.
We know this rivalry is going to go on for all these centuries,
and we know these empires are going to exist for all this time. But
when you think the first contact comes in the nineties BC, the first war
is in fifty four BC when Crisus attacks and gets defeated here later, but
it all happens at a time when the Seleucid Empire has only just shriveled up
finally and gone, and Pompey's just abolished it. I mean, it's got
smaller and smaller, but it is one of the oddities. And it comes
back to this sense of you can't break this down into a simple East and
West rivalry other than you know, there's some basic facts of geography, but
beyond that, because in the middle you have that area that was ruled by
the Seleucids for several centuries, the largest chunk of the Asian part of Alexander's
conquests. That has a lot of Greek communities, but it also has lots
of other people's as well, and in its entirety that is never taken by
either of these new empires, the Parthians or the Romans who come along.
They sort of cut it down the middle. And there are a lot lots
of communities like Selucia on the Tigris, which next to Alexander and Antioch,
is the biggest Greek city in the world, and it's never part of the
Roman Empire. You know, they take it a few times, but it's
always Parthian and then Sicanian, and they still have Greek law, Greek tradition,
all of these ideas that whatever the ethnicity, culturally, there is still
this perception that this community. Now if you're looking at things in a sort
of where a natural boundaries where that shouldn't be there, or if it is,
then Syria has more in common with Selucia than it does necessarily with Libya
or something like that, or much of the Roman Empire. So it cuts
down the middle this political grouping that has lasted again for a long time,
and that's the other reminder. Both of them are new powers in the area.
You know, the Romans start intervening, they prod around, they get
involved this big war with Mithridates of Pontus in the first century BC. That
sort of spreads to Armenia and other areas around, and Roman command will march
around. The Parthians have been coming from the other direction but doing much the
same thing. They've expanded quickly, but they've started to overrun these and they
are piecing together an empire that isn't again a sort of simple entity waiting to
be united under one rule. Yes, it has a large part of what
had been the Achemenid Persian Empire, but it doesn't have Syria, Palestine,
Egypt, all the areas which were part of that. And you know,
there are brief attems, but they don't get that. So nobody is taking
over something that is is naturally there or you know, you can see the
outline of what should be this this regime, these provinces, this region controlled
united under one authority. So they're both expanding and I think there is a
shock there. It strikes me if you look at the Kahi campaign, if
you look at the campaigns of marc Antony and others in those first few decades
of conflict when they actually fight quite a lot, but then it down.
Both sides are very confident in themselves because both are the great power. They
are people who've got used to winning that any other foreigner you meet and fight,
you will probably prove that you're superior. And this is the same era
when Caesar has been charging around Gall and crossing the Rhine and coming to Britain,
all this sort of thing. The Romans are expanding. They're used to
the fact they're better at fighting than anybody else out there. But the Parthians
have exactly the same perception, and it's a bit of a shock to find
someone who is rather more dangerous and has a depth to their power that simply
defeating them once or twice isn't going to be enough to bring them down.
So I suspect early on there is probably a sense that anything could happen,
and that's why you have Crasus declaring he's going to march on Selucia. Doesn't
necessarily mean him plan to conquer Parthia anymore than you could say Julius Caesar is
actually planning on conquering Gall. He wants to extend Roman dominance, but that
doesn't necessarily mean permanent occupation per provinces. It just means that everybody becomes your
ally and knows their place, and there's no other competitor within that region.
And then by forty BC you've got the Parthians overrunning Syria, overrunning capturing Jerusalem,
and pushing to the coast because they think, well, maybe we can
do this, and it takes those early campaigns where both sides suffer serious defeats.
We know a lot about Krhai because the Roman sources that survive talk about
it, though again they're written quite a lot later. It's assumed a prominence
that perhaps it didn't really have. For much of Roman history, we don't
hear very much about the defeats of the Parthians by Ventidius, which involved the
death of the crown prince of Parthia. That the king of king's favorite son
gets himself killed fighting the Romans, is beheaded, his head is paraded around
the recently reoccupied cities of Syria. You know, it's even it's a scene
that nearly always gets cut, but it's even in Shakespeare's as the a Cleopatri
that far. So there's a sort of shock factor that suddenly, and I
think there's a learning process where people start to think, oh, actually,
these aren't a pushover. From the pathy of perspective, the Romans are a
lot tougher than anyone else they've met. This is not a declining Solucid kingdom
that we can beat in the end. This is something bigger. They've got
lots more soldiers, they'll keep coming back. And the Romans have also realized
that these people are dangerous because the Emperor Augustus doesn't fight a big Parthian war,
but he fights wars all over Europe and in western parts of North Africa,
so he will fight lots of aggressive campaigns. He adds lots of territory
to the Roman Empire, consolidates areas where the Romans had intervened, but he
doesn't do that very noticeably in the East. So I think there's there may
be an element of personal recognition of somebody shrewdly sort of looking at the costs
of the benefits and saying, well, I can get the glory I need
over here and it's less risky. Whereas if I go that way, where
do I stop? I mean, one thing we always forget, And I
wrote this book very consciously, having just done Philip and Alexander before. Yes,
the Romans don't necessarily have recent detailed geographical knowledge of large parts of the
Parthian Empire one beyond, but they have that memory of Alexander. They do
know how far the world stretches that way, They do know that all these
lands are out there, and they do know how rugged some of the terran
is, how difficulty is. So it isn't you know that Sometimes you get
from modern scholars this perception they have very little sense of geography and they don't
really know. They think they could conquer the world. I think they actually
know that while Alexander's tried that and they didn't quite you know, it didn't
last. Yes it's glorious, but we know what's involved, just how far
we'd have to go, and how big these people might you know, how
big this empire might be. So I think that comes together with this sense
very quickly. Because the dominant pattern for the First Entry AD is that while
there are moments of tension and some limited campaigning in Armenia under Nero, they
don't fight. The two great empires effectively coexist nervously, perhaps with great suspicion
with lots of saber rattling on each side, and Augustus claims that the Parthians
have submitted to him, builds this big arch in the forum, just as
you can go and look at Chapa the first triumphal monuments where he talks about
these vast Roman armies he's defeated. You know, both need to be taken
with the same pinch of salt, because this is a great leader telling his
people how great he is, and they're the home audience. They don't know
the details, and even if they do, they're not going to say anything.
So it's trying to it's reminding us als, but I think it's actually
it probably takes a generation, but I think remarkably quickly they do seem to
realize that this is something different, This is something that is so much stronger
that you have to be a lot more careful in what you do. But
neither also seems to have this great ambition to just keep on conquering until there's
nothing left to conquer. So it tells us something about how aggressive states in
this period work in that they they are willing to see that there are limits
to what's useful what's what's worth doing. Well, yeah, I mean there
has to be something worth taking. You know, the Romans looked at a
lot of areas and said, plus, it's not worth the trouble of why
would we march south of the Sahara, for example, Like, what would
be the purpose of that. There's there's no reason to do so. And
I do think, you know, I tend to go back to if you
talk about sort of this the idea of sort of personal emperors, And I
do wonder also if there's sort of a transition in mindset as we go from
republic to principal, you know, where you know, there's no longer this
need to drive your own standing through military success in glory anymore. And if
Rome remains a republic and it's in its current sense, do we launch endless
campaigns to try to replicate the efforts of Alexander? Who? Yes, I
mean I think that that's that's important. You know, Alexander, you know,
had to string up a reas of victories against the Achemenid Empire. It
wasn't just one and done, which is the way that it is in a
lot of other states. You know, these are two empires who can take
a punch, and that is a big deal to that extent, And you
know, I kind of think of sometimes the transition between Trajan and Hadrian.
You know, Trajan is sort of the last Roman emperor to say I'm gonna
I'm gonna roll the dice on this, and Hadrian looks at it and says,
nah, this is this isn't worth it. What are we trying to
hold on to so far away from the heart of our empire. It's going
to cost far more than it is. Give it back to them and and
go back receive some areas. Sign one of those treaties that I love that
the you know people sign in the ancient engine classical world of this is a
treaty of perpetual peace, which is then broken two years later. And I
mean, you just you get this all the way, you get this all
the way up to the early modern aid. I mean, you know,
France is the first and Charles the fifth are still doing it in the in
the sixteenth century. So it's a lot of it's ludicrous. But sometimes I
do wonder. And the next question that I had about this is like,
was there also just sort of a uniqueness in terms of the way these two
empires organized their fighting forces that made it to such that it made it a
lot easier for either to win on their home turf, their home field,
and a lot more difficult to win, you know, when they were the
visitor. You know, it was a lot harder for Roman legions to march
into the Iranian plateau, and a lot more difficult maybe for Cisonid or Parthian
step horse archers to go into the dense Balkans and be successful. I've always
wondered if there's something to that sort of uniqueness of military styles that it just
didn't lend itself to either conquering the other. What do you think about that?
It's very difficult because there are so many gaps in our knowledge when it
comes to the military side. I mean, it had never really struck me
in quite just the extent to which we have descriptions of the Battle of Kai
fifty three BC. Prass's is defeated. We've got Plutarch, We've got Dio,
who seems rather more confused, more impressionistic. Plutarch's account, by Plutarch
standards, is pretty good and seems reasonably plausible, reasonably logical. We then
have to jump until procopious talking about the sixth century AD before we have another
battle description that's anything like is detailed, and we know they fight lots of
battles, and we know the Romans wind sun, the Parthians or the Persians
win others, but they're not described. So we sometimes can jump to conclusions
about the military systems which are based on very little understanding of how these campaigns
played out. Now you can step back and say, well, it's all
the sort of the military systems. So the number of soldiers you can journal
rate, how well you can supply them, how effectively they will fight in
these environments is limited. But on the other hand, Alexander has steamed through
a Persian empire with effectively an infantry based army. Yes, he gets lots
of cavalry. They're important, but there are always a small minority of the
overall force, perhaps until you get to the latest stages where he's picked up
all these various nomads and horse archers and other types by the time he's pushing
into India. So infantry armies can do really well. And of course one
of the solutions have done quite well fighting against the Parthians and then suffered defeats
in other battles. It depends on how well you manage things. So I
used to come from this point of view because I very much you know,
my early research was all onto the Roman army. How do And I thought,
well, yeah, maybe this is a lot of people had said.
It's simply the legions can't function in that area, but they adapt to all
sorts of other environments and function very well. Now, obviously the difference is
that the resources of the Parthians are considerably larger. Again, coming back to
the point you made a few moments ago talking about the Persians, you don't
they don't just fold. If you win one battle, they can form another
army, they could replace it. I found looking at the sort of the
longer term, is that it's interesting how the two sides seem to adapt.
Now again we see it most from the Roman side, But if you look
at the army of the first century AD, the Roman army, it's moved
from being the purely legion based or primarily legion based force. You've got all
these auxiliaries. You've got very large quantities of archers on foot, of horse
archers, and looking at the Armenian campaigns described by Tacitus and Veniro's reign,
the Romans seem pretty much most of the time able to march where they like,
besiege what they like. Now Armenia is different country to other parts.
And obviously, yes, we never find out about what the Romans would do
if they'd got into the Iranian heartland, because they don't try it and they
don't push that. Could they have adapted to those circumstances. Perhaps, perhaps
not, But there is an ability, and you see it the other side
in that there's this emphasis. The classic Parthian warrior, as far as the
Romans are concerned the Greeks are concerned, is the horse archer, the man
who shoots you, then gallops away and shoots you a bit more and keeps
on wearing you down, but doesn't get close until you're very weak. The
classic Sasanian warrior is the heavily armored Climinarius catafract whatever he might be, who
might still be using a bow, but he's using it from much closer range,
and he certainly isn't trotting away and then coming back at you. He
goes toe to toe. He'll shoot you first at close range and then eventually
he'll come in with sword or mace. So and you've got then the prominence
of war elephants and the like. So you've got an army that's changed,
you do. Yes, it's still primarily cavalry, or at least it's most
prestigious and important part, but it's fighting in a very different way, in
the same way that the Roman army will eventually develop into the sort of precopious
army and the army of the strategicon, which is predominantly cavalry at least in
its aggressive arm and its battlefield arm So think, actually it's it's it's more
that at this higher level they realize that the scale of a war against the
other is just too risky. And it's not I don't think that either things.
We couldn't do it. It's just it's too much, it's not worth
it. It comes back to your you know, the Augustine tag that he
doesn't want reckless generals. He compares them to fishing with a golden hook.
This idea, you know, it's simply any gain you can possibly get is
not worth the risk that just if you do lose. So I think there's
there's a difference, but it is deeply frustrating. And you mentioned Trajan,
these major campaigns that break that tradition of the first century a d. When
you haven't gone deep into parthy and territory at all, and you certainly haven't
fought these major expeditions. Trajan suddenly does that for a couple of years,
and there's all sorts of interesting questions about why. But the big problem is
we don't know the sources for that period. Those campaigns are atrocious. You
have you don't have even have dire. You have an epitome of written centuries
later that's very brief, very confused. You've got bits from the Historia Augusta,
and you're using this stuff in the same way that when you come to
Lucius Verus's campaign in the earliess of Marcus Aurelius's reign, where again the Romans
will go right down the Tigris Euphrates valley, we end up relying on Lucian
and his satire of the terrible military histories he viewed the of this campaign to
try and piece together what the heck is going on, because we just don't
know, so I'd like it would be wonderful to know more about that development
what has changed. Why do the Romans suddenly get more aggressive? Apparently?
How are the Parthian armies fighting? Because the Sasanians will spring up in the
third century and look a bit different in the way they conduct things, most
of all because they could suddenly they're very good at sieges in a way that
Parthian armies have not seemed to be, and that is an extra dimension in
the warfare. It was something again going back to Philip and Alexandra, I
wanted to emphasize with them that once you get an army like that that can
actually take wall stronghold and walled cities, they can make their victories far more
permanent because you can't just go back and hide behind your walls and wait for
them to run out of food and go away. Suddenly there is no refuge,
because they will come for you. Now the Romans fight in a similar
pattern. At least the Romans by the time you get even to Crasus this
day, let alone the Imperial army, they're very good engineers, they're very
good at siege craft anise. Initially the Parthians don't seem to have matching skills,
but by the time you get to the third century, the Sasanians do,
and by the time you get to the fourth century and amianas, there's
very little difference between the way the Persians and the Romans actually go about attacking
walled strongholds and walled cities, and the wars between them are dominated by sieges,
not battles. So the armies have become very similar, so that none
of this is static. Things develop at every stage, and there is probably
more back and forth. Somebody has an innovation than the other side thinks of,
okay, maybe we can get around this by doing that to regain the
advantage, and perhaps that works. Perhaps it does, or they copy something
the other one does. So there's probably you can see the broad outline of
that going on, but you can't see all the detail. And again it's
a danger doing one of these sort of long, long range studies, really,
but we forget how many lifetimes and how many incidents are taking place.
And then again you step back and you realize that actually warfare at any time
is the exception. Most of the time, they're not fighting each other at
all. And I think that that's the important part of one of the aspects
of the title of the book, which is you know, the seven hundred
year rivalry. This isn't that both sides to an extent have the benefit of
time. They have the benefit of understanding your opponent and adapting into the different
ways that they do things. If you look for opposite to the collapse of
the Achemenid Empire, an empire that had lasted several hundred years, you know,
Alexander sort of explodes out of Macedon with this highly professional army. And
yes, you know, Derius is able to hire Greek mercenaries to try to
combat these elite sarissa wielding warriors, but they're just not up to the task,
and there's no time. There's no time to sort of if you I
sort of the equivalent that I give is sort of an old boxing match where
you know, Mike Tyson would explode out of the corner and three or four
punches later, the opponent is down. There's no time to sort of get
your feet under you. They're just coming at you too quickly. With the
Romans and the Parthians and then the Sosanids, they have the time to sort
of adapt to one another. And the siege aspect that you bring up is
so critically important like, yes, battles of course matter in the pre modern
age especially, but it's actually pretty rare that a kingdom is simply knocked out,
even by a decisive defeat on the battlefield. And I think the best
example of that that would be probably the Byzantines that you just can't take Constantinople.
You just can't. You know, they try and they try and they
try, but you can't crack those walls. So if you don't have the
capacity to do that, then it just doesn't matter. You know, you
can march around, but you're going to run out of food at some point,
you're going to have to go home. So without the ability to take
those major cities, and that sort of leads me to my next question,
because if you back up and you look at the maps here, I come
to the conclusion and I don't know, I honestly don't. I don't know
how much the Parthians slash the Sonids knew of Europe and European geography and what
that looked like. I mean, they maybe have had no conception of what
would become Great Britain. But you look at the map and you simply come
to the conclusion that there is no way at least I do that either of
these empires could have ever conclusively knocked the other one out. There's too many
choke points. From the Hellaspant, you know, then you have to get
around the Balkans, and from the opposite side for the Romans, you have
to get into the Iranian plateau, and that's mostly desert. It just seems
impossible to me. I mean, what do you think about that? It
just seems like neither of these two ever could have knocked the other one out.
I think you're probably right. I mean, they might have done it,
but it would have taken decades and huge effort, and everything would have
had to keep on going your way, and that's simply not in the interest
of any king of kings or emperors. You know, why do this for?
In the end, what will you get an empire that's probably too large
to be manageable. I think they look at smaller ambitions that are still quite
big. I mean, even if you look at you know, Treasure was
supposed to be planning perhaps beginning the administration of a province of Assyria. Whenever
that meant, you know, he's taken Armenia, he's developing this, but
this is all within less than three years of campaigning before it all goes horribly
wrong. But even if you'd taken that, and even if you stretched our
mean an if you said he wanted testifon Salucia, those big cities down there,
then that still leaves eighty percent of the Parthian empire. Yes, you've
taken a big chunk of population and a bit that is probably most most similar
to you, but an area you could probably assimilate because it's it's cities,
at least one of them, a big Greek city that you can understand.
You know how those work, you know how they administer, you know how
they think. You've put Plenty of those still run their own affairs, but
they're part of your empire. And I think there's an element of back and
forth that the Parthians and then the Persians could go so far thinking well,
we know what these people are like, we know how this works, we
can manage this. But you know you have apart from in the that forty
one forty PC when they do look as if they're going into Syria and maybe
they're thinking, well, it's actually you know, take Antioch and keep it.
Everything else they do until the very last conflict right at the end there
in the seventh century is we go in, we plunder, we capture people,
we take them away, but we go home. We don't stay here.
This is about glory, this is about prestige. So they do seem
to have what they consider sort of realistic ambitions, even if sometimes they prove
they can't fulfill those because the other side fights harder, or there's just bad
luck, whatever. So that even when you look at people like Crasus or
Trajan, actually they're not going they're not trying to do an Alexander all out
whatever anybody says, because Alexander is not going to do yes, let's take
this bit in a few years time and maybe do the next. He just
keeps going. This is different. But those were peculiar circumstances. But I
think the other big advantage, I mean another theme, which is not you
know, I'm not the first to say this, but often there is conflict,
competition, perhaps warfare between the Romans and the Parthians or the Persians,
but then one side breaks away and makes peace, often on unfavorable terms because
they've got a bigger problem somewhere else. For the Parthians, for the Persons.
It's very often the northeastern front of you, but it can be elsewhere.
It's up by the Caspian Sea. It's all this area for the Romans.
Maybe somebody has just come steaming across the Danube to start plundering the settled
provinces there. The big differences with the other empire is that if you come
to an agreement with the king of kings or an emperor that covers a wide
area and more or less you can expect them to keep to it. Now
it comes back to your point earlier that yes, you'll declare so many years
peace and all this sort of thing or eternal peace, and you know it
isn't you know, that's not going to happen. It's going to be anything
else but that, and you'll never you know it, but you'll probably have
warning. So yes, it'll be a big war, but you'll probably have
some warning. But if you're trying to deal with different warleaners amongst the nomads
of the steps, if you're a Parthian or a Persian, if you're dealing
with kings, warlords in the swabe of the Alamanni or Franks, so whoever
it is, there's loads of them. There's never anybody who's so powerful that
if you deal with them, either by defeating them that solve that problem,
or even just negotiating and settling a piece, there is probably another leader within
a you know, fifty miles or so who's going to do the exact jobs
in a town and break that piece and tack you. So it's I think
there's always there's probably an element of relief in that, even though, yes,
the potential threat of each empire to the other is much bigger, there's
also a sense that, okay, we can deal then, we can quantify
it more, we can predict what they're going to do more, and if
they do we do get an agreement with them, we can be reasonably confident.
So it's almost easier to deal with that. And it is striking how
often they will make peace in with the other empire so that they can go
and deal with another problem, which might also be for many periods in both
cases a civil war. You know, a usurper who's appeared somewhere and is
challenging you, So you've got to deal with that, and you'll give up
some territory, you'll pay them some money, you know, you'll let them
strut around saying how they've humbled you and you've bit and all this sort of
thing. But you're not giving up too much. You're never giving up critical
things. You know. It's striking that even the big horror in the fourth
century, after Julian's been killed and Jovian's treaty, you know, there are
two major cities that the Romans give up to the Persians, and this is
seen as a terrible sort of dishonor and breach and strategically a big loss,
and it is, but it's still only two cities, and the frontier is
still broadly in the same place. It's not that different. So that's the
level you're dealing with. You it's sort of finer points of negotiation. But
again, if you can get peace there, it relieves you of a really
big problem. So you can go to deal with the dozens of little problems
that are likely to be propping up anywhere else but could explode into something bigger
if you don't deal with them. Yeah, and I think that also one
of the things that it's worth pointing out here is that I don't think we
do ourselves any favors when we do this all the time with maps where we
just draw this line don the map and we say this is this was the
border and such and such, you know, a d or ce whatever you
want to call it. And it was a firm border, so as though
there were like some sort of checkpoints or something across the two. And we
do this a lot. But when it comes to like the colonialization of North
America, you know, this was France, Like there was no French people
in this in what it's going to be North Dakota, are you kidding me?
But like it's blue, so it's France. Like That's that's kind of
how we do it, and when in reality, what we probably should have
done, especially when we think about the Romans visa v. The parthy in
Sessanis, is draw sort of a couple of lines and say like, well,
this is more or less this is sort of high tide for this side
and this is high tide for that side, and this area in between can
kind of go back and forth. But we're not, you know, never
really held forever by one side or the other. And I wanted to follow
up on one thing that you said, because I'm always perplexed by this of
you know, I sometimes wonder, like to what extent are Romans, especially
I'm thinking in the late Republic period, Julius Caesar is said to have wept
when he thinks about everything that Alexander has accomplished by the time that he's of
the same age. You know, is there this sort of Alexander syndrome of
like, oh, he's the he's the model that I have to emulate,
or is there sort of the opposite, sort of a tacit understanding of like,
well, that was interesting, but look what happened to his empire immediately
upon his death, and that's not something that we have to emulate, you
know, our emperors and maybe even you know late Roman official senators. Are
they looking at at Alexander as something to copy or are they looking him as
somewhat of almost an anomaly of this is something that is fascinating, but you
know, it's not worth trying to replicate. It's it's interesting that that there's
a clear distinction between what they say and what they do. And obviously,
because of the nature of sources, we don't get the dull letters reports from
one governor writing to the emperor saying, well, this is what's going on.
You know what I think the Parthians are thinking about. We get the
poets, we get the propaganda, we get the monuments, we get Augustus
boasting of his empire, stretching to India, ownA this sort of thing.
So it's always there, and any Roman has to do no more than think
about looking in the direction of anything sort of east of Asia minor, and
Alexander will appear from nowhere, and people will talk about the new Alexander and
these great victories. But it's never that concrete. It doesn't come in anyone
formally saying you know you have even with someone like Julian, who clearly is
a very theatrical individual who likes play acting and pretending to be Emilianus and doing
all this sort of thing, and even he is not in any practical way
trying to do this limitless conquest of Alexander, partly because they know it's but
also I think it is. It's almost like we can watch lots of movies
where the hero gets upset and then slaughters a whole load of people in revenge.
Now, probably the villains have done something terrible to deserve this, but
the body count is staggeringly high, and you feel, you know, some
city has become basically depopulated as a result of these actions. And we go
back and you're after your audiences will watch this stuff, but they don't live
that way. Now that's obviously an extreme case, but Alexander has become a
lot of the Alexander that we read about. The Alexander the Great as he
becomes is something that is created. Yes, he was consciously projecting his own
image as this this wonderful, you know, semi divine son of a god
sort of thing, but it develops afterwards. It's what the successes are saying
when everybody's trying to be the next Alexander, and then it's what the romans
are saying. He becomes. He's like in an ansort of where he's almost
like an Achilles from the Iliad. He's he's the best hero, he is
the greatest warrior. But you don't actually live that way. Yes you say
that's great, yes you admire it, but that's not how the world works
anymore. So I think he's there in the same way that citizens from Athens
or any other city state can read the really and be inspired to be brave.
In Batman, feel I've got to live up to this, but they
still don't try and do the Achilles just half their way through all the enemy
on their own and die young. You know. It's so I think Alexander
is there. It's powerful, But actually I would say it's the practical side
that seems to influence their behavior. They know because of Alexander, as I
said before, how big the world is out there. They have a pretty
fair idea of what's out there, and they realize that, you know,
this is a long way to go. And they also perhaps you do get
some criticism later on of Alexander the sense, you know, it's an empire
that doesn't last, doesn't outlive him at all. It fragments. Some of
those fragments survive a long time, but in the end it goes. There
is always that strange relationship between the Romans and the memory of the Greeks,
in this sense that yes, this is a culture you admire, you've taken
over, but also, well, we've conquered them, so we must be
better than they are. But it's it is just striking. Even you have
people like Caracala supposedly forming two legions and equipping them in what he thought was
what the Macedonians had worn. It's you know, it's rather like Civil War
armies dressing up as Napoleon soldiers or that French influence you get and then talking
a lot about Napoleon because that's relatively recent history. But that's how you win
great battles, that's how your glorious soldiers. You get this emulation. So
it's there, there's an element of it, but that experiment doesn't last,
doesn't that live Caracala, And it's you know, there's no we don't even
know whether it was anything ever more than an idea. In the same way
that you know, briefly, Napoleon asked the artist David to design a uniform
one of the regiments of the Imperial Garden. He came out this classically inspired
tune and bare legs and sort of helmet and everything to make them look like
Greco Roman warriors sort of things, which was yes, thank you very much,
and here's your money. But yes, we'll quickly sideline that nobody actually
thinks of doing it in a practical sense. So I think he's there.
But it's the other thing we've got to remember is that Alexander is as far
away even from Crassus as the late seventeenth century early eighteenth century is from us.
It's a long time ago, so they know the world is it has
been sort of relegated history by this point, and it's it's moving into that
so and particularly because I mean you get it in the you know whats the
Alexander romance, this tradition on the fiction side of things of his story gets
more and more exaggerated. And yes, people still read about Alexander and say,
well, you know, this is a great strategym as a general,
this is something you can copy. You have people like Arion in the second
century writing a Man All which has drills and tactics for modern Roman cavalry.
And then when you get to the infantry, it's the phalanx of Alexander,
and it's you know, quite why he does this to what extent his audience
is just saying, well, this is all a literary device. Nobody's trying
to do this. So I think he's there. I think he's a memory.
And there's an element where, particularly under the Republic, the Roman aristocratic
culture has been one of superlatives. You have to outdo the last success,
You've got to go better you've got to go better. Alexander sort of gets
added on to that, but in a vague sense, in the same way
that whether it's Corbulo saying you know how fortunate the generals of the republic were,
you don't actually do that anymore. Emperors aren't expected to leave their army
in battle until very late, and then it's mostly in civil wars or because
things are desperate, and that eventually stops as well. A governor's a lot
allowed the free reign of somebody like Caesar to go off and provoke wars all
over the base or Pompey before that in the east. So everybody knows it's
a different world, and that's different in terms of the sort of state you're
in. And again, this is a Roman empire that is pretending to be
a republic, and the emperor is still pretending for a long time to be
the greatest magistrate, the greatest servant of the state, rather than its ruler.
He's not a king, he's not a monarch, and they studiously avoid
that royal title. Even when later on they develop all this ornate ceremony around
the imperial court, they're still pretending. They still never call themselves king,
so I think they just know the world is different. And I think Alexander
is an inspiration in some respects, but not to the extent of this is
what you want to do. Other than yes, I can be a great
commander, I can lead me as brave and skilled as Alexander, but not
in I don't have to do what he did. I think because sometimes because
technology doesn't change as dramatically as it has in the modern age, I think
sometimes when we look at especially the ancient classical world to some extent the medieval
world, we tend to shrink time down and we don't realize the length of
time that has passed. Because you're right, it's between the time that Alexander
begins his Persian conquests and the time that Augustus forms the principed is almost exactly
three hundred years. And that's a long time, because that's the time between
now and if you want to go back, say, let's we can just
almost exactly go back to George Washington almost, you know, and say,
you know, so that that is sort of the mythology that develops over the
time. And you're right, I mean Julius Caesar, for all his protesting
that you know, he wants to emulate Alexander. With a couple of exceptions,
he is not mounting a horse and riding directly into the opponent's lines.
Like maybe to even him, that seems like an antiquated and foolish way of
doing things. I do think to an extent, Alexander is the anomaly in
a lot of ways, and and a lot of that just simply has to
do with he really believed he was emulating Achilles. You know that that was
the model for him, and you know that he had a different mindset.
It wasn't create an empire that lasts forever. It was glory and that was
what mattered. But I want to ask one last question because we're up on
time here, so I'm going to jump way forward. But I'm always curious
about this. So the the you know, the Arab armies of Islam explode
in the seventh century out and sort of wipe away what was the Soanet Empire
in a few quick strokes. The people who are calling themselves the Romans that
we call them the business teams, they survive, And I'm always curious about
this. Is it are the I'm going to call them the Romans. For
the sake of argument, are they stronger or is it just simply geography bails
them out in this particular case. And if we switch the Issanids and the
Romans around, then they get wiped out and the Issanets make it. I'm
just curious. I think it's a combination. I mean, some of its
geography. But we have to remember the Romans do lose Syria, Palestine,
Egypt. They will eventually lose the rest of the North African provinces as well,
that some of which they've only just in relatively recent terms reacquired under Justinian
that they'd lost before to the Vandals. So and then eventually, you know,
the Arabic armies will be coming into southern Spain and pushing beyond that.
So there's an element where it comes back to the Dardanelles and the simple strength
of fortified Constantinople and it's really hard to take. So that saves them,
but they do lose an awful lot. Yes, they maintain a presence in
Asia Minor, but it's never as prosperous as it has been because it's always
a potential war zone. Some of its chants in that if the Arab armies
had come a little bit earlier, they would have hit the Romans, which
the time of the great successes of the Persians against them, when they overrun
many of the same areas that the Arab armies will take, like like Alexandria
in Egypt, all this sort of thing. They've taken these places within living
memory at the time when the Romans are divided in a civil war, the
Arab armies attack the Persians when they are still very vulnerable, when it's not
clear who should be king of kings, who's going to succeed. Where you
have that the brief periods where you have a female king of kings, I
mean they're still used the same title, and then her sister, though she
never gets to min coins with her image on them. But other than that,
you've suddenly got this break because they are desperate to find members of the
royal family. And these are traditionally royal houses that have produced lots of children
because of multiple concubines and wives of the king of kings, and there's always
been lots of potential rulers out there. Suddenly you seem to be running out.
So there's an element whereby they are particularly vulnerable. The other thing as
well, which which recent research in the last few decades has pointed out that
there are many essentially Parthian noble families in the heart of Iran that change side
again. And they've done this before to back the Sicanians, and they stay
for at least several generations, still controlling their old lands under the Caliphate,
and they, as far as we can tell, it's fairly slow the process
of really converting to Islam. There's an element because that's again it comes back
to a point raised earlier. Yes, we can look at the weaknesses.
These two empires have just fought this monumental war where the Romans have nearly they've
come the closest to extinction they've ever come in any struggle with Parthians or Persians.
You know it. Again, they've been saved by the Bosporus by and
by the walls of Constantinople, but because the Persian army couldn't get to join
the Avars to help attack and capture the city. But even then it's a
narrow victory in that siege. So they're very vulnerable. But again you've got
to remember, yes, we should see there are weaknesses there are problems they're
facing, but there's also the Arab armies are doing a lot. That's right.
You know, they are successful. They've got good leaders, they've got
highly motivated forces, they're very skillful, and they are combining as all successful
empires have done, like the Parthians, like the Romans in the past,
they combine military force and threat with diplomacy, and they manage to convince the
areas they overrun that it's actually worth being loyal to them, because reprisals will
be terrible. But actually life under us isn't that bad because we don't interfere
with your religion, We don't interfere with your daily life. We just want
you to get on with things and not cause us any trouble. So you
pay tribute, and it helps perhaps in the Roman provinces that in most of
these areas, the ones that fall first, you've fairly recently been occupied by
the Persians and you've come to the same deal with them. You've decided,
well, if the empire can't protect us, there's no point dying for an
emperor who isn't going to turn up and save us with his armies. So
let's just wait and see you know, these people aren't asking too much of
us, They're respecting us, they're respecting our traditions. So there's a lot,
a lot of reasons why the Arabamis are successful, as well as reasons
why both of the empires are defeated. But I think it's it's really a
combination of those things that that all come together, and both empires are exhausted
after this long struggle both the week the Persians are divided, they are in
the same way that, of course Alexander hits an Achemen in Persian Empire with
a Darius as king who hasn't been there very long, and isn't you know,
perhaps a generation or so before, wouldn't have been the obvious candidate to
be there and has had problems with recently, There'll be rebellions in Egypt you've
just managed to put down, but you're struggling to control what you've got,
and then suddenly this avalanche hits you that's come from nowhere. So all of
these things come together, and I don't think there's there's one simple answer as
to why it changes so suddenly, But again there's it all comes back to
this perception as historians of time for us, it's really sudden, but actually
much of this is happening over years, and if you're living through it in
the same way that you know the Second World War doesn't yes in one sense
it starts. If your Polish September thirty nine doesn't finish till forty five,
that's still six years. Best part off that you've got to live through.
It sounds quick, but it isn't. And we always have this dangerous archaeologists
as well are prone to it, where you see things as a trend,
and the less evidence you have, the more you compress all the events and
make them very, very rapid. And they are fairly rapid, but there
are still probably lots of occasions where people are living through this thinking well,
this might all change and we might win. And it isn't all inevitable,
and it hasn't been instant. It's quick, and yes things are bad,
but again from the Roman perspective, those provinces have been overrun, but they
retook them within a few years, and maybe people are thinking, well,
let's just hunker down and see what happens, but maybe the Romans will be
back. They've always come back the past, so it's trying to restore that
human element, but also that sense of time that we can so easily lose
when we just focus on the big events, and particularly big events that are
the only things that appear in very meager sources. You know, we would
love to know more about all of this, and that's the doing this story.
It was striking, even from the Roman perspective, when you know we
know most of the sources come from them, there are huge chunks where we
know almost nothing about what's going on for decades really and sometimes for the best
part of a century, and we're left with making do and trying to understand
what's going on. But that can sometimes mean we sort of we compress these
centuries into short periods of time instead of several people's lifetimes. And I think
that's ultimately one of the biggest challenges, whether it's writing about history or teaching
about history, is trying to avoid the narrative of inevitability that this was going
to happen, because obviously we have the benefit of knowing what will happen,
but at the time they didn't know. I mean, if you were betting,
you'd probably say in the mid third century that the Roman Empire was done,
but it wasn't. It makes a comeback. It's fine in the fourth
century by and large, so these things aren't inevitable. But it's a fascinating
book and it's such an interesting story. I'm sure that people will pick it
up. I hope that they do. But we talked about a lot of
interesting things here today, so you know, I just want to say thank
you for coming on the show because this has been really illustrative, and I
mean, we could talk about the Romans for years and no one would get
tired of it, right, Yeah, absolutely, Well I kind of knew
whether anybody wants to listen, I don't know, but no, thank you
for inviting me. It's a lot of fun. It is nice to talk
about this, and it's mean I'll be interesting to see how they this book
does, because it's whereas if you write about Alexander or Julius Caesar, you
know, people recognize the name and they'll pick it up and they probably know
some of the story already. Lots of this is not familiar, and no
one's really looked at the rivalry as a whole. So it's really interesting,
but it isn't something. There are lots of things I had to learn whilst
researching it and writing it, and as a reader there probably there are going
to be many people who know about all the things covered in this before they
start, which you might get. There are plenty of people who are really
keen on Alexander, really keen on Cleopatra, Caesar, whoever. So I'm
it this is an interesting experiment to see whether you can just say, well,
look, this is really interesting, trust me, But you are going
to have to pick up You're gonna have to go and think about places that
maybe we don't all the rest of the time. And there are lots of
I've tried not to avoid too many names because otherwise you're dealing with all sorts
of characters who pop up and I'm very hard to remember who they are,
but even places you know. But in other respects you find this history and
these conflicts go on in the same area again and again, rather like you
know, Belgium from seventeenth century onwards really is in European Wars. People are
probably going to come through there at some point or other. It's just that's
the trap of geography, essentially, this is the way you're going to go.
So there are similar patterns in terms of these frontier areas where there's nearly
always tension and the same places are attacked, defended, taken, retaken again
and again and again. So it's a different sort of story to the things
I've told in the past. So I'm hoping hoping people will like it anyway.
Well, I certainly enjoyed it, and I hope that people pick it
up. So again, thank you so much for coming on. And in
my experience, anytime you stamp the word roma and something is going to do
pretty well. So let's hope that that holds true for the future, and
I think that we will both be successful. Right yep, fingers crossed,
Let's hope. But again, thanks for inviting me.