The Flavians, the Colosseum and Vesuvius

Roland Emmerich doing the chariot-racing and gladiator business under Vespasian. Historically loose and gleefully so; watch it for the machinery of the games, not for the dates.

The BBC's three parts on the Regio IX excavation, filmed as it happened, so you watch rooms come out of the ash. The best Pompeii documentary made this century.

Ninety-seven minutes inside the first new dig at Pompeii in seventy years, filmed with the archaeologists while the finds come out of the ash. The DNA work on the victims is what lifts it past a tour of the ruins.

Part of The Ancients

With Jessica Venner

The eruption hour by hour, and the argument about the date: the traditional 24 August has been under attack since a charcoal inscription turned up in 2018 pointing at October.

Part of SandRhomanHistory

The Jewish revolt and the siege that ended it, with the ramp the Romans built still standing.

Part of The Ancients

With Andrew Wallace-Hadrill

The other town, better preserved, less visited, and with carbonised scrolls that are now being read by particle accelerator.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

With Josho Brouwers

Sixty-nine, four emperors, and the discovery Tacitus draws out of it: an emperor could be made somewhere other than Rome.

One hour, real people reconstructed from the bodies in the ash, and a volcanic timeline you can set your watch by. The scene everyone remembers is the pyroclastic surge, and it earns it.

Part of The Ancients

AD 83 or 84, somewhere in Scotland, and the only account comes from Tacitus writing up his own father-in-law. Sixty minutes on a battle whose site nobody has found.

How the building worked as a machine, which is more interesting than the body count: lifts, trapdoors, an awning worked by sailors.

Beard on the excavation as it happens, with the bodies treated as people. The section on what the casts can and cannot tell us is the honest counterweight to every dramatised eruption.

Part of Cost of Glory

With Nat Friedman

Fifty-four minutes with Nat Friedman on the Vesuvius Challenge, the prize for reading the carbonised Herculaneum scrolls without opening them. A Roman library is being read as we speak.

Part of The Ancients

With Guy Maclean Rogers

The war that destroyed the Temple in AD 70 and paid for the Colosseum. The Arch of Titus still shows the menorah being carried through the city.

Part of The Rest Is History

Part three, fifty-three minutes on the burning of the Temple, the triumph that paid for the Colosseum, and Masada.

Part of The Rest Is History

Fifty-three minutes on the Flavian amphitheatre: gladiators, mock sea battles, and executions staged as scenes from mythology for an audience of tens of thousands.

Part of The Ancients

With Gabriel Zuchtriegel

Gabriel Zuchtriegel, who runs the site, on what the current excavations are turning up and on what a director decides to leave buried. Fifty-two minutes.

Italian archaeologists opening a Pompeian street, roadside food counter and all. Fifty-two minutes on how the town ate and moved, which is the half the death casts crowd out.

Part of The Ancients

Four men claimed the purple in AD 69 and one was alive at the end of it. Fifty-one minutes on how a general from the Jewish war took Rome from the eastern legions.

Part of The Ancients

Fifty-one minutes on a find from the Great Pompeii Project, in a suburban villa some seven hundred metres from the walls. Excavation there is still producing new bodies.

The eruption of 79 is the famous one; this is about the one eighteen centuries before it, which buried a Bronze Age settlement on the same mountain. Forty-seven minutes, and it turns Vesuvius from a single catastrophe into a habit.

Part of The Rest Is History

Forty-six minutes on the eruption of AD 79, a column of gas and ash some twenty-one miles high and the surges that came down the mountain after it collapsed.

Part of The Ancients

With Nathan Elkins

Nathan Elkins on the Flavian amphitheatre: who paid for it, what the spoils of Jerusalem had to do with it, and how a building that size was emptied in minutes. Forty-three minutes.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

Forty-two minutes on Agricola in Britain, drawn almost entirely from a biography written by his son-in-law Tacitus, which is the whole problem with it.

Part of The Ancients

Forty minutes on the eruption of AD 79 itself, hour by hour, in the series the show built around the town. Carries a warning for the descriptions of how people died.

Part of The Ancients

The Pompeii Lakshmi, carved in India and dug out of a house near the Bay of Naples. Thirty-nine minutes on the trade route that could carry an object that far.

Part of The Ancients

Thirty-nine minutes on the gladiator barracks and the graffiti scratched by the men who lived there, which record wins, losses and admirers by name.

Part of The Ancients

Thirty-eight minutes on what is still coming out of the ground, in a town first opened in the sixteenth century and still producing finds most weeks.

Part of The Ancients

With Jodi Magness

Jodi Magness on the siege works, which survive better than almost any Roman siege anywhere: the camps, the wall and the ramp are all still on the ground. Thirty-seven minutes.

Part of The Ancients

Thirty-seven minutes on the evidence for brothels in Pompeii, and on how much of it is a modern habit of reading every carved phallus as a signpost.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

Thirty-seven minutes on the two Dacian wars, which ended with a province, a column in Rome and enough gold to pay for both.

Part of The Ancients

Thirty-five minutes on the vineyards replanted inside Pompeii's walls from the root cavities the ash preserved, which is how anyone knows what was growing there.

Part of The Ancients

Episode one of the series, thirty-five minutes on the town as a working place before AD 79: the elections painted on walls, the bakeries, the water supply.

Part of The Ancient World

Thirty-two minutes on the Greek kingdoms of Central Asia lasting into the Kushan period, and on Hadrian's measures in Judaea that set off Bar Kokhba.

Part of Being Roman with Mary Beard

Lucius Caecilius Iucundus lent money, ran auctions and took a cut of both, and his business archive survived the ash on wax tablets. Twenty-eight minutes on Pompeii's middleman.

Part of The Ancients

With Jodi Magness

Jodi Magness, who co-directed the 1995 excavations, on the 967 who supposedly died on the rock in AD 73 and on how much of Josephus the digging actually supports. Twenty-three minutes.

Twenty minutes on the carbonised library at Herculaneum and the imaging that reads a scroll without opening it. Short enough to watch before the Pompeii films, and it explains why the town that gets less attention is the one holding the books.

Part of Ancient Rome Live

The amphitheatre riot of AD 59 between Pompeians and Nucerians, which Rome punished with a ten-year ban on games. Seventeen minutes, and there is a fresco of it painted by someone who was in the town.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

Twelve minutes on a fair doubt: the only account is by Agricola's son-in-law, the site has never been found, and the casualty figures are one-sided beyond belief.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

Eleven minutes of informed hoping: the carbonised Herculaneum scrolls are starting to be read, and this is what military historians would most like to find in them.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

Ten minutes on the siege of AD 73 and on Josephus as the single source for what happened on top of the rock.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

Part two, nine minutes, on the half of the question the previous episode did not reach: the siege works, the ramp and the timing.

Part of Ancient Rome Live

Nine minutes on the Temple of Minerva in Domitian's Forum Transitorium, which stood nearly intact for a thousand years, spent the Middle Ages as a grain store, and came down in 1606 when Paul V wanted the marble for something else.

Part of Ancient Rome Live

Eight minutes on the macellum, the covered market hall, traced from Pompeii to Jerash in Jordan. The plan barely changes between the two, which are two thousand kilometres apart.

Part of Ancient History Hound · Ancient Blogger on Greece, Rome and antiquity for every level; 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 Jessica Venner

Part of Ithaca Bound · Andrew Schiestel on the Mediterranean, 2021 to 2022; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of Ithaca Bound · Andrew Schiestel on the Mediterranean, 2021 to 2022; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of Ithaca Bound · Andrew Schiestel on the Mediterranean, 2021 to 2022; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of Ithaca Bound · Andrew Schiestel on the Mediterranean, 2021 to 2022; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of Ithaca Bound · Andrew Schiestel on the Mediterranean, 2021 to 2022; only the Roman episodes are indexed

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

Part of Greeced Lightning · Myths and movies with a doctor of classics; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of Greeced Lightning · Myths and movies with a doctor of classics; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of Ad Navseam · Two classicists in lively discussion; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast · The companion to Ancient Warfare magazine, since 2008