The High Empire: Trajan to Commodus

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of The Rest Is History

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Rest Is History

Forty-six minutes on facial hair as politics, taking in Marcus Aurelius, whose beard was a philosopher's statement and not a fashion.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

With Andrew Birley

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of The Ancients

Forty-one minutes on Galen and the humours, and on how a theory of four fluids organised European medicine for fifteen hundred years.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of Being Roman with Mary Beard

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.

Part of The Ancient World

Twenty-seven minutes on Trajan reaching the Persian Gulf in 116 and watching the conquest come apart behind him before he could get home.

Part of The Ancient World

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of toldinstone

Nine minutes at Italica near Seville, founded in 206 BC for wounded veterans of the Spanish campaigns and later the birthplace of two emperors.

Part of Ancient Art Podcast (audio) · Art and culture of the ancient Mediterranean; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast · Philosophy texts read and chatted through; only the Roman episodes are indexed

With Ryan Holiday

Part of The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast · Philosophy texts read and chatted through; only the Roman episodes are indexed

With Ryan Holiday

Part of Literature and History · Two-hour episodes on famous works, in order; 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 Dan Snow's History Hit · Dan Snow on history's defining moments; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of Echoes of History · History Hit for Assassin's Creed; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of Ancient Greece Declassified · Conversations that take in Greece and the wider ancient world; only the Roman episodes are indexed

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

With Aaron Poochigian

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