OCR A Level Classical Civilisation H408/22 · A-level
9 episodes · listening order
This route follows Imperial Image, option H408/22 on OCR's A Level Classical Civilisation specification, which examines how Augustus built and defended his position as Rome's first emperor. Nine episodes trace that reign from the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra through the constitutional settlement of 27 BC, the peace he claimed to have brought, and the monuments and family he used to make the claim visible. It opens at Actium and closes with the heir Augustus lost before he could succeed him.
Read the exam syllabus
Part of Historia Civilis
Actium in animated blocks, which sounds absurd and is the clearest explanation of the battle anywhere. Historia Civilis makes fleet movements legible in a way no documentary manages.
Twenty-six minutes of coloured rectangles on the last year of both of them, Actium to the asp. Historia Civilis is strongest on sequence, and 30 BC is almost entirely sequence.
Part of The Ancients
With Hannah Cornwell
16 January 27 BC, the day Octavian was handed the name Augustus and had the gates of Janus shut. Hannah Cornwell on what actually changed that morning, in fifty minutes.
Part of Ancient Rome Live
Fifty-six minutes on the constitutional sleight of hand: a man who invented no new office ended up holding everything, and the Senate voted him each piece of it.
Part of The Partial Historians
With Victoria Austen
Victoria Austen on the altar of peace and the painted garden room from Livia's villa, two Augustan works about nature and control. Fifty-nine minutes.
Victoria Austen on the tomb Augustus built for himself at thirty-five, decades before he needed it, and on what a garden-topped mound was saying to Romans. An hour on architecture as a claim.
Lindsay Powell on the later career of Marcus Agrippa: the aqueducts, the first Pantheon, the fleet that won Actium. Sixty-seven minutes on the man who built most of what Augustus is remembered for.
With Emma Southon
Livia had more influence than any woman in Roman politics and a reputation as a poisoner invented mostly by Tacitus. The episode separates the two.
Part of toldinstone
Seven minutes at the cenotaph raised in Lycia for Gaius Caesar, the grandson Augustus meant to succeed him, who died there in AD 4 at twenty-three. The tomb is empty; the succession went to Tiberius.
