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Why was the Roman military so powerful? How did its structure work? What men joined up and what did they actually do with their time? Twenty-five years was a long time to serve. Interestingly, the Roman military offered credible opportunities to advance in Roman society. And for non-Romans, military service could get them on the path to becoming citizens themselves.
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Here is the first of several episodes on the Roman military. How did the military fuel expansion, secure borders and bolster the emperor's power? How large was the military and what did it cost? What role did soldiers play in both receiving imperial ideology, as well as advancing it?
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The Pax Romana may have thrived, but much of its prosperity was born on the backs of million. On this episode, we look at a darker side of the Pax Romana, and the institution of Roman slavery. How did it function--from the brutal realities of capture and sale--to the opportunities for freedom? Roman slavery was of questionable economic benefit, so why did Romans keep this institution around for so long?
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Roman society was highly stratified. Rank, wealth, birth and political power--not necessarily merit--determined one's place in the world. The social system was intricated and divided; both masses and elites were subdivided in a variety of ways. And above all was the emperor. He reigned supreme, as not just a ruler, but a patron and father over the entire Roman world.
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Scholars tend to think of the Pax Romana as being at the pinnacle of prosperity and its economic and military power. And in a sense that is true, compared to the crisis that followed. But despite the high achievements of the Pax Romana, it remains an open question as to whether highly populated Roman cities were as healthy as we often imagine. In this episode, I discuss the sanitation infrastructure and technology of the Roman Empire: aqueducts, baths and sewers. How much did these improve health in Roman cities?
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Hadrian ruled the Roman Empire for 21 years. His legacy, however, is a tangled mess. On the one hand, he left behind impressive architectural marvels, like Hadrian’s Wall; and his epic journeys across land and sea reinforced the notion that he was not just the leader of Rome, but the representative of tens of millions of people across a vast commonwealth. And yet, both his early years and, as we’ll talk about today, his latter years, were strange and shrouded with intrigue and animosity. One senator even cursed Hadrian. But as we’ll see today, amid the mess, Hadrian managed to set up a succession plan that ensured two generations of stability—and place a teenager into the line of succession who would grow up to become Rome’s famed philosopher king: Marcus Aurelius.
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Hadrian's Wall served as the Roman frontier in Britain for nearly 300 years. While not an impenetrable barrier, it deterred large-scale raids, allowed for the regulation of trade, and provided a base for Roman military operations when necessary. Hadrian’s Wall is both a symbol of Rome’s final ruinous end, but also of the extent to which the Roman peace was an illusion. Ultimately, the Wall failed to protect the Empire—not only from outside invasions, but as we will continue to show on this podcast—from Rome’s own emperors, and the fatal flaws of arrogance, decadence and unbridled power.Primary Sources Referenced:Vindolanda Tablet 291--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/paxromanapodcast/support
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By the year AD 130, Hadrian had ruled the Roman Empirefor more than a decade—touring its far flung provinces, and transforming it from conquest empire to unified commonwealth. And yet, one peoples in particular were not aligned with Hadrian’s grand vision. The Jewish people had been subjugated to some of the worst brutality imaginable—a fact they had not forgotten. Under eventual Roman emperor Titus, their capital of Jerusalem as well as the great Jewish temple, had been levelled to the ground. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were enslaved or murdered. And now, once again under Hadrian, the Jews in Judea would fight yet once more for what seemed an impossible dream—the rebirth of an independent Jewish state in the holy land. This would be the most serious revolt yet--the Bar Kokhba Revolt. Would it succeed?
Primary Sources Referenced:
Cassius Dio, Roman History 13.1.
Numbers 24:17.
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Hadrian took over for Trajan, and it was a little awkward. As we saw last time, Trajan went to his deathbed without naming a successor; then over the course of several secretive days, Trajan died and Hadrian emerged as the next emperor. Only Trajan’s wife and praetorian prefect seem to know what happened. Others knew what happened, of course, but they were murdered under mysterious circumstances. Then, four leading senators were also executed without a trial. Whispers of a plot swirled, but to this day we still don’t know what happened. Hadrian would forever be treated with suspicion by the Senate, but the population loved him. Why was Hadrian such a beloved emperor and what was his vision for a new Roman commonwealth?
Primary Sources:
Inscription on Debt Cancellation, CIL 6.976.
Inscription at Lambaesis, ILS 2487.
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The Pax Romana, and especially its period of five good emperors, is often thought of as a continuous period of peaceful and uncontroversial transitions of power. But, as we’ve seen on this podcast, there is far more to the story than that. Today’s topic is emblematic of the Pax Romana’s strange dissonance between superficial peace and its subtle undercurrents of intrigue and scandal. When Trajan died, and his successor took over, every effort was made to give the transition of power a planned and predicted character. But a deep dive into the source material reveals some inconsistencies and mysteries, and even a few murders.
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The Roman emperor Trajan looked to emulate Alexander the Great. In AD 113, he began a campaign to push Roman borders eastward further than ever before. In his way was the Parthian Empire. These two powers were engaged in a complex geo-political chess match for virtually the entirety of the Pax Romana. Would Trajan be able to do what no previous Roman had done, and take Rome's eastern Nemesis?
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Our modern economy is miraculous. But did the kinds of market mechanisms that make modern economies so prosperous prevail in the Romain Empire? On the one hand, Rome's economy was impressive. It was highly monetized, unified by law and seemingly vibrant. But to what extent was Rome's economy "free market"?
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Around AD 112, Pliny the Younger, Roman governor of Bithynia wrote a letter to his emperor Trajan, on a subject that he thought fairly mundane, but this letter has become one of the most important sources in ancient history. What does the letter say? Pliny told Trajan that he had arrested several members of a strange and growing new religion; these men and women called themselves Christians, after a messianic figure—Jesus the Christ—who was crucified under Pontius Pilate in Judea some 80 years prior. As we’ll see in this episode, Pliny put Christians on trial. But how did he find them? What did he force them to do? What did they tell him about their faith? And what did the emperor Trajan have to say about Christianity? --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/paxromanapodcast/support
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By the time of Trajan—at the beginning of the second century AD, one man—the emperor of Rome—ruled over 60 million people spread throughout the Mediterranean basin, from damp and dreary Great Britain to the hot dry and desolate wilderness of Syria. And, as I hinted at last time, Trajan would push the boundaries of this massive empire ever further east—and Trajan himself would stand upon the shores of the Persian Gulf. But one thing we haven’t yet addressed, is how the emperor actually managed such a vast imperial apparatus. Well, by an accident of history, we have an incredible collection of letters between Trajan and one of his governors. The letters offer unparalleled insight into the mind of a Roman empire—revealing his ruthless expectations of those under him, his miserly attitude and even his paranoia.
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It took two wars, but as we saw last time, the emperor Trajan finally got the job done in Dacia. By the year AD 107, the crafty Dacian king was dead, and Rome had itself a new province—one supposedly flush with gold and silver. And with Trajan’s new one-kilometer long bridge across the broad Danube River, Roman soldiers, merchants, workers and government officials would have no trouble exploiting Dacia for all it was worth. So suddenly, Trajan had several extra zeros in his imperial bank account; and with this new money, Trajan launched into a monumental construction campaign that remade the centre of Rome…
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The Roman Emperor Trajan took office in the year AD 98. This new emperor was a friend of Roman soldiers, and he seem poised to expand Roman influence into the farthest reaches of the known world. His first aggressive step was to subjugate the treacherous Dacians—a people rich in gold and silver, and who harassed Roman forts along the Empire’s northern boundaries. But the Dacian king Decebalus was a crafty and clever strategists, with a proven track record against Rome’s legions. Once the war broke out, Trajan quickly found himself outmaneuvered by the Dacian king. As we learned last time, Trajan surged deep into the mountains of what is now modern Romania, but king Decebalus shocked the emperor, and led hordes of Dacians—perhaps more than 100,000 in the opposite direction, towards the Roman Empire’s now undermanned borders. How did Trajan rescue the Empire from such a terrifying threat, overcome a blunder that could have ended his reign barely before it even began and discover a one the largest hoards of buried treasure ever found in human history?
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Under Trajan, members of the Roman Senate had to face facts: the republic was gone, and elements of the military were equally if not more important than them. To us, this sounds like the kind of junta or military dictatorship that rarely lasts long—but in fact, with the accession of Trajan, the Roman Empire would enter its most dominant and prosperous period; it would also be an era free from major civil wars or usurpations; but how did Trajan manage to get this most remarkable phase of the Pax Romana off on the right foot?
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With the death of Domitian, we now enter the age that some historians call the High Roman Empire—the pinnacle of the pinnacle. For just shy of a century, from AD 96 to 180, Rome is ruled by a succession of five emperors. And while each of them had their flaws, some more obvious than others, they are generally regarded as among the best that Rome had to offer. Edward Gibbon, who wrote The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in 1776, would call this span of time: “the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous”. Lofty words, but are they true? Were these years the best years in Roman history, let alone the history of the whole human race?
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Augustus Caesar set up a military autocracy in which he, and he alone, would be supreme leader. He then wrapped that autocracy in the tattered remains of Rome’s shredded Republican constitution. Emperors came and went, many of them claiming to secure and uphold the republican system; in reality, the new autocratic system became permanent. As we learned last time, the year AD 81 would mark the beginning of a new and infamous regime—that of the hated emperor Domitian. Ancient writers universally condemn Domitian as one of if not the worst Roman emperor. But was Domitian Rome’s worst emperor?
Primary Sources Referenced:
Suetonius, Life of Domitian 3.
Pliny, Letters 1.12.
Suetonius, Life of Domitian 23.
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The reign of the emperor Titus, the son of Vespasian, was short—just a little over two years—but boy was it eventful. And for once, these events have little to do with the emperor—by all accounts Titus was a decent leader—but rather, it was nature that wreaked havoc on tens of thousands of Romans. First, the famous eruption of Vesuvius, the volcanos burial of the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Then a major fire in Rome. And finally, a plague that at least once source claims killed 10,000 Romans—in just a single day. But if the Romans thought these deadly natural disasters were the worst that could happen under the new dynasty, they were wrong. Because as we’ll see on this next episode, Titus was soon succeeded by perhaps one of the Pax Romana’s most infamous emperors.
Primary Sources Referenced:
Pliny’s Letters 56.Suetonius, Life of Titus 8.4
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