BBC Radio 4, one Roman life in twenty-eight minutes
12 episodes indexed · 5 hours
Presented by Mary Beard
Periods · The kings, The Republic, The late Republic, The Pax Romana, The third-century crisis, Christian Rome, The fall of the west
Themes · Daily life Love and sex Women
Beard takes a single ordinary Roman and rebuilds a life out of whatever survives of it, in twenty-eight minutes, with a BBC Radio 4 budget behind her. Twelve of those are Roman and they are indexed here; the feed was renamed Ancient Lives in 2026 and moved to Greek subjects. She is the most widely read Roman historian alive and this is the shortest way to hear how she works.
Where to start. Anywhere in series one. Each episode stands on its own.
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
The Julio-Claudians AD 14 – 68 · 1
The letters of Claudius Terentianus, a young soldier who wrote home begging his father for sandals and complained about nearly everything else. Twenty-eight minutes on the army from inside it.
The Flavians and Vesuvius AD 68 – 96 · 1
Lucius Caecilius Iucundus lent money, ran auctions and took a cut of both, and his business archive survived the ash on wax tablets. Twenty-eight minutes on Pompeii's middleman.
The High Empire AD 98 – 192 · 2
With Elizabeth Fentress
Julia Balbilla wrote verses on the leg of the Colossus of Memnon while travelling up the Nile with Hadrian and Sabina, and they are still legible. Twenty-eight minutes.
Regina was a British slave from the Catuvellauni, freed and married by Barates, a Syrian from Palmyra, and he buried her at South Shields in two languages. Twenty- eight minutes.
Dominate and Christian Rome AD 284 – 395 · 1
Twenty-seven minutes on the clerks: the thousands of men who kept the provinces fed and watered, and the complaints they left behind about each other.
Roman Life, Army and Culture across the centuries · 7
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.