Welcome to the New Books Network.

Welcome to Madison's Notes, the official podcast of the James Madison program,

an American ideals and institutions at Princeton University.

I'm your host, Ryan Schenkel.

Thank you. I'm your host, Ryan Schenkel. As we continue season five, I have with us Dr. Reese Edmonds to talk about all things ancient

Rome, from Republic and Augustus to the empire.

Dr. Reese Edmonds is a Roman historian, a graduate of King's

College, Cambridge, and a member of the junior faculty in the Class 6 department here at Princeton.

He recently completed his PhD and defended his Princeton dissertation on propaganda under the

First Roman Emperor Augustus, also known to us as Octavian. Dr. Edmonds, welcome to the Madison's Notes podcast.

Hello, Ryan.

Thank you for having me here.

Please tell me a little bit about your background.

I'm a Roman historian.

I'm at the Classics Department in Princeton.

And primarily I research the politics of the Roman Republic

and the political ideas which infused the developments in that period. In particular, I'm

interested in the rise of Augustus, whom we call Rome's first emperor. How did you get interested

in the subject? So I first got interested in the Roman world in early childhood, actually.

My parents would take me around Roman forts, because we lived

in England where there were lots of abandoned Roman forts there. I used to really love the Roman

army. I would really love drawing Roman legionaries, Roman soldiers with their armor and their red tunics.

...