Mary Beard on Ruling the Roman Empire
6/11/202652 min
What did it take to rule an empire that was never meant to have an emperor?
In this second episode of our series on the Roman Empire, we're joined by classicist Mary Beard to trace how Roman leadership evolved over a thousand years - from the competitive power-sharing of the Republic, to the carefully constructed one-man rule of Augustus. Why did the republican system buckle under its own success? And what set the empire on the path to fragmentation?
Make sure to join us for our third episode next week, when Peter Heather will explain how and why the Roman Empire fell apart.
Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.
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First 90 secondsDan Snow· Host0:00
Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to HistoryHit and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe. [dramatic music] How do you rule over one of history's greatest empires? For over 1,000 years of Roman history, that answer kept changing, from the fiercely competitive republic through to the age of the Caesars, the emperors. This is our second episode in our series on the Roman Empire, and we're gonna trace how leadership in Rome evolved over, well, 1,000 years. We're gonna explore how the institutions of the Roman Republic forced powerful men into competition, into balancing each other, I guess. And then we're gonna look at the rise of one-man rule under Augustus, whose reign transformed a republic into an imperial system. And then, from then, it keeps changing. The empire itself changed. Rome itself was eclipsed, and we're gonna look at how power fragmented, and across much of the empire, it was extinguished. This is the story of how Rome reinvented itself, reinvented power, and how those reinventions