Being Roman with Mary Beard

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.