Imperial Image

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.

Part of Historia Civilis

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.

Part of The Partial Historians

With Victoria Austen

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.