Seven films on the fall of the Republic
16 episodes indexed · 6 hours · Historia Civilis
Periods · The kings, The Republic, The late Republic, The Pax Romana, The third-century crisis, Christian Rome, The fall of the west
Themes · Power struggle Battle Government
Seven films indexed here and they cluster on one stretch: Actium, the death of Antony and Cleopatra, the years the Republic stopped being one. The battles are drawn as moving blocks on a map, so what you follow is the manoeuvre.
Where to start. The Battle of Actium.
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 Late Republic 133 – 44 BC · 1
Cicero in his sixties taking on Antony with words alone, and losing his head for it. The Philippics as a political campaign.
Julius Caesar 100 – 42 BC · 4
The Ides drawn minute by minute, with who stood where in the theatre of Pompey. Sixty conspirators is a logistical problem and this shows it as one.
The years of manoeuvring before the crossing, drawn as diagrams the way this channel does everything. You see the legal trap close around Caesar before he reaches the river.
Twenty-two minutes of moving rectangles on Philippi in 42 BC, two battles three weeks apart in which both sides lost a commander to suicide on bad information.
Antony's speech and the riot it started, which decided more than the murder did.
Antony, Cleopatra and Augustus 44 BC – AD 14 · 5
Thirty-eight minutes on Pompey's surviving son, who held Sicily with a fleet and starved Italy of grain until Agrippa built a navy that could beat him.
Thirty minutes of rectangles on Antony's Parthian campaign, the one that lost him the reputation Actium then finished off.
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.
Twenty-six minutes on the years when the triumvirate stopped pretending, told through the propaganda each side published about the other.
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.
Roman Life, Army and Culture across the centuries · 6
The question mark in the title is the episode: whether Caesar was reaching for a crown, and what the evidence for that really is.
Pharsalus and the flight to Egypt, ending with a murder on a beach. The diagrams show where each legion stood, which a narration cannot.
What happened after the Rubicon, with the senate leaving the city and Caesar walking into an empty capital. The animation makes the speed of it legible.
What a triumph actually involved: the route, the spoils, the prisoners killed at the end. A standalone explainer; it stands outside the narrative run.
The sacred boundary of the city, why a general lost his command by crossing it, and how that one line shaped Roman politics for five centuries.
What Caesar actually built once he had won, which is the part the story usually skips on its way to the Ides.
