The Julio-Claudians: Tiberius to Nero

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.

Part of Our Fake History

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.

Part of Our Fake History

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 of The Rest Is History

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

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 of The Rest Is History

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

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 of The Rest Is History

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

Forty-seven minutes on why an emperor with no military record needed Britain: a conquest Caesar had left unfinished was the cheapest available triumph.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancient World

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.

Part of The Rest Is History

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 of The Rest Is History

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.

Part of Our Fake History

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.

Part of The Ancients

Thirty-one minutes on what the evidence for Boudica actually is, which is two Roman writers and a burnt layer in three towns.

Part of The Ancient World

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.

Part of The Ancient World

Twenty-seven minutes on Zenobia taking Arabia and Egypt while Rome buried two emperors in a year and found Aurelian.

Part of The Ancient World

Twenty-six minutes on Tacfarinas raiding Africa for seven years while the province kept reporting him defeated, and on the death of Juba II.

Part of The Ancient World

Twenty-six minutes on Tiberius Julius Alexander, prefect of Egypt, whose declaration for Vespasian in July 69 decided the year of four emperors.

Part of The Ancient World

Twenty-four minutes on the end of Tacfarinas in Africa and the years when Sejanus ran Rome while Tiberius ran nothing from Capri.

Part of The Ancients

With Caitlin Gillespie

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.

Part of Echoes of Empires

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.

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 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

Part of The Classics Podcast · The Classical Association: revision, myth and interviews; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of The Classics Podcast · The Classical Association: revision, myth and interviews; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of The Classics Podcast · The Classical Association: revision, myth and interviews; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of The Classics Podcast · The Classical Association: revision, myth and interviews; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of The Classics Podcast · The Classical Association: revision, myth and interviews; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of The Classics Podcast · The Classical Association: revision, myth and interviews; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of The Classics Podcast · The Classical Association: revision, myth and interviews; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of The Classics Podcast · The Classical Association: revision, myth and interviews; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of The Classics Podcast · The Classical Association: revision, myth and interviews; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of The Classics Podcast · The Classical Association: revision, myth and interviews; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of The Classics Podcast · The Classical Association: revision, myth and interviews; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of The Classics Podcast · The Classical Association: revision, myth and interviews; 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

Part of The Classics Podcast · The Classical Association: revision, myth and interviews; 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 Sam Moorhead

Part of The Classics Podcast · The Classical Association: revision, myth and interviews; only the Roman episodes are indexed

With Sam Moorhead

Part of The Ancients · Tristan Hughes and the History Hit team, twice a week since 2020

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