Romes Crisis Of The Third Century Explained With Adrian Goldsworthy

TITLE: Rome’s Crisis of the Third Century Explained with Adrian Goldsworthy CHANNEL: Tribunate DATE: 2026-03-29 ---TRANSCRIPT--- [music] Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Tribunite. Today I am joined by Dr. Adrien Goldsworthy. He’s the author of a number of books on the ancient Mediterranean world including Pax Romana, Roman Persia, and a personal favorite of mine, Julius Caesar, Life of a Colossus. Dr. Goldsworthy, welcome to the program.

Thank you for inviting me. Yes. So, uh, it’s it’s no, uh, overstatement on my part to say that you’ve been a huge influence on me and it’s it’s a great joy to have you here with us. Could you, uh, let some of the listeners know about the work you do, about your particular areas of interest and, you know, just how you got into this messy world of ancient history. It’s always fascinated me. I I I love history in general and um it doesn’t take much seeing a book that seems interesting or visiting somewhere, seeing a a castle or anything like that. I can very readily get distracted into almost any era of history. But the Romans have always been special to me. And that’s partly because growing up in the west of Britain, South Wales, only about 20 miles from where I live, there are the remains of a Roman army base that was occupied for best part of 300 years. um and an amphitheater and things. So it meant that Roman history felt very much like my history. The Romans had come to where I lived, my home, it felt very personal, very immediate. So for that and I think watching some of the epic movies on on TV when I was a kid, some of the somehow the Romans have always fascinated. So having studied it academically, I did my undergraduate degree in ancient and modern history. Then I did a doctorate on the Roman army in particular, but within ancient history and I I was rather shocked just yesterday I was at my old college in Oxford talking to some undergraduates, some of whom are considering a career in publishing and being an author and this type of thing. And it made me realize that my book on Caesar would have been written before any of those kids were born. That was slightly humbling. But the thing is all these decades on I’m still fascinated by it and I’m still learning. There is so much out there. One of the frustrating things about the ancient world is that there are lots of gaps in the sources. There’s lots of things we can never know 100% whether that happened or not. But on the other hand, it it’s also it’s much easier than in more recent periods to immerse yourself in all the evidence for a topic and to get sort of history at the coalace where even if you just develop a hobby interest, you can very quickly start to read, you can read translations of the Greek, the Latin sources and you have the same information that all the the eminent scholars of generations past have had as well. And you can think about it yourself. if you can understand why they come to their conclusions. That’s much harder to do with a lot of more recent history because there’s simply so much more information. So, it’s it’s partly that, but it’s also deep down, as a a friend of mine said back years ago, you might not have wanted to live next door to the Romans, but they were never dull. You know, Roman history is dramatic. It’s exciting. It’s full of personalities like Julius Caesar, like uh uh Augustus, Nero, Vespasian, um dramatic events, dramatic people, larger than life. Some of it seems as if it’s almost a soap opera when you’re reading and this is what really happens. So, it’s always dramatic stuff. It’s always interesting. It’s always intriguing. And it’s that odd mixture of in some ways they’re human beings, so they seem very much like us, but they’re also aspects of their society, their culture. That means they think in a different way, act in a different way. So trying to bring all that together and just understand this world that once existed and the people who, you know, filled it and lived there that it is human history. So what I’ve been trying to do for, you know, I’ve been a pretty much full-time writer for the last 20 years or so, I write the books that I would like to read. I try to take people to either an individual like Caesar or a period in ancient history and try and explain what was going on and say, “Well, this is how we think we understand things and this is what the evidence says and here are the places where we’re not sure what to conclude or we’re not sure whether we can trust the sources.” So, it’s one of those things that is still always fascinating. I’m always learning more. Every time I settle down to a new project, I am discovering things that I’d either missed when I’d read a source before or sometimes it’s coming from new discoveries, new sources that I I didn’t know about. So, it’s it’s marvelous, fascinating stuff. I I agree and I I think that’s what makes uh makes it such a fun field. And I think that, you know, what you said about folks active today can have the same information that great scholars have had. But you know there are also areas where just a general hobbyist today has access to more than someone did you know 100 or 200 years ago. Uh so that it’s just fascinating to be like wow I you know we all stand on the shoulders of giants obviously but to be uh to be able to discern at a level that you know someone like Mson or Gibbon would not have been able to is is quite the privilege. Uh but if we’re talking about kind of those gaps in sources and areas where um things get a little cloudy, I think that one of the one of the areas of Roman history that is less well understood at least at the popular level and that is partly owing to the fact that sources for it are not as great is that uh 3 century crisis era you know uh postseverance through to maybe Diolesian you know depending how you want to define it uh it’s not like you said you wouldn’t want the Romans to be your neighbors. Well, this is a time when you definitely wouldn’t want the Romans to be your neighbors or the Romans neighbors to even be your neighbors. So, uh could you provide just kind of an overview of how this uh crisis came about because you know you look back just a couple generations before and things you know things are going relatively well in in the second century and then the wheels kind of fall off. Could you could you outline like external and internal causes for this this sudden decline? Well, like all of history, it’s very much hindsight. You know, people at the time didn’t think they were living through the 3rd century crisis or know that we’d consider them to be living in the third century. But it is a period where emperors come and go very very rapidly. There’s this huge turnover and it really depends on which people who claimed to be emperor and then got murdered or committed suicide or died for whatever other reason within a matter of months or didn’t even last a year or barely more than that. How many of those do we actually count as official emperors and how many were simply somebody who made a bid for power but it was never really realistic. So, but you’re talking about, you know, at least 30 or so emperors in about 40 years. um from the 230s through to the 270s into the 280s. Again, how people define the crisis depends on their their point of view. We know that the Roman Empire would continue united for another century or so. It would then divide into an eastern and western half. The western half goes late in the fifth century AD. the eastern half. We often refer to them as the Bzantine, but they called themselves Romans and thought of themselves as Romans. That’s going to go on to the 15th century. So, this is a period of chaos, disorder, disruption, civil war, political violence, eucipation that is unmatched for its intensity in any other period of Roman history, though only to a matter of degree. Now if we go back earlier we’ve had the first century BC the time of people like Julius Caesar before that the dictator Sula Pompy um Cassus and then leading up to Mark Anthony Brutus Casius Caesar Augustus Augustus creates the imperial system the principate as it’s it’s known officially by scholars the rule of one emperor a prinaps who is not officially a king not officially even an emperor that’s a modern term we impose but Effectively, he controls the army. He is the source of ultimate power within the empire. And he pretends to be a magistrate and a servant of the state. But it becomes more and more obvious that this isn’t the case. You know, it’s the the joke Hrien, sorry, a philosopher who’d argued with Hadrien and had allowed Hrien to correct him even though Hadrien was wrong. The man is supposed to have said afterwards, “Well, you don’t argue with someone who’s got 30 legions.” Um, you know, in the end, that’s the the basis of imperial power. The Roman emperors are military dictators. They’re often quite benevolent ones and efficient ones like Augustus, like Trajan, like Hadrien, like Marcus Aurelius, the famous philosopher emperor. But you have after the chaos of the late republic, the first and second centuries AD are remarkably stable. There is a civil war for nearly a year after Nero’s death. Uh but the next one doesn’t come any serious until within months of the death of Comeodus that again people know mainly because of movies like Gladiator. um you know a mad bad emperor who doesn’t get killed by Russell Gller in the coliseum but gets you know strangled in his bath but nevertheless um had got murdered because he was he alienated his own household as well as nearly everybody else among the elite but the first and second centuries seem very stable and this many of the great monuments today that you’ll see left over from the Roman period the coliseum the temples a lot of ancient Athens you will go and look at now was built under Hadrien to the extent you know sets up an inscription, this is the city of Hadrien, not of Thesius. Um, so even a lot of things we think of as part of that Greek culture, they come from Greeks living in the Roman period and often from imperial patronage. The population is probably at its height. The economy is at its height. Objects we can see archaeologically are traveling from one end of the empire to the other. So are people. And along with the people are ideas. I suppose in one sense one of the most famous cases would be the spread of Christianity through the empire that this idea can reach every province of this very large area and then it all seems to go wrong in the 3rd century. So yes, officially the 3rd century crisis as most scholars would consider it begins really with the last of the the dynasty of Septimius Seis. Now he’s the man who wins out in the power struggle that erupts after the death of Comeodus. You briefly have a chap called Pertinax uh uh the son of a slave which is quite remarkable. This man had risen to be a Yes. It’s um he lasts three months and doesn’t give the the imperial bodyguard the the full bounty that he’d promised them on accession and they murder him. Um but seems to have been a decent man. But he’d almost been chosen as a a placeholder in the sense that he was he didn’t have any children. He was too old to have any. And it wasn’t so much people liked him. It was just not many people had anything against him. But when he dies, the system breaks down. You get three provincial governors, the men in charge of the biggest armies in the Roman Empire, all declare themselves emperor. The one who wins after four years of struggle and sort of doing an alliance with one of his rivals to dispose of one and then coming back and dealing with the other is Septimius Seis. Although he goes off and fights wars in uh the east against the Paththeians and then in the north of Britain against the Caledonians, he um you know his main victories really were those civil war victories and he does campaign afterwards. He passes on power to his two sons Caracala and Getter with supposedly this wonderful recommendation of love one another, indulge the soldiers, despise everyone else. So it doesn’t work because they don’t like each other and the younger brother Getter is murdered by uh Caracala within before the year is out. Caracala Caracala kept only part of that advice, right? Yes. Yes. He indulged the soldiers. He indulged the soldiers and despised all other Yeah. Exactly. So I suppose you know that bit worked but um two out of three I guess. Yeah. Exactly. And he thought of himself as the new Alexander and was going off to repeat Alexander’s conquest. again he gets murdered um in one of those it’s it’s a grim incident he’s on a journey um out near Kahhai which is the place where Caesar and Pompy’s ally Crassus had been defeated by the Paththeians centuries before um this now become part of the Roman Empire and he stops dismounts from his horse on the journey to relieve himself behind some bushes and gets stabbed by one of his bodyguard and then the Ptorian prefect the commander of that bodyguard makes himself emperor. So although we sort of allow the Sephron dynasty to go on because it it returns, the chaos actually starts much earlier and lasts longer than people tend to allow. It’s just at its most intense in the middle of the century. But this is nothing like the stability of first and second centuries AD. It’s simply gone from that. The shocking thing is is that up until now, unless you were a blood rel uh relative of um one of the emperors or like uh Augustus, the great nephew of Julius Caesar, but you make yourself uh his adopted son post uh postumously for Caesar’s case. The man who takes over a chap called Mcrinus is not any relation at all to anybody from the imperial family, but he’s also not even a senator. So the traditional elite of Rome get bypassed. Up until now, that’s been the other source. If you’ve looked for someone who could be a senator. So governors who command armies, they’re senators and they’re the people who can win civil wars. So McCrinus is able to convince people to make himself make him emperor because the troops on the spot will back him. However, then you get another extraordinary thing where um the widow of Seis and uh one of her daughters proclaims that daughter’s child and claims that he is the illegitimate child of Caracala. Now again, you know, bastard children didn’t have any legal status in Roman law, let alone in the imperial family. And it’s funny to me because they claim they claim his descent through Kakala and then Kakala was also then you know just fraudulently claiming descent or adoption through Marcus Aurelius through his father. So it’s like it’s a very messy family tree, right? Like it it is and they’re all proclaiming these things and they because they when they’ve got force behind them people will accept it. But it’s it’s very very you don’t correct Yeah. Just as you don’t correct a philosopher with 30 legions, you don’t collect a family genealogologist, you you don’t correct someone who has 30 legions, whatever their hobby is, right? So, I mean, McCrinus, he’s disposed of because some troops to rally to the claim of this this chap that we know as Elegabalis um you know, the dancing emperor. This this kid’s only 14 or or so when he’s so and has not been raised with any view at this stage to a political career. So proves not to be the most politically savvy um emperor behavior is pretty bizarre. So he gets murdered. This time it’s within the family. They’ve realized that they’ve got another boy has grown up enough, Seis Alexander. And we can just get rid of Elgabalis because he’s too embarrassing for everybody and too incompetent. But you get another murder this time within the family. Seis Alexander lasts for a while. But it’s already there are more eucipations just in those couple of decades than we’ve had for centuries. And it’s going to get far far worse once Sephus Alexander is again denounced by his troops and killed. So that’s really where you lead into the formal third century crisis. And at the same time, the Romans are spending most of their main effort fighting each other. You also have failures on the frontiers whether it’s particularly the Danu but occasionally the Rine as well from the Germanic speaking peoples the tribes beyond um you’ve got problems with at the same time this is happening in 224 um a chap called Adashia rebelss against the Paththean king of kings uh the um Assassid dynasty that’s ruled Paththeia for 400 years and created this very large empire not as big as Rome but nevertheless large sophisticated wealthy adashia takes over he basically puts a new dynasty on the throne it isn’t that he you know there is a tendency scholars sometimes rather simply say this Cisanian family which this name he chooses for his family and his dynasty that will then rule for another three and a half centuries they’re not they’re actually ruling exactly the same empire they are part of the aristocracy that’s been there for generations anyway way and nearly everybody simply changes sides. They are the winners in a civil war. But winners in a civil war, just as the Romans will do, nearly always seem to look abroad and say, “Well, I know I fought my way to power and everybody knows that. But if I go off and fight a genuine foreign enemy of the people, of our nation, of our empire, that’s good, clean glory. And it’s much easier to rally all the people that weren’t so keen on me or fought against me. let’s all come together and let’s fight someone who deserves it, who has it coming. So, right, I mean, Caesar Caesar basically does the the the opposite of this where, you know, his prior to his assassination, his plan is to go conquer Persia because he doesn’t want his greatest uh, you know, military triumph to be over fellow Roman citizens. So, yeah, it’s a very similar, it’s a very interesting parallel. And I think that um you know I the the the way that the assassinates become so much stronger in in this solidification of the dynasty is truly fascinating and I it kind of leads into this other question I wanted to ask where you know you I think you did an excellent job of outlining how Rome wasn’t truly stable prior to the crisis period. That’s an arbitrary you know date that we kind of put down based on perception. But how much of that perception is based on the fact that well previously the the disorder was internal. Romans are having civil wars and then all of a sudden now they’re fighting you know after several decades of kind of an erosion of civic unity or cohesion. Now they’re fighting against uh the Persians against tribes beyond the Danube beyond the rine. And for the first time in, you know, in centuries, they’re losing or they’re at least, you know, having to orient a lot of resources to do things that used to be accomplished fairly easily. Uh so do you think that this this kind of decline in Roman military success is what feeds into this notion of the crisis, you know, beginning at this certain time? Very much so. A lot of a lot of the work on this period particularly in the last generation or so of scholars has been part of a a very healthy revival of interest in what’s become known as later antiquity, the later centuries of the Roman Empire. Mh. And they’ve developed a narrative within this in that is 3rd century. Yes, it all goes um all goes horribly wrong. Civil war, defeats against foreign enemies, emperors getting killed either by other Romans or by foreigners or captured like Valyrian. But by the 4th century or the late 3rd fourth century you get the military strong men like Dialesian like Constantine who restore the empire to power and you will even find people arguing that the empire might be stronger in the 4th century than it had been in the second or first. Personally, I don’t buy that because if you look at the longer trajectory, they are spending more and getting less and there are still more defeats and the the degree of stability in the 4th century only looks good when you compare it to the middle of the third. There are still frequent civil wars. Men like Dialesian and Constantine won their greatest victories not against foreign opponents but other over other Romans. And when you’re doing that, it’s it’s rather like there’s um, you know, some good work being done on the the later Roman army to show that it is often very efficient, very effective, and as one scholar pointed out, it wins most of the battles it fights against foreign enemies. Um, but the problem is most of the battles it fights even then are actually against other Roman armies in civil wars. So yes, the Romans win those, but they lose them as well. And that’s eroding the military system all the time because you’re wasting your strength fighting against yourself. So there is certainly improvement, stability. It’s not as bad as it it had been, but it isn’t ideal that I think sometimes people have wanted to justify their own interest. Scholars will often talk something up because they they sort of almost feel attached to it. I think we all do. you spend a lot of time working or researching on something, you you almost feel you’ve got to look after it and you you’ve become its advocate to some extent, particularly when you’re arguing this is a period that’s been neglected or misunderstood. And sometimes that can lead with you pushing the arguments too far and a little more balance needs to be that things are they’re certainly not perfect in the first and second centuries AD. Um but they’re very definitely not they are significantly less perfect later on. [laughter] Yeah, I I think that’s I think that’s a fair that’s a fair statement because yeah, I think that this this desire to uh apply a narrative to history. I think that’s that’s a human instinct and we we apply it to like every aspect of our lives, but and history is no different, especially when it becomes more distant and we can’t actually we don’t have, you know, video recordings or actual people we can talk to. It’s all about, you know, the interpretation of facts. And naturally when when we’re interpreting disperate facts, narratives get built. And that one of the things that gets neglected in that narrative building is, you know, you’d find a lot of people surprised about the wars that Marcus Aurelius, for example, had to fight during the quote unquote Pox Romana that there were invasions of Italy that were a pretty dire, you know, things got pretty dire. Uh and it it just doesn’t mesh with you know that perception of no five good emperors and what Gibbon called you know the happiest time to have ever been alive. Uh it doesn’t mesh with that. So it kind of gets neglected or just by by omission people tend to put less emphasis on it. But in re in reality, you know, I think one of the things your work has has really driven home in other aspects is that this whole it was a very delicate balancing act, you know, from the beginning. These ancient societies operated on just the thinnest of margins, right? There was not a lot of room for error. So we shouldn’t necessarily be surprised that you know one bad event, one poor outcome, be it a a plague, a poor harvest, a drought and then defeat you know that can lead to other bad outcomes that then compound, right? Um yeah, very much so. And of course the one of the biggest problems we have to face and we end up admitting that we simply don’t have the evidence is really understanding those antine plagues that ravage the Roman Empire and lands outside um during particularly during Marcus Aurelius’s reign and how much that you know we don’t have if you look at the the 14th century the black death in Europe in in England there are far better records and you can see communities that cease to exist There’s a a medieval village just on the edge of the town where I live that was abandoned precisely at this period. Had been thriving for centuries up until that point, but there simply aren’t enough people around to keep all these communities going in the aftermath of this. All we have is dramatic descriptions by the ancient authors. There is simply not the statistics we’d have about population, about the impact of this on the economy. You know, one thing that’s interesting is that you have somebody like Pertinax becoming a senator and then ultimately emperor and from Septimia Seus to an extent onwards there is more reliance on uh what we call the equestrian order. It’s the social class below the Senate far far more numerous. that these people who have only ever been sort of minor governors of minor provinces, financial officials, they start to have the jobs commanding legions or significant provinces that up until now had been reserved for senators. You sometimes wonder that the old argument is well this because this will be a trend that will continue is that oh well the senators weren’t trained for this. They were amateurs. They didn’t know what they were doing. So the emperors are promoting on the basis of talent. But they may also be promoting on the fact that there simply aren’t as many senators around as there used to be in any sort of healthy condition to do to then select from them. So that there are probably a lot of changes we can’t see. But it’s it it becomes in you know it becomes conjectural how much damage that has done to the economy and how much in the same way that we have no real idea of population fluctuations among the tribes outside the empire. So you get at different periods of Roman history whether it’s the the Kimrian Tutones back in the late 2nd century BC Helveti when Caesar arrives in Gaul for a few years either side and of course later on we’re familiar with the big migrations of various tribal groups but we don’t know what’s behind that. We don’t know what the scale of it is. Have you suddenly got conditions where either the population has grown with outgrown its resources where it’s actual it’s it’s been its established tribal lands for a century or more or is there an overall population increase or are they simply more devastating because the Romans are that much weaker? You know, we can see with the Roman army that there are the same number of units, there are the same numbers of legions. In fact, a slight increase, several forms, uh, several new ones. Um, and then that would be the trend to more and more units being formed. But we never have a clear document telling us just how many soldiers there are in those units and how many how many units have what you’re supposed to have. And particularly looking at the plague situation, it is emphasized in the sources the cities and the army camps suffered the most. And when you look at them and see how crowded and cramped these barracks would be or how packed densely packed with people Roman cities were, it makes tremendous sense. That is how an epidemic would spread. These are going to be the most vulnerable places. And of course, it’s not just the people who die. It’s the ones whose health is poor either permanently or for a long time that can’t function as a soldier or even as a craftsman, as a laborer as effectively. But again this is you’re guessing and thinking well this sort of thing might be going on. It’s quite likely but we have no way of quantifying it no way of understanding it. So there’s lots of it’s again it comes back to this frustration of the Roman period is there are so many things you can’t measure. You can see over the course of the 3rd century the devaluation of the coinage as the silver content drops from well earlier on in the first century it had sometimes been up you know 70% or more and it gets to less than 1% by the worst the really lowest period of the the third century. So you have um a government that is clearly trying to make its resources go further and hope that people won’t realize but again you can’t measure the impact of all this too directly. we just don’t have the the data, right? Yeah. I think that’s it’s it’s simultaneously frustrating, but it also is fascinating in the sense that it invites you to like, you know, everyone everyone kind of develops their pet theories and everyone is like, you know, combining the evidence in new ways. And then you also, it’s it’s in some ways fun, I think, to be at an impass like that where you’re speaking with somebody who has a radically different interpretation than you do, but their interpretation is 100% consistent with available evidence. They’re just maybe prioritizing different pieces uh at at different weights than you would, right? And I think that, you know, that that can just lead to to fun discussions and, you know, academic banter that, you know, it can feel low stakes to outsiders, but it’s it’s engaging and I think iron sharpens iron in that respect. And overall, it does bring everybody closer to the truth even when we can’t totally arrive there with any certainty. Right. Yes. It’s we’re edging hopefully in the right going in the right direction all the time. It does. You know, we all develop our our precious ideas and think this is the way or this will solve everything. But yes, until you’re actually challenged and you have to defend it and and then somebody can, as you say, take exactly the same evidence and make a completely different case from it. Um, and we both know that you can’t prove one or the other. So it is it’s part of the as I say when you look at any period of ancient history you get very quickly to the the detail of it all and the nature of the sources and these basic problems in a way that is harder to do uh in other eras. Right. So your your specific area of expertise, I know you’ve written extensively on, you know, the ancient world, the ancient Mediterranean world, but your specific area of expertise is, you know, the Roman army, the Roman military, its organization, its history. Uh could you kind of let folks know is is the perception that Rome is is vastly weakened during this period? Is that accurate? like it looks that they’re experience experiencing sustained difficulty, right? But is there a shift in how leadership uh functions or tactics or do you think it’s simply a run of bad luck or is the whole thing just kind of people trying to apply a narrative of decline arbitrarily on a period and making the evidence fit that theory? I think that’s the that’s always the danger because the evidence is so poor. We do not have detailed accounts of campaigns in the 3rd century or specific battles. Um so that you get these very brief very stylized ones but to analyze there’s nothing like Caesar’s accounts of his campaigns in Gaul for instance or the civil war where you can actually look and you get some idea of at least how he presents it of the logic of the strategy of a campaign the tactics of a battle that’s just not there. You get little glimpses and then you’re trying to understand from that at a very basic level the Romans suffer a lot of defeats in this period far more than had been the case for centuries before not that there haven’t been other periods where things have gone badly again talked about the Kimrian Tuton uh a minute ago late 2nd century BC as they’re migrating they destroy something like six Roman armies and but again we don’t really have the details of those battles to know what went wrong before Marius defeats them. So Roman armies have lost at every period and in you know Caesar’s contemporary Cassus gets defeated by the Paththeians at Kahigh 53 BC. The frustrating thing is is that the accounts of that battle are the only detailed accounts we have of a battle between the Romans and the Paththeanss at all for the rest of of the history. There’s no more accounts for it. So we know sometimes the Romans win, sometimes they lose, but we don’t know why in detail. And in fact, it’s an equal problem. The next time we get a detailed account of a Roman army fighting the Persians in battle as opposed to a siege is actually from Precopius in the the 6th century AD talking about Belisarius at Darra. Mhm. So we are trying to understand how a Roman tactical system and a Paththeon and then Cisanian tactical system interacts on the basis of such little evidence. Amianis Marcelinius in the 4th century talks about sieges quite a lot but he doesn’t describe any real pitch battles a little bit with Julian’s campaign but not in in great detail. Certainly not to the extent where we can see well this is you know the Romans have got a system here that’s either not functioning against this enemy or it is or they haven’t adapted properly. So again the Cisanians leap in and under Adashir and Shapur they defeat Roman armies. They Shappo captures the emperor Valyrian. Uh he forces Philip the Arab, another emperor to um capitulate, basically makes peace and Gordian III s uh Chapo claims to have killed him, but the probability is he’s he the campaign bogs down and then he’s murdered by some of his own men. There’s an asterisk. There’s an definitely an asterisk on that one, right? Yeah, we we don’t know it. And from Shaper’s point of view, the Romans invaded me. They’ve retreated. Their emperor’s dead. So, of course, I did it, you know. I mean, of course I Yeah, exactly. It it’s a logical thing. Any politician worth, you know, his or her salt would say exactly the same. And there is a logic to it because the Romans haven’t won. Therefore, Chappo can feel he’s won. One thing I’d say to remember is always Adashir and Shapper are the men who’d led an army in a civil war that had taken over the Paththean Empire. So that by definition means they’re good at fighting. Mhm. Once Shapur dies, the level of threat posed by the Cisanians drops significantly and there are fluctuations then where sometimes they’re strong, sometimes the Romans are strong as each empire goes on, but they have their own internal problems and civil wars. So, um that’s one thing. However, something that is interesting is that the quintessential Paththeon warrior is a horse archer. you know, somebody without much armor who uh does the famous Paththeon shot, turning around to shoot back behind him as he’s galloping away, you know, which overthrows every Greco Roman idea of how a heroic warrior should fight. That, you know, you can fight and kill the enemy while you’re running away just is is too weird for them. Um, but that’s the quintessential Paththeon for the Romans. The quintessential Cisanian warrior is the mounted clonarius or catifact where it’s not about nibbling away, running off, and then coming back and gradually wearing the enemy down. It’s a man in full armor with an armored horse who might also be an archer but shoots at close range and then charges in lance in hand, mace in hand, sword in hand. The other thing the Cisanians are doing, which as far as we can tell the Paththeanss don’t use, is they use war elephants. So the whole Paththeon tactic seems to be about in a sense not confronting the enemy’s strength, avoiding that, wearing the enemy down, fighting when you choose. And it’s it’s very much warfare from from the European steps. The idea is there’s no point fighting for a patch of land because who cares? There’s always more step out there. So run away, beat him somewhere else, come back. All you’re planning to do is kill him at some point. It doesn’t matter where and when. [laughter] But catifacts can’t do that. War elephants definitely aren’t agile beasts that are zipping around and then retreating. So it looks and the supply the supply chain that you would need, you know, for yeah to keep an army in the field of of welle equipped nobles with the armor and then the elephants obviously have a prodigious appetite. So you’ve got to make a battle happen relatively quickly. So you identify the spot and you know you you pound straight ahead and and go for it, right? And it fits in with this greater Cisanian capacity for siege warfare. They are able to supply an army for as long as it takes to and they’re also able to undermine the defenses as we can see from the archaeology of Juropus where the the the mines they dug under the Roman walls have been discovered. So you’ve got an army that’s actually become in one sense quite Roman in that Roman warfare has always been about let’s fight a big battle cuz we’re good at it and if you go and hide behind your walls well we’ll just besiege you and take the place. So it’s very much a sort of highintensity let’s hit the enemy hard where he’s strongest just because we’re better than he is. We are going to win. The Cisanians have almost come up with their own it’s you know it’s a different version because they’re much fonder of horses. There’s that aristocratic emphasis on horses and hunting and archery but it’s almost their own cultural solution to that. So you you can look at it in one sense that they have reacted. They’ve learned, they’ve seen what has happened when the Paththeanss have tried to beat the Romans the old way and it doesn’t work. Perhaps in part because of how they’ve taken control of the Paththean Empire, but they’ve created this much more aggressive means of fighting way of warfare. However, strategically they their campaigns, their attacks on the Roman Empire are never more than large scale raids. No, Shapper will get to Antioch twice on the coast of the Mediterranean and sack the place, but he’s never thinking about I’m going to occupy this and take this territory from the Romans. So, they’re doing that in the same way that because the balance of power, the Romans still have more people and more money than their eastern neighbor. The Cisanians are big, they’re organized, they’re powerful, but they they’re not an equal when it comes to that strength. So it’s but what’s also quite interesting to jump ahead a bit is that you know people may have heard of the famous Zenobia queen of Palmyra her husband who leads the defense against one of these big Cisanian attacks twice leads his own raids that get right down to Tessifon which is one of the main Paththeon and then Cisanian cities. It’s where the king of kings is crowned by tradition and raids up to the walls of of that. So, it’s it’s not that the the Persians have suddenly become this overwhelming power. It’s that they’ve got aggressive leaders, a good army, but they’ve also got their own problems because these are the new dynasty that has got to secure its control not just of its western borders and the territory in lands like Armenia that are sort of buffer states between Rome and the Persians, but they’ve also got to go to the east to the borders of what’s now Afghanistan and to the south to control those areas as well and make sure that there’s no challenger. So there are times when they’re busy elsewhere just as the Romans are sometimes busy elsewhere and each side tends to be strongest when the other one’s vulnerable. Yeah. I think that’s the recurring theme of the third century because the one of the things I found is that parallel between, you know, that Rome was kind of chipping away at the broader Mediterranean world during that republican period of expansion during a period where its foes were incredibly fractured, right? like you, you know, to go back to Caesar, look at how he wheels and deals in Gaul and pits one tribe against another only to then betray them and and use another tribe to go against his former allies and uh you know just playing up the fractiousness of that society and you know you can kind of draw that parallel of like well when the society is you know having internal conflict it’s prey to outsiders and the Romans of course are no different uh you know they’re no exception to that just because they’re bigger and stronger. longer, but once you have a couple civil wars where tens of thousands of your own, you know, the cream of the crop of your military dies, you know, it’s you’re going to be vulnerable. And I think kind of but to just build on build on something you said when you talked about Odin having military success against the Persians, but that’s something that kind of just gets omitted from what we’re talking about like that broader narrative of decline because, you know, he was never an emperor. he never uh you know made a claim to the to the throne. Someone who you know does make a claim to the throne and did have military success. You know the emperor Amelon, the very short-lived Emperor Amelon, there’s just a few lines about it, but we learned that he he gets the acclaimed emperor because he has such military success against the Goths, right? And he he leads a punitive raid. He ends up uh returning many Roman prisoners of war who had been captured by the Goths previously. and that encourages his soldiers to claim him. Uh similarly, Valyrian who uh is later emperor was stationed on the rine and you know we have to imagine he was having a lot of success in in dealing with tribes on that frontier or the troops never would have followed him down uh to become emperor. So you know but it’s just we don’t we don’t have the full snapshot but there must have been you know just as many successes as failures at during this period and and one of the other problems is we tend to think very naturally of sort of tactical systems of the equipment used and you can see a a change from the you know the the paniply of a legionary with the segmented armor the rectangular shield the helmet the pylum the gladius that’s there in the second century by the end of the You’ve got an a flatter oval shield. You’ve got male armor instead. You’ve got a much simpler helmet, but it’s still effective. You’ve got a throwing or thrusting spear rather than the pylum and a longer sword. We sort of look at those changes and we look at the organization of units and some of the but we sometimes forget the human element because with any organization, particularly any army, they know the theory. They know what should work, what should be done. But to achieve that requires training, preparation, good organization, good supply, and critically good leadership. So when you don’t have those, it’s not that suddenly your tactical system is no good. It’s just you’re sending a poorly prepared, poorly motivated army, perhaps outnumbered as well because you’ve sent people off to go and fight a civil war somewhere else. for clearly there’s got to be massive disruption of recruitment and training and promotions during all these civil wars because there are plenty of cases where particularly from the legions that are quite big units of 5,000 or so on paper you’re going to end up with a detachment of that unit on a different side to the main body and once that happens how does promotion work you know are your your two rivals in a civil war sportingly not promoting anybody to be primus pelis the senior centurion until it’s all cleared up and know presumably they’re rewarding their followers. So the system the the they know how to do all of this and that will still be true right the way through till really the the sort of the last generation or two of the the western empire but again knowing how to do something you know you can read Sunsu or Clausvitz or any of these things and the basic ideas of oh yeah you fight when you’ve got the advantage and you don’t fight when you haven’t um all of these things are really simple and even the technical element of this is a good tact this is good equipment um That’s those basic principles have been established, but actually fulfilling them, performing them, that’s the hard part. And the more disrupted the system supporting the army is, the harder it is. But of course, as you’re saying, you get people who put enough things together in the right place at the right time and lead in a good enough way that they win. I mean, obviously, all these problems are being faced by the other side as well. The different tribal groups will not always be as strong. You know, there’s no sign of any permanent dynasty emerging as a sort of warlords, tribal leaders of especially of confederations of tribes. Sometimes they unite, sometimes they come together. Maybe there are charismatic leaders we don’t know much about, but they don’t last. They don’t turn their power into a permanent stronger uh unit any more than anybody has done before. There have been occasionally these leaders like Arminius uh you know the man who defeated Augustus legions in Germany debilis the Dian uh king that had caused problems for dimmission and gets defeated by Trajan but it tends to be the one strong man who can do this he can’t really pass it on to a son or other heir and it doesn’t last the basic pattern if you look at Caesar’s descriptions of how the Germans fight the Germanic tribes and Amianus Marcelinus writing you know over four centur centuries later, there’s not a lot of difference in the numbers, the scale, the organization. If anything, the later ones seem less numerous. Um, they’re not particularly better equipped. Their tactics aren’t any more sophisticated. They’re very, very similar. A lot hasn’t changed. And again, the Romans know how to beat people like this. They know how to win wars, but they don’t always have the right situation and the ability to get everything working properly as it should be. I think that makes this period so much more fascinating personally because I remember when I first encountered it, it was easy to just characterize all these emperors, all these claimments, all this squabbbling as just vain, you know, self arandizing people and you know, they certainly were. You don’t you don’t lead a civil war by accident. Uh you know, you you know what the consequences are going to be, win or lose, right? Uh, so there’s c certainly part of that, but like there was just a temptation to see like, oh, they everybody was an idiot, everybody was a fool, nobody had any idea how to do anything, and the the only thing they knew how to do was stab each other. And uh, you know, but really the reality is, you know, a lot of these guys were they had risen to the top of military positions. They had had success on other fronts. And you know, none of them makes it long as emperor because there’s this, you know, cauldron of of chaos and and competing ambitions. But the fact is, you know, writing them all off as as idiots is just too easy in my opinion. I think one of the things that studying this period more closely has illustrated is that, you know, they’re bound by preconceptions. Like you had said earlier, everyone is shaped by their times to to interpret information in a certain way. And so like there was just this barrier to in imagination sometimes it’s it’s that they can’t think beyond their circumstances to imagine something new. But oftent times it’s well I can’t defend the Danube the Ry and the East at the same time. It doesn’t matter how smart you are, how how uh you know well-trained you are in military theory. If you’ve got two armies and three fronts, you’re in big trouble. So uh how does but then there is kind of a sense that later the barracks emperors bring some degree of stability they’re able to stench this the bleeding so to speak. Uh, in your opinion, how does this crisis kind of lead to the rise of these these barracks emperors, these emperors that are termed the barracks emperors? And what changes are they like more symbolic of broadly? Like because there’s a big social shift that occurs that accompanies this this push, this equestrianization of the empire that results in in the empowerment of these men. It’s a major major change. And obviously there’s some at a basic level the people who win out are the ones who are more skillful, more ruthless, luckier than the others. You know, it’s been a very competitive and robust system of selection to to get to this point. I think it comes down to you sort of see it with people like Aurelian who can create stability for a few years and win success but then get murdered. It obviously you get with Dialesian you have a man who seizes power and then first of all defeats his other Roman rivals and then creates the tetrarchy this system of eventually two senior emperors two men with the title Augustus each helped by a junior who’s called Caesar. So, one of the problems has always been, and it comes back to what we were talking about a minute ago, is that, as you say, if you’ve got three fronts to fight in only two armies, one of them is going to be neglected. The people who live there aren’t going to be too happy about your decision to make them the lowest priority. And if somebody can scrape together enough troops there to fend off whatever threat you’ve got, then they become a hero, which means that a they might start to have ambitions. But even if they don’t, any emperor around will probably think they will have ambitions. So it becomes one of those things where you almost have to declare yourself because you’re you’re not going to be trusted anyway. And not being trusted tends to be fatal. So what you have with the tetrarchy is the idea, well I’ve got now there’s more than one emperor. There’s four eventually each with troops that are under their direct control that they can move around that are not tied to a frontier zone. And therefore you can move to wherever the problem is. And it’s like a firefighter. You basically go, you deal with the latest problem, you sort it out and um move on to the next one. And that gives you four people at any one time who can go off and solve a major major problem on the frontiers, which does significantly increase the capacity of the empire to deal with multiple threats at one time. However, to do that, you sacrifice a lot. At the same time you drastically changed the old system of imperial administration. Again something was as so often you can see a lot of this change occurring under the severance and Septimia Seis himself for uh century and a half from when it’s conquered Britain is a single province with an army of three to four legions with auxiliary troops 40 50,000 men in theory a major chunk of a Roman army of say 350,000 and it’s all under the command of one provincial governor who’s a senator appointed by the emperor he holds delegated authority, but he is the supreme military, judicial, political authority on the spot. Now, those sorts of resources can deal with nearly every major military threat you’re likely to face. However, it also means that man’s got enough resources to challenge you and make himself emperor. So, from Severis onwards, most provinces like Britain get split into two. Under Dialesian and into the 4th century, Britain will end up being split into four provinces, eventually five. same area, but within those provinces, you separate the military and the civilian administration. And you separate the military into the what called the Liatani, these uh frontier troops and the cometensees, the the sort of the um the field army supposedly. Um what that does is make it much harder for any one individual to rebel against the emperor because it’s much harder to gather support from all these other people to back your claim. But it also means, conversely, it’s much harder for if a an army of 40,000 barbarians suddenly appears for one person to get all the resources they need because you might control the troops, but you don’t control the sources of food to supply them, the uh the animals they’ll need or pay them. Yeah. Or pay them exactly all of these things. So, it means that there is a big difference between the local people and one of the emperors. The emperor can turn up and do all of these things. [snorts] But again, it comes back to that same basic problem. If you’ve got four emperors and suddenly you have five major threats, five fronts, what happens to number five? It’s easily forgotten that while Dialesian is emperor for two decades and eventually resigns, that the first decade he’s fighting civil wars more than most of the time more than foreign enemies. when he creates this tetrarchic system of four emperors, it only lasts a matter of months after his resignation because he ignores Constantine for instance, who’s the son of one of the had been a junior emperor has now become a senior emperor and ignores the son of one of the others. So you end up very quickly with five emperors afterwards because one’s being proclaimed by the army, Constantine in York. And then it spreads Constantine who again will unite the empire but spends half of his reign fighting civil wars and only the second half really dealing with trying to reassert Roman dominance on the frontiers. The priority is always with your Roman opponent because your Roman opponent will take your job and kill you. The odds are most of the foreign foreigners won’t do that. You know Valyrian is captured by the Persians. Desus gets killed by the Goths. Um, but most Roman emperors die at the hands of other Romans or commit suicide. It’s often in a palace conspiracy rather than necessarily a battle, but it’s it’s in one of these campaigns, these power struggles. So there are in some ways you can see this as a way of patching things together, reasserting some control. But the tetrarchic system they create does really rely on having a strong man like Dialesian, someone with the force of character, the ability perhaps to bully all those around him into doing what he wants and who scares people because they know he’s ruthless. Constantine can do this, but his sons can’t. You know, again, his attempt to divide the succession up falls apart as soon as he’s gone. And they they’re at each other’s throats. There’s this purge of the family. the tetrarchy with the the neat system of two senior two junior emperors doesn’t outlive dialesian and we tend you know we use it as a convenient term for describing that later government it’s a tetra the dominate the because the emperor has changed from being the the first among equals that Augustus pretended to be you know that I’m just another senator I walk through the streets of Rome instead um of someone who will go to dine with other senators who will talk to petitioners you have I mean there’s the the classic account in Amianis Marcelinus of an emperor riding into Rome and not even acknowledging the crowd in any way as they cheer him, not looking aside. And as Amianis points out, not even picking his nose or scratching his nose, which it’s one of those odd throwaway lines where you think, well, what are people normally doing at the um but you have the emperor is now Dominus, that’s lord, master, you know, it’s it’s what a a slave would call their owner. And instead of Augustus who would rise to greet you and shake you by the hand, if you’re ushered into the presence of one of these emperors, you prostrate yourself and if you’re lucky, you get to kiss the hem of their robe or if you’re more senior might kiss their hand. Um, but it’s a very different world and it’s partly the Senate have to some extent been sidelined, which yes, they’d caused all sorts of problems, but it’s equestrians this lex level down. That’s where men like Dialesian, you know, these other later emperors, that’s where they’ve come from, but there are tens of thousands of them around in the empire. It’s not a group you could possibly know in the same way that you could know five or six hundred senators, which means there’s a there’s an element there’s a political sort of level that’s been taken out of the system. It’s still very very hard for these later emperors to ensure the loyalty of their subordinates at all levels and to control and even to know what’s going on. You have classic cases in um Amianis Marcelinus talking about the 4th century where we get detailed accounts where emperors act on false reports on lies told about some of their subordinates that end up provoking a civil war because once the man’s been condemned then he feels he’s got nothing to lose. He’s dead anyway. So it it’s you see that there there’s a really neurotic sense. Yeah. Constantine even executes his own son based on false reports. Like yeah it’s it’s it’s a fake news has always been a problem I guess you could say. And the more your emperor shuts himself away the more he’s isolated. You could say Tiberius did this to himself by going off to Capri then those who have your ear who control the information you receive. But at least in the older fashion where the idea of the emperor who was just a distinguished senator and talked to these people talked to more people it gave him a slightly better chance of knowing what was going on. U it becomes very difficult later on. So it’s it’s true with all these sort of extreme centralized uh regimes that this this is the problem. How do you know what’s happening? Yeah. And I think that actually really segus nicely to this this last question I wanted to ask about, you know, the the fact that I think this is a trend we see in the 3rd century, but that really comes to uh comes to dominate in the 4th century with the tetrarchy. But that idea of Rome is where the emperor is. And of course there’s precedent for this. You mentioned Tiberius just decamping from Rome for the last decade of his life to spend it on Capri and he’s still the emperor you know uh Senus is pulling the strings but Tiberius is the one controlling things right uh but then also you have Hrien who spends the bulk of his reign uh on tour throughout the empire and there’s no sense that like oh well he’s not the emperor because he’s not interfacing directly with the Senate every day right so in your opinion how does the third century you know lead to a decline in senatorial prestige. Um because I think one of the things people often forget is that even though the Senate had been defanged and was not the same institution it was during the republic, they were still valued either as counselors or as administrators and you know it was not a entirely uh you know powerless position to be a senator that it wasn’t just a social club as can often be considered. But then the the authority gradually declines and legitimacy is sought more through the army than through that you know uh social networking amongst the elites. As the power dips and as Rome basically just becomes wherever the emperor is at a given moment and that is really solidified with the fact there are four when there become four emperors there become four capitals and then later is just set in stone with Constantine being like all right we’re moving to a new city for this. So uh so that was a kind of an unwieldy question but the overall thrust if you could just comment on you know the decline of the Senate and how legitimacy kind of uh exercised itself throughout this period comes back to something we talked about earlier and emphasized with mccrinus you know the man who arranges the murder of Caracala is not a senator has never had a senatorial career that’s the first time someone like that gets accepted as emperor because up until then there’s been a sense that you didn’t just need to command an army, you needed to be a man of reasonable status. And in part, you only got those commands because you were a senator of distinction. And you have even, you know, Tacitus, interestingly, when um Tiberius in his usual ham-handed way that he’s just not very good with people. When Augustus dies, he’s sort of makes, you know, confuses the senator as to whether or not he wants to succeed. And they start considering who amongst their order would be a suitable emperor, who could be a Prinkaps. And there’s always been that view. The same thing is happening when Caligula is murdered and the Senate then you know for a couple of hours debate should we be a republic again says no that’s a bad idea so which one of us should be emperor who’s best suited to this this task it was quite hard to be an emperor yes you could do it through winning a civil war but you had to be somebody of fair status before you started and again you were from that limited group it’s much easier to keep your eye as a suspic suspicious emperor on five 600 people particularly when you can rule out more than 50% of them you know, they’re they’re backbenches. They’re not going to ever be important enough to to do that once you throw things open. So, there’s an element where Seis in particular and his sons um rely more on equestrians because they feel well equestrians aren’t a threat because they’re not senators. They don’t have that status. that gets overturned completely with McCrinus and then subsequently to the point where as senators stop having provincial commands and stop commanding armies they don’t have any military um clout any any influence so it’s much easier actually for an equestrian and then there are so many equestrian officers you you don’t even need to have followed a clear career path be of a certain age which was the way they tended to think about things so but again when the emperors have traveled they’ve traveled with an entourage of senior senators and other senior senators are already there in the provinces. Again, come back to Britain. You tend to think of it as right on the fringes of the empire, not very important. But in the the first and second centuries AD, there were always four senators and three men who wanted to be senators in Britain at any one time. One as governor, three in charge of the legions, and then three as the senatorial tribunal. You know, they’re at that very beginning stage of their career. So an awful lot of that old Senate had been posted around different bits of the empire and had some experience of these regions. You’re losing that. You’re going to a more the the traditional scholarly view particularly those who will talk up later antiquity is that the equestrian officers are professional soldiers. They are simply better. They are more talented, more experienced. They’re people you can rely upon rather than these these feet amateur senators. except that there’s no evidence for any formal training of equestrian officers or any selection process on talent for them and they don’t seem to do any better or any worse particularly than the senatorial commanders have before. One thing though and this is something that I has only really come to me in more recent years and but it’s it’s an interesting thought. We tend to think of the idea being very much how Tiberius established how an emperor should be that you stay in Italy. He didn’t leave it during his lifetime only to go first of all outside Rome then to Capri. But Augustus actually spent more of his reign away from Italy than he spent there, let alone in Rome. And he also repeatedly used a gripper and gave him similar powers just not quite as distinguished as himself. He got the uh you know the myasium proconsular this authority greater than any provincial governor. He got um the sacra sanctity of being a tribune as did you know there be similar powers given to Tiberius drus gas and lucius. I half wonder in a funny sort of way I don’t know whether it was necessarily conscious whether actually Augustus wasn’t trying to create a system of the rule of a single princ but actually of a team that’s remarkably similar in some ways to the idea of dialesian that you have more than one man at the top so you can be in more than one place at a time and that you’re actually so when a gripper will go and deal with the eastern empire settling the internal provinces negotiating with the paththeanss somebody else might be doing it or Augustus himself in Spain even when he’s not campaigning he’s supervising from close to the theater of operations and he travel you know he’s simply it’s only because Tiberius is very old when he becomes emperor and doesn’t want and has already been doing this for a long time and doesn’t want to do it but in a funny sort of way that what we think of as the typical role of an emperor of sitting there in Rome isn’t Augustus but you only realize that when you actually look through and go chronologically and say well where is at any one time. And it’s partly as well he has the advantage he has family members he can trust to do these these grander jobs whereas after Germanicus is dead and his own son Dusus Tiberius doesn’t nor does really anybody else later on. But you know we think of Hrien as a great traveler. Augustus traveled just as much and probably visited every province or all but one of the empire at some point during his reign. So maybe there’s almost in a funny sort of way that actually because sometimes people will say well one of the reasons for the 3rd century crisis is that Augustus fudges the issue by saying I’m not an emperor. I’m not a monarch. I’m not a dictator. I’m simply a magistrate and these powers I have are given to me individually by the Senate and people of Rome. Not creating a simple system of succession like a an openly monarchical system. and that therefore that allows for all the disputes, the power struggles later on, which is a big leap given that it’s a couple of centuries before it, you know, it all goes wrong. But again, that’s perhaps just thinking in the wrong way. And maybe we’re imposing lots of what happens afterwards on Augustus who’s shaping the system in the first place. But as I say, in one sense, the idea of emperors moving of more than one emperor and sort of co-ruule and again it keeps popping up. We think of it as an aberration, but when you think Marcus Aurelius rules with Lucius Verus at first, that’s the only time it works because normally if it’s um Caligula and Tiberius Galileus, it’s uh Nero and Bratannicus, you know, the younger, the weaker one doesn’t last 5 minutes. Um they’re quickly disposed of and condemned. Um so I don’t know. I I just it’s one of those intriguing thoughts that hadn’t struck me for until actually I wrote the biography of Augustus and then suddenly just began to wonder whether what we think of as the sort of the pattern that the Roman Empire almost had to be wasn’t actually what was planned in the first place and that in some ways there’s more similarities between Augustus and Dialesian because again Augustus is a strong man who wins through winning a civil war fights his way to power murders his way to power and then imposes order for longer than Dialesian was able to do. But nevertheless, it’s it’s similar in some respects. That’s that’s fascinating. And I think it really drives home like one of the things I I continually find on the channel is that the Roman history kind of rhymes with itself in the sense that obviously we we all seek you know within our own internal national policies. We seek the precedence of like great leaders and we we hearken back to like great moments and try to emulate you know uh be it in America a great president in in the UK a an illustrious prime minister or monarch or something. Uh but then the Roman system was even more founded on precedent than than ours is. There’s like a reverence almost religious for the way things were. And you know, this worked in the past that indicates that it will work again if we apply ourselves to it correctly. So yeah, I don’t I don’t find this this idea terribly shocking or terribly out of, you know, out of the blue because, you know, I think one of the interesting things about the crisis period is you can see it building to the tetrarchy with an increased division of uh of imperial authority. I I think it’s Philip the Arab names his brother, you know, corrector of the east and it’s like this brand new position where, you know, you’re essentially the deputy emperor, but you’re having the eastern half and obviously none of these guys are able to thread the needle and make it work for long enough for them for us to see, oh, did that did that system um did did Gordian giving Timothy incredibly unprecedented power as Ptorian prefect, you know, Was that a viable way to kind of have a loyal deputy uh you know to to be a man in in different spaces because the emperor in an era uh before modern communication just simply can’t hold something like this together. And anyway, like you said, it’s it’s fertile grounds for speculation and uh obviously like it’s it’s it’s unfalsifiable which makes it frustrating but also makes it fun. So uh who knows? But, uh, anyway, before we wrap, I want to just ask, um, are there any projects you’re working on that you’d like to promote? Anything? I I know you’ve got a book in the works. Are there social media channels where people can find more of your scholarship, more of the work you’re doing? Uh, the only thing I do is YouTube. I mean, I’ve got my website, adriengworthy.com, but the active stuff, once a week, I post a video talking about mostly Roman history or Greek history. um on that that’s Adrien Goldsworth the historian and author but if you search for Adrien Goldsworthy you’ll find it um and the book is Athens and Sparta which is released in early May 12th of May I think in the United States a couple of weeks before that over here in the UK and that’s a look at a long 5th century BC and it’s trying to explain partly because I’ve written about Philip II Alexander the Great how the world came to be as it was when Philip II is born and becomes uh later King of Macedonia. But also the one thing everybody seems to know about the Greeks is the Spartans at Themopi, you know, the 300 standing up against the the Persian invasion. Athens and Sparta fought together to defeat the Persian invasions. Within barely a generation or more, when you come into the time of what we call the Pelpeneisian war, both sides are asking the Persians for money to fight their former allies and fellow Greeks. So how does that happen? and then broadly through that try and present an introduction to Greek history because while I I’m always intrigued and fascinated by the Romans and I’m not going to stop looking at the Romans sometimes Greek history gets neglected and it’s worth understanding in its own right but also because it’s shaped so much of subsequent culture in particular the Roman period so it it works in on so many ways so it’s meant as an introduction and by looking at Athens and Sparta you see these two experiments in different ways of running a state a city and how that plays out and just telling the story. Again, as with everything I write, the aim is that if you’re interested enough to pick the book up, you’re told everything you need to know. You don’t have to come with prior knowledge. That’s fine if you do, and hopefully there’s new ideas if you do, but that it’s it’s bringing people to this subject and trying to show again just how much how exciting it is, how much fun it is looking at this, how intriguing all of this is. So, that’s that’s the aim of that book. All right. Well, great. I I am not as as well-versed in Greek history, which makes me, you know, I think the prime uh prime target for that. A Greek Greek history just seems so messy. I mean, I have a I have a good understanding of it, but like and I’m sure this is how Roman history looks to the outsider. But like every time I dive into the Greek world, I’m like, “Okay, this is too many cities. I can’t like like oh, you’ve you know, you’ve got archons, you’ve got kings, you’ve got oligarchs.” Like, come on, guys. like can we get this together? [laughter] So, but yeah, it it sounds fascinating and especially at a moment I think when uh you know that dichotomy of Athens and Sparta, I think that’s it’s crucial. you know, they they fought a war over their different systems of government. And I think it’s so interesting to like just kind of make the make the classical world more complex in a sense because people will say the Greco Roman tradition as if it is a thing and or oh, I like ancient philosophy. It’s like, well, which one? [laughter] You know, like like the Stoics and the Epicurans were not on the same page at all. Like you can’t, you know what I So like obviously you take the you take the good with the bad and you you you look at different systems from each but like at a time I feel like when so many people will say will extol Greco Roman civilization as like this incredibly unified thing. I think a book like this could be absolutely fascinating to read in a sense of like listen not even Greek civilization was this unified whole you know there were a thousand people with a thousand different ideas about how things should work but that’s more or less how every society is. They’re never as as as unified as as we can look. You know, it’s 2,000 years ago. We we just smooth over the differences arbitrarily. Well, Dr. Goldworthy, again, thank you for joining. Um I’d love to do this again. This was incredibly informative and there was a ton we didn’t get to. I I did want to talk more about the military. Is that your area of expertise? But, you know, you had you had so many great things to say and I couldn’t resist the follow-up questions that I did add. So, uh if if you’re up for it later, we’ll do it later. But I appreciate your time. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me and yes, I’m sure we can do another one. It’s it’s as I say, as you may have noticed, I like talking about history and particularly the Romans. Likewise. Uh awesome. Well, appreciate the time and uh until next time. Thanks everyone. Bye.