Here's Rhiannon Evans.

The Theatre of Marcellus is a theatre in Rome.

It was built in the late 1st century BCE, sort of planned long before, and like a lot of Augustan buildings, because it is an Augustan building, was planned under Julius Caesar and then brought to fruition by Augustus.

So it's a, it's obviously a public building, something that he's giving to the public and like a lot of those kind of public facing pleasure buildings, leisure, I guess.

is in the Campus Martius.

It's right in the south end of the Campus Martius, both ancient and modern terms, I guess, between the Circus Flaminius, which is kind of a public square, not a circus race course, not like the Circus Maximus, and the vegetable market, the Forum Olitorium.

So if you go there today, there's still substantial remains of it.

It'd be a very interesting place to live, I think.

Um, my question was about Livia and what role she and her connections either did or did not play in, um, Octavian's propaganda.

Well, I wish we knew more.

We do know that, uh, she was always seen as his most significant advisor, that he deferred to her.

And the highest compliment that you can give a Roman woman, this is gonna sound very faint praise, is that he didn't divorce her even though they had no children together.

But honestly this was a quite normal reason for divorce.

It was very easy in ancient Rome.

Um, so he clearly thought very highly of her, and she appears in his propaganda.

Uh, um, I was just curious what sort of, uh, long-term or, and short-term implications there would be if for history if Mark Antony had won at the Battle of Actium?

[laughs]

You know? They just don't want this.

They are torn, quite often, the troops of Caesar between these two.

Out of all of this, though, the really important thing for Octavian is that the adoption in the will is established as not just him i- inheriting the property, which he's not finding it easy to get his hands on all of that.

But what he really wants is to inherit Caesar's power, to be fully his heir.

So the property is kind of useful, uh, but really he wants to have his name, to be the legal son, to have what may have been an inheritable title of Imperator, that kind of thing.

I mean, after all, he knows that there is at least one person blood related to Caesar.

Yeah.

Here's Rhiannon Evans.

So Artia, after the death of her husband, she's in a position where she's now in charge of two, well, in the case of Octavius, the younger, very young children.

As a widow, she potentially has a bit more freedom and she's reasonably well off.

She's from a very elite family.

But this also puts her in the position of being a desirable person for someone else to marry.

Now, it may be that she wanted to remarry.

She may well have wanted to be a wife again.

So what sort of upbringing does he have?

Yeah, it could have got very sick from that.

Well, no. Mars could have got sick.

But you're meant to do the ritual properly.

But he won the battle against the invading army and dedicated an altar of Mars.

So there's a kind of Octavian ritual.

Altar of Mars in Velitrae.

And of course this makes them, if the legend is true, this makes them local heroes.

So are there other sources that treat her like this or treat her differently or how's Adia coming up otherwise?

So how significant does that make it?

If you want to find out the truth about the people east of the Rhine in first centuries BC and CE, I don't think it tells you very much at all.

It tells you a lot about Roman attitudes, or one particular elite Roman's attitude towards other peoples.

And that they've got, and we see this in Caesar as well, a kind of hierarchy of barbarians, as they'd have called them, and the Germani are more dangerous than the Gauls, that kind of thing.

And it's more interesting than just we're better than them, as we've seen.

In some ways, we're worse than them.

So he's using this to attack Rome itself.

For a long time, it's lost.

Mm.

And, and if we think about it in our terms of, uh, kind of ethnic balance, absolutely, because, well, we know eventually an emperor came from North Africa.

Uh, it's quite likely that we will have senators and other important people, they're not the only important magistrates, who could come from anywhere in the empire.

They could come from Turkey.

They could come from Gaul.

They could come from Syria.

Um, and as long as they obey certain norms for Rome, then Rome will get on with them.

Get ready, folks.