Century 6 of 13 · 44 BC – AD 14
The Republic ends and the principate is invented.
63 entries · 45 hours · 47 with a written verdict
The Republic outlives the Ides of March by thirteen years, and the man who finally ends it is nineteen when he starts: a famous surname, no military record, and a legion he has bought with his own money.
Octavian, Antony and Lepidus form the Second Triumvirate in 43 BC, legally, by a law passed for the purpose. Their first act is a proscription list; Cicero's head and hands go up on the rostra he had spoken from. Philippi in 42 destroys the Liberators, and then comes a decade of manoeuvring in which Antony holds the wealthy east and Octavian holds Italy and the story.
The story is the interesting part. Almost everything you know about Cleopatra was written by the side that beat her: the seductress, the foreign queen, the will supposedly seized from the Vestals. She was a Ptolemaic ruler who learned Egyptian when her dynasty had not bothered for three hundred years, playing the only hand a client kingdom holds during a Roman civil war. Actium in 31 BC is a naval battle Antony largely declines to fight, and both are dead within the year. Then in 27 BC Octavian resigns every power to the Senate, is handed most of them back with a new name, and spends forty years insisting he has restored the Republic while holding permanent command of the armies. In AD 9 Varus loses three legions in the Teutoburg Forest, the frontier stops at the Rhine for good, and an old man is heard asking for them back.
I feel like…
Cogitare, how it was thought and ordered
Sentire, what was lived and endured
Facere, what hands made and did
how it is made
who is talking
how much time you have
With a written verdict
Part of Historia Civilis
Actium in animated blocks, which sounds absurd and is the clearest explanation of the battle anywhere. Historia Civilis makes fleet movements legible in a way no documentary manages.
Livia's story as drama, and much better than its lack of an audience suggests. Takes the standard hostile sources and asks what she would have said.
Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast
Ninety-three minutes with the Ancient Warfare panel on how Octavian cut some sixty legions down to twenty-eight and made them permanent. The professional Roman army starts here, and so does the pension bill.
Part of The Ancients
Lindsay Powell on the later career of Marcus Agrippa: the aqueducts, the first Pantheon, the fleet that won Actium. Sixty-seven minutes on the man who built most of what Augustus is remembered for.
Part of HistoryHit
Sixty-one minutes with Mary Beard on the daily business of being emperor: the petitions, the letters, the dinners, and how much of the job was answering post.
With Joyce Tyldesley
Cleopatra before the Romans got hold of her story: a Ptolemaic ruler who learned Egyptian when her dynasty had not bothered for three hundred years, playing the only hand a client kingdom had.
With Emma Southon
Livia had more influence than any woman in Roman politics and a reputation as a poisoner invented mostly by Tacitus. The episode separates the two.
Recorded for the two-thousandth anniversary, fifty-nine minutes on the loss of legions XVII, XVIII and XIX somewhere in northern Germany. Those three numbers were never issued to a legion again.
With Robert Harris
Robert Harris on Agrippa, who won the wars and then had his name quietly worked out of the record by the friend he won them for. Fifty-seven minutes.
Part of Ancient Rome Live
Fifty-six minutes on the constitutional sleight of hand: a man who invented no new office ended up holding everything, and the Senate voted him each piece of it.
Jo Ball on her own book about Varus, who was a competent administrator given a job that was not administration. Fifty-five minutes on AD 9.
Over fifteen thousand men lost in the Teutoburg Forest in AD 9, and this episode carries the story past the ambush to what Germanicus found on the ground six years later. Fifty-three minutes.
With Daisy Dunn
Daisy Dunn on the pair from Tarsus to the tomb, fifty-three minutes. The political arithmetic gets as much room as the romance, which is the only way the ending makes sense.
With Hannah Cornwell
16 January 27 BC, the day Octavian was handed the name Augustus and had the gates of Janus shut. Hannah Cornwell on what actually changed that morning, in fifty minutes.
Forty-nine minutes on Augustus solving the problem of owning some fifty legions and having nobody left to fight: he cut them, settled them and made the rest permanent.
Joanne Ball on the basic question the story usually skips: where the battle actually happened, and how Kalkriese came to be the answer. Forty-eight minutes.
Forty-seven minutes on the question underneath the German campaigns: what Augustus wanted from the Rhine, and whether a province beyond it was ever really the plan.
With Jeffrey Tatum
Jeff Tatum on the stretch from Philippi in 42 BC to Actium, the years when Antony was the senior partner in the triumvirate and spent that advantage. Forty-five minutes, the second of two parts.
Forty-three minutes on Agrippa before the buildings: Naulochus, Actium, and a career that stayed loyal at every point where it could have turned into a bid of his own.
Adrian Goldsworthy from the archive on what the Roman peace actually was: two centuries with less warfare inside the frontier than anywhere had managed, and what it cost to hold. Forty-two minutes.
Forty-two minutes on Antony before Cleopatra: Caesar's deputy, the master of horse, and the man who read the will out loud at the funeral.
Forty-two minutes of the panel choosing one battle each to stand at the edge of, which turns into an argument about what the sources cannot tell us.
Recorded at the site, forty-one minutes on the days before the ambush of September AD 9. Part one of two, and the ground does much of the explaining.
With Simon Elliott
Forty-one minutes taking the whole rise in one run, to camera, which makes it a frame to hang the detailed episodes on.
Part of Tides of History
Forty minutes opening a run of episodes on the first-millennium economy, starting with whether the ancient economy is one subject at all.
Part of The Rest Is History
Part three of four, forty minutes on what Plutarch and then Shakespeare did to the story before anyone alive today met it.
Thirty-eight minutes on Pompey's surviving son, who held Sicily with a fleet and starved Italy of grain until Agrippa built a navy that could beat him.
With Jane Draycott
Jane Draycott on Cleopatra Selene, walked through Octavian's triumph as a child and later ruling Mauretania as queen. Thirty-six minutes on the one who got out of that family alive.
Part of The Ancient World
Part two of two, thirty-five minutes on Galerius from Tetrarch to the edict of toleration he issued from his deathbed in 311.
Part one of two, thirty-one minutes on Galerius: refugee, herdsman, soldier, Caesar, Augustus, and one of the Tetrarchy's least examined figures.
Thirty minutes of rectangles on Antony's Parthian campaign, the one that lost him the reputation Actium then finished off.
Twenty-nine minutes on Samsigeramus saving Emesa from the Sasanians and then declaring himself Augustus, until Valerian arrived and Odaenathus took over.
Twenty-eight minutes on the early years of Cleopatra Selene, daughter of Cleopatra and Antony, walked through Rome in a triumph as a child.
Twenty-eight minutes on Juba II, a Numidian prince raised in Octavian's household after being walked in his father's triumph, and later made a king by Rome.
Twenty-eight minutes on Juba II accompanying Octavian into Egypt in 30 BC, at the end of which Cassius Dio writes that Egypt was enslaved.
Twenty-seven minutes on the death of Augustus, Tiberius taking over, and the young Germanicus starting the career that would make him the heir everyone wanted.
Twenty-six minutes of coloured rectangles on the last year of both of them, Actium to the asp. Historia Civilis is strongest on sequence, and 30 BC is almost entirely sequence.
Twenty-six minutes on the years when the triumvirate stopped pretending, told through the propaganda each side published about the other.
Twenty-six minutes on Germanicus taking command in the east, the posting that ended with his death at Antioch and a poisoning trial in Rome.
Part of The Pax Romana Podcast
The third part on the mathematician killed by a mob in 415, and on what her death is used to argue about ever since.
The children Antony had with Cleopatra and with Octavia, and what Augustus did with them. Most of them lived.
Fourteen minutes on the recruitment height everyone quotes, where the figure comes from, and what the skeletons from military cemeteries actually measure.
Marcellus, Gaius, Lucius and Agrippa Postumus, the four who were supposed to succeed and did not. Tiberius was the last option, not the first.
Eleven minutes on what the legions under Caesar and Augustus actually wore, decades before segmented plate appears. Mail, and three competing accounts of shield shape.
Part of toldinstone
The monument Augustus built where his camp stood before Actium, decorated with the rams of the ships he captured.
Nine minutes on whether ancient commanders rehearsed: what the manoeuvre drills and the staff rides in the sources amount to.
Seven minutes at the cenotaph raised in Lycia for Gaius Caesar, the grandson Augustus meant to succeed him, who died there in AD 4 at twenty-three. The tomb is empty; the succession went to Tiberius.
Everything else, in order
Part of Ithaca Bound · Andrew Schiestel on the Mediterranean, 2021 to 2022; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of Ancient History Hound · Ancient Blogger on Greece, Rome and antiquity for every level; only the Roman episodes are indexed
With Joanne Ball
Part of The Classics Podcast · The Classical Association: revision, myth and interviews; only the Roman episodes are indexed
With Andrew Wallace-Hadrill
Part of Echoes of History · History Hit for Assassin's Creed; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of Dan Snow's History Hit · Dan Snow on history's defining moments; only the Roman episodes are indexed
With Sam Moorhead
Part of Kings and Generals · Military history in campaigns and battles; only the Roman episodes are indexed
