The Last Roman Emperors

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In the end, there was no fanfare.

No epic clash of armies.

No desperate last stand amidst the ruins of the forum when the Western Roman Empire breathed its last.

Instead, it fell with a whimper and the muted ceremony of a bloodless abdication.

The year is 476 AD.

In the city of Ravenna, up in the northern reaches of the Italian peninsula, a mere boy, barely a teenager, surrenders the symbols of imperial authority.

A golden crown gleaming in the fading sunlight.

The regal cloak of office dyed a deep and shimmering purple.

The scepter and orb, adorned with Rome's once triumphant eagle, now brought to heel.

The boy's name is Romulus Augustulus, and his resignation brings a long and storied age to an end.

For he is the last to bear the title of Emperor in the West.

It's the Ancients.

I'm Tristan Hughes, your host.

This is it, the finale of our special mini-series about the fall of Rome.

Over the past two weeks, we have embarked on the most epic of adventures, chronicling the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.

From highlighting the initial origins of decline in the third and fourth centuries, to unpacking the lasting impacts of barbarian invasions and devastating plagues, we have traversed the contours and causes of Rome's ultimate fate.

If you haven't had a chance to listen yet, do go and check them out.

And now to the final chapter in this gripping saga of decline and collapse.

The twilight of Rome's last emperors.

The story ends with the boy Emperor Augustulus renouncing his imperial throne.

But what set this seismic moment in motion?

How was it that a teenager came by the authority to sign away an empire that had lasted for half a millennium?

To find an answer, we must delve into a period coloured by violent usurpation and chess-like manoeuvring.

To a time where puppet emperors danced to the tune of formidable barbarian overlords.

When Emperor Valentinian III, who had ruled for some 30 years, was assassinated in 455, the Western Roman Empire was seized by a frenzy.

An irrepressible power vacuum greedily sucked in one pretender after another.

Emperor followed emperor followed emperor, with each achieving little of note, the exception being Majorian, who briefly managed to reverse the empire's decline before he too fell from power.

But the one constant in this time of tumult was the Gothic kingmaker behind the throne, a supremely skilled military commander by the name of Rissima.

For two decades he lurked in the shadows, pulling the strings of power as four ill-fated emperors rose at his whim, only to be cast aside when the winds of change turned against them, none lasting more than a fleeting five years each on the imperial throne.

The pattern continued after Ricima's death in 472, as described by the Byzantine historian Procopius.

There were, moreover, still other emperors in the West, but they lived only a short time after attaining their office and accomplished nothing worthy of mention.

That is, until the coming of Orestes, a celebrated Hunnic general from the distant plains of Pannonia.

A former envoy at the fearsome court of Attila, Orestes was no stranger to the inner workings of Rome's weakened power structures.

And when he saw the maelstrom that now engulfed it, he took a chance to seize the empire for himself.

Marching on the imperial capital of Ravenna from across the freezing snow-capped Alps, Orestes convinced the latest in the line of puppet emperors to flee and installed his own son on the imperial throne.

That boy's name was Romulus.

He would take the title of Augustus when he became emperor, although that was soon ridiculed.

He became known as Romulus Augustulus, Little Augustus, because of his young age.

Orestes' intention was to rule in the manner of his Gothic predecessors, as the power behind the throne.

His son, meanwhile, would be a mere pawn in the brutal Legame of Thrones that devoured the remnant of Rome's western dominions.

But the imposition of Augustulus as emperor and Orestes' ascent to the reins of total power did not prove to be the masterstroke he intended it to be.

The bulk of the army which Orestes had used to depose the rightful emperor was little more than a collection of disparate barbarian bands, lureled only by the promise of plunder and land.

And when Orestes refused to grant these mercenaries the lands they demanded, he was met with turmoil and unrest.

The chaos was whipped into order by Odowaka, one of Orestes' subordinates, who united the soldiers with a promise to find them the land they sought.

It was a daring gambit.

Odowaka was in no real position to offer what he promised, but by stoking the fires of rebellion and inciting a civil war, he managed to defeat Orestes on the plains of Placentia under a waning August sun.

Odowaka was victorious.

But at what cost?

It is only with hindsight that we can say his lightning uprising sounded the death knell for an already withering empire.

A month after his victory, Odoacer met with Orestes' son, the boy Emperor Romulus Augustulus, and compelled him to stand down as emperor.

But Odoacer did not succeed him.

Instead, he took the mantle of king.

and in so doing revived a title that had lain dormant since the defeat of the ancient Roman monarchy in 509 BC nearly a millennium before.

Hear the words of the 6th century chronicler Marcellinus.

Odoacer, king of the Goths, took control of Rome.

With this, the Western Empire of the Roman people perished, which the first Augustus Octavian had begun to rule in the 709th year from the foundation of the city.

This happened in the 522nd year of the reign of the departed emperors, with Gothic kings subsequently holding Rome.

The dismemberment of the Western Roman Empire was complete.

Its territory fractured between Goths, Saxons, Franks and Vandals.

New houses were emerging, carving out their own domains in the West from the husk of a decaying corpse.

The age of empire was over.

The time of the kings had come.

To help us unpack this journey into oblivion and the emperors who ruled the Roman Roman West as the sun set on their dominion, I'm thrilled to be joined by historian and best-selling author Adrian Goldsworthy.

He's been on the podcast before, most recently to talk about Rome's great enemy to the East, the Parthians, and is the author of The Fall of the West, The Death of the Roman Superpower.

Adrian, it is a pleasure to have you back on the podcast today.

Thanks for inviting me again.

Now, I know yourself, with the research that you do, you go from 5th century BC Greece to Alexander the Great to the height of the Roman Empire, and now we're bringing you to the end of the Western Roman Empire.

So I hope you don't mind us bringing you so far forward in ancient history.

To kick it all off, can you set the scene what we should be thinking of, particularly with the Western Roman Empire, as we get to the beginning of the 5th century AD?

Well, the big deal, obviously, is that there are two empires, although, again, there's a common system of law to most respects.

And if an emperor issues a ruling on a law in one half of the empire, it's normally respected and held to be valid in the other.

So they're separate and they're not separate.

They're culturally much the same, though there are differences.

The big deal that has happened is that the West is crumbling in a way that is not happening to the East.

So the emperors in Constantinople are still that much more secure.

They haven't lost a lot of territory.

Whereas in the West, you're getting to the point where, you know, there's this wonderful document called the Notitia Dignitatum that lists all the offices in the Roman Empire around about this time, around about 400-ish, that sort of era.

And it lists all these commanders of units that are supposed to exist.

And some of them are tied to frontier defense.

Some of them are the mobile field armies that scholars like to talk about, but they're not very mobile.

They're not in the field.

And they're often not armies at all, as the latest days.

And that's the problem.

What should be there?

doesn't correspond with what's really there.

So there's a weakening of central authority.

What the emperor can do, do, the power he has, is much, much less than it had been even 50 years before, let alone centuries before.

It's a very different environment.

It's much more complicated because whereas in the East, to a great extent, you're dealing with one big neighbor, the Sasanian Persians.

In the West, you've got lots of different groups of broadly Germanic peoples that are some of them within the empire, some of them fighting for you, but they might change their minds, different leaders, different warlords appearing.

So it's a very dynamic situation.

And the ability of the emperor in Italy to say, you should do this and make this happen, is much, much less than it has been.

So everything is a different setup.

But there is still this sense that everybody wants the empire to go on and everybody wants the empire to work.

So when you have early on in the fifth century, you know, the tradition is that those in Britain are being told sort of get on with it themselves, deal with their own problems.

It isn't that sense that, oh, well, we're really abandoning the province in a formal sense.

It's just we can't get around to you at the moment.

So, you know, you should be able to.

And in the past, there was an element where provinces could run a lot of their day-to-day affairs.

There's been a, in one sense, a move towards centralization of the bureaucracy and the government over the last century or two.

But at the same time, there's a devolution as well where local powers are appearing, where local warlords, army commanders, whatever, are more significant.

So it's an odd mixture of it's much, in some ways, you have, in theory, more direct power, but actually in practice, you have a lot less.

So it's a precarious thing, but we know that by 476, the last emperor in the West is going to go.

Nobody at the time knows that.

And if you think, it's taking us back to, well, beginning of Charles I's reign, 400 years or so.

There has always been an emperor.

There's always been a Rome.

All of these areas, nothing here is recently conquered.

Even if you're in Britain, you've been Roman for 350 years.

You cannot imagine anything else.

And there are no independence movements like the sort of winds of change that swept through the European empires of the 20th century.

Post-Second World War, we've got VE Day today when we're recording.

You're thinking of that incredibly rapid change that occurred where nationalism was so strong, countries wanted to govern themselves.

That just isn't there because nobody can really remember an identity that is not Roman in some respects.

You know, you might have kept lots of your traditions, some of your languages, some of your cults, this sort of thing, but it's so vague and distant.

And the only good life is Roman life.

That's civilization.

That's prosperity.

That's what you expect.

And you don't really have an alternative that's waiting there.

I think that's important to highlight straight away, Adrian, especially as we're going to be covering several big names from this period as we kind of go all the way to that canonical date of 476, especially as some of those figures, as we'll highlight, are so-called barbarian generals.

And yet, as you say, the importance of Roman culture to them is so, so high.

As we're focusing on the Western Empire and we're going to be going through these big figures, these emperors and the key generals next to them, it feels like we should start with the man at the beginning of the fifth century, Adrian, this figure of Honorius, because he seems to loom large quite infamously, I guess.

You've got the sack of Rome in 410.

I mean, I mean, How significant a figure is he?

Tell us about Honorius.

As with a lot of these people, it's actually hard to get to the person.

You You know, they're a title, they've got these ranks, events happen, but you're dealing with an era where you don't have good narrative sources at all.

You know, you've had that wonderful blip in the fourth century where Ammianus Marcellinus comes along.

And for a few couple of decades, you've got detail.

And you get some sense, prejudiced sense, but nevertheless, of what just Julian was like, what Valens, Valentinian, you know, what these people were like, how they acted, how they behaved.

It's much, much harder to say with those later.

And we're dealing with very prejudiced sources of people who liked them or didn't like them.

And of course, these disasters.

You know, the sack of Rome in 410, on the one hand, you can put it down as something minor.

It's just a group of your own army that is in a bad mood.

Yes, there are a load of Goths, primarily, or at least they're identified as Goths.

What they actually were and how many other people have accumulated along the way and joined this group is anybody's guess.

But their basic identity, their leader, is based around

a version of traditional tribal Gothic structure.

I mean, it's changed because it's in a different environment, but there's at least some sense of that identity.

So you're dealing with that sort of danger.

Now, it's easy to play this down and say, oh, well, not much of Rome was actually affected.

Rome's a big, big city.

There's still half a million people here at least, maybe more.

plundering for a day or two.

There's not a lot that you can actually do.

It focuses on particular areas.

You know, the city's still there.

Life resumes fairly quickly.

That's true up to a point, but the big thing is the shock that this could happen.

It's happened in the past when a Roman army in what is clearly a Roman civil war has turned up.

And they've done things, you know, way back in 68, 69, the year of four emperors after Nero's death.

And that's very ane and that's rather traumatic, but this is someone who does seem foreign, does seem utterly alien, and the emperor cannot stop them and cannot do anything about them, and yet knows the leader in question.

He's supposed to be one of his own men, and yet cannot control him.

So you're very much with Honorius.

You've got one of these people who has the prominence, has the power, has the titles,

but actually can't do very much and can't control in a way.

So it's probably worth thinking of him more in those terms than trying to pin him down and blame him.

You know, there are almost certainly very bad decisions made at this, as is so often the case throughout human history.

You know, these moments of crisis, people react in what appears to be the worst possible way, which is very easy for us observing from with hindsight to see.

But it's

essentially a misjudgment.

And there is also,

it's very hard if you're the emperor to take the Goths or a group like this seriously, deep down.

Because you know there's not that many of them.

You know they've been your soldiers before, they probably will be again, or they might be somebody else's.

They're not trying to overthrow you, kill you, and take your throne.

And that for such a long time is the deep fear of every emperor, because that's how most of them die, is at the hands of other Romans.

So you're in this neurotic era where you've inherited because of a family connection, but you haven't got the career of the man who's fought his way to power.

So you're there, you're surrounded by a court.

The emperor has become so much more distant from

the the sort of the principate days the idea of the augustan you're first among equals you mix with senators you dine with senators to the very formalized court where you're admitted to the imperial presence and you might kiss the hem of his garment this this ceremony this distance but you're not you're removed from any sort of political class you only know what people tell you And you can see that back even in the fourth century when the emperors are stronger, how hard it is for an emperor to know what's actually happening anywhere because they're not told the truth.

And so often your senior officials, whether military or civil, have an agenda of their own and are up to their own things and will tell you what they feel they want you to hear.

So you are very much a figurehead.

And Honorius, perhaps particularly, is a man who doesn't campaign in person, doesn't do things in the field, isn't active.

Yes, he moves around a bit, but basically his life is court life.

And he has very little sense of what the empire is like, other than what people tell him and how he's been raised to think.

Which, compared to a Theodosius or someone like that, who's fought their way up, is a very different situation.

And you, it is generally the pattern that the emperors become much more figureheads during this century than they have been before.

And the real power is the military man backing them.

So, that context feels really important, isn't it, Adrian?

Because in past episodes, we've already covered the general Stilico and his importance, but then how honorius another person gets in his ear stilico is kind of blamed for one of too many incursions and not being able to defeat them and then he's assassinated so as you say it's almost who can get the ear of the emperor that will determine you know kind of policy and also as you say the generals who are around him someone one of them might have his favor at a time then they might lose his favor but then that general might react in a bad way if they feel that the emperor has then just betrayed them so you see all of that happening everybody is frightened because Honorius does not know who to trust.

And if you're one of these senior commanders, you realize, well, maybe I could persuade the Emperor.

You know, he doesn't really know much if I'm convincing.

And perhaps I'm right.

Perhaps, you know, some of these people you feel with Stilico and like, and some of the others, they genuinely feel they're doing a good job.

And that, you know, it's human instinct.

We feel if we're working hard and we're going well, as far as we're concerned, it's going well.

Everybody should realize that.

And we're a bit shocked if they don't, because they haven't, they don't know all the details.

So there's that distance made much worse by the court situation and by this constant competition.

Essentially, if you're at that high level, you can't trust anybody.

You know, every Roman commander has to look at all his colleagues as rivals, all his juniors as potential rivals.

The emperor is looking at these people and think, well, if they could find somebody else, Honorius has the strength for a while that there isn't an alternative.

There isn't an obvious replacement for for him.

So that gives you a position of strength.

If these warlords want to remain commanding the army, commanding, effectively running the state, there needs to be an emperor as a figurehead that people will accept.

You don't want one with such a dodgy claim that a commander elsewhere can easily find somebody just as good.

You know, again, we tend to focus on the big events and the foreign wars, but civil war is something everybody experiences.

It's part of life.

It's natural in a way that we find in our era very, very alien.

So if we move on to the death of Honorius in 423, Adrian, aside from, as you say, being this character who seems quite aloof, it's whoever's by the emperor and whispering into his ear and all that paranoia that's around as well.

But are there any other, any significant legacies trying to leave Honorius on a positive note that he leaves to the Western Roman Empire?

Well, it hasn't gone as bad as things could,

in the sense that there's always the potential to mess up.

He does, he has a long reign by the standards of this period.

He's there a long time and surviving that long, even if much of the time you're a puppet, is still an achievement.

And it's very easy to say, you know, why doesn't somebody like this really sort things out, start getting the empire working again?

But it's in the same way, you know, we know from our own system, most governments, most leaders are dealing with the decisions and consequences of those decisions of their predecessors.

So, you know, when things are bad, yes, they can try and blame them and they try and take credit for the good things, but their degree of control to make things happen quickly is very limited.

Everything is slower in the ancient world, and you've got a system that has developed over such a long period and got to this stage with the other factors.

I mean, you've got the

impact, the ripples caused by the Huns and the other groups.

So there are changes in what the wider world situation is.

And ultimately, you know, you are emperor, you are imperator.

Security is your biggest task, really.

That's what you're supposed to provide.

You are supposed to make Rome strong and make sure that its enemies don't pick on it.

So, you know, you are dealing from it, it's a stack deck in the first place for something like Honoris.

There isn't so much they could do.

However, they also, it's again, one of those things, looking from a distance, we can see stages of decline.

But when you're living through it, all of this is normal.

There is the traumatic event like the sack of Rome, but actually you're not thinking in terms of 100 years ago, 200 years ago, what things were like then, because they've never been like that.

You might have read about them, but you accept what you have as natural, what you've grown up with.

And the tendency is with all ancient governments, they're sort of conservative with the small C, is that they don't try and do as much as modern states do.

Part of what they're there for is almost to keep things as they are, because, well, that's how we got here, and that's why things are so good.

So, apart from the occasional reformers, most people actually don't try and change things.

So, in a sense, he's following in the pattern of most emperors in not doing very much.

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Should we then highlight very briefly, Adrian, I guess one of the big movements, which does seem to be around defense, but please correct me if I'm wrong.

This move away from places like Rome, maybe even Milan as well.

And you see the rise of Ravenna at this stage, which seems important all the way down to 476 and after.

Obviously, Rome has rarely seen an emperor for a long time.

It's an odd thing.

It's one of those things that when I was writing about this period, it didn't really occur to me until I went back and looked at Augustus.

Augustus spent most of his reign touring around the empire, away from, he spent more time away from Italy than he was there.

And if he wasn't touring, then an Agrippa or a Tiberius or a Drusus.

For a long time, that changes because you have Tiberius who doesn't want to go anywhere and is too old and fed up.

And that sort of sets the pattern.

And then you get the traveling emperors like Hadrian, who pop up later on, a century or so later.

But most of them, unless they're fighting a war, which becomes more common from the third century onwards, but it's already happening.

You know, Marcus Aurelius, the man who leaves us his meditations, not thought of as a soldier, spends a lot of his reign supervising a campaign, if not leading in person.

By the third century, that's pretty much what you're doing a lot of your time as an emperor.

And this will remain for a long, long period.

That means that you move away from Rome because the wars aren't being fought in Rome.

So from the third century onwards, really, Rome rarely sees an emperor and it changes the whole political system, which is to do with other changes as well.

Then you get the sort of the soldier emperors, the Aurelians, the Diocletians, the Constantine, people like this, again, who are on campaign a lot.

And that's when you have the movement to imperial capitals elsewhere.

So you have them in Constantinople, you have them in Tria, you know, on the Rhine.

You've got somewhere where, and the court is always where the emperor is, but there is a tendency to settle down and keep some of it in a sort of semi-permanent base so that people know where to go to find you, at least to start the process of I need something from the emperor.

This is...

is where I go.

So Rome's been marginalized for a long time.

And when Ammianus in the fourth century writes about Constantius visiting Rome, it's very much the novelty.

And the emperor who rides in this chariot like a statue and doesn't look to, you know, doesn't acknowledge the crowds.

That's it.

So Rome has a symbolic importance and it's still the ideal.

But in the same way that being a Roman has, for centuries, had nothing whatsoever to do with any ethnic Italian, let alone Roman components.

So there's always been a...

a danger and they've moved to Milan because it's a little bit more convenient.

It's further to the north.

You're more likely to to be doing things away from Italy and that's a base.

And of course, you know, you go back to the third century where with the Gallic Empire, for a while it was close to the frontier.

So it's coming into that same pattern.

They seem to reach the conclusion, reasonably enough, that even Milan becomes a bit vulnerable because you're no longer so secure.

And obviously, the lesson of the Goths and Honorius is that for years on end,

a

mutinous part of your army, a rebel group of your army, a group of barbarians, however you choose to describe them, can wander around the empire and nobody can stop them.

So Milan starts to look a little bit

more vulnerable because by now you've changed from the fourth century soldier emperors,

whatever their military capacity, they generally went on campaign, to the honorious pattern where you have somebody to do that for you.

And you're not expected to campaign, which means you minimize the risks to the emperor of getting killed, but also disgraced.

He can blame the commander now instead of himself when things go badly wrong which was the how plenty of other emperors were discredited and they're quickly murdered or overthrown in the past which means you need somewhere secure for the emperor and the court to be ravenna is a lot more secure because of its position you've got marshes on various sides of it it's a lot it's a little bit off the beaten track it's a lot harder to reach So it gives the emperor a base and there's also less there apart from the emperor worth taking.

So, you know, there's a lot to steal in Rome.

And even to a fair extent, somewhere like Milan, there's more to make it worth plundering because, again, the practical element, these armies that maraude around, they've got to feed themselves and the leader has to keep the loyalty of the men by giving them rewards.

So

it's again a shift.

But of course, making the emperor more difficult to reach.

means that his job of being emperor becomes that much harder because it is again off the beaten track a little bit harder to access

even when you get there it's then tightly controlled as to whether or not you can get to the emperor so this this idea of the emperor that's that's you know pretty fundamental to the roman system and a lot of other ancient monarchies that

you have this person to whom you can appeal you can ask to sort out your problems to do you favors you've got to be able to get there got to be able to reach him somebody's got to get through so you're you're again making the state a bit less efficient by moving the emperor to a place of safety.

It's a little bit in the much earlier case when Tiberius moves to Capri.

He's hard to get to, which means that the people who control the route to him and the access to him get even more control.

So the balance of power between the emperor and the court, or whoever controls the security of the court and access to the court, has shifted very much in favor of that individual, like Sejanus under Tiberius.

Well, yes, exactly.

And I think maybe we'll be able to explore more of that in time, maybe with figures like Rickima and so on.

So Honorius Honorius dies in 423.

The next emperor I've got in my list is Valentinian III.

So what do we know about Valentinian III?

It looks like he also reigns for quite a long while.

Again, it's very much the same pattern.

You have somebody convenient from the imperial family, succeeds pretty young.

So again, that encourages the sense that, oh, well, you know, sir, you need to be guided.

You need to listen to your wiser ministers.

And then that's always the difficulty for any ruler of, do you break away from in a sense, almost these guardians, these regents that are pretty much doing everything?

But he does survive.

You know, he's again the figurehead.

There is an emperor.

Real power is with other people, with this succession of commanders,

because

the emperor doesn't go out.

He doesn't travel, you know, very rarely.

And it's mostly local.

So he's mostly there at Ravenna.

waiting for people to ask him to do things and presiding over various ceremony.

He's hearing reports, all this sort of thing.

But they're not very active in their role.

So they can involve themselves in church matters and state matters and all these things, but it's very limited.

And while this is going on, you have the

greater pressure caused by the Huns.

You've got movements within the empire where there are groups you simply cannot control.

So all of these same problems, but the emperor's role in this is distant and less significant.

And you have army commanders who are trying to deal with it, but also to protect their own position, to protect against potential rivals.

And

the resources at your disposal are being eroded, sometimes fairly dramatically, when you lose control of provinces, when the vandals are moving into Spain and then subsequently into Africa, when you've got...

other groups that are simply in areas, which means they're not under control.

They're not as settled, prosperous as they were.

They're not sending you the food, the money, the men you need.

So the armies, it's very hard to trace who's actually in the Roman armies at this time.

And that's why people like the Goths have such power, because ultimately you'd much rather have them as your soldiers than you would destroy them.

And this basic problem, but it means that dealing with bigger threats when they occur tends to be extremely difficult.

Well, there's one figure in regards to these people, as you say, with emperors just being figureheads and Valentinian, it seems, was very much much similar.

I'm pretty sure he assumes the throne very, very young.

And one of the first people, it seems, is really significant in his reign.

It's not a general, although they're probably there as well, but it's his mother, Gala Placidia, or Gala Placidia.

I mean, she's an extraordinary figure from this time, Adrian.

She is.

And compared to the women of the imperial family we know about earlier, suddenly she seems a much more independent agent.

And that's partly because you've actually, through all the civil wars, you've narrowed down who has some claim to any sort of connection to being a member of the imperial family.

And because you've moved away from the generals making themselves emperors to trying to keep a dynasty going, then whoever belongs to that, so someone as a daughter and then even more as a mother of a potential emperor becomes far more significant.

And in her case...

It shows how at least some people could see the politics of this time, not in the Roman barbarian divisions that tend to jump out to us, but you can negotiate with the Goths and talk to them and ask for help from them.

You can be a captive at one point, or but how willing is all of this?

You can appeal to Attila.

You can do all this sort of stuff.

And it's very much a case where it shows how you've got to get yourself away from the thought that you have a Roman state and a Roman army that is this big institution.

at this time, that there are hundreds of thousands of soldiers, even tens of thousands of soldiers as permanent units that are fairly efficient that ought at least to obey the emperor.

They might not, they might follow a different emperor, but they're there.

They are there to deal with these threats.

That's no longer the case.

That structure is not there.

The logistics behind it has gone.

You don't have the army bases.

You don't have the recruitment patterns.

You don't have the training.

Most of these units, if they exist on paper, do not exist in reality.

And that's been very clear, which means that anybody with even a reasonable number of armed men at their command becomes a major player.

And they're all part of this.

But it comes back to this idea that deep down, it's obviously particularly true if you're a member of the imperial family, but even for most Romans, you still believe the only thing is Rome.

That's the only state that there's going to be.

That's the only empire there's going to be.

And that whatever means you use to get power within that is perfectly legitimate.

So you can talk to what groups we would consider to be barbarians and are thought of as hostile and seek support from them in a way that, again, simply is not imaginable earlier.

It's just not the way it works.

Keeping on that kind of thematic part of this chat now, Adrian, if we focus on the Roman army, as you say, you've got big figures like Attila at the same time, which is naturally going to

weaken the military forces that you have and so on.

But is there, as you say, contrasted to centuries earlier where Italians and Romans are very eager to sign up to the army and do their part, has that feeling now gone?

Is it very much for the Emperor or his generals that they are calling in these barbarian groups to do the fighting for them?

It is, but it's been a long-term thing.

I mean, even in the first century, you see that drop-off of recruits from Italy joining the legions.

The legions are still Roman citizens, but you tend to join the Praetorian Guard or something a lot safer and better paid.

And you don't go into the army and you'll be a Roman, but you'll be from Gaul or from North Africa or from, you know, Beirut, one of the big colonies or one of these areas.

And there is that trend.

There is a big difference.

If you look at the infrastructure underlying the army, so you know, I'm in South Wales, not far away, Kylian,

big fortress, big base, basically a huge garrison town, base of Legio II Augusta, its depot, all of this sort of thing.

By the early fourth century, pretty much all of these are abandoned.

Forts stay in some areas.

When you build new ones, they're much smaller.

And this is a big theme from the fourth century that you're starting to billet troops in cities rather than in their own bases.

Now, in the short term, that doesn't sound like a bad thing.

But when you start to think about the practical element of it, if you have a large army and a provincial army of 15,000, 20,000, a quarter or more of it cavalry, that's a lot of horses.

Those horses need to be stabled somewhere.

If you send them to a city, how many cities have got stabling for a thousand horses, let alone more than that?

Where do you break the horses?

Where do you train the recruits to ride?

Where do you train everybody to fight?

All of this stuff that's happened within these, what we just see as bits of stone and laid out and sort of, you know, impressive ruins, that's gone.

Instead, it becomes a case where you can keep that experience for a while.

You know, basically you're conscripted into a unit and they teach you.

But that will tend to wear away as all those people retire or are lost in defeats.

It then becomes much easier.

If you want soldiers quickly, rather than take some peasant who's not too willing and probably his landlord isn't too willing to take him and conscript him into the army, then it's much easier to go and find an Alan or a Goth or one of the Alamanni or the Franks who's grown up to fight to a degree.

He doesn't have the discipline and the way of doing things that you used to have, but he's quite good.

It's a better starting place than the raw recruit when you've had, again, you can look generation after generation, emperors will issue new laws saying that these are the dire punishments for anybody resisting conscription.

And, you know, you have, and the punishments for cutting off your thumb rather than be recruited.

And, you know, there's a long tradition of this, but the fact that they're repeating it suggests that it isn't working, that people simply don't, because there's a great danger.

You end up in the army, you may never come back.

And you might well end up fighting Romans as often as anybody else.

But you also, you're not going to a big depot like Kailian when you enlist to be trained, to be equipped, to learn how to be a soldier.

Instead, you're drifting into what's effectively a war band that has an itinerant existence, isn't settled anywhere, or is the garrison that lives in a few houses in a city, you know, like that group that crops up in the fifth century that sort of, after the empire's gone, that's still wondering where their pay is coming from and this sort of thing, but it's very small.

It's easy to think of armies just in terms of, well, you've got this weapon, you know how this tactic works, and it'll just happen.

But again, as you can see in the modern day, if you cut all the bits that support it, that produce that end result, then you don't get to the end result it doesn't just happen and with all armies the danger is you cannot keep them permanently in the highest readiness for war and ready to fight so instead you're having to improvise and keep going and mostly you still have the advantage that you can train yours to be a bit better than the enemy and they're a bit more organized they're at least as good to start off with because basically you're recruiting the same sort of people you're fighting And you've got a slightly more, you've got a better road system.

You've got at least some idea of how to supply this army, but it's all harder to do.

And it's simply, you will read studies that claim that in the late antiquity, and you know, if you take the notitia dignitatum at face value, that the army is still huge and you've got hundreds of thousands of men.

The problem is they're just not visible in any of the accounts of any of the campaigns.

It's much more improvised, it's much more short-term, which means that a stilico or a rissima or any of these can build up quite a good force.

An Aetius, another of these people, who again is relying on connections with other groups with with you know foreign groups to bring in your soldiers but it's a bit like hannibal's army it's a distinct thing that can become very good can become very efficient but it doesn't naturally extend to the next generation and the next generation you've got to keep on rebuilding it from scratch whereas the older way was having this bigger

system within the empire that supported that and made it happen.

So it's not that that the soldiers are any less brave.

It's not that sometimes they're not as efficient.

It's just that it's much harder for them to be efficient, much harder for them to stay there and then to keep doing this year after year, decade after decade.

If we, let's say, go to about 455, Adrian, which is when Valentinian III is assassinated, and you mentioned Aetius there in passing, obviously the general battle of the Catalonian planes against Attila.

does so well then valentinian has him murdered i believe but then valentinian himself is murdered in turn.

I would like to ask a bit, Adrian, then, about what happens next, because if these emperors are already quite distant, puppets-like, following Valentinian's death, do you see the rise of more of those warlords?

And do the emperors become even more puppets-like?

They do in some respects, but the warlords that follow are less strong than the warlords you'd had before.

than a stilico, than Arissima, than an Aetius, partly because what they're drawing on is less.

You know, you've lost Africa.

That's gone.

The Vandals are there now established.

They can plunder Rome on a larger scale than the Goths had done.

You've lost most of Spain.

You've lost control of large parts of Gaul.

It's being run by kings who are, in theory, part of the empire and like to feel they are, but also are not supplying you with all the money, all the resources you might want.

So you're scratching together from a smaller and smaller pile the manpower, the money to pay them, to feed them, to do all of these things.

So, but it's this problem that you have an emperor who is dependent upon a figure like Aetius, but also

that figure is a threat.

And

it again becomes, from the emperor's perspective, the empire is quite narrow and it is simply the court they see around them.

You know, hear reports of what's going on elsewhere, but it's about that day-to-day.

How am I perceived?

How am I obeyed?

How safe am I?

Is this person now going to decide?

And you've got to remember as well, one thing it's hard to do because the sources are so poor, but logic tells us that you have all the personality clashes you'd get in, you know, an office today, a university department or whatever it might be, let alone in government within the cabinet, where some people just don't like each other and see someone else's success as almost a failure for them, or certainly as diminishing their own status and reputation.

So in every respect, things are getting weaker.

The emperor is in many ways more distant.

But the commanders that the emperor requires

and relies upon, but also fears,

because they're effectively the kingmakers.

They're the ones that can get rid of you.

If they are confident enough they can replace you, they might.

And you are trying to play one off against another because you don't want one man to have...

basically a sword over your head saying, well, you know, obey me or you're gone.

But again, that competition is disruptive.

It's again, the perspective of the emperor is staying alive, which means staying emperor.

That is the priority.

It isn't about the other things you might feel are good things about governing well, keeping the empire prosperous, but you are so removed from that and the empire is so small.

And there is so little you can really do by this time because your

warlords, you know, yes, you can repulse Attila in a confused battle.

You can hold things together, but it's a question of patching up the cracks and then moving to the next one.

And then hoping that the first crack hasn't broken out again before you've had time to come back and deal with that again.

You are fighting fires at every stage.

So they are struggling to do their job.

They have less with which to do it.

And they're weaker as is this more removed, more distant, more symbolic emperor.

And do you get also, it seems, because I've got in my notes after 455, you get the rise of people like Ricima that I've already mentioned.

And it almost feels like you've got this very quick succession of Roman emperors.

You've got the likes of Avetus, then you've got Majorian, who seems to be more of a military man and does seem to reconquer large parts of it, but then he ultimately fails.

You get this quite quick succession.

And Ricima is there in the background almost as well, all the way to Anthemius.

Because it's in quite a small timeframe, if I remember correctly, it's about 10, 15 years or so.

Does that add more to the instability of the Roman Empire at that time?

And you have very different natures of Roman emperors as well, with Ricima also there in the background?

Yeah, in many respects.

I mean, you can see, even if it's very limited success, Honorius, Valentinian III, they are successful because they live a long time.

and they stay in power a long time.

Some of their favorites, their generals, rise and fall.

And that allows them to continue.

But when you have

the system sort of running wild where nobody's lasting a long time, the emperors aren't lasting, the favorites aren't lasting, people like Rissima are pulling the strings, but they're not achieving too much.

Their main aim does seem far more about staying in control and power.

You can see more of a serious effort to do things in a Mastillico or some of these earlier leaders, Aetius even.

Whereas it's more about...

Again, it's a little bit like the emperor thinking, well, the only way for me to stay alive is to have power.

And to do that, I must dispose of,

or at the very least, weaken any potential rival.

And I must control the emperor.

And once you, again, with all of these things, it's the same way when you get earlier patterns of, you know, third century crisis, the

rebellions, declar usurpations, lots of people declaring emperors.

It tends to encourage more very quickly.

The longer someone like Honorius or Valentinian lasted, the harder it is to say, well, I'd be a better alternative, or this favorite of mine, because that's generally what it is.

It's the strong man.

As you say, Majorian is a little bit of an exception where he actually does things on his own.

But in the main, these are puppets and they are very short-lived puppets.

Because all the resources you've got, the basis of power is smaller.

It's much easier for the balance to change between one man being having enough to be dominant and then somebody else being able to challenge him.

So there's this rapid succession because it's again, it's like over-correcting.

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It is interesting, isn't it, Adrian, how, as you've highlighted, in one way, even though they're seen as weak and still they are far away from the action and they have their favourites doing their military battles and stuff for them, the fact that Honorius and Valentinian have quite long reigns is in stark contrast to the rest of the Western Roman Empire for that next 20 years or so after Valentinian's death, where majority and apart, where as you say, he seems to be a bit of an exception.

Like most of them, they still don't live long.

And, you know, they aren't very successful at all.

And obviously, there's, you know, there's an element of chance in all of this, in that things go worse.

They miscalculate about levels of trust, but also enough people think there's an opportunity.

It's much harder.

The longer somebody lives, in a sense, they become more secure because you've got to get a stronger reason for disposing of them, getting rid of them.

Once it's happened once, once there's been that, it's like you know, it's much easier to have another revolution, another usurpation, get rid of this, because on the one hand, they're a lot less secure.

They're still trying to prove themselves, which means it's much easier to fail or be discredited.

The longer you are, you can cope with failure.

So, Honorius can cope with the sack of Rome.

He is not fully discredited and destroyed by this.

He's still around for a decade and more afterwards.

But if you're new, if you've got a more questionable claim to power and something goes badly wrong, then it's much easier either for you to try and blame the army commander you've trusted, which might mean he might turn against you, or for him to blame you and get rid of you.

So you have

Rissimer in the background pulling the strings over quite a long period.

And

that's an element where you've got somebody who's got enough power to make and break emperors.

But also the fact that they can do that shows how weak you are.

And again, it's remind ourselves that even compared to where we started with Honorius, what he controlled as Western Emperor, at least in theory, now the empire has shrunk so much by this time.

You know, Britain has gone early on.

In theory, you're saying they're still appealing and all this sort of thing.

And it's still Romano-British.

It's still trying to live as a Roman, but it's not something from which you're going to get any help.

They might want it from you, but they're probably not going to get that either.

Most of Gaul is not under your control.

All the Rhineland provinces, all that area, that's gone.

Spain, largely gone.

North Africa, largely gone.

You can only be sure of Italy.

And

to some extent, there's often treaties.

There's often, you know, the kings that have set themselves up are at least paying lip service to you to some extent.

But in terms of getting money, resources, manpower from any of these.

So everything is getting closer to home.

And because it's smaller, again, that magnifies the impact of any failure.

And to some extent, it's the reverse.

And that if you have a success, it seems like a really big success.

But again, the problem is there's going to be another problem very soon, and you can't keep doing that.

So everything's combining to make this much, much less stable.

And it's a reflection of that wider weakness, that wider collapse.

But also,

it's encouraged by that because, again, there have been so many failures, and there are, there's just less to go around.

So the overall strength of what you control, by this stage, you are not much more in practical terms than one of these Gothic or Vandal kings.

In terms of the area you really control and the sort of money you have.

You've got a more sophisticated system to deal with it.

You've got a longer tradition.

You've got that prestige.

You know, you are still the Caesar, the Augustus.

You have all of that grandeur and you've got this association with the bigger, still stronger Eastern Empire, but it's much less close.

You can't really rely upon them.

And also,

your officials, as well as the Emperor yourself, you don't want too much interference from them because they've probably got other ideas of who should be in charge.

So you can't even ask for help and expect to get it on your terms from them.

So that is the big problem, isn't it, Adrian, with the loss of territory?

And I guess the growing confidence of those neighboring powers alongside the always kind of stronger, stable Eastern Roman Empire, is that they will think, oh, I would like my candidates now in control of this empire, which is getting noticeably weaker within my lifetime.

As you say, Majorian exception, maybe for a bit, and don't worry, we'll do an episode specifically on Majorian in time.

It's a person I really want to cover.

As you say, you just gradually see Roman France, Roman Gaul going to the Burgundians and the Visigoths.

You've got Spain with the Visigoths and the Swerby as well.

And by the time of 472, Adrian, it feels like this is almost the last chapter of it.

I mean, this is like the last crisis that we get between 472 and 476.

Well,

the clearest proof of this is that when Romulus Augustulus, the last emperor, is deposed, who has been, you know, the figurehead of all figureheads.

He's never done anything.

He's just a boy.

He's not even worth killing.

You know, you can send him off to be a priest and to live that life because he just does not matter.

And that shows.

Early on, you had to kill your Roman opponents.

That's the way it works.

That's why these civil wars have been so brutal, because there wasn't any negotiation or dealing with this.

You would be dead either by your own hand or they would sort it out for you.

You've really become such a local power by this time.

The decisions that are being made, the struggles that are going on, you really are, you're not in full control, even all in all of Italy.

It's become very much focused in the north, and more widely, why should anybody listen to you?

Because you have no power to back this this up.

And

it's that cumulative

decline.

There's really no other word for it.

You've shrunk.

The Western Empire has just got smaller and smaller, less and less of it under control, which means that you're getting fewer and fewer resources.

And many of these areas that you've lost were really big deals in terms of the money you got from them, the food you got from North Africa, in particular.

That's perhaps the biggest single blow of all.

Losing that area to the vandals, because, and it's why they make repeated attempts over the next century or so to get it back but can't until justinian and even then it's you know it's precarious because

you can only be an empire if you've got the money the might to enforce it ultimately empire imperium it means power that's what it's all about and that has just gone it's shrunk to nothing you really are a local figure and you have to negotiate with these inverted commas barbarian rulers that have set themselves up in various parts of your empire, you can't go and destroy them.

You do not have the capacity to do that.

And yet, there is no evidence for there having been vast hordes of hairy German warriors sweeping in and taking over and expelling the population.

What you've got is a warrior elite and a warlord who's taken control.

And when, again, you can see a sign of it jumping on into the next century, but when Justinian does send the likes of Belisarius round to reconquer North Africa, Sicily, and Italy, he does it with very small numbers of soldiers because there aren't big armies there.

That's never been the case.

It's just a reflection of, again, it's sort of foreshadowing the Middle Ages in terms of the scale of warfare, the scale of what was a big army, what you need to control, how power works.

That transition has been occurring

in the course from where we start 400-ish right the way through.

to the point where, again, to the people experiencing it, it may not be so obvious.

A lot of this is natural.

It is gradual with these sudden steps down when something really bad happens.

But it doesn't work anymore.

Do we think Oduaka's revolt, which ultimately ends in the deposition of that last Roman emperor in 476, a very young Romulus Augustulus?

And just to clarify before him, 472 to 476, so you've got very short-lived emperors like Lyserius.

Julius Nepos, then he's pushed out by Orestes, who then installs Romulus Augustulus.

So it's all very quick succession.

Julius Nepos hangs about in the Balkans for a bit and some argue that he's actually the last emperor but that's another story.

But you've still got those barbarian generals in the background installing these figures.

With Oduaka's revolt and him actually deposing the emperor, how much is he kind of following a trend?

Or is he following a trend, but is he going to the next level by actually deciding I'm not now just going to pick who I want to be the next emperor.

I'm actually going to now remove the emperors entirely and declare myself king.

So, I mean, how different is Odo Akron what he does?

He is in many ways.

Though, again, it's gradual.

And to characterize them as barbarian, you know, what does that really mean in this period?

In that, yes, you have these men who set themselves up as kings and have already done so and are, you know, various types of Goths and the like.

But for such a long period, you have had senior leaders in the Roman army who are described as an Alan or a Frank or a Goth or whatever it might be.

they don't seem to act any differently from anybody else who has a senior command role in the Roman army.

And in many cases, it's a clumsy term, but they're Romanized.

They're part of the system.

They are not this very alien foreigner standing there.

They are part of it.

They're part of how it works.

I think the final decision is really

what is the point?

of these puppets rather than

they've been changed particularly in that that rapid period well you know we've talked about in this last phase where you get quick succession, lots of emperors, compared to earlier where they've lasted a long time and there's been that level of stability.

They've actually shown that

they can be hard to control.

And

that's why you end up with the end with you're putting a nephew, a relative, as emperor, because you think, well, okay, he's young.

I can definitely control him.

The warlords have been making most of the key decisions.

And they're the only ones that can keep a level of defense, of military capability that you need because you are threatened on all sides.

And just to assert yourself and to make some, you know, the point of anybody listening to you at all.

So the emperor has become wholly a figurehead.

You know, there is really nothing they do.

Their personality hasn't mattered beyond do they turn against a general and try and get rid of him or provoke somebody else?

Do they favor another one?

This sort of thing.

Well, that's that's all they're doing.

Anything practical is being done by the man in charge of the army.

And the only basis of his power is keeping control of that army.

So there is a clear logic, the point of view of Odovasa, to just do it.

Let's put the two drops together and let's do this.

It's really, in a way, quite sad that ultimately the end of the Western Roman Empire is figures deciding, well, with the emperors at least, with that canonical 476 date, what's the point?

What's the point of continuing this any further?

I mean, would you argue that the Western Roman Empire's fate had long been sealed before that point?

It's such a difficult question to answer to kind of per particular point, or what could you say to that?

Anything like this comes into the what-ifs of history.

If people had acted differently, if they'd got their act together a generation or so earlier, they could have sorted it out.

If Valens had made a few better decisions and been a bit less hasty at Adrianople,

would all sorts of problems have been avoided in the future?

Maybe, maybe not.

Maybe there would have been different problems.

Human history is made up by human beings making decisions, and often they get things wrong or they do things that prove to be catastrophic.

That's there.

You can't remove that element.

So simply to put it into terms of long-term trends against this, to see it as, well, this is a system that could flourish in the

economic system of a Mediterranean-based agricultural economy, that sort of thing.

There's truth in that, but it doesn't answer everything.

These are people living their lives and making decisions.

A lot has changed.

And you can also make the other point that for many of the people living in the Western Empire, even the bit that was still acknowledged itself as part of the Western Empire, the deposition of Romulus Augustulus made no difference at all to their daily lives.

There's still a warlord in charge who's now calling himself a king, but he's where you go if you've got a problem, if you need protection, if you need help, this sort of thing.

The laws are the same.

There's not this sudden, oh, let's do everything, you know, the good old German way of Even to the point where, you know, think about it in that basic level, you get the Romance languages developing.

You're not changing culturally anything unless, you know, not in a deliberate way.

Most of it changes because

the system that the Empire was able to support of movement of people, of goods, of ideas over such long distances, that goes.

That's not there.

That's declined for a long time.

You know, the big difference is that

particularly in the north, if you look at a site from height of the empire, that the amount of small finds are massive.

There's just lots of it.

And most of it, a lot of it has been made hundreds, even thousands of miles away from where it's found.

Afterwards, there's much less of everything.

There's much less stuff, and it's locally made, apart from the very occasional high-prestige object that's been, which you would have had in the pre-Roman Iron Age as well, that's come a long way and is maybe part of diplomatic exchange as well.

But it's that's all gone.

There is a difference.

The closer you are to the Mediterranean, the better things are, the less things change.

And for a lot of these communities, especially from the archaeological viewpoint, you can look at bits of southern Spain, Portugal, Italy, very little difference, which again shows how unimportant the empire had become by this time.

So I think there's a lot of difference in the change.

And there's a lot of, because it's so gradual, the big thing is there's no alternative waiting to step into the place of the Roman Empire that people want.

And everybody's still desperate to be Roman and to live that nice, comfortable Roman lifestyle, including the Vandal kings, the Visigothic kings, you know, the others, they are trying to run a little Roman Empire as their kingdom.

And they'd like to be rich and they'd like to have the luxuries.

It's just that they can't do it.

It doesn't work on that scale.

And so much of the wider system has gone.

So there's, you cannot look at this from a long point of view and not see a decline and not see a change.

At what point it became inevitable is difficult to say and because we don't know what could have been done, what might have happened.

And there's an element where the later you get, obviously, the harder it is.

But even then, the fact that Honorius Valentinian just lived that long, I know, you know, for whatever reason, if they'd caught the fever and died much younger, in the same way if Augustus had actually died on all those occasions when he was despaired of, people thought he was going to early on in his reign, would you have got the principate as it was, or anything resembling it, or something completely different?

That the role of the individual still matters at each point.

So it's a combination somewhere in between all of this in this complex mix is the truth.

But I don't think, you know, you could look and say, well, Augustus never really sorted out succession of emperors.

Therefore, that was going to be a problem.

It would lead to civil war.

That's why centuries later, the empire goes.

Now, that's a big step between those two points.

There are problems, there are things they maybe could have done better, but on the whole,

the success of Rome was something that nearly everybody seems to want to continue.

It just doesn't happen.

But again,

it would be marvelous if we had the data that meant we could measure the impact of successive plagues, you know, from the Antonine one through to the third century ones.

And what that's done, just what that means.

Whereas, you know, you can look at the Black Death in Britain or Europe in the 14th century and get a sense.

of the impact and consequences of it.

There are so many other factors in the same way when people will start to say, oh, you know, the climate's changing, all this sort of thing, things are less favorable for the agricultural system.

Well, maybe, but we don't know.

We don't have enough data yet.

We probably never will to measure most.

So a lot is going on.

I think we should come back, we should flip the question and say, isn't it remarkable that the Roman Empire lasts as long as it does?

And it's as big as it is for so long.

Because

other people haven't done this.

So in the same way, Achaemenid Persia, take that, you know, it's destroyed by Alexander the Great, but it isn't half incredibly successful for a very long time so you you can't in the same way if you know we live a healthy life and do and achieve things we will eventually die so that there's you come to all these questions whereby nothing is going to be forever but it could have been different i guess it's the fact isn't it adrian that the roman empire had suffered all those shocks in the past like the third century crisis but had emerged from it transformed And I guess with all the continuity and transformation that there even is there at the end of the fifth century, you could almost argue that the Roman Empire, it endured that, but in a different form.

It emerges from it in a different form, but all of its, like you said, its laws, Christianity is still there.

So many of the things that have been central to it, that these successes like Theodoric and so on, they continue.

You could argue that it is almost like another third century crisis, but what was the Roman Empire has emerged from it, but just very different looking.

It is, I mean, there's a sense that's the sort of the fluffy view of the early medieval period rather than the Dark Ages, where, yes, it's just transformation.

okay yeah there's some violent bits along the way but the problem is again you look at what had been before and what's there standards of literacy prosperity even to the extent i mean look at somewhere like vinderlander from the the writing tablets you and from the archaeology you can see that even at the end of the first century on the very fringe of the empire all the goods, all the ideas of that imperial economy are available to you there.

That your ordinary soldier owns several pairs of shoes and has a pair to go to the bathhouse, has his boots, has his indoor shoes, and can afford when he loses one to throw the other one away, which is what we tend to find and get some new ones.

A lot of people in the Middle Ages are going to be wearing their one pair of shoes till they fall apart and then getting another pair because that's all they've got.

There are big, big differences.

This isn't, it's, you know, you could say somebody at the end of their life transforms from a living person into a corpse.

There is still something remarkable about that achievement, for good or for ill, of the Roman empire the roman government empire on that scale for so long

and the lifestyle that it created you know there's there's there's a fair bit of truth in gibbon looking at the you know from the perspective of the later 18th century and talking about you know the best time to be alive is under the antonines it's exaggerated but if you look at the road systems you know, that are not yet created in most European countries, people are still using the Roman roads.

Nothing like that.

There's so much about the Roman.

Even, I mean, a favorite one I would say is the bathhouse, where the Romans have devoted all that technology.

It's one of the most complicated things they design just to making life more pleasant.

And this is something that goes.

You see, it's the bathhouse that, when villas are occupied in the post-Roman period in Britain, it's the bathhouse that first falls into disrepair and nobody can put it back again.

You can keep an aqueduct going, plugging it sort of to keep it.

serviceable, but you can't build a new one.

So much of that knowledge, that learning, again, it comes back to this literacy, this ability to pass things on, has gone, that it is a pretty drastic change.

And this is, you know, it's hard to see this as a terribly good one because it will be the best part of a millennium or more before things start to pick up.

And

again,

the whole idea of the Renaissance of rediscovering this, this rebirth, going back to this lost knowledge.

Now, it hasn't been lost everywhere in the world.

But nevertheless, society has taken a very different route.

So I still can't help thinking of it as as decline.

I still can't help thinking of it as a bad thing.

I know I'm a bit of a pro-Roman nut, but nevertheless, there is change.

There is big, big change.

And characterizing that as transformation does rather ignore the scale of it, the extent of it, and the violence of a lot of it.

And that, you know, the old Roman peace, however much you may say it's not perfect, compared to what follows, to the risk of being raided and having a house burned down by your neighbor, things have changed a lot.

This has been a really interesting chat going through those last emperors and the state of the Roman Empire in the 5th century until that date of 476.

Adrian, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast.

Thanks for inviting me again.

Well, there you go.

That was best-selling historian Dr.

Adrian Goldsworthy, wrapping up our Fall of Rome series.

with a look at the final emperors of the West.

From Honorius to Romulus Augustinus, we trace the last desperate decades of imperial rule and asked what the very end really looks like.

I hope you enjoyed it.

If you want to hear more from Adrian, be sure to check out his past episodes on the ancients, covering everything from the Parthians to Alexander the Great.

We will also be putting out a poll on Spotify for this episode, asking which late Western Roman Emperor that we mentioned in today's episode you'd like us to dedicate an entire in-depth episode to.

Honorius, Valentinian III, Majorian or Romulus Augustius.

We will do an episode on the winner.

If you've missed any of the episodes in this Fall of Rome series, now is a great time to go back and catch up, whether it's to find out more about the internal crises, the so-called barbarians, or the plagues that helped unravel an empire.

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Ancients.

Please follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

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We'd really appreciate that.

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.

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