R. V. V. A. V. And welcome to Emperor of Rome, a podcast series looking at the rulers of the ancient Roman Empire.

I'm your host Matt Smith and this would be episode I X, Augustin Rome.

With me as always is Rianna Evans, lecturer in ancient Mediterranean studies at Latrobe University.

In our last podcast we looked at the rise of the Emperor Augustus

and how he defeated his rival Mark Antony.

We now enter a time in Rome when there's relative peace throughout the empire, something the people of Rome hadn't seen for a long time.

He's not going out and fighting battles himself at this point.

He's not even really pretending to, but he is someone who cultivates that reputation for

building the empire. In fact, he pretty much just consolidates the empire.

Is he doing this through a gria? A Grippa is around for a while I think until 12

b. But it's more his steps on Tiberius who he's going to be the next emperor actually, who he starts sending out, say, to fight in Germany and areas like that, where the Romans are never really fully successful, but Tiberius has some successes there. He has effectively conquered Egypt.

He's created that as a province and that's a major coup and also a huge amount of wealth comes with that, which is really good for Augustus because now he can start using that wealth to please the people and build things.

But he doesn't actually extend the empire much more than that. It is much more about keeping the status quo and

one of the great coups he has in terms of diplomacy is that he gets back from the Parthians.

The Parthians are kind of in the area we call the Middle East.

They're really the great remaining power

that the Romans haven't managed to conquer.

The Parthians had had some Roman standards since 53

B.C. when Krasus had gone there and had a huge military defeat that was just shocking and

shameful to the Romans.

And Augustus managed to get the standards back and he kind of portrayed it as a military

victory.

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