The Julio-Claudians

Studio-bound, wig-heavy, fifty years old, and it still buries almost everything since. Derek Jacobi stammers his way through the entire Julio-Claudian bloodbath. The source is Robert Graves, so treat the plot as literature and the atmosphere as gospel.

Four hours from Augustus to Domitian, made when documentaries still let a talking head finish a sentence. Slower than anything made since and considerably more informative.

Eleven Oscars and a chariot race that no CGI has improved on. Fiction wrapped around a Roman Judaea that is more carefully built than the plot deserves.

Caligula, tyranny and paranoia. The weakest season for accuracy and the one the historians on screen most visibly strain against, which is its own kind of interesting.

Nero burning Rome, played to the back row by Peter Ustinov, who is having more fun than anyone else on screen. The template every toga film since has copied.

It is here for one scene. What have the Romans ever done for us is, accidentally, the best three-minute summary of Roman provincial administration ever filmed, and every historian on this site has quoted it.

Beard takes the maddest emperor and asks the awkward question: how much of this is Suetonius settling scores a century later? A masterclass in reading a hostile source.

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