Rome's Crisis of the Third Century

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Speaker 1 It's the ancients on history hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host.

Speaker 1 Today, we're covering one of the most important yet complicated and catastrophic periods in Roman history, all in one episode, the third century crisis.

Speaker 1 The third century AD is regularly seen as a period of great turmoil and transformation in the Roman Empire, particularly between the years 235 and 285 AD.

Speaker 1 During that half century, more than 25 emperors rose and fell, almost always meeting a sticky end.

Speaker 1 There was plague, there was economic collapse, there was massive conflict both from powerful external enemies in places like Germany and the Middle East, but also from power-hungry leaders within Rome's borders seeking to carve out their own kingdoms.

Speaker 1 The third century crisis was this melting pot of different catastrophes that struck the Roman Empire.

Speaker 1 And yet, for all of these hardships, the Roman Empire did ultimately survive them, albeit emerging from it radically transformed.

Speaker 1 Now our guest today to untangle and explain this third century crisis is Dr. David Gwynne from Royal Holloway University in London, where he is a reader in ancient and late antique history.

Speaker 1 David has been on the podcast once before. He was our guest for the episode we released in early 2024, all about the Goths, one of my favourite episodes of the last year, I must admit.

Speaker 1 Now, David, he's back to tackle the massive topic that is the third century crisis and explain why this period of chaos was so so significant and transformative for the Roman Empire.

Speaker 1 This was an extraordinary chat covering everything from the seven-foot giant barracks emperor that was Maximinus Thrax to Christianity and the empire-wise persecutions of its followers at times during this period.

Speaker 1 I really do hope you enjoy.

Speaker 1 David, what a pleasure. Welcome back to the podcast.

Speaker 18 Thank you very much. Great to be back.

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, good luck. This is quite a topic, the crisis of the third century.

Speaker 1 And yet, this feels like one of those pivotal, I don't want to say moments, because it's not a moment, it's decades long, but one of those pivotal times in the history of ancient Rome.

Speaker 18 It's the turning point in many ways between what we call the classical world and the early medieval world.

Speaker 18 A lot of universities, when they teach classical history, stop at the end of the second century with the Roman Empire, because the third century is so complex, so confusing, and what emerges out of it is what we call the later Roman Empire, the world of late antiquity.

Speaker 18 So a lot of classicists don't even get there.

Speaker 1 I see it sometimes with similarities with, let's say, the Wars of the Successes, where there's so many names following Alexander the Great's death and so many similar names that many people, you know, they refrain from focusing in on it because it is such a crisis and it's quite daunting to approach.

Speaker 1 And I can imagine with the crisis of the third century, with so many different players involved, it is complicated and complex.

Speaker 1 That is one of the main reasons that sometimes we don't focus it on it as much as, let's say, Constantine the Great afterwards or Marcus Aurelius and Commodus before.

Speaker 18 Absolutely. And you can add to that, it's the worst documented period in Roman imperial history.
That's not because people weren't writing. It's not such a crisis that no one could write.

Speaker 18 almost none of the works survive. So the last two really good or solid historians of the earlier period, Cassius Dio and Herodian, they stop in 229 and 238, respectively.

Speaker 18 We're not going to have another reliable narrative historian until Ammianus Marcellinus' surviving account begins in 354.

Speaker 18 So there's no historical narrative, even remotely contemporary, we can use.

Speaker 1 That's over 100 years where there's no narrative history.

Speaker 18 What we've got is we've got a church historian, Eusebius of Caesarea, very useful, but obviously specifically focused on the church and tending to judge emperors by did they persecute.

Speaker 18 We've got a number of fourth century writers who wrote very short biographies of emperors and just give us a very basic outline.

Speaker 18 And then we've got the one source that covers almost the entire third century crisis, but that, unfortunately, is the work known as the Historia Augusta.

Speaker 1 I thought you were going to say that.

Speaker 18 Yep.

Speaker 18 This is a collection of imperial biographies, so it's written as Lives of Emperors. It claims to be written by six different people working together around the year 300.

Speaker 18 It's actually written almost certainly by one person who invented all the other six persona

Speaker 18 and is doing this as a literary exercise either in the late 4th century or in the early 5th century.

Speaker 18 And it's not just that he's creating persona, he invents names, he fakes documents, he gives citations that don't exist.

Speaker 18 Basically, there is some genuinely useful material in the Historia Augusta, but finding it and identifying which bits you can trust has been a scholarly industry for a hundred years and has not stopped.

Speaker 1 What a difficult source.

Speaker 1 Almost going back to the Wars of the Successes, we have a similar source, I'd argue, with Adjustin, a later episteme of someone called Pompeius Trogus, but it's once again the thing of there are so many outlandish or just wrong statements in there.

Speaker 1 However, there is some beautiful little parts that you can glean from it. And that feels, I guess that is one of your challenges.

Speaker 1 It is figuring out what's real, what's fake, and I guess also archaeology, what can be corroborated with surviving archaeology.

Speaker 18 Exactly. And archaeology is utterly crucial here.
It always is in ancient history, but particularly when your literary sources are, at best, unreliable.

Speaker 18 Not just trying to trace damage, but also, of course, trying to monitor things like population shifts, the debasement of the coinage. Can we see settlement patterns altering?

Speaker 18 One of the key things, actually, from the archaeology is it confirmed that some areas of the Roman Empire are actually doing really well in the third century crisis.

Speaker 18 So Britain famously seems to be reaching a peak of prosperity because Britain was far enough away. that it wasn't touched by the crisis.

Speaker 18 North Africa is largely prosperous and the archaeology seems to bear that out.

Speaker 1 Because actually, it's such an interesting time.

Speaker 1 If it is actually a prosperous time in the Roman Empire for so many parts, so the archaeological records surviving must be very, very rich, which is a godsend compared to the literary sources that you have surviving.

Speaker 1 And of all that archaeology, should we give special mention to coinage right now because of the amount of emperors and different faces? Surely coinage must be so useful for this time period.

Speaker 18 Yes. And it would help if the coinage was better quality.
So a lot of the people who later hoarded coins didn't collect third century examples. They weren't good quality.

Speaker 18 And a crucial element of the wider crisis is that as the emperors come under strain, they need more money. What's the easiest way to create more money? You mint more coins.

Speaker 18 But the difference between an ancient coin and, say, a modern 50p piece is that an ancient coin is supposed to be worth its metal content.

Speaker 18 The silver coinage of the Roman Empire at the start of the third century crisis was still about 40% silver. By 270, it's less than 5%.

Speaker 18 And so we can find coins that, you know, technically they're silver coins, but actually they're just made up of other metals.

Speaker 18 And we actually have laws passed by emperors complaining that money lenders or money exchangers won't take the coins.

Speaker 18 Because this, of course, is what you do if you're a money exchanger in the ancient world. You test a coin, you bite it, you test, can you snap it?

Speaker 18 They're actually very good at working out whether a coin has lost its real value.

Speaker 1 So that is something, once again, I think we should really highlight right here before we delve into it.

Speaker 1 So kind of getting out of the modern perception of coins, the material value of the coin denotes its actual wealth to the ancient Romans and people living in the ancient Roman Empire.

Speaker 1 And that is so different to today.

Speaker 18 I mean, after all, the original coins, the very first ones we have on record, are actually just lumps of gold with a stamp on them. Those go back to, indeed earlier than the classical Greek period.

Speaker 1 And Croesus and Lydia, yes.

Speaker 18 The Romans have been minting coins, of course, for most of their history. But if you go back to, say, Augustus, the staff of the Roman Empire, the gold and silver coinage is 90%.

Speaker 18 It's very high-quality gold and silver. And it's going to be a real problem for the emperors after the third century to try and rebuild trust in the coinage.

Speaker 18 So Diocletian, who's the great figure who tries to rebuild the empire at the end of the crisis, never solves the problem of how to mint reliable coinage.

Speaker 18 It's Constantine who did, the first Christian emperor, and that's because a Christian emperor could melt down gold and silver statues from pagan temples and gave him a supply of precious metal to rebuild the coinage.

Speaker 1 Now, with this whole topic, the crisis of the third century, we're not going to do a whole narrative, go emperor by emperor, because there are quite a lot.

Speaker 1 And I think it would get a bit tedious after a while.

Speaker 1 What we're going to do is we're going to go thematically and explore the big themes of this almost century-long crisis, and we can focus in on a couple of particular case studies too.

Speaker 1 But it does make sense to start at the beginning. I mean, David, when does the crisis of the third century begin? And don't just say the third century, please.

Speaker 18 It sounds like it should be a hundred years. Actually, the third century crisis is from 235 to 284.

Speaker 18 So it's basically a 50-year span in the middle of the century, because the period before that is the age of the Severan dynasty, the last major dynasty to rule the Roman Empire for any length of time before the crisis began.

Speaker 1 This is the one found by Septimius Severus and famous from Gladiator II recently, of course, and Caracallagita and so on.

Speaker 18 Exactly. The last of the Severans is Severus Alexander, who dies in 235.

Speaker 18 And his death is usually regarded as the first date. at the start of the crisis.

Speaker 18 In reality, three important things had happened under the Severans, which will have a major influence and are already having an influence on the crisis.

Speaker 18 One is the Severans placed more emphasis on the army than previous emperors had. So they're very strong on army support, which is giving the army greater say in who should be emperor.

Speaker 18 The second is the Severans greatly cared about religion. They're one of the first dynasties to link themselves to a specific cult.
It's actually the Syrian cult of Baal.

Speaker 1 Or is it Elegabalis and that figure?

Speaker 18 Exactly, because Septimius Severus' wife, Julia Domna, is a priestess of that Syrian cult. And the longer the dynasty goes, the more it's emphasized.

Speaker 18 Now, obviously, some later emperors, including the Christian ones, are going to draw in part on this model of a dynasty linked to religion.

Speaker 18 So those are the two major severan changes inside the empire, the army and religion. Actually, for the third century crisis, the biggest change didn't happen in the Roman world.

Speaker 18 It happened out in Iran-Iraq.

Speaker 18 Because in the 220s, the Parthian Empire, which had been dominating what's now Iran-Iraq and had been in decline for 100 years, got overthrown by a new Persian dynasty called the Sasanians.

Speaker 18 And the Sasanian Persians immediately launched major attacks on the Eastern Empire and will continue to do so right through the crisis.

Speaker 1 This is imperial blowback to the extreme. I mean, it's the epitome of it, isn't it?

Speaker 1 The Romans contribute to the decline and fall of the Parthians, that preceding dynasty in Iran and Iraq, but they're replaced by this even stronger, what will be a more deadly threat to their eastern provinces over these next 50 years or so.

Speaker 18 Trajan had attacked the Parthians, Septemius Severus did it, Caracalla did it. The Romans have directly undermined the Parthians.
The problem is this new dynasty.

Speaker 18 has a vision of its own, its own ideology. What the Sasanians claim is they are the successors to the Achaemenid Persians.
That's the old empire of Darius Xerxes from the Greco-Persian wars.

Speaker 18 The problem is, if the Sasanians claim to retake the old Persian Empire, that includes Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, and arguably, very briefly, Greece.

Speaker 18 So the Sasanians can actually make a claim that all those territories should be theirs.

Speaker 18 And we know they're making this claim, because although our Persian sources aren't great either, the old Achaemenid Persians had great rock-cut monuments.

Speaker 18 So they went to some of the great rock cliffs in Iran, notably a place called Naki Rushtar, and they carved images of themselves there.

Speaker 18 Well, the Sasanians go back to the same locations and put their own monuments below those of the Achaemenids. They're making a very specific ideological claim.

Speaker 18 Interestingly, Cassius Dio, the Roman historian, knew that before he dies in the early 230s.

Speaker 18 Dio already knows that is the claim of the Sasanians, which means they're coming and they're going to keep coming.

Speaker 1 And it feels like this is something we're going to be talking about, which is this crisis in the East, especially because the East of the Roman Empire at that time, it is rich, it is wealthy.

Speaker 1 And if that is under constant attack or constant strain, that is going to filter through to the west, to the rest of the Roman Empire, and affect the stability and, I guess, the wealth, they said, the coinage and everything of the Roman Empire as this period progresses.

Speaker 18 Exactly. I mean, some parts of the Roman Empire and the East are actually going to break away temporarily and become quasi-independent because they've got to protect themselves from the Sasanians.

Speaker 18 The Sasanians are going to sack Antioch, the greatest city in the eastern Roman area of Syria.

Speaker 18 Shapor, in particular, who's the second Sasanian Shah, the only rival he has for the greatest enemy Rome faced is Hannibal of Carthage. No one else strikes quite the same chord.

Speaker 1 I think you're right, and he is often overlooked, Chapot, and maybe we'll talk a bit more about him as time goes on. But before we focus in on the yeast, I feel kind of going back to that beginning.

Speaker 1 So Severus Alexander, last of the Severans, he's been assassinated, still quite young, AD 235.

Speaker 1 As I say, the first case study, because I think this also defines the nature of many of the emperors that will follow, let's focus in on the character of the person who succeeds Severus Alexander, because in many ways, this is a breaking from the the norm in so many different ways for an emperor character.

Speaker 18 Severus was murdered in an army mutiny, and his successor is just a soldier, as far as we can tell. He's not a noble.
He's not even educated.

Speaker 18 The only thing the Historia Augusta says about him is that he was eight foot six, which seems slightly unusual.

Speaker 18 But Maximinus Thrax is simply a soldier who was charismatic enough to get other soldiers to agree with him.

Speaker 1 Eight foot six.

Speaker 18 According to Historia Augusta.

Speaker 1 Okay, okay, that's a good according to to put in there, to be fair.

Speaker 18 And as I often say, whenever you say a fact that comes from the Historia Augusta, it always requires, according to the Historia Augusta.

Speaker 1 But he's probably tall. He's probably got a tall.

Speaker 18 He was clearly, oh, you know, he's a big, impressive man. And that seems to be his qualification.
There must have been more to it, but we don't get any clear sense. He's just a soldier.

Speaker 18 who's rallying the soldiers and they hail him emperor.

Speaker 1 And is this where we get the term then, which seems to be important over those next few decades, the term barracks emperor?

Speaker 18 One of the great features of the entire crisis, you're talking about a 50-year period. There are approximately 25 official emperors and about the same number of major usurpers.

Speaker 18 So it's an incredible imperial turnover. The average reign is about two years.
The majority of those emperors are soldier emperors.

Speaker 18 So they're being hailed by the army, sometimes only by the part of the army that knows them. So you get a lot of civil wars between different parts of the army.

Speaker 18 These aren't people like Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius back in the second century. They're none of them emperors that are focusing on culture, art.

Speaker 18 Almost none of them even have time to present an image of themselves. They're soldiers.
And it's worth saying, a number of them are clearly good soldiers.

Speaker 18 Even some of the ones who lose are clearly competent military leaders. but in a sense, that's all they are.
The definition of a Roman emperor never used to be just a good soldier.

Speaker 18 Yet, a lot of these third-century emperors, that's all that really defines them.

Speaker 1 So, it's not who has the royal blood anymore or who belongs to this dynasty who's grown up in the palaces of Rome.

Speaker 1 It is very much who has the strongest army at the time and who is willing to make that play for power.

Speaker 18 Exactly. There are no dynasties here.
Of those 25 emperors, one maybe died of natural causes.

Speaker 18 Otherwise, a few disease, plague, most of them are murdered, a few die on a battlefield. That's what is happening in this period.

Speaker 18 No matter how you try and emphasize, you know, there were some aspects of prosperity, there are some aspects of culture.

Speaker 18 If you're only talking about imperial power, this is the greatest period of crisis in Roman history.

Speaker 1 Well, how successful were some of these barriers emperors?

Speaker 1 I mean, if we focus on Maximinus Thrax, we've been talking about him how long does his reign endure or do cracks start to emerge does he prove that he's not up for the task yes he's a military man but administrative wise he's not able to control the empire is it very clear with his qualifications that he he's very quickly not up for the job yes as far as we can tell maximenus never even makes it to rome it's not clear but basically the army has hailed him but the roman senate who are still important not as important as had been back in, say, the Roman Republic, but they're the richest leading nobles.

Speaker 18 The Senate have no interest in having this kind of emperor, so they promptly hail their own, who then gets murdered, so they hail another one, who's also going to get murdered, before Maximinus Thrax himself gets murdered.

Speaker 18 And then we get the grandson of one of the predecessors until he gets murdered. I mean, there are approximately seven emperors between 235 and 244, depending on who you count as an emperor.

Speaker 18 So Thrax never actually has authority. And this is one of the recurring themes of the third century crisis.

Speaker 18 And it's why one of the hardest things to judge is, is the Roman Empire struggling because of external pressure like the Persians?

Speaker 18 Or is it struggling because the constant civil wars and the lack of imperial authority are weakening the empire? In reality, it's a chicken egg scenario. Which do you think is coming first?

Speaker 1 Well, let's focus in, like thematically, let's then tackle all of these civil wars. I mean, how seismic do these civil wars become over these next few decades?

Speaker 1 Are they sometimes you get small scale where they actually don't end up in a pitch battle because they pay someone to assassinate their rival?

Speaker 1 Or do you also sometimes get massive battles and breakaways and so on?

Speaker 18 There are a few major battles. Mostly, this is...

Speaker 18 Not a civil war in the sense of, say, the English Civil War or the American Civil War, where it consumes everything about society.

Speaker 18 Basically, these are individual armies, individual barracks emperors, fighting over who wins.

Speaker 18 So for most of the common people, it's just a matter of how much of their land will get plundered by an army that passes through. Most of the emperors are murdered.
So

Speaker 18 one leader's officers will decide, no, the other leader's better, so we'll kill ours. In a few cases, there are actually defeats on a battlefield.

Speaker 18 And obviously, if you win a battle against a potential rival, that rival does not survive.

Speaker 18 Perhaps a closer parallel would therefore be, say, the War of the Roses, where you've got ongoing, not huge scale battles and a lot of people in England who are just waiting to see who should we call emperor now or who should we call king.

Speaker 1 Do you see almost a period of terrace learning from these potential usurpers, these generals, that when they have got their armies, because surely they're not so stupid to think, you know what, I'm now going to try my luck, even though it didn't work for X or Y or Z before.

Speaker 1 Do they look and just say, okay, it didn't work in the past because of this reason or because of that reason? I'm going to now try my luck.

Speaker 1 I'm going to try and take this territory and I'm going to do it differently to try and make sure that my result is different to what's happened previously.

Speaker 1 Do you see that almost that education, that learning curve from usurpers as time goes on?

Speaker 18 I mean, some of them really do just seem to be, oh, look, I have a dagger. There's a, you know, let's create a job vacancy.
There doesn't seem to be a lot of forward planning.

Speaker 18 But there are actually some who quite clearly have thought through how you need a support base. In a sense, the irony there is the two most successful of these usurpers never become emperors at all.

Speaker 18 What they actually did was create breakaway regions, which were regions now loyal to them.

Speaker 18 So, in the heart of the third century crisis, so in the 260s, when it really looks like the empire could break, there are actually three rulers in what was the Roman Empire.

Speaker 18 The official emperor is Gallianus, but Gallianus only rules the central bit, so North Africa, Italy, the Balkans.

Speaker 18 Out in the east, the Persian attacks have got so bad that a local eastern leader has united most of Syria, Palestine, Egypt in his own breakaway kingdom because he'll lead the defence.

Speaker 1 This is the Palmyran kingdom, Odinathus and Zenobia.

Speaker 18 Exactly. This is Odinathus, the leader who founds the Palmyran kingdom and then Zenobia, his widow.

Speaker 18 We actually had beautiful monuments from this. Unfortunately, Palmyra was badly hit by ISIS back in 2015.
But Gallianus clearly made the conscious choice, it's not worth fighting Odonathus.

Speaker 18 Odonathus is doing the job that needs doing in the East.

Speaker 18 And exactly the same thing happens in the West.

Speaker 18 So we get what's called the Gallic Empire, which is a breakaway group led by originally a Roman general named Posthumus, who unites at his peak Britain, Gaul, and Spain.

Speaker 18 But But just like Odonathus, what Posthumus is doing is providing the localized defense that the centralized empire is not delivering. So Posthumus deals with the Rhine frontier.

Speaker 18 And both Odonathus and Posthumus are very successful, but also never manage to create long-term stability. They're both eventually murdered.

Speaker 18 And once the central empire has strengthened, they take those regions back again.

Speaker 1 I mean, shall we also talk about that other big case of usurper being pretty successful, which is, of course, usurpers in Roman Britain, because this is another area where it seems like they've learned, I mean, you've got an island basically kind of strengthening this part of the Roman Empire as the base of your new kingdom.

Speaker 18 Because there are two major regions in the Western Roman Empire where no major foreign threat can hit. One's Britain, the other's North Africa.
In both cases, they've got slightly problematic people.

Speaker 18 In the case of Britain, it's in Scotland. In the case of North Africa, it's on the desert fringe with the Berbers.
But in neither case is there a serious invasion threat.

Speaker 18 So you can have the prosperity. You can therefore use it as a resource base, because that's, of course, the great challenge.
It's one thing for a user to say, oh, I'm emperor.

Speaker 18 But if the tax revenue isn't coming in,

Speaker 18 then you don't have the resources to pay the army, to keep your supporters loyal. So Posthumus uses Britain and the parts of Gaul and Spain that haven't really been hit as his key basis for resources.

Speaker 18 Odonathis in the east, well, Palmyra is a trading city and Egypt is the richest territory on the entire map and it's largely not being affected.

Speaker 18 So if you've got those resources, you can then build something up. Gallianus is trying to use Italy, North Africa, when he begins his recovery for the same purpose.

Speaker 1 So we've kind of explored kind of these civil wars and these usurpers and how fractured this period is for the Roman Empire.

Speaker 1 But let's talk about something which is closely linked to this and the external factors that you hinted at there.

Speaker 1 And we'll get to the East and the Sasanians in a bit because they feel really important to this story.

Speaker 1 But let's focus further west because you mentioned, let's say, posthumous, there's a Gallic Empire. One of the things is managing that Rhine frontier.

Speaker 1 So at that time, was there a bigger threat of peoples from beyond, let's say, the Rhine frontier, first of all?

Speaker 18 Yes. And what makes the third century crisis is it's the first real point, at least externally, that the Roman Empire has ever been squeezed on all three major frontiers simultaneously.

Speaker 18 Britain, North Africa don't come into the reckoning here. There are three great frontiers where the Romans can face major attack, the Rhine River, the Danube River, and the East.

Speaker 18 And for most of the second century, The German frontiers had remained stable until it cracks wide open back in the 160s under Marcus Marcus Aurelius. He then re-stabilized it.

Speaker 18 Septemius Severus works hard to stabilize it as well. So in the 230s, the main threat's in the east.
But in the 250s and 260s,

Speaker 18 three major Germanic groups become a threat, and two of them are brand new.

Speaker 18 The only one for whom we have a previous track record is what's collectively known as the Alemanni.

Speaker 18 which is just really a collective name for Germanic peoples, usually around where the Rhine and Danube don't quite meet.

Speaker 18 What's completely changed the reckoning is on the Rhine River, a new people have emerged, particularly around the Low Countries, Belgium, the Netherlands, and that is the Franks.

Speaker 1 It's the Franks? So this is when the Franks emerge, okay.

Speaker 18 The Franks first appear in our record as a clearly distinct group in the 250s.

Speaker 18 And in the 240s, for the first time, we meet the Goths.

Speaker 18 Because the Goths, who originally came from somewhere around the Baltic region, late in the second, early third century, migrated down to what's now the Ukraine.

Speaker 18 And then, as the third century progresses, in the 240s through to the 260s, Gothic pressure is growing on the Danube. So you've got Goths raiding across the Black Sea and down over the Danube.

Speaker 18 You've got Alemanni and Franks raiding across the Rhine.

Speaker 18 And then you've also got... the rise of Sasanian Persians.

Speaker 18 Arguably no emperor, no matter how good, could actually have coped with that treble threat.

Speaker 1 So is this something you see time and time again that certain emperors, when they're not battling against other emperor wannabes or usurpers, rather than having a rest and dealing with the administration or whatever, they're having to march their armies beyond the borders or near the borders to fight other great potential enemy threats on either the Rhine, Danube or in the east?

Speaker 18 Yes. I mean one thing I'd always emphasize, we've got lots of emperors.
Most of them are highly intelligent, very active men. Rome is not a society that lies down and dies.

Speaker 18 You see that again when you get to the collapse of the eventual Roman Empire in the West in the 5th century. It doesn't fall because they just give up and stop fighting.

Speaker 18 The Romans know how to beat Germanic tribes. The key is you need enough of the resources to exploit the fact that your equipment and training is usually better.

Speaker 18 And crucially, that you normally on a battlefield have reserves, and very few tribal armies remember the importance of having a reserve.

Speaker 18 Maximinus Thrax does what he was originally hailed emperor to do, which would stabilize that German frontier. The problem is he'll never secure overall power.

Speaker 18 Posthumus Odonathus do what the local peoples look to them to do, which was protect the Rhine or the east.

Speaker 18 And a number of the emperors, even quite short-lived ones, fight seriously hard and actually sometimes quite effectively against the Goths.

Speaker 1 Claudius Gothicus is a good example. His name, Gothicus, he wins quite a big victory, even though he's not around for very long.

Speaker 18 No, I mean, you know, the Goths were a new threat. They were a new scale of threat on the Danube.
So their initial attacks plow into the Roman provinces of the Balkans.

Speaker 18 But the Emperor Decius does actually manage to win several battles against them to try and push them back, then gets caught in what appears to partly be an ambush battle and is killed.

Speaker 18 And he is the first Roman emperor ever killed by a foreign enemy on a battlefield.

Speaker 18 Emperors have died in civil war battles before, but Decius in 251 is actually the very first emperor to die on a battlefield against an external enemy, with the result that Gallienus, who then effectively takes over, he campaigns against the Goths.

Speaker 18 Through a long, Gallianus actually rules for 15 years. He's the only person to reach double figures in the third century.

Speaker 18 And there is a debate over he win the major victory against the Goths or did Claudius II? Because it happened in the year in which Gallianus is finally murdered, 268.

Speaker 18 Gallienus is not popular in our sources.

Speaker 18 Claudius II Gothicus was claimed by Constantine, so the first Christian emperor, 50 odd years later, as his ancestor.

Speaker 18 So the accounts we get of Claudius Gothicus glorify Claudius in part because of, and as far as we can tell, totally fictitious claim of ancestry.

Speaker 18 But given that he takes the title, he must have certainly won some battles. And crucially, after Claudius Gothicus, the Goths are not a threat again in the third century.

Speaker 18 Whatever's happened in 268, 269 has pushed the Goths back.

Speaker 1 Oh, and interesting, because I was going to ask, would you argue that on all fronts, not just in the East, that the enemies that the Romans are facing in the third century AD are stronger than they'd been in previous centuries?

Speaker 1 Or that the Roman army is weaker? I mean, what would you argue there?

Speaker 18 Certainly it's not helping the Roman army to have constant civil wars. I mean, after all, the real damage of civil wars is how much it destroys your own military.

Speaker 18 But one of the problems actually with the Roman Empire's frontier policy when it comes to the Germans is it was much easier for the Romans to deal with organized tribal units because then you can sign treaties with leaders, you can try and influence their successes.

Speaker 18 But one side effect of that is the size of Germanic tribal blocks on the edges of the empire is going up.

Speaker 18 We've got Tacitus's Germania, written right at the end of the first century AD, and Tacitus is describing lots of small tribes.

Speaker 18 The Alemanni Federation seems to have emerged in part because it was easier for a larger federation to try and get things from the Romans.

Speaker 1 It's all uniting together.

Speaker 18 So it's partly the enemies right on the frontier who know the Romans are learning from the Romans.

Speaker 18 And then you've got the Goths, who are a distinct and larger group, and like most groups that have just moved, are still in the process of stabilizing, which means they're particularly warlike.

Speaker 18 Certainly, the Goths seem to be much more of a threat than the Franks. at least in this middle years of the third century.

Speaker 18 The Franks are there, but as far as we can tell, they're really exploiting the Alemanni, destroying the Rhine frontier, and the Franks just raid over it.

Speaker 18 The Gulfs, on the other hand, you know, they're actually raiding all the way into Asia Minor. They sacked the city of Athens.

Speaker 18 I mean, you know, the Gulfs are a real threat until they're finally driven back.

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Speaker 1 Well, let's move on from the Franks, Alemanni and the Goths.

Speaker 1 I mean, the complicated relationship between the Franks and the Alemanni is certainly one for another tale, but let's do a case study of that Sasanian threat, particularly should we do the story of Valerian, because I think this is an important one to cover at this time.

Speaker 18 The Persians, though, they've risen originally back at the end of the Severan dynasty.

Speaker 18 Severus Alexander tries to fight back, loses, and that's actually what helps cause the mutiny that gets him killed in 235. From then on, the Persians are raiding.

Speaker 18 Ardashir is clearly a very effective ruler. He's the one who pulls the dynasty together.
And then his son, Shapur, is as good or better. So the pressure never really eases.

Speaker 18 Shapor wants to gain the prestige of taking over those eastern territory. You've got this ideology of conquest.
So through the 240s, Shapur is still putting on the pressure.

Speaker 18 But then you've also got the Romans trying to juggle with multiple frontiers.

Speaker 18 And so what actually happened after Decius gets killed is for the first time, two Roman emperors effectively split the empire in a clearly defined divide.

Speaker 18 There have been joint rulers before, Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, for example. But what Valerian and his son Gallianus do is actually define areas of responsibility.

Speaker 1 That's a father and son. Interesting.

Speaker 18 So it's a father-son combination. Valerian the father takes the east because that's the immediate threat with Persia and leaves Gallianus to try and deal with the Danube Rhine.

Speaker 18 So Valerian goes off to try and face Shapur, but the Sasanian army is a serious threat.

Speaker 18 It's a combination of very heavy cavalry, solid archers, and then a fair number of sometimes unreliable infantry. And the Roman army is not at its strongest.
It's too divided in different places.

Speaker 18 They can't win. Indeed, in the entire third century crisis, they're not going to win a pitched battle against the Sasanian.
It's not going to happen until Diocletian and the Tetrarchy.

Speaker 18 Valerian tried his best, and he was another soldier. I mean, he's an experienced soldier, a good one.
But he's outmatched and his army is outmatched. So he tries to negotiate.

Speaker 18 The result is sort of a skirmish that gets out of hand.

Speaker 18 And just as Decius became the first emperor to be killed by a foreign enemy, Valerian sets his own record by being the first Roman emperor captured by a foreign enemy and taken off to Persia basically as a court monument.

Speaker 18 And he'll die in captivity. And according to our sources, he's then sort of of slightly skinned, stuffed, dyed purple, and put up in the main Persian temple as an ongoing prize.

Speaker 18 And we've actually got a picture of the capture of Valerian by Shapur on Shapur's rock-cut monument with Shapur on his horse and Valerian with his hands bound.

Speaker 1 Now, we have been focusing largely on the military and the figures of these emperors at that time and usurpers and so on.

Speaker 1 But the crisis of the third century is not just military battles, external threats and civil wars and so on, because also natural disasters, climate stress, all that, this is huge at this time, particularly plagues, and they play a big role in the whole course of this crisis.

Speaker 18 I mean, plague, after all, is endemic. It's a feature of the ancient world.
You always have waves of illnesses.

Speaker 18 But there are certain points where basically the plagues become so prominent in our sources that they are clearly above whatever is considered normal.

Speaker 18 So there was the major plague, sometimes called the plague of Galen, in the second century. Possibly smallpox, it's an ongoing argument.

Speaker 18 Actually identifying the specific disease is always a problem with these ancient epidemics.

Speaker 18 And then in the third century, because it is so unstable, even what would probably in previous times have been relatively minor epidemic outbreaks are having a bigger impact.

Speaker 18 because there's less strength. Valerian's army gets ravaged by plague before he gets captured.
Claudius Gothicus, as you've already alluded to, that appears to be his cause of death.

Speaker 18 And he may well have died of illness rather than been murdered. We're not always certain, particularly with the very rapid turnover, but it's another factor in imperial mortality.

Speaker 18 And obviously, it's also going to be weakening wider society, manpower, and that means both the army, but also the tax base. And taxation is getting harder and harder to maintain.

Speaker 18 But taxation is what separates the Roman Empire from, say, smaller, later medieval kingdoms.

Speaker 18 It's when you've got a solid tax system that you can have a professional standing army and try and control it.

Speaker 18 So the instability of the army is linked to that wider issue of population, plague, famine.

Speaker 1 There's famine as well as plague. Just another thing to add to this whole mesh of disasters that seem to be affecting, but also various parts of the empire.

Speaker 1 So the plague, I've got my notes, plague of Cyprian, hits Egypt big and the east, maybe not Rome and Britain as much. So once again, it's focusing on particular parts of the empire that suffer more.

Speaker 18 It's an interesting feature of those plagues in the case of Carthage and Alexandria. The reason we're well informed on them is we've got Christian writers for whom this is a major concern.

Speaker 18 Now, in fact, Christianity is growing right through the third century, not least because Christians care for victims. And they care for victims regardless of their religion.

Speaker 18 They don't make that distinction when it's a plague victim or an orphan. Are they Christian? That's not the point.
They need to be supported.

Speaker 18 So we hear about these plagues from Christian bishops who are actively promoting support for them.

Speaker 18 Ciprian of Carthage is simply the best documented because we've got a lot of Ciprian's letters and treatises. It helped, of course, that North Africa wasn't being greatly disrupted.

Speaker 1 Oh, so it's named after the person who documented this plague and what he witnessed. Interesting enough.

Speaker 18 And particularly documents his own support methods. Because

Speaker 18 if we're thinking of this as a great period of dislocation, well, it's interesting that Cyprian can write letters to everywhere in the Mediterranean.

Speaker 18 So it's not actually destroying the communication network. Ciprian can write to Spain, to Gaul, to Alexandria, to Antioch.

Speaker 1 How do all of these factors that we've already discussed, and you've hinted at it already,

Speaker 1 how do they affect the economy, the whole economy of the Roman Empire? It's not good. And you can see it in wars down to present day.

Speaker 1 All the factors coming together, leading to the equivalent of a massive economic crash.

Speaker 18 It's an economic crash for the imperial structure. This is where I think you'd get a lot of different answers

Speaker 18 from different scholars here. Because if we're focusing on the imperial structure, so the tax system, which relies on a stable coinage, it's collapsing.

Speaker 18 Buying things based on coins, well, debasement means inflation. If coins are worthless, you need more coins to pay for them.
So inflation is going to be a major problem.

Speaker 18 But a lot of the Roman Empire is still an agricultural world where people are largely living by subsistence agriculture.

Speaker 18 Now as long as an army doesn't march over your fields, you can carry on doing that.

Speaker 18 So what seems to be really crashing is the empire-wide economic structures that allowed for a higher standard of living. Without a good coinage system, trade becomes problematic.

Speaker 18 The Silk Road is in a state of current flux, not least because the Sasanian Persians are still trying to work out exactly how best to profit from that famous great trade route that heads out all the way to China.

Speaker 1 And the Red Sea as well, the connection with India, does that continue?

Speaker 18 And the naval route, so the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf routes are still trading.

Speaker 18 But the main thing that the Romans sent east was actually gold and silver coinage because they didn't have the spices, the silk.

Speaker 18 And if you don't have that coinage, so that kind of luxury trade is going to diminish.

Speaker 18 But what's likely to happen in, say, an Egyptian village is now you're just going to revert to a a barter economy. So can we trade, you know, what's the value between a sheep and a goat?

Speaker 18 How much food for this pot? And most of the Roman Empire can survive on that localized level. So it's not that there's a colossal collapse in standards of living.

Speaker 18 We don't seem to see a huge decline in population. The Roman Empire by the end of the third century is still probably around the 60 million mark.

Speaker 18 So

Speaker 18 that's where I'd temper it.

Speaker 18 Was it a great time to be alive? Well, especially if you're anywhere near the battlefields, definitely not.

Speaker 18 But for a lot of the Roman small farmers, so in Britain, in Spain, in North Africa, Egypt, but even, say, Asia Minor, they're able to carry on.

Speaker 1 Do you think, because you've also talked about like transport routes and communication routes, you know, one of the things that is often defined with the Roman Empire is bands of people coming into the Roman Empire and then ultimately becomes too much almost.

Speaker 1 But people coming into the empire and then a lot of movement around the empire.

Speaker 1 Do you think that continues in the third century as all of this is going on, that people are still able to, let's say, go from somewhere, ideally like Hadrian's Wall, all the way to Syria or North Africa?

Speaker 1 Are those routes and roads and so on still open?

Speaker 18 The routes are there. One suspects the number of people using them is diminishing.
This world's becoming localized. So you get the Gallic Empire, the Palmyran Empire.

Speaker 18 So you're getting more local distinctions there. Someone like Ciprian can still send messages with letters across these routes.
So the routes are potentially available.

Speaker 18 But they're nowhere near as safe as, say, they were in the second century when you've got the 50 years of near total stability. And it's going to be more stable again in the fourth century.

Speaker 18 So the roots don't disappear. They're there to be revived when the great recovery fully takes effect.
But during the heart of the third century, so the worst years, which is basically 250 to 270.

Speaker 1 20 whole years i mean it feels not that much time when we're looking at it back now you know when we cover an ancient history so many years in in one episode but 20 years you know that could be half a lifetime for many people back then so to live there we don't even want to think of it before we get to that great recovery are there any other big contributions to this crisis that we should also mention because we talked about the military, we talked about external threats, civil war, climate, plague, economy.

Speaker 1 Are there any other things we should cover before we move on to the recovery?

Speaker 18 The other great theme of this period is religion and the role religion is playing.

Speaker 18 Now, in older scholarship, and there's a famous book called The Age of Anxiety, that this is a period of superstition of different views.

Speaker 18 Actually, what seems to be happening is it's an age of quite active intellectual philosophy. And also, unsurprisingly, people seeking answers in different directions.

Speaker 18 And there's no question, the crisis is having an impact. And you do see it above all with Christianity.

Speaker 18 Because Christians were a small minority at the start of the third century and still a small minority at the end.

Speaker 18 But at the start of the third century, they're perhaps two, three percent of the population. By the end of the third century, it's more like 10%.

Speaker 18 There's give or take 6 million Christians. Christianity grew in this period.
Now, partly that is this emphasis on charity, welfare, in a time of crisis, of plague, of famine.

Speaker 18 The Christians provide support.

Speaker 18 But it's also very noticeable that this is the same period where for the first time Christians are really attracting detailed imperial attention.

Speaker 18 We often think of Christians as constantly persecuted by the Roman Empire, but actually for the first 250 or so years, Christians could be easily persecuted anywhere.

Speaker 18 So we have major local outbreaks of violence. But what never actually happened was an empire-wide attack on Christianity.

Speaker 18 Even say, Nero, who's one of the few emperors to really try and persecute, basically does it in the city of Rome.

Speaker 18 But Decius, while he's trying to fight the Goths, is responsible for what becomes the first persecution of Christians.

Speaker 1 He's not even reigning that long.

Speaker 18 He's only got a two-year reign.

Speaker 18 And yet he's very prominent in, say, Eusebius of Caesarea's church history for this reason. To give Decius credit, we don't think he meant to launch a persecution of Christians.

Speaker 18 What he actually believed was this crisis has to be due to divine anger.

Speaker 18 After all, almost everyone in this world, pagan or Christian, believes in divine providence, that the will of the gods is playing a key role.

Speaker 18 So Decius orders everybody to sacrifice in the empire, everyone to show their piety, let's win divine support.

Speaker 18 The problem is there is one particular group who will not sacrifice to the old gods, so Decius' order to sacrifice becomes the Decian persecution.

Speaker 18 Now, Decius then gets killed by the Goths, so the persecution stops. What's interesting is six years later, Valerian decides that's the right answer again.

Speaker 18 We need divine support, so you get the Valerian persecution of the Christians. And unlike Decius, Valerian definitely meant it.
So he targets clergy. Ciprian gets caught up in this.

Speaker 18 He targets churches as far as they exist, because they're really just small house churches. But it's a targeted persecution.
Then Valerian becomes a Persian monument, and Gallianus abandons it.

Speaker 18 I mean, you can see how the Christian writers are going to treat the fact that the two people who try to persecution are Decius and Valerian.

Speaker 18 And then for the next 40 years, Christians just get left alone. Gallianus' view does seem to have been there are bigger priorities than this.

Speaker 18 And the subsequent emperors, like Aurelian, basically just ignore Christians unless they're forced to pay attention.

Speaker 1 It's something you forget, isn't it?

Speaker 1 That actually this, you know, because of course following it, afterwards you get, you know, Constantine the Great and Christianity starting to really make a foothold, take a foothold in the Roman Empire.

Speaker 1 But the rise of Christianity can actually be intertwined with the story of the third century crisis. And that is something I must confess I completely overlooked.

Speaker 18 I mean, it's one of the problems that, you know, still religious history is often treated. in slight isolation from wider history.

Speaker 18 I mean, after all, the Christians have been there ever since Augustus, but they have been low profile except for those rare moments of persecution.

Speaker 18 The standard Roman view is the one that Trajan famously said to Pliny the Younger, which is if you meet a Christian who insists on being Christian and won't then back down, you can go ahead and execute them, but don't look for them, is Trajan's explicit instruction.

Speaker 18 Don't go looking. We're just otherwise going to let them get on with it.

Speaker 18 And it's interesting that it was in the heart of the third century crisis that they changed that, which does suggest that Christians are becoming higher profile, as well as this great concern with what the Romans call the Pax Deorum, the peace of the gods, which the Christians are disrupting, well, by going around saying the gods don't exist.

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Speaker 9 Oh, scratchers, good idea.

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Speaker 1 How does the great recovery, and it's fair to say, I think it is fair to say it's a great recovery, how does it begin? How does the crisis end?

Speaker 18 If you look at a map of the reign of Gallianus, 253, 253-268 to the heart of the crisis, it looks like the empire's going.

Speaker 18 Gaul, Britain, Spain's going one way, Palmyra is going the other, Gallianus is in the middle.

Speaker 18 Gallienus, in our sources, is largely disliked, not least because he didn't make the slightest effort to get his father back from Persia. But actually, Gallianus is the start of the recovery.

Speaker 18 What he focused on was within his territories, building up the imperial administration and above all reorganizing the army to have a much stronger cavalry arm and be much more mobile.

Speaker 18 Now, by the time the Goths are beaten back by Gallianus and Claudius Gothicus, you're beginning to reap the benefits of that. And then the man who sees it through is Aurelian.

Speaker 18 Now, Aurelian only rules from 270 to 275, so it's not a hugely long reign. But nonetheless, in that time, Aurelian beat the Goths and crushed both the breakaway groups.

Speaker 18 It helped that in both cases the original founder had been murdered by this point.

Speaker 18 But nonetheless, Aurelian, by the end of his reign, has actually pulled back almost the entire empire, at least on a map, to look as it had at the beginning. Only one territory is actually abandoned.

Speaker 18 It's the region of Dacia. So roughly speaking, modern Romania.

Speaker 1 To Trajan's conquest, the gold mines and everything, quite a rich province beyond the Danube.

Speaker 18 So the very last province that the Romans took, and the only one beyond the Rhine and Danube. And basically, Aurelian clearly decided you couldn't hold it, not with the Goths moving into that region.

Speaker 18 So Dacia is the only region lost. And then Aurelian gets murdered after what looks on paper like such a successful reign.

Speaker 18 And the historia Augusta simply summed up Aurelian by saying he was, quote, necessary rather than good, end quote, which suggests he was efficient, effective, and as soon as he'd done the job, enough people wanted him dead that he gets killed, with the result that you then now get another six emperors in the space of about five years.

Speaker 18 You get a massive new series of murders.

Speaker 18 And then finally, the recovery that Gallianus and Aurelian began gets completed

Speaker 18 because the last emperors of the true third century crisis are Carus and his children Carinus and Numerian.

Speaker 18 Now, according to our sources, Carus and at least one of his sons were struck by lightning. Oh wow.

Speaker 18 That seems statistically unlikely, which suggests we may be dealing with a euphemism. And interestingly, the guy who was technically responsible for their safety ends up being the next emperor.

Speaker 18 His name was Diocles. He was a Balkan peasant farmer.
He'd risen up through the ranks. And he becomes Emperor Diocletian, who is one of the greatest emperors in the entire history of the Roman world.

Speaker 1 It's such a problem, though, for these ancient protectors of emperors. You know, you're doing everything you can, and then you can't help it.

Speaker 1 They're just out one day going off a walk, and they both happen to get struck by lightning. It's,

Speaker 1 I mean, good on Diocletian, you know, now he's just paved the way.

Speaker 18 Who'd have thought something like that could happen? Yeah, I mean, it's one of the great things about the Praetorian Guard, the old Imperial Guard.

Speaker 18 They are responsible for the protection of the emperor and are directly responsible for more imperial deaths than any other single factor.

Speaker 1 So Diocletian, Balkan peasant, now finds himself in the hot seat of the Roman Empire, but he's seen all these people come before him. How does he then decide, right, enough is enough.

Speaker 1 How do we restructure this so that stability can return long term?

Speaker 18 And he emphatically has learnt those lessons. And actually, the key lesson he'd learnt quite clearly before he took power,

Speaker 18 when things are in disarray, the Roman Empire is just too big. You can't easily control it as one person.
Doesn't matter where you are on the map. It's too big a map.

Speaker 18 So the first thing he does is appoint a co-ruler, another Balkan soldier who's risen through the ranks, who Diocletian knows he can trust, a man named Maximian. And they're going to share power.

Speaker 18 And then for the next almost 10 years, they keep control, Diocletian in the east, Maximian in the West. And then then Diocletian decided that actually even that's not enough.

Speaker 18 Not when there's a revolt in Britain, which is what happened. Not when the Persians are a threat.

Speaker 18 So what Diocletian created, which was unique in the history of Rome, is what is called the Tetrarchy, the rule of four.

Speaker 18 So you still have Diocletian and Maximian, the two senior emperors. but they each now appoint a junior emperor, a Caesar.
So Diocletian and Maximian are

Speaker 18 the Augusti. Their title is Augustus.
But Galerius is the Caesar to Diocletian, and Constantius Chlorus is the Caesar to Maximian. Constantius Chlorus is the father of Constantine.

Speaker 18 And the reason he's done this is now you can have an imperial presence everywhere on the map.

Speaker 18 Maximian can watch the Rhine, while Constantius Chlorus can deal with the British revolt of Carousius and Electus and does very effectively.

Speaker 1 Because you have that coin, the first ever coin of London shown up when he retakes London.

Speaker 18 Precisely. Diocletian can make sure the Danube is staying safe and Galerius can achieve what no one has done in the entire third century and beat the Sasanians.

Speaker 18 For the first time, the Romans actually win a major pitched battle in 298. And that is, in a sense, the tribute to this organization.

Speaker 18 Because it's all now stabilised, they could give sufficient resources. The army had been been built up.
But the Tetrarchy may be unique.

Speaker 18 Almost everything else Diocletian did is actually what worked earlier on, just made better organized. So he used Gallianus' development of the mobile army.

Speaker 18 Smaller legions, the old big 5,000-plus man groups, you don't need those. You need small groups of about 1,000 men.
But you need more forts so the frontiers can be stabilized.

Speaker 18 The tax system gets overhauled so that it's now effectively half barter. So it's half in kind, in goods, not just in coinage.

Speaker 18 So although the coinage is still a problem, the army supply system's been fixed.

Speaker 18 The government, the provinces get split up. Diocletian actually doubled the number of Roman provinces.

Speaker 18 So create smaller administrative units because firstly, their governors aren't a threat, but secondly, they can do a better job because they've got a smaller region.

Speaker 18 So everything he's doing is drawing on earlier models, but stabilizing.

Speaker 18 What's interesting is he also drew on one earlier model that you'd have to say hadn't worked and doesn't work for him because it's under Diocletian that the great persecution, the last great imperial pagan attempt to crack Christianity, is launched in 303 and fails.

Speaker 1 Looking at the big picture, it seems to be a massive success, isn't it? This is the great recovery at the end of the crisis of the third century.

Speaker 1 So it does beg the question, is the crisis of the third century, is there any part of it irreversible? Is it significant in the ultimate demise of Rome?

Speaker 1 Is this that century, is that crisis almost a trigger point for the ultimate fall of Rome and the, I guess, the Western Roman Empire, or at least the great change of the Roman Empire?

Speaker 18 It's certainly a great change. What we call the later Roman Empire is the remodeled empire of Diocletian, then with the promotion of Christianity from Constantine onwards.
It's that combination.

Speaker 18 It's hard to argue that that left obvious weaknesses that would cause the subsequent collapse.

Speaker 18 The later collapse of the Western Roman Empire, indeed all the disruption of the fifth century, there are some factors that come out of these developments, including the rise of Christianity, but then there are also factors that no one could have scripted, which is above all the arrival of the Hums driving the Goths onwards on a scale that did not happen.

Speaker 18 Effectively, in the third century, the Romans have met their worst-case scenario, which is the Rhine and Danube getting out of hand at the same time as you suddenly get the rise of a new empire in the east.

Speaker 18 And it very nearly broke them, but they do hold together. Of course, if they'd stayed stabler for longer, would they then have had an even stronger resource base going into the fourth century?

Speaker 18 Or actually,

Speaker 18 in the second century, when they're peaceful, they actually stagnate.

Speaker 18 So

Speaker 18 my own tendency is to argue that what comes out of the third century crisis is at least as well organized and structured as the empire before.

Speaker 18 It's arguably got a slightly better system for supporting the military. Christianity is going to add an extra layer of organization.
It's also going to add a much stronger emphasis on welfare. But...

Speaker 18 The empire is too big. The third century crisis demonstrated that, so will the later crises.

Speaker 18 A single person ruling the empire will actually be very rare in the last 150 years of Rome because it is too large. You're too vulnerable.

Speaker 18 The basic structure was never able to cope against multiple shocks.

Speaker 18 The East-West divide. Now that is going to intensify over time.
It's always there, partly linguistically, but it will potentially grow.

Speaker 18 And yet, if you took, say, Diocletian's provincial tax reforms, they're still there in Justinian's time in the Eastern Empire.

Speaker 1 That's Byzantines, that's after the fall of the Western Empire.

Speaker 18 So, you know, by the sixth century, they're still, I mean, indeed, ironically, they were still dating by Diocletian.

Speaker 18 In the sixth century, it's why the man who came up with BCAD dating, a monk named Dionysus Exiguus, his original argument to the Bishop of Rome was, why are we still dating years from Diocletian, the man persecuted us?

Speaker 18 And that's actually what causes the original realignment of that calendar. Dionysus Exiguus comes up with an estimated, effectively, year of our Lord.

Speaker 18 And so you get that switch to the dating system that the medieval world knows. But Diocletian, the organization he left strengthened the empire.

Speaker 18 So my own view would be it's remarkable they survived this. The real question is, why couldn't they repeat this trick in the fifth century?

Speaker 18 You've got the same shattering effect happening, but Gallianus Aurelian were able to dig in and pull it back together.

Speaker 18 And a key part of that does seem to be that Posthumus and Odonathus never actually wanted to fully break away. They were proud of being part of a Roman orbit.

Speaker 18 Whereas when you've got a much larger migration of Germanic peoples who are creating independent groups, then you do get the breakaway.

Speaker 18 It's an awful lot more complex than that.

Speaker 1 And that is certainly an episode for another day.

Speaker 1 But I think you've done incredibly well, David, in tackling this topic and making a topic that is complex and daunting to so many people understandable, going through those different themes and how important they are for this, you know, half a century long time of crisis and the key figures and major players and major events and so on.

Speaker 1 David, this has been an absolute blast and it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast.

Speaker 18 My great pleasure. Thank you.

Speaker 1 Well, there you go. There was Dr.

Speaker 1 David Gwynne giving you a masterclass, talking you through the story of the third century crisis, the key figures and events, and why this chaotic period in Roman history, it was so tumultuous, but also transformative in the shaping of the Roman Empire.

Speaker 1 I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Thank you for listening to it.
Please follow this show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favor.

Speaker 1 And having mentioned Spotify, we will be putting a poll up with this episode and focusing in on particular figures and events of the third century crisis.

Speaker 1 And you can vote for which figure you would like us to cover next, whether it be Maximinus Thrax, the massive Thracian, or the Emperor Aurelian, or potentially something else like Valerian and his capture by Chapur, Diocletian.

Speaker 1 You let us know whatever wins that poll, we will do an episode on in the future. And we may well do episodes on the others too.
Who knows?

Speaker 1 It's one of the great things of ancient history and doing this incredible podcast.

Speaker 1 Now, don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hit's podcasts ad-free, and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com/slash subscribe.

Speaker 1 That's enough from me, and I'll see you in the next episode.

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