Century 9 of 13 · AD 98 – 192
Trajan to Commodus. The walls, the Pantheon, the plague, the edges.
55 entries · 46 hours · 44 with a written verdict
Gibbon called this the happiest period in human history, which is a nineteenth-century Englishman admiring an empire built on slavery, and he was still pointing at something real. For most of the second century the frontiers hold, the succession works, and the map is the largest it will ever be.
Trajan takes Dacia in two wars, puts the campaign on a column that still stands, and reaches the Persian Gulf; the empire covers roughly five million square kilometres. Hadrian looks at that map, decides it cannot be held, gives back Mesopotamia and builds walls, one of them eighty Roman miles across northern Britain. He also rebuilt the Pantheon, whose dome is still the largest unreinforced concrete dome on earth nineteen centuries later.
Antoninus Pius rules for twenty-three years and almost nothing happens, which is the highest compliment available to an emperor. Marcus Aurelius spends most of his reign on the Danube fighting the Marcomanni and writing private notes to himself in Greek that were never meant for anyone and are now the most widely read Roman book in the world. The cracks are already there: the Antonine Plague arrives with the army in 165 and kills somewhere between two and ten percent of the empire, and the honest answer is that nobody knows. Marcus breaks the pattern by leaving the throne to his son. Commodus fights in the arena, renames the months after himself, and is strangled in his bath in 192.
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 Roman Empire
Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, and the strongest of the three Netflix seasons because the historians on camera are given real disagreements to have.
Anthony Mann's, and the film Gladiator quietly borrowed its plot from. It flopped so badly it ended the Hollywood epic for a generation, and it is better than that history suggests.
Commodus did fight in the arena and everything else is invention. Watch it for what it is, then listen to the Marcus Aurelius episode above and enjoy how little survives contact.
The Ninth Legion vanishing into Caledonia, filmed as a survival chase. Nonsense as history, and the only film that makes the northern frontier feel as cold and hostile as the tombstones suggest.
Part of The Ancients
With Rob Collins
Rob Collins on the fifth century at the wall, when the forts stayed occupied long after the pay stopped arriving. Seventy-five minutes on an ending that took generations.
Frances McIntosh on the daily round at the wall: rations, rotas, and local gods picked up on the spot and worshipped alongside the official ones. Seventy minutes treating the garrison as residents.
With William Stephens
William Stephens on Marcus Aurelius: plague, the Danube wars, and a notebook written in camp that he never meant anyone to read. Sixty-nine minutes.
Part of Our Fake History
Hadrian has been celebrated as one of Rome's five good emperors, but his reputation is complicated by the mysterious death of his teenage lover, Antinous.
Sixty-four minutes on Tacfarinas, a Numidian auxiliary who deserted and then tied down Roman forces in Africa for seven years while Tacitus filed him under bandit.
Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast
Sixty-one minutes on the Danube wars of Marcus Aurelius, fought by an emperor with no taste for it against pressure that never let up. Angus Wallace with Josho, Lindsay and Mark McCaffery.
With Barry Cunliffe
Barry Cunliffe on the long chain from Egypt to China: Roman glass and silver going east across monsoon seas, silk coming back, and nobody at either end meeting the other. Fifty-eight minutes.
With Alex Imrie
Alex Imrie on Commodus, who came to the throne at eighteen, fought in the arena as Hercules and renamed Rome after himself. Fifty-four minutes on the reign the film borrowed.
With Andrew Birley
Andrew Birley, who runs the excavation, on the site that gave up the writing tablets: a birthday invitation, an order for socks and underpants. Fifty-three minutes on the only Roman voices in Britain that are not carved in stone.
With Frances McIntosh
Fifty-one minutes on the build itself: between eleven and sixteen feet high depending on which side of the Irthing you stand, some eighty Roman miles across northern Britain, and still an open question what it was actually for.
Part of The Rest Is History
Kyle Harper with Tom and Dominic, fifty minutes on disease as a first-order cause of Roman decline, which is a newer argument than it sounds.
The 1,900th anniversary episode, assuming the wall was begun in AD 122 and not 119. Forty-nine minutes of the panel arguing about the date and the purpose, both of which are genuinely unsettled.
Antinous drowned in the Nile in AD 130 and Hadrian answered by making him a god, with temples, a city and coinage. Forty-nine minutes on grief exercised by someone with the power to enforce it.
With William Dalrymple
William Dalrymple on India as Rome's largest trading partner, reached by monsoon sailing from Egyptian ports, and on the pepper and the gold that went each way. Forty-eight minutes.
With Andrew Tibbs
Andrew Tibbs on the wall Antoninus Pius ordered about AD 142 between the Forth and the Clyde, turf on stone, held for roughly twenty years and then given up. Forty- seven minutes.
With Jim Crow
Jim Crow on Housesteads, the auxiliary fort with the best-surviving latrines in Roman Britain. Forty-six minutes in which sanitation turns out to be the most talkative evidence on the site.
Forty-six minutes on facial hair as politics, taking in Marcus Aurelius, whose beard was a philosopher's statement and not a fashion.
With Murray Dahm
Murray Dahm on his own book, forty-five minutes on the Dacian wars of AD 85 to 106 fought man against man, with Trajan's Column as the contested evidence.
With Matthew Nicholls
Matthew Nicholls on the Pantheon: Agrippa's temple, burnt and rebuilt by Hadrian around AD 126, and a concrete dome nobody matched for thirteen centuries. Forty- three minutes.
Andrew Birley on that season's dig, forty-two minutes from a site that has been excavated annually for fifty years and still has most of itself underground.
Forty-two minutes on the invasions that hit Marcus Aurelius from AD 166: tribes crossing the Danube in numbers Rome had not planned for, with plague already in the camps.
Forty-one minutes on Galen and the humours, and on how a theory of four fluids organised European medicine for fifteen hundred years.
Lindsay Powell on his own book about the revolt of AD 132: a Jewish state that minted its own coins for three years, and a war Hadrian won by depopulating Judaea. Forty-one minutes.
Thirty-nine minutes on the Ninth, which disappears from the record after York and has been fictionally massacred in Scotland ever since. The evidence points elsewhere.
With Nick Summerton
Nick Summerton on the epidemic that arrived with the armies returning from the east in the 160s: the flight from cities, the advice on staying well, and what Galen recorded. Thirty-two minutes.
Part of Being Roman with Mary Beard
With Elizabeth Fentress
Julia Balbilla wrote verses on the leg of the Colossus of Memnon while travelling up the Nile with Hadrian and Sabina, and they are still legible. Twenty-eight minutes.
Regina was a British slave from the Catuvellauni, freed and married by Barates, a Syrian from Palmyra, and he buried her at South Shields in two languages. Twenty- eight minutes.
Part of The Ancient World
Twenty-seven minutes on Emesa becoming a pilgrimage centre and on Trajan's confrontation with Parthia over the Armenian crown.
Twenty-seven minutes on Trajan reaching the Persian Gulf in 116 and watching the conquest come apart behind him before he could get home.
Twenty-seven minutes on Julia Domna marrying Septimius Severus and raising Caracalla and Geta in a Rome that Commodus was refounding in his own name.
With David Breeze
David Breeze on Bearsden near Glasgow, where the bath house and the latrine sewer survived well enough to show what the garrison ate. Twenty-five minutes.
Twenty-two minutes at Corbridge, the most northerly town in the empire, which was a supply base and a market with no garrison wall around it. Twenty-two minutes on site.
Frances McIntosh walking Chesters, the most complete cavalry fort in Britain and the best-preserved military baths on the island. Twenty-two minutes on site.
Thirteen minutes on who actually moved legions around the empire, and on how much of it was the emperor and how much was a provincial governor asking.
Eleven minutes on the question Hadrian's Wall keeps raising: a barrier that could not stop an army, so it was doing something else. Customs, control of movement, or display.
Eleven minutes on Trajan's Column and its successors as evidence: a narrative carved for a Roman audience, on a monument almost nobody could read from the ground.
Ten minutes on the charge that the philosopher-emperor made the one succession decision that undid the century, by choosing his own son.
Part of toldinstone
Ten minutes in Emerita Augusta, founded in 25 BC for discharged legionaries and still standing well enough that the theatre holds a festival every summer.
Nine minutes on a listener's claim that Dacia extracted tribute from Rome, which it did under Domitian, and on what Trajan did about it.
Nine minutes at Italica near Seville, founded in 206 BC for wounded veterans of the Spanish campaigns and later the birthplace of two emperors.
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Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast · The companion to Ancient Warfare magazine, since 2008
