Are they, and welcome to Emperor's of Rome, a Roman history podcast from Latrib University?

I'm your host Matt Smith, and with me today is historian and author Dr Adrian Goldsworthy.

This is episode C-L-X-X-X, the fort.

Adrian Goldsworthy is the author of numerous works of both fiction and nonfiction, and

his most recent book, The Fort, tells the story of Flavius Farox, the soldier from Britannia,

who is sent to a distant fort on the Danubian frontier during the reign of Trajan.

I spoke to him about Roman forts as well as his book, and the process of writing historical

fiction.

Here's Adrian Goldsworthy.

When you look at a fort that's near, I'm assuming, where you live, let's say you look

at Vindelander, and you look at a fort that is on the other side of the Empire over on

the Danubian frontier.

How much can you take from one and then superimpose it on the other?

Are the forts that uniform, that you're going to see that amount of similarities?

They are recognizably the same in that you have from develops really under Augustus,

and then under his success as this sort of playing card shaped rectangular, but with curved

corners, fort with a broadly similar pattern of whether

the gates are, where the roads are, the internal buildings.

Oddly, once you cross to Asia and beyond that, the forts are square, and we don't really

know why this is other than that people in that area seem to be building square fortifications

for millennia, so everybody locally just thinks, well, that's the way you do it, far

fewer have been excavated from that area, so we still have to be a little bit careful

...