Century 7 of 13 · AD 14 – 68
Tiberius to Nero, by way of Britain, Boudica and the fire.
76 entries · 242 hours · 53 with a written verdict
Everything you think you know about these four men was written by people who disliked them, for an audience that enjoyed the stories. Tacitus, Suetonius and Cassius Dio all wrote later and none of them is neutral, which is why modern scholarship spends so much of its time prising the reign apart from the reputation.
Tiberius was a capable general who did not want the job, retired to Capri and left Rome to Sejanus until Sejanus overreached and was executed in AD 31. Caligula ruled for four years; the horse was probably never made consul, though the joke is old enough to be Roman, and his own guard murdered him in 41. Claudius is the surprise. Written off as a limping stammerer, he invaded Britain in 43, built the harbour at Ostia and the aqueducts, and ran an administration that worked. He then married his niece and adopted her son.
Nero is the one everyone thinks they know. The fire of 64 destroyed much of the city, he was not in Rome when it started, and the fiddle had not been invented. What is true is that he used the cleared ground for a palace, blamed the Christians, and executed enough senators that by 68 the provinces revolted and the Senate declared him a public enemy. His death ends the family, and nobody had ever worked out what happens then.
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
The 1976 BBC serial, thirteen episodes, made on a budget that shows and with a cast that does not care. Derek Jacobi's Claudius is the performance every later screen Roman is measured against. The history is Robert Graves', which is to say Tacitus at his most gossipy, but nothing has bettered it as drama.
A hundred and seventy hours of conversational Roman history, beginning with Caesar and carrying well past him at the pace of two people talking.
The PBS series from 2001, four hours, and still the most sober television treatment of the period. No reenactment, no hyperbole.
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.
Part of Roman Empire
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.
Peter Ustinov's Nero is the reason to watch, and he is doing comedy in a film that does not know it. Historically the loosest film on this page.
Not history, and the funniest film anyone has made about the Roman occupation of Judaea. The aqueduct scene is a better summary of imperial infrastructure than most documentaries manage.
Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast
With Lindsay Powell
Lindsay Powell on his own biography, eighty-two minutes on Tiberius as a commander: Pannonia, Illyricum, the Rhine after Varus. The soldiering fills the decades the scandal usually swallows.
Part of Our Fake History
Caligula began his reign repairing relations with the Senate damaged by Tiberius and following the model set by Augustus, but something changed and he ended up at war with the Senate.
Ancient sources call Caligula's four year reign one of cruelty, sexual excess and bloodlust, but those same ancient writers rank among the most untrustworthy sources from the Roman period.
Caligula's reign is remembered for bizarre stories, from declaring war on the ocean to building a floating bridge across the sea, yet the only eyewitness account calls him arrogant, not insane.
Part of The Ancients
With Conn Iggulden
Nero at seventeen, with Seneca writing his speeches and Burrus running the guard. Start here and the reign reads as a decline; start at the fire and it reads as a monster story.
Part of The Rest Is History
Part four, sixty-six minutes on the vacuum after Caligula was killed at twenty- eight, the brief talk of restoring the Republic, and the uncle the guard found and made emperor.
Part three of the emperors run, sixty-five minutes on Caligula, built largely on Suetonius, who was writing eighty years later with the archives open and a taste for the worst version.
Shushma Malik on Nero the performer: the lyre, the poetry, the Greek tour he came home from with 1,808 victory crowns. Sixty-one minutes on why an emperor on a stage scandalised Rome more than an emperor in a war.
Londinium founded around AD 47, burnt by Boudica inside fifteen years, rebuilt, and given up in the fifth century. Sixty minutes on the commercial logic of a bridging point nobody had thought worth a town before.
Recorded at the dig in Norfolk with William Bowden, on what the Iceni did after the revolt failed. Sixty minutes in which the archaeology keeps showing continuity where the written accounts report extermination.
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.
Part two, fifty-eight minutes on Tiberius and on Suetonius, whose biography of him is the most salacious he wrote and the reason the reputation stuck.
With Holy Land, Jodi Magness
Jodi Magness on Herod outside the nativity: a client king who built Caesarea, Masada and the Temple platform, and killed several of his own sons. Fifty-six minutes.
With Elodie Harper
Elodie Harper on the revolt of AD 60, when Camulodunum, Londinium and Verulamium all burned and the province came close to being given up. Fifty-six minutes.
Part two, fifty-six minutes on AD 43 and on Claudius, underestimated by everyone around him and in need of a triumph he could not win himself.
Fifty-five minutes on whether the early Christians read Nero into the number of the Beast, and on what the persecution after the fire of 64 actually looked like.
With Caitlin Gillespie
Caitlin Gillespie on the evidence for Boudica, which is Tacitus and Cassius Dio writing decades later with speeches they invented. Fifty-four minutes separating the queen from the statue.
With Daisy Dunn
Daisy Dunn on the general who won back the German frontier and then spent eleven years on Capri. Fifty-three minutes; the episode opens with a warning about its subject matter and earns it.
With Oliver Davis
Oliver Davis on Iron Age Wales on its own terms, where the single word Celt covers several quite different ways of living. Fifty-two minutes.
Lauren Ginsberg of Duke on Octavia, Poppaea and Statilia Messalina: the three women Nero married, and the two he is said to have killed. Forty-eight minutes given to their side of it.
Forty-eight minutes on how an Idumaean with no claim became king of Judaea, which took Roman backing, a civil war and a marriage into the Hasmoneans.
With LJ Trafford
L J Trafford on Caligula, who ruled for under four years and has been paying for it ever since. Forty-seven minutes, including what the story about the horse actually says.
Forty-seven minutes on why an emperor with no military record needed Britain: a conquest Caesar had left unfinished was the cheapest available triumph.
AD 43, the crossing, and the campaign that finally stuck where Caesar's two had not. Forty-six minutes with the archaeologist Duncan Mackay on where the landings actually were.
Forty-six minutes inside the Domus Aurea, the palace Nero drove through a burnt quarter of Rome and, by the film's reckoning, the largest building standing anywhere at the time. The scale is the argument: it explains why the dynasty that followed drained his lake and put a public amphitheatre on it.
With Helen Bond
Helen Bond on Pilate outside the Gospels: a prefect of Judaea under Tiberius, known from an inscription at Caesarea and from Josephus complaining about him. Forty-five minutes.
Forty-three minutes on what the archaeology of late Iron Age Britain will actually support: the trade with Rome, the question of the druids, and the evidence for human sacrifice.
Camulodunum is the nearest Britain came to a town before the Romans arrived, and the first place Boudica burned. Forty-two minutes with Frank Hargrave of the Colchester Museum.
With Ginna Closs
July AD 64, and two-thirds of the city burnt before it was stopped. Ginna Closs on the fire, the rebuilding, and the persecution that followed it. Forty-one minutes.
With Honor Cargill-Martin
Honor Cargill-Martin on Claudius's third wife and, more usefully, on the charge sheet: who wrote it, how long after, and what they wanted from it. Thirty-nine minutes.
With Duncan Mackay
Duncan Mackay on the final battle, whose location is still unknown, and on why the candidates keep moving. Thirty-eight minutes.
Part of The Ancient World
Thirty-five minutes on Athens and Rome side by side, two very different answers to the same question about who gets to decide.
Thirty-two minutes on the death of Tiberius and Caligula's first year, including the summons and execution of Ptolemy of Mauretania for no reason anyone recorded.
Two halves in thirty-two minutes: Tom sets up the Year of the Four Emperors after Nero, Dominic takes a defeat that started the long Byzantine decline.
Part two, thirty-two minutes on the road to the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 and on Josephus, who was on both sides of it.
The Great Fire of 64 AD spawned its own truther conspiracy asking whether Emperor Nero started the blaze and fiddled as Rome burned, a legend later fed by so-called pseudo-Neros.
Thirty-one minutes on what the evidence for Boudica actually is, which is two Roman writers and a burnt layer in three towns.
Twenty-eight minutes taking Boudica's revolt, renewed war in Armenia and the Great Fire of Rome as one connected stretch of the 60s AD.
Part of Being Roman with Mary Beard
The letters of Claudius Terentianus, a young soldier who wrote home begging his father for sandals and complained about nearly everything else. Twenty-eight minutes on the army from inside it.
Twenty-seven minutes on Zenobia taking Arabia and Egypt while Rome buried two emperors in a year and found Aurelian.
Twenty-six minutes on Tacfarinas raiding Africa for seven years while the province kept reporting him defeated, and on the death of Juba II.
Twenty-six minutes on Tiberius Julius Alexander, prefect of Egypt, whose declaration for Vespasian in July 69 decided the year of four emperors.
Twenty-four minutes on the end of Tacfarinas in Africa and the years when Sejanus ran Rome while Tiberius ran nothing from Capri.
Caitlin Gillespie on Boudica as Tacitus and Dio built her: a barbarian queen written for a Roman audience to think about its own rulers with. Twenty-three minutes.
Part of Echoes of Empires
Twenty-three minutes on the army Claudius Gothicus began rebuilding in the late 260s, with cavalry moved to the centre. Most of the recovery of the empire runs through this reform.
Sixteen minutes on the moment Claudius Gothicus dies of plague and the recovery looks lost, and on the man who picked it up. Aurelian arrives here.
Everything else, in order
Part of The Ancients · Tristan Hughes and the History Hit team, twice a week since 2020
Part of Greeced Lightning · Myths and movies with a doctor of classics; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of The Classics Podcast · The Classical Association: revision, myth and interviews; only the Roman episodes are indexed
With Andrew Wallace-Hadrill
With Sam Moorhead
Part of Dan Snow's History Hit · Dan Snow on history's defining moments; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of Kings and Generals · Military history in campaigns and battles; only the Roman episodes are indexed
