Darius Arya on site, sixteen films
26 episodes indexed · 6 hours · Ancient Rome Live
Periods · The kings, The Republic, The late Republic, The Pax Romana, The third-century crisis, Christian Rome, The fall of the west
Themes · Archaeology Daily life Engineering Government Power struggle Religion Intrigue
Arya is an archaeologist and he films on the site itself, with the wall or the aqueduct behind him while he explains it. That is what video can do and audio cannot. He turns up a second time as a guest on The Partial Historians, so you can hear him at length after watching him point at a wall.
Where to start. The Age of Augustus, then whichever site you have stood in yourself.
I feel like…
Cogitare, how it was thought and ordered
Sentire, what was lived and endured
Facere, what hands made and did
when it happens
how much time you have
The Republic Rising 509 – 146 BC · 1
Eight minutes on the Samnites, the mountain confederation that sent a Roman army under the yoke at the Caudine Forks in 321 BC and took three wars to subdue.
Antony, Cleopatra and Augustus 44 BC – AD 14 · 3
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.
The children Antony had with Cleopatra and with Octavia, and what Augustus did with them. Most of them lived.
Marcellus, Gaius, Lucius and Agrippa Postumus, the four who were supposed to succeed and did not. Tiberius was the last option, not the first.
The Flavians and Vesuvius AD 68 – 96 · 3
The amphitheatre riot of AD 59 between Pompeians and Nucerians, which Rome punished with a ten-year ban on games. Seventeen minutes, and there is a fresco of it painted by someone who was in the town.
Nine minutes on the Temple of Minerva in Domitian's Forum Transitorium, which stood nearly intact for a thousand years, spent the Middle Ages as a grain store, and came down in 1606 when Paul V wanted the marble for something else.
Eight minutes on the macellum, the covered market hall, traced from Pompeii to Jerash in Jordan. The plan barely changes between the two, which are two thousand kilometres apart.
Severans and the Third-Century Crisis AD 193 – 284 · 3
How the baths were built, how they were heated, and what stood in the niches. The engineering and the decoration in one film.
The edict of 212 that made almost every free inhabitant a citizen, and the argument about whether it was principle or tax revenue.
Eight minutes on the Septizodium, the three-storey show front Septimius Severus put at the foot of the Palatine in AD 203 so that travellers from Africa met it first. Sixtus V quarried it away in 1588.
Dominate and Christian Rome AD 284 – 395 · 1
Nine minutes on the last great bath complex built in Rome, raised on the Quirinal around AD 315 and pulled down in 1605 to clear ground for a cardinal's palace. The drawings made before it went are most of what survives.
The Fall of the West AD 395 – 565 · 1
Fifteen minutes on August 410, when a Gothic army that had served Rome for years opened the Salarian Gate. The city had not fallen to an enemy in eight hundred years.
Roman Life, Army and Culture across the centuries · 14
The first dynasty told as the family it was, which explains more of the murders than the politics does.
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.
The floods that repeatedly put the forum under water, and what Rome did about them.
Four early churches in Rome examined as buildings, which is where the transition from temple to basilica is visible.
A walk through the Roman collection at the Metropolitan Museum with someone explaining what each piece is for.
The river followed from its source to the sea, and what it meant for a city built on it.
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.
The trophy as a monument type, from a pile of captured armour to the marble versions on Trajan's column.
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 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.
