Tacitus and the Decadence of Rome (In Our Time)

this is the BBC this podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK thanks for downloading the in our time podcast for more details about in our time and for our Terms of Use please go to bbc.co.uk/topgear it vicissitudes Grimm with warfare torn by civil strife a tale of horror even during times of peace that's on page one of the histories by the Roman historian Tacitus Tacitus rome is a scene of crime sex and violence of excessive wealth and senatorial corruption his work is a pungent study in tyranny and decline that has influenced depictions of Rome from Gibbons decline and fall to Robert Graves I Claudius but is it a true picture of the age does Tacitus work present the tyranny and decadence of Rome at the expense of its virtues and a what extent when we look at the Roman Empire today do we still see it through his eyes with me to discuss testers Ellen Gorman senior lecturer in classics at the University of Bristol Maria Wieck professor of Latin at University College London and Catherine Edwards professor of classics and ancient history at Birkbeck University of London Catherine Edwards clusters two major works are called annals and the history which cover most of the 1st century AD can you introduce us to the annals first of all right well taxes annals is actually his last work but it covers the earliest period that he writes about and that's the period from the death of Augustus in 14 ad down to we think the death of Nero although the last parts of the annals are actually missing so also missing are the period that covers the reigns of Caligula and Claudius so so it's a it's a fragmentary work but it's nevertheless hugely important and it's had the most massive influence on how we see ancient Rome can you tell us more what how many books remained for you've said that we don't know that Caligula returned that's right well we have books 1 to 4 part of book 5 book 6 then book 7 to 10 and missing and then we have books 11 through to the fragmentary book 16 book 16 breaks off and at a very sic moment and then we don't know what happens after that so if you don't give an overall view but what you can get from what's remaining in the annals what would you say the theme was alone well there are different ways in which one could see the theme I mean it's it's the history of Rome written in some ways in a traditional way but preoccupied with the question really perhaps of how one can go on being a good Roman senator under the regime of the emperors is it actually possible to to function as a Roman senator under that autocratic regime we'll see a man who would have first-hand knowledge of this absolutely he was a Roman senator himself he'd reached the the highest peaks really of a Roman political career he'd been a console which is Rome's highest Majesty and he'd also had the very prestigious post of proconsul of Asia being governor of Asia so he knew history absolutely from the inside and they saw the work of the histories and what ways are different from the animals the histories is written in fact earlier but covering a later period the period starts off covering ad 69 for the periods of the year of the Four Emperors and goes through probably to the death of Domitian there again that work is also fragmentary we only have the first part of it it's really concerned with civil war primarily and that is desired is that different the way it's written the way it's aimed and then they and then the annals it's not profoundly different and one might say the Tacitus is style is kind of more mature perhaps in the annals than it is in the histories but the histories to is concerned with the sort of inner conflict of Rome whether room can still be itself under the emperors and in some ways Civil War the the the kind of conflict and violence of civil war that that's involved so many deaths is sort of comes out as a kind of in some ways an essential characteristic of of Rome that Rome is is a nation that's always them have been preoccupied with civil war so by and large these two these two incomplete collections the history's animals are giving us a picture of Rome in the first century AD the Roman Empire essentially based on what is happening in Rome it's oh yes it is largely based on Rome itself but Tacitus also brings in what's happening on the edges of the Roman Empire in some ways that act in counterpoint to events back in the city so we get campaigns and Germany campaigns in the east against the Parthian campaigns in Britain can we develop that Allen O'Gorman what is is going what is largely going on in the first century AD in terms of history yes in terms of what's going on outside Rome the battles the extensions of empire the defeats some some idea of more than what what is happening well one of the things that the tasida starts with at the beginning of the annals as he says in Augustus as will one of the things that Augustus leaves to his successors is the advice that they don't extend to the Empire and so one of the themes of the annals is yes we are we are maintaining our boundaries and but we're not actually pushing our boundaries out any further and this is then placing a constraint upon the aristocratic class because it places a constraint on the kind of military glory that they can achieve and by conquering new territories basically they're in a maintenance pattern and tasida says that about four books into the annals he says you must be aware that my history is different from earlier histories because there are no great Wars there are new cities to conquer it'll be rather surprising to listener so it is to me that Augustus puts this in his will and Emperor's follow it although Emperor's we think naturally want to know more and more it's just because they're obedient or because the Emperor is big enough for them to look after sometimes it's about practicality but for each Emperor it's a balancing task the Rhine frontier is one good example it's it's a natural frontier so it's actually easy and and therefore relatively inexpensive for the Romans to maintain but any Emperor who maintains the boundaries also runs the risk of alienating first of all the people in Rome because they like triumphs and money coming in but also the Legionaries eyes on the boundaries and that becomes then the problem at the beginning of the histories because the Legionaries start naming their own emperors so this one of the big thing is happening I know it's asking you to put caught in a thimble but is this that one of the main things that's happening in the first century in Rome we're going to come to that plenty of em prize like Emperor's and activities there but out there it's the the Roman armies roaming around and themselves gathering strength yes well they've always had strengths what they're lacking now is and something focus to do and that M increases a sense of dishonor for them but there's this rumor going around that we're not allowed to fight any wars anymore and they also start to get attached to their military commanders who of course are there and present rather than to some figure back in Rome are we talking about an extremely rich Empire in terms of material is much booty and and goods coming in from from the Empire to Rome well it's it's no longer booty because most of the time it's not about looting it's not about conquering new territories and looting so it's more maintenance money it's more about local taxes and and also of course the important important grain coming particularly from Egypt so it's a sort of regular maintained influx of money which of course it is bringing with us as a system of collecting these taxes and siphoning them back to Rome so outside Rome are we talking about a largely settled Empire at this time and largely it does vary from place to place and of course at the end of the histories as we have us at the very brutal at Jewish war is is being forced on the siege of Jerusalem is about to happen justice also wrote about Germany and about Britain what's happening particularly there well I think the reason he wrote about Germany which was one of his earliest monographs was probably because he wrote this in 1898 the elderly new Emperor Nerva had just adopted a young and experienced general Trajan as his successor but Trajan was still out on the Rhine frontier and this was creating a certain amount of tension in room why was why was our new emperor or new emperor to be still out in Germany and that was probably one of the reasons why Tacitus wrote a monograph on germany to explain the place to the really like he wrote about Britain alone in a biography of his father-in-law Agricola in it he declared and so the population the population in Britain was gradually led into the demoralizing temptations of arcades baths and sumptuous banquets the unsuspecting witness spoke of such novelties as civilization when in fact they were only a feature of their enslavement can you elaborate on that please yes it's a curious thing about the Agricola that it's meant to be a eulogy of Tacitus his father-in-law it is full of references to tribes were subdued and kings were captured and the establishment of forts and the final conquest from the Roman perspective of Britain and yet it does take moments in which it chooses to critique Empire and imperialism from the point of those who are conquered so not only are we told that curricula civilized the British and got them in in order to warfare by offering them peace and leisure through things like the building of cities and temples he got the Chieftains sons to be educated the the British the Britons became very interested in learning the Latin language and putting on the toga and yet Tacitus then says precisely that this was not a process of civilization but a process of entering into servitude because these features also led to the demoralizing lifestyle that comes with arcades and baths and banquets and he also allows some of the conquered to criticize the imperial process in the most extraordinary moving fashion so famously there's a celebrated speech by the Caledonian chieftain Kalka curse as he summons 30,000 troops in the northernmost part of Scotland to fight a last stand against the Romans and he describes themselves as the last of the free and the Romans spillages of the world and then he he says to his troops that what the romans have called Imperium what they call government has been nothing but looting ravaging and butchery and that what they call peace has actually been desolation and over the centuries that moving speech about the the problems of imperialism have been taken taken up at time and time again and what rings through the the years is the speech of Caracas even though it's embedded in a story that praises the triumphs of curricula it is curious isn't it because he very much admires the Britain especially the north with the Caledonia's that's a pic it's Caledonians let's just say northern Britain were sick the northern Britain I'm yet yet the enemies quite pleased the Rome whose beat them of course but he finds great virtue acidnam and the virtues he finds at the switcher civilization might be called Spartan virtues and actually being introduced to civilization in the Brits you think well it might be quite civilized to go to a banquet all the theaters he calls this enslavement and this runs through his later works of history the animals as themes very strongly doesn't it can you develop that yes I mean in a sense what's really striking about that particular comment in big Ricola is the Tacitus is suggesting that the decadence is a gift a gift that Romans give to the people that they colonize and in one way of origin jealously yes indeed it is and one way of understanding that is that in some senses it actually constitutes a critique of Rome itself and and to go back to to what Katherine Ellen have been I've been saying about how all the writings of Tacitus are in some sense about the subjection of the Roman world to emperors you can see that in in talking about the Romans subjecting the Britons in talking about living in arcades and having banquets as a demoralizing process as a move from Liberty to servitude is the kind of progression which the Romans themselves have already experienced and the only people's Tacitus is suggesting who now have the traditional values that Romans used to have live on the margins of the empires is not necessarily even Spartan virtues to some degree some of these Caledonian tribes exhibit old Roman virtues which is excellence in warfare a dedication to the freedom of your people loyalty to your family's respect for your ancestors duty to your descendants these are all things that the Romans valued immensely highly and Tacitus is saying where is that now it's not at the center anymore and he uses them as the yardstick rather rather than looking back to Augustus or before before Augustus yes he does to a degree because when you could say that there's always a sense in his narrative as there are in many of the Imperial histories that there was this earlier fantastic golden age of the Republic and a decline into Imperial times but actually interestingly Tacitus suggests that the time of political equality the time of true republican government the time of traditional Roman model of morals was actually in the very very very dim distant past and we're not talking about a hundred years ago we're not talking about Augustus we're not even talking about before Augustus we're talking about the second century BC and he suggests that what has happened the problem is that there may well have been this period and one starts to think that perhaps he thinks it never quite was ever as good as that I mean he suggests that the problem is it's in the nature of man to seek power and the the dangers for Rome is when that power is worldwide is global so there's a sequence of events man desires power power brings wealth wealth brings civil war civil war brings autocracy and there we are in this decadent age so he kind of suggests that it's almost always been like that well let's turn to the decadence of Rome Catherine Edwards coming more specifically at his idea of decades what did he see is the nature of corruption will it test it to see what was it that was corrupt and and and decadent in in in the realm of let's say the first century AD remember the early Emperors well I think it's very interesting it's a very complex process and Tacitus I mean there is this this issue's Maria very rightly says of autocracy as being something that in a sense room is always heading towards and you get these kind of almost cycles as he talks about the Republic that rain starts off as the city ruled by kings but then you get Liberty in the consulship but then some some have periods of one-man rule become increasingly frequent until we get to the the sort of system set up by Augustus so that there's a sense in which individual rulers are to blame the systems to blame but also that the Romans senator to blame as well because they they collude they collude with emperors they see that is the only way that they can do well for themselves is by collusion so it's what's quite curious about the way August has the wait asked has talks about the the system of the principle is that it's not simply a question of blaming the Emperor's but that it's everybody is somehow compromised by it including a long ago and Tacitus himself I mean he paints a picture of the Roman Senate in relation to the Empress he says in auricular we the Senators must be included him led the Emperor's opponents to prison we watched their sufferings in shame we stayed and stained ourselves with the innocent blood now what's he talking about that well he's talking about the guilt of the senatorial order as a whole and one of the things he starts to explore in the Agricola and explores in very detailed ways throughout the annals and histories is what you do as an individual senator in Senate and there's there's there's a number of things you can do one is you can as Katherine says collude and the most striking examples of those and the most horrifying examples are and you start to bring accusations of treason against your fellow senators and people that you know the emperor is suspicious of you collude by dragging these people to destruction actively you actually taking you yourself as senators to take them to the prison you you you use their sufferings in shame that means you watch something tortured yes example he's giving off and we ourselves hold I think it's held vide as Priscus off to prison and we have another source saying one senators actually lay hands on health ideas in Senate and draggin physically to prison and the rest of the Senate of course stood there and we're horrified or not as the case may be and and so he said we are guilty by association so that's the other thing you can do you can actively take on accusations and you can benefit from that and you can stand to one side and not take on accusations and be silent or you can actively speak up and dissent but you run the risk then of yourself being brought to trial for treason so the fish is rotting from the head in the corruption for him begins in the Senate and the corruption of the Senate recognizes Mara Mike can I just go back one moment to the the idealized past who you put it to say you both had three centuries before justices writing was the not a sense because we're protecting the Republic not very long ago but just about the time just before the death of Julius Caesar in 44 BC that was thought of as the when Rome was great when people were elected and for a short time and I'm feeling a bit of a sort of male upper class at democracy but but there it was that didn't enter into his his thought very strongly at all well he he perceives the period before Augustus is one that has already proposed dates were well augustus officially comes to power the day that Cleopatra frees the the Battle of Actium in 31 BC and shortly after she and Mark Antony commit suicide and at that point Augustus is seen as what's called the the print caps the principal starts which means in theory the the most excellent among many but is clearly heading gradually towards what we now call the the the reins of the emperors the house of the Caesars in Rome so Tacitus doesn't necessarily suggest that the that the division is at the moment when we have what we now call our first emperor Augustus he suggests that that it's all started long before that with all the civil wars and the Legionaries were devoted to their generals is an issue that has occurred already before the time of Augustus with for example the battles between Julius Caesar and Pompey but but what what Tacitus does do also that's quite interesting is he he kind of idolizes the Republican historians in the in the sense that he at least he says that in the time before time be rias who comes to power after Augustus in in the time before time various historians wrote about the people of Rome not the one ruler of Rome when they wrote about the people of Rome they wrote with a lack of partisanship a lack of anger about great events but once you have a single ruler then history is either completely servile or completely hostile and he suggests that what he's he's now trying to in a way return to the neutrality of Republican histories and do the difficult task of writing about emperors while cine era its studio I think he says without anger or partisanship and the sexual activities mores very important in Tacitus does he link does he make a drink a direct link between moral and political corruption he does he does and he does it's in various different ways I mean with the emperor Tiberius who's the first emperor that we we hear about in detail we get the the the kind of lusts of Tiberius which are not talked about in a great deal of detail and there's a contrast there with Serato Nietzsche's biography of Tiberius which goes into all kinds of sordid detail but Asus is in some ways more high-minded but nevertheless the the kind of the lusts of Tiberius are a key part of his characterization and we can see that as kind of a reflection of the kind of traditional picture of what a tyrant is like a tyrant is somebody whose lusts are unbridled and whose perverse lusts are unbridled and so this is part of the way in which we can perceive the tyranny of Tiberius if we look on to later Emperor's you're doing is the scandal shoots it's just if you can give us some idea we are all prepared to cover our ears when we set up some indication because that must have changed their nature yes I mean he watch a lot of it is done by kind of innuendo and there's Tiberius is spent a long period of time on roads before he becomes Emperor and kind of quite what he was doing there remains the subject of rumor and gossip and rumor and gossip is hugely important in Tacitus and that's one of the ways in which knowledge circulates but it's never it's never entirely clear how stable that knowledge is and under the Prince pert and sometimes he'll tell a dreadful story and say oh actually this isn't there's no real grounds for thinking this is true but it's important because people were telling the story and that's part of how they perceived what was going on so still no information about loss I'm afraid it's really quite improper forum for the radio at this time and the what connection did you see well but I think it's a it's a symptom of a political regime that is not as it should be when the ruler is indulging his lasts and with with Nero we see that manifested in a rather different way more perhaps more flagrant way Nero has indulges his his lust with it with a slave girl actually that's not so bad and the great scheme of things but by far the kind of one of the worst aspects of Nero's reign is his relationship with his mother Agra Pina Darcy or doesn't he have incestuous relations with Agra Pina this is a kind of key question and in some ways it's this which is which prompts Nero's murder of his mother something we might come on to you later but there are other stories about Nero and his his lust he's alleged to have had a sort of public exhibition of a marriage ceremony with a man Pythagoras who at which Nero played the bride and allegedly acted out all the things that would have happened in private for a normal wedding happened in public the near is wedding to Pythagoras well I think that particular wedding and women seem to be characterized marry awake as scheming sexually voracious and generally responsible for bringing down weak and otherwise virtuous men is this what you find it doesn't is well he has got many very interesting tales to tell about women and in particular about Messalina and I crappy no if we just take Messalina as an example since I can see that you want the wife since I can see you want some specific this is the trial for this program I said at the top of the primary section and there is a trace description act operating on in our time you say what you want to say but it's part of it and if I'm getting most of it from the notes of u3z raise your eyebrows as much as you want what's on paper can be on now let's talk about Messalina Claudius well the interesting story that Tacitus tell us about Messalina is that he indicates that she was an extremely Yass lustful utterly promiscuous young bride of this age you'd rather decrepit imbecilic emperor claudius and that in her perversities in her sexual perversity is she chose to pursue the idea of marrying her lover which might not sound particularly perverse but it is when you're already married to the emperor of rome and so she decides to go through an entire wedding ceremony with her lover in rome openly including the wedding veil the banquet the the marriage bed Claudius's freedmen are absolutely horrified by by this activity they want to try and get rid of her and so they they have to think through how to do this without Claudius actually seeing her falling on his mercy so we were told this fantastic tale that they send a couple of Claudia's mistresses out to him because he's out in Ostia at the time to tell him what has happened he comes racing back to Rome mess Selena's banquet immediately dissolves she goes running through the city and can only find a garden refuse cart to get to him because Tacitus likes these little little details when she finally reached his Claudius the the freedmen start shouting over her when she's pleading for mercy and they put lists of her lovers in front of Claudia's eyes so he can't be reminded how beautiful she is they they take him back into the city show him the lovers house where half his property now resides so he suitably shopped and goes off for a good dinner at which point he decides that perhaps he will see her the next day so the freedmen then have to slaughter her that night to make sure there's no possibility of that and when they finally tell Claudius what's happened he just asked for another bottle of wine and then a while later marries somebody else and if we are to what is that story doing in Tacitus what does it tell us about the roles of women you could say that it is a perfect example of senatorial government gone horribly wrong because all that's happening here is a contest for power between the wife of the Emperor and his freedmen and Claudius is just this idiotic old man deluded by everybody around him I don't know Roman I tell you when she says I don't ask you a question I wanted to take up and our reluctance to talk about the sex scenes there were very few sex scenes in Tacitus and if we read it Tacitus only for the sex scenes we're missing the point and what Maria says is absolutely right it's it's a sign of the corruption of senatorial power but it's also Tacitus tells very few of these sex scenes because they show no possibility of redemption and he's more interested in senatorial scenes because there is the possibility of redemption there but one of the reasons that calling on women is that in if you have a hereditary system emperors would the amp'd the Caesars of the Emperor's then the woman is very important because she bares the air and therefore she will have control far more control of the errors as a mother than anybody else she becomes extremely important in that particular small scheme of things yes my new aristocratic women even in the the late Republic and had a of political clout and there used to be you know that the aristocratic women of Rome had a sort of Club but got together and they networked and sorted out whose daughters were going to marry whose sons which was it you know Keystone of political alliances in Republican Rome so in one way what we see is is that political influence of the Republican woman expanded beyond its normal be not beyond its normal influence to an excessive degree and there is a symptom of the same thing happening with the husband that instead of having lots of senators you have the Emperor right but I think it's very very interesting the way that tossed us homes in on particularly Livia who's the wife of Augustus and the mother of Tiberius an Agri Pina who's the wife of Claudius and mother of Nero and has indeed Olivia's great-granddaughter and Tacitus actually plays on the resemblance between the two of them they are some of the most compelling figures in the annals Olivia the the alleged poisoner who plays a key role in getting her son on to the the imperial throne given that actually Tiberius is not the son of Augustus and then Agri Pina who does exactly the same thing for her son Nero who is not the son of Claudius and managed to sort of sideline towards his own son in doing that but we'll see without Rapinoe we see an attempt to sort of muffle in on what pastors presented muscling in on the great decisions of States and Agri Pina wants to be their welcoming the ambassador's Agrafena wants to be sort of part of she must have a sort of little hidey-hole mate but she can listen in on senatorial debate and so on and in some ways the the very fact that any woman can be in that position is in itself the most egregious symptom of how corrupt have wrong the system of the principally is fat asses because traditionally women are not to have any that should be a strict divide and what happens in the within the household there's one thing in terms of marriage alliances and so on but what happens in the Senate that said it should be where the decisions are made not the Emperor's bedroom house it would it be true to say that Tacitus hasn't many good words to say for many people helena government one of the people he does respect is a and historian Cromartie Cordes the most most people come up badly in his journals and histories most of the problem when people come up badly um it did they fall from high standards one another they fell from high standards one where the other he's sometimes a little bit more complex than that I mean sometimes he has characters who you think are going to be a uniformly dreadful one example is Lucius fatality is the father of the Emperor of Italia Co there is the emperor Otho and in both instances these are people who lead very different lives in the city are given a provincial command hey presto go out to the provinces and and behaved impeccably so he is aware that people don't always behave as you expect certainly any historian he mentions commuters cordis gets a huge scene and in book four of the annals because he's just written a history he's called the assassins of Caesar the last of the Romans and he's now arraigned for treason and he gives a great speech defending history and defending his memory and then goes and commits suicide but also incidentally and there's there's an obituary of Servilius know me Alice and he says you know this man led an excellent life and and and all he says at this man wrote Roman history he led an excellent life he doesn't appear anywhere else so I think he continues to feel picking up on what Maria said about history in the past that if you decide you're going to be a Roman historian you're already somewhere on the path of virtue muriatic take that word history is it history as you three would understand it or is it is it what might be called the higher gossip or would you call you should let it pass as history today I sauce is clear and does he that sort of thing checking things out in some sense is it's it's much less it would fail by the standards of say you know serious historical scholarship in terms of its lack of explicitness about its documentation and in the star that is written and in all sorts of other respects but in some senses is so much more than any modern history could be because it has so many higher expectations of what history ought to be doing and it's pragmatic in the sense that Tacitus says the work of history is to commemorate great deeds and to bring to the attention of prosperity evil deeds to denounce them he also treats history as as didactic it will we should learn from history we should be able to predict the future from what we see in the past and he is writing as a statesman for readers who are going to have a life in public office my moral instruction as well its ethical as well because we should learn good and bad behavior from within the writings and because it has a strong sense of its utility history has an incredibly important function to play in society because of that you have to stir up the emotions of your audience you have to engage them and to engage them you write in a style that is full of rhetorical ornamentation devices that we would nowadays call novelistic dramas direct speeches all that sort of thing is meant to move your audience so your audience will then learn and will take from the past what's needed for the future can I ask turn to the question of Tacitus influence what do we know the influence he had around his own time before we move on from there well we don't actually have a lot of history writing in Latin from after Tacitus and we don't even know what happened to Tacitus in the end people argue about the degree to which he may have been an important influence on the historian of the sort of later centuries of the Roman Empire Amina's Marcellinus later on if we're looking you know far into the future he he does he sort of rediscovered in the Renaissance and we find scholars like Sir Thomas More it's very very interested in Tacitus and that one could detect a certain kind of tacit E and tone to the way he talks about British monix like Richard ii and then perhaps one could go through to given an Tacitus well it's good to be given another gorman he did he have given the history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire 18th century a very important work in in in in British history what is the influence and on on given direct and very important its direct and acknowledged there's there's of course the famous power in Gibbon where he recounts the scene of of the Augustan restoration in sentences it would take the pen of the Tacitus to describe this and not only describe what the people are saying but their inner motivations as well that what he's very interested in first of all is the way that tacit OSes rhetoric of appearance versus reality pervades his historical vision so have Tacitus and Gibbon are always saying this person did this and apparently from the motive of X but actually from the motive of why though people also said move w choose what you will and I think Gibbon is also interested in Tacitus because Tacitus is narrative of what is happening is also continually informed by the potentiality of the actions he describes and for the for the present for the present readership in particular in the way that Maria has outlined but also for that overall generalized sense of what is power and how does it affect individual rulers and people living under rumors but Gibbon goes straight for it and if this title says the decline and fall of the Roman Empire and is the idea of the decline and fall of the Empire is that coming from did to set the idea of how you wrote about Rome you wrote about the decline and fall of Rome rather than the rise and and grandeur Abram but the Cline is a theme that occurs throughout Roman literature even even before the time of the Emperor's Rome is in decline as far as these writers are concerned they're always in decline because the Golden Age is always somewhere far in the distance so even Horace writing under Augustus it talks about Rome having already declined from its Republican days so it's a kind of trope but it's one that becomes especially important under the Emperor's and especially important once you've experienced the reign of terror of an emperor like Domitian so then there's a much progressively stronger sense and perhaps more of a reason to to think that Rome is somehow in decline in whether those Domitian's a reign of terror the new Tacitus do we know that catherine well Domitian is described in most detail in Tacitus biography of his father-in-law Agricola and there references to individual senators who come to a bad end London omission one of the things that's quite interesting is that tasks rights as though the range of Domitian will far worse than anything that had preceded it and yet in terms of little number of fatalities seems to be considerably fewer I think this is often in the business of presenting an impression but he doesn't isn't quite substantiated by the factual details that he chooses to include but certainly the mission we also get other roman writer to present has got a very positive picture of dimensional days tend to be less belief than Tacitus it might be in a sense that the Tacitus writes like that about the mission because that is that is the tyranny that he personally experienced and he says quite movingly at one point in the Agricola that that now that the mission is dead he says that after 15 years of over tyranny of that nature we can never be what we once were that there's no possibility even of returning to the partial freedoms the partial Liberty that Romans had 15 years earlier let alone going back to the Republic what he says at that moment is now we can speak all right our voices are rough our voices are not practiced but now we can at least speak and what we would love to have of course is is the rest of the histories because the rest of the histories if it was an extent would give us Tacitus as contemporary history and and that would be very interesting one of the interesting aspects of Tacitus though is that all day at one point he promises that he will talk about his own times in more detail and so these are the times when you can you know say what you think and you have freedom he never actually kind of really writes about there's good times and one might see that as partly because it's not ultimately congenial to his particular style of writing - just to celebrate the good many people listening to this program will have received as it were Tesla's view of history through Robert Graves through I Claudius Claudius that got either on the plaque on the screen or off the page I looked fine did how many limiters did groves take metastasis well in some sense as he's extremely taciturn in that the hero of his work is a historian because if you remember in in I Claudius and Claudius the god the Claudius is represented as someone who's right history of Rome for posterity he's writing a history in which he wants to expose the corruption of the imperial house in the hope that they're compared a return to the days of Republican traditions I mean that's in a sense rather similar to the point of Tacitus but he's also extremely untasted e'en in that he draws on many other ancient authors and brings in many of the anecdotes that the catherine was mentioning earlier on and perhaps one of our strongest memories of of those novels and of the BBC series in the 70s were the sex scenes that that now are given a great deal of prominence as a way of demonstrating the corruption of Empire but Catherine what he's doing it seems to me engraves Ling Tacitus suggests things and says but these are rumors but rumors are important because you have to know the gossip that's part of the context of the day graves just plows in and said look Messalina did this and here we go here we go rumors about did Livia poison Augustus his grandsons or not did she actually poison or gustas all that then becomes actualized in the robert graves version of course with television you can't it's much more difficult to present different possible interpretations you you have to choose which together we're talking about the book she doesn't say yes I can't blame television his bland right what if the interesting tacit er influences on graves is the scene when the young Claudius who is training to be a historian goes to the library of Augustus on the Palatine and he meets the two great historians of the time Livy who we have and a senior's Paolo Palio who we don't have and they write very different sorts of histories we know that and and and the young Claudius has to choose which historian he will follow he decides to follow us in his polio insignias polio is the the stylist to metastases ultimately following so there's there's a sort of occluded taciturn ism there finally Katherine how much you trust testers via Rome well I think Costas view of Rome is an incredibly powerful view because he does present us with this very sophisticated and ironical view of human motivation which i think is many many readers have found deeply compelling thank you very much thanks and Rosella no Gorman and Maria wife this is the last in this series this series if in our time we'll be back at the end of September and the programs on this series and many more on the website and thank you very much for listening

Channel: BBC Podcasts

Views: 17,004

Rating: 4.7831326 out of 5

Keywords: history, rome, european history, latin, the koran, hagia sophia, justinian's digest, laws, pants, decline, christianity, christian, catholic, pope, greek orthodox, caesar, theodora, republic, army, legion, barbarians, crashcourse, fall of rome, byzantine, justinian, study, homework help, world history, homework, church history. tacitus, vatican, islam, robert price, bart erhman, james white, textual criticism, the watchtower, god, josephus, jesus existed

Id: z9eLsxHnSBA

Length: 41min 56sec (2516 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 05 2018