Century 5 of 13 · 100 – 42 BC
Gaul, Britain, the Ides, and the war that followed.
57 entries · 64 hours · 36 with a written verdict
Caesar wrote his own war reports, in the third person, and published them in instalments while he was barred from entering the city. The Gallic Wars are a campaign and a press release at once, and they are why we know more about him than about any Roman before the emperors.
The campaign runs from 58 to 50 BC. He crossed to Britain twice, in 55 and 54, achieved almost nothing strategically, and made himself the first Roman to reach the edge of the world. It ends at Alesia in 52, where he besieged Vercingetorix and built a second wall facing outwards to hold off the relief army. Plutarch says a million killed and a million enslaved, which is a Roman writer boasting and not a census.
The civil war begins in January 49 at a small river in northern Italy. Pharsalus in 48 finishes Pompey, Egypt finishes him properly, and Caesar spends four more years beating an opposition that keeps regenerating in Africa and Spain. He is made dictator for life in early 44 and killed on 15 March by around sixty men, many of whom he had pardoned personally. Philippi in 42 kills the last of them, and by then it is obvious the argument was never about whether one man would rule.
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
Two seasons, cancelled far too early, and still the only screen Rome that feels lived in. It follows two soldiers through Caesar's rise and Octavian's, and the politics of the street is as carefully built as the politics of the Senate.
Part of Roman Empire
The Caesar season, and the strongest of the three: reenactment cut with historians who are given room to disagree with the script. Season three is the weak one.
Part of HistoryHit
Seventy-five minutes running from Caesar's two landings in 55 and 54 BC to Agricola in the north, in one sitting. A single historian to camera, which suits a story usually told in fragments.
Part of The Ancients
With Steele Brand
Seventy-four minutes on the man whose ancestor supposedly expelled the last king, which is a family expectation nobody should have to carry.
Part of Cost of Glory
Sixty-five minutes on the pursuit of Ambiorix and the destruction of the Eburones, which Caesar describes himself. Reading his own account of it is the point.
Counterfactuals are usually a waste of an hour. This one earns it by making the case that the Republic was already gone and the assassins were the last people to notice.
Beard on Caesar as general, dictator and politician at once, and on how much of the man we have is his own account of himself. Fifty-nine minutes; start here before the assassination episodes anywhere else in the index.
Part of The Rest Is History
The Ides of March at thriller pace, fifty-seven minutes. The detail that sticks is how many of the sixty-odd conspirators Caesar had personally pardoned after fighting them in the civil war.
Fifty-six minutes on what the assassins had not planned for: no plan. The liberators freed a Republic that no longer had anyone able to run it.
With Maria Wyke
Maria Wyke on what the Ides became afterwards: Dante, Shakespeare, and John Wilkes Booth shouting Latin from a stage. Fifty-five minutes on an afternoon that keeps getting reused.
Fifty-three minutes on how much of Star Wars and Dune is Roman furniture: a republic that votes itself an emperor, a senate, an imperium already rotting at the centre.
The shorter, tidier version of the same day. Take this one if you want the events and the other if you want the room.
With Catherine Steel
The unglamorous decades before Gaul, when he was a heavily indebted politician buying an electorate. The part that explains the rest.
Fifty-one minutes on the moment Caesar nearly lost Gaul, in a series that reads the Commentaries as propaganda as much as report.
What happened on 15 March 44 BC, minute by minute, and how many of the sixty men involved Caesar had personally pardoned.
Bibracte is where the Gauls made Vercingetorix their commander and where Caesar wrote up his own campaign. Fifty minutes in Burgundy on the town that was a capital before Rome arrived and empty within a generation after.
October 42 BC, and both of Caesar's assassins die by their own hand within three weeks on the same plain. Forty-nine minutes on the day the Republic stopped having defenders.
With Hannah Cornwell
Hannah Cornwell on the months after the Ides, when Antony held the consulship and the nineteen-year-old Octavian held Caesar's name. Forty-nine minutes on how that standoff became a triumvirate.
Part one, forty-eight minutes on 55 BC: scouts along the Kentish coast, a contested landing, and a Roman picture of Britons as savages the Romans half envied.
Forty-seven minutes on 15 March 44 BC, a date that was the first full moon of the Roman year before it was anything else.
With Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones on the six Cleopatras before the famous one, a Ptolemaic line of queens who ruled, married brothers and killed relatives as policy. Forty-seven minutes.
With Philip Nothaft
Philip Nothaft on the Julian calendar, Caesar's reform that outlasted every other one and still sets the year, with 46 BC stretched to 445 days to force the seasons back into place. Forty-six minutes.
With Simon Elliott
Forty-five minutes setting the two against each other on what can actually be compared: sieges, logistics, and what each of them inherited. Simon Elliott does pick one.
Simon Elliott on the two landings of 55 and 54 BC, neither of which left a garrison behind. Forty-two minutes on what Rome knew about Britain before it went, which was almost nothing.
Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast
Forty-two minutes on 10 January 49 BC: what the crossing legally meant, how inevitable it actually was, and why a small river carried that much weight.
Part two of four on Cleopatra, covering the Alexandrian war and the years she spent in a villa across the Tiber while Caesar was alive. Forty-one minutes.
Part one, thirty-nine minutes on how Caesar became powerful enough that crossing a small river in northern Italy counted as a declaration of war.
Part two, thirty-seven minutes on the crossing itself and on Caesar going into Italy with a single legion against the Senate and Pompey.
The two British expeditions that achieved almost nothing militarily and everything politically, which is why Caesar wrote them up at length.
Part of Historia Civilis
The Ides drawn minute by minute, with who stood where in the theatre of Pompey. Sixty conspirators is a logistical problem and this shows it as one.
The years of manoeuvring before the crossing, drawn as diagrams the way this channel does everything. You see the legal trap close around Caesar before he reaches the river.
Twenty-two minutes of moving rectangles on Philippi in 42 BC, two battles three weeks apart in which both sides lost a commander to suicide on bad information.
Antony's speech and the riot it started, which decided more than the murder did.
Eleven minutes on dice and board games in the ancient world, which is where Caesar's line at the Rubicon comes from and what it actually meant to a player.
Ten minutes on Macedonian arms manufacture under Philip and Alexander, and on how much thinner that evidence is than the Roman equivalent.
Eight minutes answering a listener: how legionaries fought at the Arar and Bibracte in 58 BC and were fit to do it again weeks later. Murray Dahm on training, grain ration and discipline.
Everything else, in order
Part of Dan Snow's History Hit · Dan Snow on history's defining moments; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of Ad Navseam · Two classicists in lively discussion; only the Roman episodes are indexed
With Ken Bratt
Part of Ithaca Bound · Andrew Schiestel on the Mediterranean, 2021 to 2022; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of Young Heretics · Spencer Klavan on the great works; 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 Echoes of History · History Hit for Assassin's Creed; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of Kings and Generals · Military history in campaigns and battles; only the Roman episodes are indexed
