Hello everyone and welcome to the history of Byzantium Episode 86b, more thoughts on the

Byzantine Republic. I hope the interview with Anthony Codellus is still fresh in your mind.

Today I'm going to touch on the things I found most interesting about it and deal with

one or two listener questions which I solicited on Facebook at the time.

What stood out to me first from our history of Rome, history of Byzantium perspective

was the idea that Augustus did not abolish the Republic. He simply changed the nature

of its form of government. I don't know how that idea struck you, but I felt that was

something of an eye opener. It wasn't that it was an entirely new thought, but it just

clicked a lot of things into place. At the time people continued to live out their lives

just as they had the day before. They still sought out wealthy patrons to help further their

prosperity. Their avenues toward justice and fair treatment remained as narrow as they

were before, regardless of whether the Senate had the final say on state policy or if the

emperor did. Augustus announced to Rome, I have restored the Res publica, which we tend to

view as a sort of sham statement, a cynical rebranding to modify the ego of the Senate. But

maybe what Augustus meant was that I have restored the political body to a state of harmony.

The agglomeration of power in his hands did change the form of government, but perhaps it didn't

really change Rome from a republic to an empire in the way we traditionally think.

I recently watched the BBC television series I Claudius for the first time, and if you want to

see Patrick Stewart with hair, then it's definitely an eye opener in its own way. But I was very

interested to see that in Robert Graves' reconstruction of the lives of the Giulio Claudians,

an entirely modern understanding of republic versus empire prevailed. So most of the good characters,

including the emperor Claudius himself, want a return of the republic because autocracy is viewed

...