This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batchew with Professor Peter Frankopan, Oxford and Worcester College, Professor of Global History.

We're now in the Roman warm period, which is a delight because I've done so much of my reading most recently about all of the Game of Thrones played around Rome and throughout the Mediterranean world,

and now to discover it again as reacting to and dealing with and getting lucky about climate as a joy.

Peter, you've already mentioned Cleopatra, who steals the scenes,

but the Romans have an important philosophical approach to ecology, to nature. They want to live

in harmony with it. At the same time, they want to take advantage of it to spread their empire.

The Romans from what you present, Peter,

look to be lucky. Is that too much to take away from their achievements? They were at the right

place at the right time, in the right part of the world, with the Mediterranean as their road

to build the empire. And yet at the same time, the climate was not disruptive.

At least it wasn't disorderly as it could have been in other periods.

I think you could widen that, John.

If we had a long time with a glass of wine,

you know, I'd maybe say that all empires need to be lucky.

All empires need to get institutions right. They need to get justice systems right. And they need

to get forms of equality right to be stable because otherwise they topple over.

So Rome did lots of things that were to do with skill of good administration and good institutions.

But all empires are extractive.

Their aim is to widen the peripheries and to not just go and colonize and conquer space for the sake of it,

but to conquer space that is ecologically important,

either because it is good for fields and crops or trees or because it has

minerals or whatever that might be, stone.

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