Century 13 of 13 · across the centuries
Legionary to centurion, aqueducts to latrines. Pinned to no single century.
847 entries · 1130 hours · 272 with a written verdict
What did it smell like, what did bread cost, who emptied the latrines, and how did the water get up the hill. These are the questions people actually have about Rome, and an emperor-by-emperor history has no room for any of them.
The army is the largest subject here. Roughly five thousand men to a legion, eighty to a century despite the name, twenty-five years to a career, and a marching camp dug fresh every night. The Ancient Warfare Podcast has been at this since 2008 and will give an hour to the pay and rations of a single unit.
Then daily life, where Pompeii does the heavy lifting: bars with sunken jars set into the counter, election slogans painted on house walls, bread carbonised in the oven. The aqueducts brought water in on a gradient measured in centimetres per kilometre, the baths were where business happened, and the latrines were communal in a way that consistently derails episodes. And slavery, at a scale that puts it at the centre: estimates run to a fifth or more of the population of Italy. Roman slaves were captured in war, born into the household or sold for debt, manumission was common enough to be a social institution, and freedmen turn up everywhere including on the imperial payroll. None of that made it less brutal, and the better shows below say so plainly.
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
Mary Beard and Michael Scott underground, into the sewers, aqueducts and catacombs, with laser scanning. Ninety minutes on the plumbing, the water supply and the burial system that kept a million people alive.
Roman politics and battles as animated coloured blocks. It should not work and it is the clearest explanation of the constitution and of tactical manoeuvre that exists in any medium.
Garrett Ryan has a doctorate in ancient history and makes short, precise videos answering the questions people actually have: what it smelled like, what it cost, what happened if you got ill.
Animated history at the production level of a broadcast documentary, with maps that move the way campaigns actually moved. The Roman episodes are a fraction of the channel and the fraction to start with.
Primary sources read aloud, unabridged, with the images that go with them. No presenter between you and the text. Hearing a Roman letter home in full does something no summary manages.
The companion to Ancient Warfare magazine and the deepest military coverage anywhere: panel format, working specialists, and an hour on the logistics of one campaign when that is what it takes. Come to it once you know the outline.
A hundred-plus hours on figures who never make the emperor lists, reaching deep into the Byzantine centuries where most Rome shows stop. Coverage is the value here.
Colin Elliott is a Roman historian at Indiana and this is the imperial centuries told straight and at length. The political intrigue is handled like drama without the facts being bent to fit.
Forty-two hours on the Republic turning into a monarchy, told by two hosts working forward through it without skipping the dull decades.
Twelve and a half hours on the city itself, foundation to 1453, told as the biography of a place while the emperors come and go through it.
Agnes Crawford is a licensed guide in Rome, and this is the city itself: what is standing, who paid for it, what happened where you are standing. Twenty short episodes to have in your ears while walking it.
Beard on what held the empire together across four hours, which is a better question than how it fell and gets asked far less often.
Part of SandRhomanHistory
What happened in Britain after 410, following the archaeology where the written sources stop.
Beard's three parts on ordinary Romans, read off their tombstones. The corrective to every documentary that is only about emperors.
Alastair Sooke setting out to demolish the idea that Roman art was second-hand Greek work with the originality taken out. Three parts, and the section on late imperial portraiture changes how you look at every bust in every museum.
A documentary on how post-Roman Britain turns into medieval England, following the archaeology where the written sources stop.
Part of Voices of the Past
Two hours and seven minutes on the founding, which is longer than most books give it. The length is the point: the traditions contradict each other and here the contradictions get room.
How far Roman traders and embassies actually got, read from the accounts themselves: China, the Baltic, the edge of the Sahara.
Part of The History of Byzantium
Mehmed II becomes sultan in 1451 and starts planning at once. A hundred and one minutes covering 1448 to 1453, which is the planning and the diplomacy; the siege itself comes later.
Four and a half centuries of Roman Britain in one documentary, from Caesar's landing to the withdrawal.
Part of Cost of Glory
Eighty-seven minutes on Sparta's greatest king, whom Plutarch pairs with Pompey. Greek material that earns its place by the pairing.
Part of Our Fake History
Historian Emma Southon's book Not Built In a Day argues Rome's economy was underpinned by the labour of millions forced into slavery, people who literally built Rome yet were rarely recorded by ancient historians.
Part of HistoryMarche
All parts of the Cimbrian war in one sitting, on the invasion that nearly ended Rome before Marius rebuilt the army.
Part of Tides of History
Seventy-six minutes recorded in spring 2020, two narrative historians talking about plague and revolution while living through the first of them.
With Anthony Kaldellis
Anthony Kaldellis of Chicago picks ten East Romans the political narrative skips over. Part one, seventy-five minutes.
Part two, seventy minutes, and the half where the choices get stranger.
Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast
Seventy minutes on Dyrrhachium and Pharsalus, where Caesar lost the first engagement badly and won the war a month later. The full panel on it.
Sixty-eight minutes with Johnathan Bi on the philosophy behind the politics, which is the half most narratives of Cato skip.
Part of The Ancients
With Carey Fleiner
Carey Fleiner on spinning: sixty-seven minutes on the work that produced clothes, sailcloth and rope, done by women and slaves, and almost absent from the histories written by men who wore the results.
With Emma Southon
Emma Southon on slavery as the engine of the whole system: the mines, the fields, the households, and the numbers Rome needed to keep replacing. Sixty-seven minutes.
With Ben Kane
Ben Kane on the legionary as he actually was across the centuries, since the segmented armour everyone pictures was worn for only part of that time. Sixty-six minutes.
Barry Strauss of Cornell picking ten emperors and defending each choice, which is more useful than a list because the argument is the point. Sixty-five minutes.
With Lindsay Powell
Lindsay Powell again on the Guard, sixty-five minutes this time. Same ground as the 2021 episode with more room for the emperors they made and unmade.
Sixty-four minutes on the aqueducts, which ran on gradients around two metres per kilometre, with Pliny putting the minimum at twenty centimetres and delivered water by the million litres a day.
Sixty-four minutes on the century, the unit that actually ran the Roman army: eighty men, one centurion, and the building block everything else was counted in.
Part of The Rest Is History
Harald Hardrada in the Varangian Guard, a Norwegian prince serving as a bodyguard in Constantinople before going home to claim a throne. Sixty-four minutes.
Lindsay Powell on the cohorts that guarded the emperor and then started choosing him. Sixty-three minutes from the Guard's founding to the point where the job reversed.
With Hannah Platts
Hannah Platts on communal latrines with no partitions, the shared sponge on a stick, and sewers that ran to the Tiber. Sixty-three minutes on the plumbing nobody puts in the films.
With Mike Duncan
Sixty-three minutes of two history podcasters interviewing each other at a bookshop event, which is where each of them says what his own show leaves out.
With Bret Devereaux
Bret Devereaux on his own paper on mail in the middle Republic: when Rome adopted it, how widespread it was, and what it cost to make. Sixty-three minutes.
Sixty-two minutes on gladiators as celebrities and property at once: sex symbols who could not marry freely and were buried outside the normal cemeteries.
Sixty-one minutes on the century that opens with Trajan's conquests and closes with civil war, and on how the equipment changed in between.
Sixty-one minutes on the century of fighting that made Italy Roman before any empire existed: Latins, Etruscans, Samnites, and the settlement terms that held it together.
Part of The Partial Historians
With Laura Jenkinson-Brown
Sixty-one minutes with Laura Jenkinson-Brown, who turned the Odyssey into a game you play through. Greek material in a Roman index, and worth it for how the two doctors argue with her.
Ben Kane on the centurion, the rank the whole army turned on: promoted from the ranks, paid many times a soldier's wage, and expected to die at the front. Sixty minutes.
With Mai Musié
Mai Musie on the Greek novel, the most widely read fiction in the empire for four centuries, and on what it says about how Romans sorted people. Sixty minutes.
With Jeremy Armstrong
Jeremy Armstrong on early Roman warfare as private warbands under aristocratic leaders, long before anything resembling a state army. Sixty minutes.
Sixty minutes of the magazine team recommending books, films and podcasts to each other, recorded in spring 2020. Useful as a reading list from people who read for a living.
With Harry Sidebottom
Harry Sidebottom walking through a fighter's day: the barracks, the diet of barley, the doctor, and the fact that most bouts were not meant to end in a death. Fifty- nine minutes.
Part four, fifty-nine minutes on the decades after Boudica, when Rome decided the province was worth holding and sent Agricola north to prove it.
With Alexander Mariotti
Alexander Mariotti on the economics of the games: who owned fighters, what they cost, and why killing your own investment made no sense. Fifty-eight minutes.
Fifty-eight minutes on Roman tourism: villas on the Bay of Naples, graffiti carved on Egyptian monuments, and guided tours of the Holy Land.
A fifth-century BC military grave turned up a macaque buried dressed as a legionary, and nobody can say whether he was a mascot or something closer. Fifty-eight minutes on animals in armies.
Part of Ancient Rome Live
The first dynasty told as the family it was, which explains more of the murders than the politics does.
Fifty-seven minutes on the Mithridatic Wars, 88 to 63 BC, begun with the massacre of tens of thousands of Italians in Asia in a single coordinated day.
Murray Dahm on his own book about the end of Roman Britain and the Saxon settlement, with Marc DeSantis asking the questions. Fifty-seven minutes.
Fifty-six minutes on Roman sexual norms, which sorted people by who was doing what to whom and cared about status far more than about gender.
Fifty-six minutes on the centuries before Rome was anyone: the tactical borrowing and restructuring that happened while nobody outside Italy was watching.
Fifty-six minutes on the family that held the Roman imperial title in the west for four centuries, and on Charles V, who was king of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor at once.
Fifty-six minutes on how a single commander fought off the Roman military machine with local troops and a rival senate. Guerrilla war before the word existed.
Part of The History of Rome
Fifty-five minutes of Mike Duncan reading his own first chapter, on the Gracchi and the decades where the Republic started coming apart.
Fifty-five minutes at Paestum, where three Greek temples from the sixth and fifth centuries BC stand better preserved than almost anything in Greece itself.
Fifty-five minutes on the Celts in the classical world, from the sack of Rome around 390 BC to the gold of Tolosa taken in 106 BC and promptly lost.
With Matthew McCarty
Matthew McCarty on Mithras, a cult with no scripture and hundreds of underground temples, and on how it got attached to 25 December by people arguing about Christmas. Fifty-four minutes.
Mike Loades on experimental archaeology with real chariots, including whether the scythed blades on the Boudica statue at Westminster could have existed. Fifty-four minutes.
Part three, fifty-four minutes on the revolt of AD 60. Cassius Dio puts the dead at eighty thousand and blames the loss of the province on a woman.
With Mary Beard
Mary Beard and Charlotte Higgins on borrowing: what Rome took from Greece, what it changed, and how thoroughly it rewrote the credit afterwards. Fifty-three minutes.
With Nicola Terrenato
Nicola Terrenato on Rome expanding by deal, with aristocratic families across Italy cutting arrangements with each other. Fifty-three minutes.
Fifty-three minutes on why Spain took Rome two hundred years to hold, which is longer than Gaul, Britain and Egypt put together.
Recorded live on location, fifty-three minutes on Roman London: the bridge, the port, the burning by Boudica, and what is still under the modern streets.
Part two, fifty-three minutes on the Saxon wars: thirty years of campaigning and forced conversion that built the kingdom Charlemagne was crowned over.
Part one, fifty-three minutes on Suetonius, who had the imperial archives open to him and used them to write the most quotable and least reliable book on the Caesars.
With Rebecca Jones
Rebecca Jones on marching camps, the temporary earthworks an army threw up every single night. Fifty-two minutes on the evidence that shows where legions went when they built nothing permanent.
With Andrea Brock
Andrea Brock on the earliest Rome as an engineering problem: a flood plain raised and drained by hand, decades before anyone would call it a city. Fifty-two minutes.
With Jesse Obert
Jesse Obert pushing against the standard account of the Roman navy: whether the fleets were permanent, and whether anti-piracy was really the job. Fifty-two minutes.
Fifty-two minutes on Sicily as the island everyone fought over: Greeks, Carthaginians, Syracusans and finally Rome, which took it first.
Fifty-two minutes with Victor Davis Hanson on Alexander destroying Thebes in 335 BC. Plutarch pairs Alexander with Caesar, which is the thread back to Rome.
Decades of excavation set against the legionary of the films: what he carried, what he was paid, where he slept and how long he lasted. Fifty-two minutes, and the clichés come off one by one.
With Daisy Dunn
Daisy Dunn on the women of the late Republic, Servilia, Fulvia, Clodia and the rest, who had no office and considerable power. Fifty-one minutes.
Fifty-one minutes opening the series, on the Roman rebel who held Spain against Rome for eight years. Beethoven and Machiavelli both took him as a subject, which says how long the story ran.
Roads, bridges, aqueducts and the Colosseum taken as engineering problems, with the solution drawn out each time. Fifty-one minutes, and the one to send someone who wants to know how the empire was physically held together.
Fifty minutes on mounted troops from the ninth century BC onward, as chariots gave way to riders and the stirrup still had not arrived.
Fifty minutes of the team on the novels, which is a better guide to what is worth reading than any list, because they can say where each book gets the kit wrong.
Part one, fifty minutes on the Frankish rise that ends with a Roman imperial title being handed out again in 800, three centuries after the west stopped issuing one.
Terry Jones on the Romans who never ruled anything: what they ate, how they washed, what they found funny. Fifty minutes, and the Python eye for the ridiculous detail turns out to be a good instrument for social history.
Daisy Dunn on Catullus, who wrote a hundred and sixteen poems in the last decades of the Republic and used language that translators kept quietly softening. Forty-nine minutes.
With Josho Brouwers
Forty-nine minutes on three revolts across seventy years: AD 66, the diaspora rising under Trajan, and Bar Kokhba, each ending worse than the last.
Forty-nine minutes on the auxiliaries, recruited from the provinces and paid in citizenship after twenty-five years. Half the army, and the half that is usually skipped.
Six rulers from Julius Caesar to Hadrian, taken one at a time, public life beside private life. Forty-nine minutes an episode, and the shape of the whole empire read off the men who held it.
Massalia, founded by Greeks from Phocaea around 600 BC and still there. Forty-eight minutes on France's oldest city, which was Greek before it was anything else.
With Dennis Romano
Dennis Romano on Venice from salt pans to empire to tourism, a city founded by people leaving the Roman mainland and lasting a thousand years. Forty-eight minutes.
Forty-eight minutes on four centuries against Sasanian Persia, the last rival Rome treated as an equal and the one that outlasted the western empire.
Forty-eight minutes of the team on the year's books and documentaries, which makes it a reading and viewing list from people who can say where each one is wrong.
Forty-eight minutes on where Rome kept going after it fell: in Constantinople, in the Tsars, in the Kaisers, and in arguments still running today.
Part of Lost Roman Heroes
Forty-eight minutes on the campaign Heraclius funded by melting down church gold, because everything else had been tried. The gamble that beat Persia and emptied the treasury.
With Colchester Museum Curator Glynn
The Colchester Vase carries names scratched beside its fighters, which turns a decorated pot into a record of a real bout. Forty-seven minutes on gladiators this far north.
Ben Kane on the practical odds: fire, disease, the water supply, the food, and the parts of the city you would not walk through after dark. Forty-seven minutes.
With Catherine Fletcher
Catherine Fletcher on the road network, from the Via Appia of 312 BC onward, and on what it was built for, which was armies before it was trade. Forty-seven minutes.
Six women at a time, chosen between six and ten years old, sworn for thirty years, and buried alive if the vow broke. Forty-six minutes on Rome's only full-time priesthood.
Forty-six minutes on the auxiliary, recruited from the provinces, paid less than a legionary, and handed citizenship on discharge along with a bronze diploma to prove it.
With Owen Rees
Forty-six minutes with Owen Rees on how Rome took Greece in fifty years, and on Corinth in 146 BC, destroyed in the same year as Carthage.
Forty-six minutes with the designer Mark Backhouse on Strength and Honour, and on what a set of rules has to decide about ancient combat before anyone can play it.
Forty-six minutes with the maker of the Imperium Romanum channel on making Roman documentaries, and on what an audience will and will not sit through.
Forty-six minutes on the trailer alone, before anyone had seen the film, working out which bits of it could have happened.
The same panel after actually watching Gladiator II, forty-six minutes. Worth taking with the trailer episode for how far the guesses landed.
With Ian Goh
Ian Goh on the Roman dinner party, which was mostly conversation, reclining and a fixed order of courses. Forty-five minutes correcting the orgy.
Forty-five minutes on whether the Marian reforms happened as a package at all, which is now seriously doubted, and on what Marius did do.
Forty-five minutes on the three decades of campaigning that began when Germanic warbands crossed the Rhine in 17 BC and ended at Teutoburg.
Forty-five minutes on the eastern half under pressure before the formal division: Gothic raids across the Danube and a frontier that never got quiet.
Part two, forty-five minutes on Abbasid Baghdad, founded in 762 and inheriting the Greek learning that the Roman east had kept.
With Carolina Lima
Carolina Lima on the cremated remains from Roman Colchester and what isotopes and bone can say about where those people had come from. Forty-four minutes.
Forty-four minutes recorded at Chalke Valley on what a Roman soldier actually carried: the pilum designed to bend, the short gladius, and the shield used as a weapon.
Harry Sidebottom on his own book, forty-four minutes on why a society that valued restraint watched people die for entertainment and saw no contradiction.
With Francesca Fulminante
Francesca Fulminante on how villages became a city, read from the archaeology of central Italy and not from Livy. Forty-four minutes.
Forty-four minutes on the Republic around 450 BC, when the magistracies and the written law appear and the city is poorer than it had been under the kings.
With Greg Woolf
Greg Woolf on the city itself: how a million people were fed, housed and kept from burning, and what it took to keep them there. Forty-three minutes.
With Fraser Hunter
The Traprain Law hoard, dug up near Edinburgh in 1919 and buried around the time the legions left Britain. Fraser Hunter on why Roman silver ended up chopped into pieces north of the wall. Forty-three minutes.
Forty-three minutes on the fifty years in which Rome, which had barely noticed the Greek east, took down both of its great kingdoms.
Forty-three minutes running through the peoples Rome fought, including the ones it never conquered and the ones that came back.
Forty-three minutes of recommendations from the magazine team, new studies and old standards, with reasons attached to each.
With Walter Scheidel
Walter Scheidel on the question nobody asks: China reassembled its empire repeatedly and Europe never did once. Forty-two minutes on why the failure to reunify mattered.
Forty-two minutes on the whole question, answered by looking at Rome's rivals as carefully as at Rome, which is where most accounts stop short.
With Julien Blurel
Julien Blurel, who makes the Invicta channel, on rebuilding a legion at true scale to see how much ground it actually covers. Forty-two minutes.
Daniel Ogden on ancient werewolves and the strix, the night bird that drank blood, and on how both survived into folklore unbroken. Forty-one minutes.
With Robert Symmons
Robert Symmons on Fishbourne in Sussex, begun within three decades of the conquest and found in 1960 by a workman digging a water main. Forty-one minutes.
With Anne Rogerson
Anne Rogerson on Virgil, who asked for the Aeneid to be burned and was overruled by Augustus. Forty-one minutes on the poem that became Rome's official founding story.
Forty-one minutes on 509 BC and on how little is actually known about the first decades: the consular lists are reconstructions and the stories are later.
Forty-one minutes on what a century of conquest did to the conquering city: the money, the slaves, the building, and the politics that came with them.
Mary Beard on the office itself: what an emperor actually did all day, and why the wildly different personalities produced such similar reigns. Forty minutes.
With Matthew Nicholls
Matthew Nicholls on chariot racing, which drew crowds several times the size of the Colosseum's and ran four factions with supporters who rioted over them. Forty minutes.
Forty minutes on the villages on the hills above the Tiber and how they merged, which is the part the founding myth papers over.
Forty minutes on three centuries against Parthia, the neighbour Rome never conquered and which killed two emperors and one triumvir.
With Ewan Coopey
Thirty-nine minutes with Ewan Coopey on what auxiliaries and legionaries chose to put on their own gravestones, from northern Britain to the Near East. Rank, years served, and who paid for the stone.
Jo Ball on what happened to the losers: enslavement, ransom, display in a triumph, or execution at the end of it. Thirty-nine minutes.
Caroline Winterer of Stanford on the decline analogy: who reaches for it, and what it has to assume about Rome before it works. A talk, filmed as a talk, and thirty-nine minutes of argument.
Alastair Blanshard on where the orgy came from, which is largely later writers and a Victorian appetite for a decadent Rome. Thirty-seven minutes.
With William Dalrymple
William Dalrymple on Indian culture moving east through the same trade that reached Rome, and on what it became at Angkor. Thirty-seven minutes.
Part of HistoryHit
Thirty-seven minutes checking the film against the evidence: how often gladiators actually died, where they came from, and what the thumb meant.
Thirty-six minutes on Armorica under Rome, a peninsula of the empire with its own trade routes to Britain and a very thin written record.
Thirty-six minutes on what people actually ate, which involved no tomatoes, no aubergines and a great deal of fermented fish sauce.
With Vicky Kalambakal
Thirty-six minutes with Vicky Kalambakal and Murray Dahm on Caesar as a commander, working from the campaigns he wrote up himself and the gaps he left.
Part of The Ancient World
Thirty-four minutes on Gaius Caesar's eastern expedition, with Juba II along, and on the wound in Armenia that killed Augustus's heir.
With Caroline Freeman-Cuerdan
Caroline Freeman-Cuerdan on the venatio, the morning event before the gladiators, and on the supply chain that emptied provinces of animals. Thirty-three minutes.
Thirty-three minutes on Solon of Athens cancelling debts and freeing the enslaved, read from his own surviving verse. Part of the long run before Rome.
Aquae Sextiae in 102 BC, the first of the two battles that stopped the migration.
Thirty-two minutes on the open arguments: the Marian reforms, the pilum, the gladius, and how much of the standard account rests on one late source.
Five eyewitness accounts of military disasters, read from the sources themselves. That is what this channel does: the text, with no narrator summarising it for you.
Thirty-one minutes on Severus and Plautianus, a friendship that cost him his family, and on the British campaign he used to close the account.
Thirty-one minutes on Eunus, enslaved in Sicily, who renamed himself King Antiochus and led the first Servile War against the Republic.
Thirty-one minutes doing what Plutarch does: setting a Roman beside a Greek and asking which life went better. The comparison is the method this whole show is built on.
Thirty minutes on Manuel II playing an Ottoman civil war for everything it was worth, covering 1402 to 1430.
Thirty minutes on the eight-year Ottoman blockade of Constantinople, lifted when Timur destroyed Bayezid's army at Ankara in 1402.
With Christian Koepfer
Thirty minutes on the third century with Christian Koepfer and Glenn Barnett, on an empire that spent fifty years making and unmaking emperors.
Thirty minutes on Drusilla of Mauretania, great-granddaughter of Antony and Cleopatra, married to the procurator of Judaea who kept Paul in prison for two years.
Thirty minutes on the revolt of Avidius Cassius, who declared himself emperor on a false report that Marcus Aurelius had died, and was killed by his own men.
Part of When in Rome
With Peter Guest
Thirty minutes recorded on the site itself: Caerleon in south Wales, headquarters of the Second Legion and the furthest west this show has been. The amphitheatre and the barracks are still there.
With Yorkshire Museum
Four objects found by metal detectorists near Ampleforth in May 2020, including a bronze bust thought to be Marcus Aurelius. Twenty-nine minutes on what they were buried for.
Twenty-nine minutes on Roman intelligence: the frumentarii who started as grain officers and ended as the emperor's informers, and the couriers who carried it all.
Twenty-eight minutes on the specialists: scouts, speculatores, and the units that did the work an army needs done before a battle exists.
Twenty-eight minutes on Sohaemus of Emesa being made to help Rome annex Commagene, a client king used against a neighbouring client king.
Part of Being Roman with Mary Beard
A carved stone from a vineyard in southern Italy records an innkeeper's bill in dialogue, itemised down to the girl and the mule. Twenty-eight minutes on Calidius Eroticus.
Gaius Julius Alpinus Classicianus arrived as procurator in 61 to find the governor still killing Britons, and wrote to Nero that a province of corpses pays no tax. Twenty-eight minutes; his tombstone is in the British Museum.
Sulpicius Maximus was eleven when he improvised Greek verse in front of Domitian and a crowd of thousands, and his parents put the poem on his tomb. Twenty-eight minutes.
Marcus Aurelius as his letters show him, which is a good deal warmer and more flirtatious than the Meditations ever let on. Twenty-eight minutes on the correspondence with Fronto.
Allia Potestas, remembered on her tombstone by a lover who shared her with a friend and thought the arrangement worth carving in stone. Twenty-seven minutes with Mary Beard on a single inscription.
Galen as team doctor to the gladiators at Pergamon, keeping expensive men alive and learning anatomy from their wounds. Twenty-seven minutes.
The longest private inscription to survive from Rome: a husband's account of a wife who hid him through the proscriptions and offered him a divorce when she could not bear children. Twenty-seven minutes.
Five eyewitness accounts of war read straight from the sources, opening in Rome.
With Kevin Butcher
Kevin Butcher on Saturnalia, 17 to 23 December: drinking, gift-giving, and masters serving their slaves for the duration. Twenty-six minutes from the History Hit archive.
Twenty-six minutes on the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, with the episode's title taken from the Canaanite god whose name is the root of shalom and salaam.
Twenty-six minutes on the overthrow of a client king of Armenia dragging Rome and Parthia into open war again.
Part of Echoes of Empires
Twenty-six minutes on the Frankish kingdom that met the Arab advance into Gaul, and on the conversion that made it Rome's heir in the west.
Twenty-six minutes opening the final season on the dark ages, starting with Iberia falling in a few years. The question the season asks is how dark those centuries really were.
Twenty-five minutes from the archive on the Forum: a drained marsh between hills that ended up holding the law courts, the treasury and the speaker's platform.
Twenty-five minutes on Roman eye medicine, known from the stone stamps oculists used to mark their ointment sticks, dozens of which survive with the recipe named on them.
Twenty-five minutes of listener questions on the siege of 1453 and the Palaiologan century around it.
John V faces rebellion from his own sons and grandsons while the empire becomes an Ottoman vassal and a Venetian bargaining chip. Twenty-five minutes, 1371 to 1391.
Part of Byzantium And The Crusades
Twenty-five minutes on daily life in the crusader states, Outremer, the part of the story that is neither battle nor politics.
With Alisa Vanlint
Alisa Vanlint on the evidence for women fighting in the arena, which comes down to a relief from Halicarnassus, a Senate ban, and a handful of hostile lines. Twenty- three minutes.
Twenty-three minutes of Pliny the Elder's Natural History read aloud, which is where antiquity filed its strangest reported facts, collected by a man who later died sailing towards Vesuvius.
Part of Historia Civilis
The question mark in the title is the episode: whether Caesar was reaching for a crown, and what the evidence for that really is.
Twenty-two minutes on Roman rubbish. Monte Testaccio is a hill thirty-five metres high made of smashed olive oil amphorae, which is what accumulates when a container cannot be used twice.
Twenty-two minutes on the largest army sent east, and on the emperor who drowned in a river before it arrived.
Twenty-two minutes on August 357, when Julian met thirty-five thousand Germans crossing the Rhine. The battle that made his reputation and his claim to the throne.
Twenty-two minutes on the 1180s, when the crusader states could not agree on a leader with Saladin at the door.
Volturnus in 554, the last battle a Roman army won in Italy. A quiet end to the animation series.
Twenty-one minutes on an empire run by two regents, Stilicho in the west and Eutropius in the east, with emperors who were children. The structure that failed in 410 is set up here.
Pharsalus and the flight to Egypt, ending with a murder on a beach. The diagrams show where each legion stood, which a narration cannot.
Twenty minutes on the children's crusade of 1212, one of the strangest episodes in the whole story and one where the sources are at their least reliable.
Nisibis in 217, three days against Parthia that ended with Rome paying two hundred million sesterces to go home.
What happened after the Rubicon, with the senate leaving the city and Caesar walking into an empty capital. The animation makes the speed of it legible.
Eighteen minutes on climate as a force in Roman history, from the warm centuries of the early empire to the cooling that came with the plague years.
What a triumph actually involved: the route, the spoils, the prisoners killed at the end. A standalone explainer; it stands outside the narrative run.
A Roman writing about the new sect and about a man he calls Jesus son of Panthera, read as the source gives it.
The floods that repeatedly put the forum under water, and what Rome did about them.
Seventeen minutes closing the Sertorius arc with what happened in Rome afterwards. Short, and the place to start if you want the shape before the detail.
Four early churches in Rome examined as buildings, which is where the transition from temple to basilica is visible.
Sixteen minutes pushing back on the standard story that the late army was a shadow of the early one, which rests largely on writers with an argument to make.
Sixteen minutes on how the Guard was structured, whether it campaigned, and why emperors kept a force in the city that kept killing them.
The sacred boundary of the city, why a general lost his command by crossing it, and how that one line shaped Roman politics for five centuries.
Fourteen minutes on the Ninth, which vanishes from the record after York, with a theory offered and the Scottish massacre firmly not endorsed.
Part of toldinstone
Fourteen minutes at Arykanda, stacked up a Lycian mountainside in terraces so that the theatre looks out over the valley from halfway up.
Fourteen minutes at Pinara, a Lycian city under a cliff face honeycombed with rock- cut tombs, empty since the Byzantine centuries.
Fourteen minutes on Delos, sacred birthplace of Apollo and, once Rome made it a free port in 166 BC, the busiest slave market in the Aegean. Both facts are on the same small island.
A walk through the Roman collection at the Metropolitan Museum with someone explaining what each piece is for.
Thirteen minutes on client kingdoms copying Roman equipment and organisation, from Thrace to Mauretania, and how far the imitation went.
Part of Invicta
Thirteen minutes on a Total War patch, which is here because the family-tree system is a decent model of how Roman political dynasties actually worked.
What Caesar actually built once he had won, which is the part the story usually skips on its way to the Ides.
Twelve minutes on the evocati, veterans recalled to serve again, and on how much political weight a body of recalled soldiers carried.
Twelve minutes on how orders travelled across a battlefield: horns, standards, and what a soldier could actually hear once it started.
Twelve minutes on posca, the sour wine and water mix that was the standard army drink, and on how Roman soldiers made bad water safe.
Twelve minutes on what a surrounded legion did, and whether the sources describe a drilled formation for it or improvisation.
Twelve minutes chasing the last attested legion, with Legio V Macedonica in Egypt as the leading candidate and the evidence for it thinner than the story.
The river followed from its source to the sea, and what it meant for a city built on it.
Eleven minutes on what happened to auxiliary recruitment once Caracalla made everyone a citizen in 212, which removed the main incentive for joining.
Eleven minutes on whether recruits had to buy their way in, and on the deductions from pay that the Egyptian papyri actually record.
Eleven minutes on Roman marines, who in the games look like legionaries in red, and in the evidence rather less so.
Eleven minutes on the last legion to take the field as a unit, asked separately for the western and eastern empires because the answers differ by centuries.
Eleven minutes on whether ancient armies had elite units in any modern sense, and on the handful of battles where one appears to have decided the day.
Eleven minutes at Patara, capital of the Lycian League and later the province, where the council chamber has been rebuilt and the lighthouse still stands in pieces.
A Roman city in Algeria preserved well enough to walk through, filmed on the ground.
A street into the forum reopened after centuries, filmed as the excavation finished.
Where executions actually happened: the Carcer, the Tarpeian Rock, and what the locations meant to the crowd.
Ten minutes on the switch from spear to pilum and gladius, and on why an army would give up reach on purpose.
Ten minutes on whether the revolt of AD 60 could have ended differently, including what an alliance with the northern tribes would have been worth.
Ten minutes on the standing camp under attack: who was already awake, how the alarm travelled, and how long the ditch bought you.
Ten minutes on the ninety-odd per cent of army life that was not battle: building, drilling, quarrying, and the paperwork that survives from Egypt.
Ten minutes on the Roman navy beyond the trireme: liburnians, quinqueremes, river patrol craft, and what each was actually for.
Ten minutes on Cynoscephalae and Pydna, and on whether the phalanx was obsolete or just badly used on broken ground.
Ten minutes on the campaign against the Marcomanni that was called off in AD 6 when Illyricum revolted, and what it would have looked like.
Ten minutes chasing a source: which ancient author Murray Dahm was quoting about a Roman equivalent of the Marathon run, and whether it holds up.
Ten minutes on how an army recruited from Syria to Britain gave orders anyone could follow, and what Latin actually functioned as.
Ten minutes on the counterfactual, answered by someone who spends his time on what did happen and is suitably careful with what did not.
Ten minutes on why Alexander's best arm was so much less effective under his successors, which is a question about doctrine and not about horses.
Ten minutes on the allies who made up half of every Republican army and are almost never described as anything other than present.
Ten minutes on the best question in the series: Rome's method of absorbing defeat was visible to everyone in Italy, and nobody copied it.
What survives of Roman Alexandria, which is less than you would expect and stranger.
The trophy as a monument type, from a pile of captured armour to the marble versions on Trajan's column.
Nine minutes on the pre-manipular army, when Rome did fight in a phalanx, and on what made it change.
Nine minutes on the wedge, the formation the sources keep mentioning and never explain, and on what it could have been in practice.
Nine minutes on how a bodyguard ended up selling the throne, which took a permanent barracks in the city and an emperor who needed them nearby.
Nine minutes on the ugly mechanics of enslavement after a battle: separation, movement, sale, and the deliberate breaking of any group that could act together.
Nine minutes on countering massed archery, which is the Near Eastern problem Rome and everyone else in the region had to solve.
Nine minutes on why imperial campaigns are so much worse documented than Republican ones, when the empire was larger and more literate.
Nine minutes on the logistics of moving a legion: whether it went at once, and who held the fort it left behind.
Nine minutes on when the three lines of the manipular army stopped being distinct, which happened gradually and not by a reform anyone announced.
Nine minutes at Xanthos in Lycia, where the dead were put in pillar tombs raised above the living. The reliefs from the Harpy Tomb are in London; the pillars are still standing.
The Roman capital of Crete, filmed on site, with the law code carved in stone that is still standing there.
Eight minutes on the standing argument about Caesar in Gaul, where the casualty figures come from his own account and are not modest.
Eight minutes on the polybolos, a repeating catapult that worked and that nobody kept, which makes it a good test of what ancient armies actually valued.
Eight minutes in the Hippodrome, where the Nika riots of 532 ended with the army penning the crowd in and killing it, and where an obelisk cut for Thutmose III still stands on the base the Byzantines built for it.
Eight minutes at Oenoanda, where a citizen named Diogenes had an entire Epicurean philosophy carved along a public portico for passers-by to read.
Eight minutes on the Romanesque churches of northern Spain, put up five centuries after the empire and still using its arch, its vault and its basilica plan.
Eight minutes on the Meta Sudans, the conical fountain that stood beside the Colosseum from Domitian's reign until Mussolini had the stump cleared in 1936 to widen a road for parades.
Eight minutes on Roman bathing taken as medicine: mineral springs, prescribed cures, and resorts built on water that was thought to work on particular complaints.
Eight minutes on the temple of Serapis that Caracalla put on the Quirinal, one of the largest in the city and now known mostly from two enormous fragments.
The Byzantine city in the Peloponnese that outlasted Constantinople by seven years, filmed among the ruins.
The largest surviving water tanks in the empire, filmed inside them. The Piscina Mirabilis at Misenum held twelve thousand cubic metres for the fleet.
Ravenna, Milan, Trier and Constantinople as the cities that took over when Rome stopped being the capital.
Seven minutes on decimation and lot-drawing in the year of four emperors, a punishment that is far rarer in the record than in the films.
Seven minutes on the weakest arm of the Republican army, which is exactly the arm Hannibal used to destroy it.
Seven minutes at Sidyma in the Lycian hills, where the tombs outlasted the town and a village was later built in among them.
Corinth after Rome destroyed it and rebuilt it as a colony, which is two cities on one site.
Five minutes at the Tower of Hercules above A Coruna, built under Trajan and the only Roman lighthouse anywhere still in service.
Five minutes at Segovia, where roughly 25,000 granite blocks stand in two tiers with no mortar holding any of them together.
Part of Kings and Generals
Animated campaign maps with arrows that actually move the way the armies did. Best used the moment a podcast loses you geographically, which with Roman campaigns is roughly every twenty minutes.
How the Roman army was organised, paid, fed and moved, at the level of grain rations and marching order. Logistics, on the argument that an empire lives in its supply lines.
Battle animations with the terrain drawn properly, which turns out to be the whole difference. The Punic Wars series is the clearest visual account of Hannibal's campaigns anywhere.
Arms, armour and Latin pronunciation, from someone who handles the reproductions and reads the sources in the original. Opinionated and occasionally combative; strongest when he is holding a gladius and explaining why the grip is that shape.
Long-form narrative documentaries, often two hours, in the register of a good radio feature. For the ancient world it comes nearer to a book than anything else on YouTube.
Darius Arya filming on the sites themselves, usually with the excavation still open behind him. Less polished than the animated channels and considerably closer to the dirt.
Single-subject deep dives of an hour or more, delivered flat and sourced carefully. The kind of channel that assumes you already know the outline and wants to argue about the detail.
Everything else, in order
Part of Ancient Art Podcast (audio) · Art and culture of the ancient Mediterranean; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps · Peter Adamson on the whole history of philosophy; 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
Part of Myths and Legends · Myths and folklore retold; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of Literature and History · Two-hour episodes on famous works, in order; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast · The companion to Ancient Warfare magazine, since 2008
Part of The History of Ancient Greece · Greek history in order, from the Stone Age forward; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of Ancient History Hound · Ancient Blogger on Greece, Rome and antiquity for every level; 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 Podcast episodes – The Secret History of Western Esotericism Podcast (SHWEP) · The forgotten story of Western thought; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast · The three centuries between Alexander and Actium; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of Professor Kozlowski Lectures · University lectures on philosophy and the humanities; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of Lucretius Today - Epicurus and Epicurean Philosophy · Epicurean philosophy read line by line; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of Ad Navseam · Two classicists in lively discussion; 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 The Delicious Legacy · Food history from a Greek gourmand; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of Triumvir Clio's School of Classical Civilization · Ancient literature for people who want to start reading it; only the Roman episodes are indexed
With Michael Fontaine
Part of Young Heretics · Spencer Klavan on the great works; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of Ithaca Bound · Andrew Schiestel on the Mediterranean, 2021 to 2022; only the Roman episodes are indexed
With LJ Trafford
With Ed Watts
Part of Expanding Eyes: A Visionary Education · Lectures on literature and mythology; only the Roman episodes are indexed
With Fiona Radford, Peta Greenfield
Part of Greeced Lightning · Myths and movies with a doctor of classics; only the Roman episodes are indexed
With Andrew Tibbs
With Caroline Lawrence
Part of The Classics Podcast · The Classical Association: revision, myth and interviews; only the Roman episodes are indexed
With Andrew Wallace-Hadrill
With Joanne Ball
Part of Echoes of History · History Hit for Assassin's Creed; only the Roman episodes are indexed
With Abigail Graham
With Llewelyn Morgan
With Sam Moorhead
Part of Kings and Generals · Military history in campaigns and battles; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of WINNOW: A Couple’s Close Reading of the Iliad and Odyssey · A couple reading epic one book per episode, Homer first and now Virgil's Aeneid; only the Roman episodes are indexed
With Hannah Cornwell
