Tristan Hughes and the History Hit team, twice a week since 2020
238 episodes indexed · 195 hours
Presented by Tristan Hughes
Periods · The kings, The Republic, The late Republic, The Pax Romana, The third-century crisis, Christian Rome, The fall of the west
Themes · Battle Life on the frontier Power struggle Archaeology The army Government Daily life Religion
Two hundred and thirty-six episodes, no order required. Pick a subject.
76 min · This episode
The revolt itself, seventy-six minutes, and nothing before it required.
66 min · This episode
The eruption and the days around it, sixty-six minutes.
59 min · This episode
What the job involved, from the training yard to the contract, in fifty-nine minutes.
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Two episodes a week, every Sunday and Thursday, past six hundred in total and 237 of them about Rome. The guest is the person who did the work: the archaeologist from the excavation, the academic who wrote the monograph, the translator who gave a decade to the text. Hughes has read it before they arrive and asks the question a listener would ask, which sounds small and is the whole difference. Producer Joseph Knight, senior producer Anne-Marie Luff and audio editor Aidan Lonergan keep two of these a week on air, which is a schedule most weekly shows would not survive.
Where to start. Any subject you already like. Every 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
how much time you have
Before Rome c. 900 – 509 BC · 6
With Jeremy Armstrong
The founding myth taken seriously as a piece of storytelling, which is the more useful approach: the Romans believed it and acted on it.
The seven kings, and the far more interesting question of why there are exactly seven of them covering 244 years, which is an average reign no royal line has ever managed.
With Lucy Shipley
Start here for the people Rome learned it from. Cities, writing, painted tombs and a naval reach across the Tyrrhenian Sea while Rome was still huts on a hill.
Fifty-five minutes on how the dominant culture in Italy became a Roman province, city by city, over roughly two centuries. Veii went first, in 396 BC, after a siege the Romans told stories about for ever after.
With Rachel Pope
Rachel Pope on where the Celts actually began, in the Alpine and upper Danube country, long before the word attached itself to Iron Age Britain. Forty-nine minutes giving a loosely used term a map.
With Guy Bradley
Forty-four minutes on what the archaeology actually shows about the site: a river crossing, a salt road, and why anyone settled there.
The Republic Rising 509 – 146 BC · 8
Seventy-nine minutes on the counterfactual: Alexander lives past Babylon and turns west on a Republic that has only just taken Italy. Livy put the same question in book nine and answered it patriotically.
With Louis Rawlings
The king who beat Rome twice and gave the language a word for it. A good hour on why winning battles and winning wars are different problems.
Sixty-three minutes on the empire that ran from Thrace to the Indus, the largest of Alexander's successor states, and on how Rome cut it down at Magnesia and then by treaty.
With Steele Brand
Steele Brand on the citizen-farmer army: Pyrrhus lands at Tarentum in 280 BC expecting a walkover and spends six years learning otherwise. Fifty-nine minutes.
The awkward question of whether Rome was deliberately imperialist or kept acquiring an empire by accident. Historians have been arguing about this since the 1970s and the episode says so.
With Simon Elliott
Simon Elliott on the clashes between phalanx and legion, from Pyrrhus to Cynoscephalae and Pydna. Fifty-three minutes on what happened when the two systems actually met.
With Kathryn Lomas
Kathryn Lomas on the last of the three Samnite wars and what beating the mountain confederation did to Rome itself. Thirty-four minutes, the second of two.
Twenty-eight minutes with Kathryn Lomas on who the Samnites were before Rome fought them: a Campanian confederation that took three wars and half a century to break.
Carthage and the Punic Wars 814 – 146 BC · 15
What the city was like to live in, from the harbour to the tophet, which is the part every account of the wars skips.
How a nine-year-old swore an oath and spent the rest of his life keeping it, and what the Barcid position in Spain actually was.
Sixty-five minutes on Hannibal before Italy: the oath sworn at nine, the years campaigning in Spain, and the siege of Saguntum that handed Rome its war.
For over twenty years Rome and Carthage fought for supremacy over Sicily; Tristan Hughes and Carthage expert Eve MacDonald explore the First Punic War's naval clashes, boarding bridges, war elephants and sacred chickens.
With Eve MacDonald
The third war, which was not really a war: a disarmed city destroyed because Cato kept demanding it. Also disposes of the salting of the earth, which is a nineteenth-century invention.
Louis Rawlings on 211 BC, when Hannibal rode to the walls of Rome to break the siege of Capua and the Romans kept besieging Capua anyway. Fifty-five minutes.
Eve MacDonald on Carthage as a Phoenician colony on the Tunisian coast that outgrew the mother city at Tyre. Fifty-four minutes before Rome enters the story at all.
With Silvannen Gerrard
Silvannen Gerrard on the Seleucids, who had the real elephant army: an empire reaching to the Hindu Kush with a treaty supply of them from India. Fifty-two minutes.
480 BC is remembered for Thermopylae and Salamis, and in the same year Carthage and the Sicilian Greeks fought at Himera. Forty-seven minutes on the war nobody teaches.
December 218 BC, the first full battle after the Alps. Forty-five minutes on how Hannibal got a Roman army to cross a freezing river before breakfast and then ambushed it.
Forty-two minutes on a mid-December battle in northern Italy, which almost nobody in the ancient Mediterranean fought, and on why Hannibal wanted one.
21 June 217 BC, an entire consular army caught in fog against a lake shore with nowhere to go. Louis Rawlings on the ambush that killed Flaminius. Thirty-nine minutes.
Part two with Louis Rawlings, thirty-two minutes on the year between Trasimene and Cannae, when Fabius refused battle and Rome lost patience with him.
Thirty-one minutes on Cannae in 216 BC, where a smaller army enveloped a larger one and Rome lost more men in a day than on almost any day since.
Twenty-eight minutes on the crossing of 218 BC: out of south-east Spain, through hostile Celtic country, over two ranges, with elephants. Which pass he used is still argued over.
The Late Republic 133 – 44 BC · 16
With Ben Kane
Seventy-six minutes with the novelist Ben Kane, the longest of the show's four passes at Spartacus and the one with room for the revolt itself: the route up and down Italy, the winter at Thurii, the six thousand crosses on the Appian Way.
With Catharine Edwards
The coup that made Cicero and then destroyed him, because executing citizens without trial turned out to be the kind of precedent your enemies keep.
With Nick Rauh
Nick Rauh and Adam Dawson on piracy from Spain to Syria across the second and first centuries BC, and on Pompey clearing the sea in a single season. Sixty-three minutes.
Mutina, April 43 BC, with Octavian, Antony and Decimus Brutus all fielding armies and Cicero holding only a voice. Steele Brand takes Tristan Hughes through the campaign that gave the Philippics their weight and then cost Cicero his head and his hands.
Carrhae in 53 BC ended the richest man in Rome and opened three centuries of war with Parthia. Badly covered elsewhere.
With Alex Petkas
The man who marched on Rome, won, posted lists of citizens who could be killed for their property, and then resigned. Everything after him is downstream of the first two of those.
Forty-nine minutes on the revolt of 73 to 71 BC: how a gladiator from Thrace held Italy for two years, and why the Roman writers who recorded it were more frightened by the slaves who joined him than by the man himself.
Spartacus was Thracian, and this is forty-eight minutes on what that meant. Zosia Archibald on cavalry, worked gold and a people Rome mostly met as recruits and as slaves.
Forty-seven minutes measuring the 1960 Kubrick film against the sources, which for Spartacus are Appian, Plutarch and Florus writing generations later and disagreeing with each other. The show ran it again in 2024 at the same length.
The show's 2024 pass at the same question, in forty-seven minutes. Same ground as the 2020 episode, same running time; take whichever your app offers first.
With Emma Southon
Emma Southon on Publius Clodius Pulcher, who had himself adopted by a plebeian to hold the tribunate and was killed in a street fight on the Appian Way. Forty-six minutes.
Ronald Hutton on the Druids of Britain and Gaul: what Caesar reported, what Cicero's meeting with one suggests, and how little of either can be checked. Forty-five minutes.
With Federico Santangelo
Federico Santangelo on Marius, born 157 BC without rank, consul seven times, and called Rome's third founder by people who had just watched him save it. Forty-four minutes.
Thirty-nine minutes on how a man from Arpinum with no consular ancestors talked his way to the top of Roman politics. Catherine Steel on why the speeches still work.
Henriette van der Blom on Cicero across the whole career, thirty-six minutes, from the prosecution of Verres to the head and hands nailed up on the rostra.
With Peter Stothard
Peter Stothard on the richest man in Rome, who made it partly from fires and proscriptions and lost it all at Carrhae in 53 BC. Thirty-five minutes.
Julius Caesar 100 – 42 BC · 13
Seventy-four minutes on the man whose ancestor supposedly expelled the last king, which is a family expectation nobody should have to carry.
Counterfactuals are usually a waste of an hour. This one earns it by making the case that the Republic was already gone and the assassins were the last people to notice.
With Maria Wyke
Maria Wyke on what the Ides became afterwards: Dante, Shakespeare, and John Wilkes Booth shouting Latin from a stage. Fifty-five minutes on an afternoon that keeps getting reused.
The shorter, tidier version of the same day. Take this one if you want the events and the other if you want the room.
With Catherine Steel
The unglamorous decades before Gaul, when he was a heavily indebted politician buying an electorate. The part that explains the rest.
What happened on 15 March 44 BC, minute by minute, and how many of the sixty men involved Caesar had personally pardoned.
October 42 BC, and both of Caesar's assassins die by their own hand within three weeks on the same plain. Forty-nine minutes on the day the Republic stopped having defenders.
With Hannah Cornwell
Hannah Cornwell on the months after the Ides, when Antony held the consulship and the nineteen-year-old Octavian held Caesar's name. Forty-nine minutes on how that standoff became a triumvirate.
Forty-seven minutes on 15 March 44 BC, a date that was the first full moon of the Roman year before it was anything else.
With Lloyd Llewellyn Jones
Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones on the six Cleopatras before the famous one, a Ptolemaic line of queens who ruled, married brothers and killed relatives as policy. Forty-seven minutes.
With Philip Nothaft
Philip Nothaft on the Julian calendar, Caesar's reform that outlasted every other one and still sets the year, with 46 BC stretched to 445 days to force the seasons back into place. Forty-six minutes.
Forty-five minutes setting the two against each other on what can actually be compared: sieges, logistics, and what each of them inherited. Simon Elliott does pick one.
Simon Elliott on the two landings of 55 and 54 BC, neither of which left a garrison behind. Forty-two minutes on what Rome knew about Britain before it went, which was almost nothing.
Antony, Cleopatra and Augustus 44 BC – AD 14 · 14
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.
With Joyce Tyldesley
Cleopatra before the Romans got hold of her story: a Ptolemaic ruler who learned Egyptian when her dynasty had not bothered for three hundred years, playing the only hand a client kingdom had.
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.
With Robert Harris
Robert Harris on Agrippa, who won the wars and then had his name quietly worked out of the record by the friend he won them for. Fifty-seven minutes.
Over fifteen thousand men lost in the Teutoburg Forest in AD 9, and this episode carries the story past the ambush to what Germanicus found on the ground six years later. Fifty-three minutes.
With Daisy Dunn
Daisy Dunn on the pair from Tarsus to the tomb, fifty-three minutes. The political arithmetic gets as much room as the romance, which is the only way the ending makes sense.
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.
Joanne Ball on the basic question the story usually skips: where the battle actually happened, and how Kalkriese came to be the answer. Forty-eight minutes.
With Jeffrey Tatum
Jeff Tatum on the stretch from Philippi in 42 BC to Actium, the years when Antony was the senior partner in the triumvirate and spent that advantage. Forty-five minutes, the second of two parts.
Forty-three minutes on Agrippa before the buildings: Naulochus, Actium, and a career that stayed loyal at every point where it could have turned into a bid of his own.
Adrian Goldsworthy from the archive on what the Roman peace actually was: two centuries with less warfare inside the frontier than anywhere had managed, and what it cost to hold. Forty-two minutes.
Forty-two minutes on Antony before Cleopatra: Caesar's deputy, the master of horse, and the man who read the will out loud at the funeral.
Recorded at the site, forty-one minutes on the days before the ambush of September AD 9. Part one of two, and the ground does much of the explaining.
With Jane Draycott
Jane Draycott on Cleopatra Selene, walked through Octavian's triumph as a child and later ruling Mauretania as queen. Thirty-six minutes on the one who got out of that family alive.
The Julio-Claudians AD 14 – 68 · 24
With Conn Iggulden
Nero at seventeen, with Seneca writing his speeches and Burrus running the guard. Start here and the reign reads as a decline; start at the fire and it reads as a monster story.
Shushma Malik on Nero the performer: the lyre, the poetry, the Greek tour he came home from with 1,808 victory crowns. Sixty-one minutes on why an emperor on a stage scandalised Rome more than an emperor in a war.
Londinium founded around AD 47, burnt by Boudica inside fifteen years, rebuilt, and given up in the fifth century. Sixty minutes on the commercial logic of a bridging point nobody had thought worth a town before.
Recorded at the dig in Norfolk with William Bowden, on what the Iceni did after the revolt failed. Sixty minutes in which the archaeology keeps showing continuity where the written accounts report extermination.
With Holy Land, Jodi Magness
Jodi Magness on Herod outside the nativity: a client king who built Caesarea, Masada and the Temple platform, and killed several of his own sons. Fifty-six minutes.
With Elodie Harper
Elodie Harper on the revolt of AD 60, when Camulodunum, Londinium and Verulamium all burned and the province came close to being given up. Fifty-six minutes.
Fifty-five minutes on whether the early Christians read Nero into the number of the Beast, and on what the persecution after the fire of 64 actually looked like.
With Caitlin Gillespie
Caitlin Gillespie on the evidence for Boudica, which is Tacitus and Cassius Dio writing decades later with speeches they invented. Fifty-four minutes separating the queen from the statue.
Daisy Dunn on the general who won back the German frontier and then spent eleven years on Capri. Fifty-three minutes; the episode opens with a warning about its subject matter and earns it.
With Oliver Davis
Oliver Davis on Iron Age Wales on its own terms, where the single word Celt covers several quite different ways of living. Fifty-two minutes.
Lauren Ginsberg of Duke on Octavia, Poppaea and Statilia Messalina: the three women Nero married, and the two he is said to have killed. Forty-eight minutes given to their side of it.
Forty-eight minutes on how an Idumaean with no claim became king of Judaea, which took Roman backing, a civil war and a marriage into the Hasmoneans.
With LJ Trafford
L J Trafford on Caligula, who ruled for under four years and has been paying for it ever since. Forty-seven minutes, including what the story about the horse actually says.
AD 43, the crossing, and the campaign that finally stuck where Caesar's two had not. Forty-six minutes with the archaeologist Duncan Mackay on where the landings actually were.
With Helen Bond
Helen Bond on Pilate outside the Gospels: a prefect of Judaea under Tiberius, known from an inscription at Caesarea and from Josephus complaining about him. Forty-five minutes.
Forty-three minutes on what the archaeology of late Iron Age Britain will actually support: the trade with Rome, the question of the druids, and the evidence for human sacrifice.
Camulodunum is the nearest Britain came to a town before the Romans arrived, and the first place Boudica burned. Forty-two minutes with Frank Hargrave of the Colchester Museum.
With Ginna Closs
July AD 64, and two-thirds of the city burnt before it was stopped. Ginna Closs on the fire, the rebuilding, and the persecution that followed it. Forty-one minutes.
With Honor Cargill-Martin
Honor Cargill-Martin on Claudius's third wife and, more usefully, on the charge sheet: who wrote it, how long after, and what they wanted from it. Thirty-nine minutes.
With Duncan Mackay
Duncan Mackay on the final battle, whose location is still unknown, and on why the candidates keep moving. Thirty-eight minutes.
Thirty-one minutes on what the evidence for Boudica actually is, which is two Roman writers and a burnt layer in three towns.
Caitlin Gillespie on Boudica as Tacitus and Dio built her: a barbarian queen written for a Roman audience to think about its own rulers with. Twenty-three minutes.
The Flavians and Vesuvius AD 68 – 96 · 17
With Jessica Venner
The eruption hour by hour, and the argument about the date: the traditional 24 August has been under attack since a charcoal inscription turned up in 2018 pointing at October.
With Andrew Wallace-Hadrill
The other town, better preserved, less visited, and with carbonised scrolls that are now being read by particle accelerator.
AD 83 or 84, somewhere in Scotland, and the only account comes from Tacitus writing up his own father-in-law. Sixty minutes on a battle whose site nobody has found.
With Guy Maclean Rogers
The war that destroyed the Temple in AD 70 and paid for the Colosseum. The Arch of Titus still shows the menorah being carried through the city.
With Gabriel Zuchtriegel
Gabriel Zuchtriegel, who runs the site, on what the current excavations are turning up and on what a director decides to leave buried. Fifty-two minutes.
Four men claimed the purple in AD 69 and one was alive at the end of it. Fifty-one minutes on how a general from the Jewish war took Rome from the eastern legions.
Fifty-one minutes on a find from the Great Pompeii Project, in a suburban villa some seven hundred metres from the walls. Excavation there is still producing new bodies.
With Nathan Elkins
Nathan Elkins on the Flavian amphitheatre: who paid for it, what the spoils of Jerusalem had to do with it, and how a building that size was emptied in minutes. Forty-three minutes.
Forty minutes on the eruption of AD 79 itself, hour by hour, in the series the show built around the town. Carries a warning for the descriptions of how people died.
The Pompeii Lakshmi, carved in India and dug out of a house near the Bay of Naples. Thirty-nine minutes on the trade route that could carry an object that far.
Thirty-nine minutes on the gladiator barracks and the graffiti scratched by the men who lived there, which record wins, losses and admirers by name.
Thirty-eight minutes on what is still coming out of the ground, in a town first opened in the sixteenth century and still producing finds most weeks.
With Jodi Magness
Jodi Magness on the siege works, which survive better than almost any Roman siege anywhere: the camps, the wall and the ramp are all still on the ground. Thirty-seven minutes.
Thirty-seven minutes on the evidence for brothels in Pompeii, and on how much of it is a modern habit of reading every carved phallus as a signpost.
Thirty-five minutes on the vineyards replanted inside Pompeii's walls from the root cavities the ash preserved, which is how anyone knows what was growing there.
Episode one of the series, thirty-five minutes on the town as a working place before AD 79: the elections painted on walls, the bakeries, the water supply.
Jodi Magness, who co-directed the 1995 excavations, on the 967 who supposedly died on the rock in AD 73 and on how much of Josephus the digging actually supports. Twenty-three minutes.
The High Empire AD 98 – 192 · 19
With Rob Collins
Rob Collins on the fifth century at the wall, when the forts stayed occupied long after the pay stopped arriving. Seventy-five minutes on an ending that took generations.
Frances McIntosh on the daily round at the wall: rations, rotas, and local gods picked up on the spot and worshipped alongside the official ones. Seventy minutes treating the garrison as residents.
With William Stephens
William Stephens on Marcus Aurelius: plague, the Danube wars, and a notebook written in camp that he never meant anyone to read. Sixty-nine minutes.
Sixty-four minutes on Tacfarinas, a Numidian auxiliary who deserted and then tied down Roman forces in Africa for seven years while Tacitus filed him under bandit.
With Barry Cunliffe
Barry Cunliffe on the long chain from Egypt to China: Roman glass and silver going east across monsoon seas, silk coming back, and nobody at either end meeting the other. Fifty-eight minutes.
With Alex Imrie
Alex Imrie on Commodus, who came to the throne at eighteen, fought in the arena as Hercules and renamed Rome after himself. Fifty-four minutes on the reign the film borrowed.
With Andrew Birley
Andrew Birley, who runs the excavation, on the site that gave up the writing tablets: a birthday invitation, an order for socks and underpants. Fifty-three minutes on the only Roman voices in Britain that are not carved in stone.
With Frances McIntosh
Fifty-one minutes on the build itself: between eleven and sixteen feet high depending on which side of the Irthing you stand, some eighty Roman miles across northern Britain, and still an open question what it was actually for.
With William Dalrymple
William Dalrymple on India as Rome's largest trading partner, reached by monsoon sailing from Egyptian ports, and on the pepper and the gold that went each way. Forty-eight minutes.
With Andrew Tibbs
Andrew Tibbs on the wall Antoninus Pius ordered about AD 142 between the Forth and the Clyde, turf on stone, held for roughly twenty years and then given up. Forty- seven minutes.
With Jim Crow
Jim Crow on Housesteads, the auxiliary fort with the best-surviving latrines in Roman Britain. Forty-six minutes in which sanitation turns out to be the most talkative evidence on the site.
With Matthew Nicholls
Matthew Nicholls on the Pantheon: Agrippa's temple, burnt and rebuilt by Hadrian around AD 126, and a concrete dome nobody matched for thirteen centuries. Forty- three minutes.
Andrew Birley on that season's dig, forty-two minutes from a site that has been excavated annually for fifty years and still has most of itself underground.
Forty-one minutes on Galen and the humours, and on how a theory of four fluids organised European medicine for fifteen hundred years.
Thirty-nine minutes on the Ninth, which disappears from the record after York and has been fictionally massacred in Scotland ever since. The evidence points elsewhere.
With Nick Summerton
Nick Summerton on the epidemic that arrived with the armies returning from the east in the 160s: the flight from cities, the advice on staying well, and what Galen recorded. Thirty-two minutes.
With David Breeze
David Breeze on Bearsden near Glasgow, where the bath house and the latrine sewer survived well enough to show what the garrison ate. Twenty-five minutes.
Twenty-two minutes at Corbridge, the most northerly town in the empire, which was a supply base and a market with no garrison wall around it. Twenty-two minutes on site.
Frances McIntosh walking Chesters, the most complete cavalry fort in Britain and the best-preserved military baths on the island. Twenty-two minutes on site.
Severans and the Third-Century Crisis AD 193 – 284 · 19
With David Gwynn
David Gwynn on the fifty years from 235 to 284, when Rome ran through more than twenty emperors and almost none of them died in bed. Sixty-two minutes on the century that reorganised the empire by breaking it.
With Matilda Brown
Elagabalus took the throne at fourteen and was dead at eighteen, and the people actually running the empire in between were his grandmother and his mother. Sixty minutes with Matilda Brown on the women.
Eve MacDonald on the Sasanian king who took a Roman emperor alive: Valerian in 260, and the rock relief at Naqsh-e Rostam cut so that nobody could forget it. Fifty-eight minutes.
Alex Imrie and Matilda Brown on the real Macrinus, a praetorian prefect who took the purple for fourteen months in 217, long before Denzel Washington played him. Fifty- six minutes.
With Adrian Goldsworthy
Adrian Goldsworthy on the empire that destroyed the Seleucids, killed Crassus at Carrhae and outlasted the Republic itself. Fifty-four minutes.
Two brothers, one murder in their mother's arms, and the citizenship grant of 212 that made every free inhabitant of the empire a Roman, largely for the inheritance tax.
Fifty-one minutes on the emperor who killed his brother in their mother's arms and then gave citizenship to every free person in the empire.
Eve MacDonald on Ardashir overthrowing the Parthians in the 220s and building a state that pressed Rome harder than anything before it. Fifty minutes.
Dura-Europos was buried under a Sasanian siege ramp and rediscovered in 1920 with its synagogue and its church still painted. Forty-nine minutes.
Emran El-Badawi on Mavia, queen of the Tanukhids, who fought Rome in the 370s and then supplied it with cavalry on her own terms. Forty-eight minutes.
Forty-seven minutes on Severus Alexander, on the throne at thirteen and killed by his own soldiers at twenty-six, which opens fifty years of the same.
With Ted Kaizer
Ted Kaizer on the caravan city that sat on the only reliable water for a long way, first named in the second millennium BC and rich on the traffic that had to stop there. Forty-six minutes.
Eve MacDonald on the eastern frontier, where Rome faced the only neighbour with a comparable state behind it. Forty-four minutes.
Forty-one minutes on the first emperor born in Africa, who took the throne in a civil war, held it for eighteen years and told his sons to pay the soldiers and ignore everyone else.
With Jonathan Eaton
Jonathan Eaton on Lugdunum in 197, where Cassius Dio puts around three hundred thousand men on the field, Roman against Roman. Forty minutes on whether to believe him.
Thirty-eight minutes on the admiral who took Britain and northern Gaul in 286, minted his own coins with Roman legends on them, and held it for seven years.
Emma Southon on Zenobia, who beat the Sasanians, stabilised the Roman east and then claimed it. Thirty-four minutes on the three years she ran a third of the empire.
Simon Elliott on the campaign of 208 to 211, the largest force Rome ever sent north, aimed at conquest and abandoned the moment Severus died at York. Twenty-seven minutes.
Alex Imrie on whether Caracalla really raised a sixteen-thousand-man phalanx in imitation of Alexander, and what the coins and the sources will support. Twenty-six minutes.
Dominate and Christian Rome AD 284 – 395 · 9
With Peter Heather
How a small movement went from persecuted to imperial in three centuries. The demographic arithmetic is the interesting part.
Fifty-eight minutes on what happened to temples, statues and libraries as Christianity took the state, and on how much destruction the evidence will actually carry.
The most systematic Roman attempt to destroy Christianity, launched in 303, over within a decade, and followed by a Christian emperor. Also good on the four-emperor system that worked exactly once.
With Rosamond McKitterick
The bishops of Rome before there was a papacy, when the claim to primacy was still being invented.
With Joan Taylor
Joan Taylor on Bethlehem before the nativity, a small place south of Jerusalem with a longer history than the one story it is known for. Fifty-two minutes.
With David Potter
Milvian Bridge, the sign he described differently to different audiences, and a deathbed baptism. Whether he was convinced or calculating is an argument that will outlive all of us, and the episode does not pretend otherwise.
Forty-nine minutes on Constantine's climb from York in 306 to sole rule, and on how much of the Christian account of it comes from writers who needed him to be a convert.
With Dafydd Daniel
What Christians actually argued about in 325, which was not what most people assume, and how an emperor came to be chairing it.
Thirty-one minutes on Valentine of Rome, patron saint of beekeepers and of epilepsy, and on how a martyr with almost no biography acquired one.
The Fall of the West AD 395 – 565 · 28
Britain is the clearest case study in the whole collapse, because the coins stop, the pottery stops, and the archaeology shows a material standard of living falling off a cliff within a generation.
Where to start on the fall if you want one episode: what was already wrong before anything visibly went wrong.
410 and 455, the two sacks, and the difference between them. The first shocked the Mediterranean world; the second did more damage and less to the reputation.
The men nobody remembers between 455 and 476, and the case that 476 is a date historians chose, and that nobody alive that year noticed.
With Kyle Harper
Kyle Harper on the volcanic dust veil of the 530s followed by bubonic plague in 541, and on the argument that climate and disease set the limits everything else happened inside. Sixty-four minutes.
The Goths and the Vandals, both pushed west by the Huns, both of whom sacked Rome. Sixty-two minutes on how confederations arriving as refugees ended up as the successor kingdoms.
With Dominic Perring
Dominic Perring on Londinium from a timber drain of AD 47, the earliest dated structure on the site, to the empty walls of the fifth century. Sixty-one minutes on a river crossing nobody had thought worth a town.
Kyle Harper on disease as a cause and not a backdrop: the Antonine plague, the Cyprianic, and the bubonic outbreak of 541. Sixty minutes, third of the Fall of Rome run.
With Tom Moore
Tom Moore on pre-Roman Britain as the archaeology has it: roundhouses, hillforts, chariots, feasting debris, metalwork sunk in rivers for the gods. Fifty-nine minutes on the society Caesar filed under barbarian.
Dominic Perring on how a city of tens of thousands became empty ground inside a century, read out of the dark earth layer that sits over the Roman levels. Fifty- eight minutes.
Miles Russell argues that Arthur is five earlier figures welded into one by later writers. Fifty-three minutes on how a legend gets assembled out of real people.
Miles Russell again, fifty-three minutes, working through the candidates including Magnus Maximus and asking what a fifth-century war leader would have looked like.
With Hyun Jin Kim
Hyun Jin Kim on the Hephthalites, who built the larger Hunnic empire in Central Asia and held the Silk Roads for a century while Attila got the reputation. Fifty-three minutes.
Fifty-two minutes on Ravenna, capital of the west from 402 because marshes defended it better than walls, and the place the last western emperors actually lived.
With Ian Wood
Ian Wood on the Franks, who started as one group among many on the Rhine and ended up with the whole of Gaul. Fifty minutes on how that happened.
With Andy Merrills
Andy Merrills again, fifty minutes, on the people whose name became a word for destruction and who ran Carthage as a functioning state for a hundred years.
Andy Merrills on the Vandals, who crossed Gaul and Spain, took Carthage in 439 and ran North Africa as a kingdom for a century. Forty-nine minutes.
Peter Heather on the Saxon migrations: mercenaries invited in, a Roman order that stopped paying, and how much of the population actually moved. Forty-eight minutes.
With Laura Spinney
Laura Spinney on ancient DNA that pushes Yersinia pestis back more than five thousand years, long before the outbreak of 541 that was thought to be the first. Forty-eight minutes.
With Miles Russell
Miles Russell on Ambrosius Aurelianus, the one named Briton in Gildas who fought the Saxons and is the nearest the record comes to a documented Arthur. Forty-six minutes.
David Gwynn on the Goths from the Danube crossing of 376 to the sack of 410 and the kingdoms after it. Forty-six minutes on refugees who became successors.
Forty-six minutes on 453 and after: Attila dies on his wedding night and the empire he assembled comes apart among his sons inside a generation.
Forty-six minutes of argument with Matt Lewis of Gone Medieval about where the ancient world stops and the medieval one starts, which is a boundary nobody can draw.
With Gordon Noble
Recorded at East Lomond hill fort with Gordon Noble, forty-five minutes on the people Rome never took, known mostly from their carved stones and their forts.
Hyun Jin Kim on the Huns as a state with a court, diplomacy and a tax base. Forty- four minutes correcting a picture written by their victims.
Hyun Jin Kim on Attila consolidating the Hunnic tribes and turning them on the Balkans. Forty-four minutes, the first of two.
Part two, forty-four minutes on Attila after the Balkans: Gaul in 451, Italy in 452, and the meeting with Pope Leo that everyone painted afterwards.
Gordon Noble on the Picts, who appear in the third century as Rome's northern problem and left carved stones where other peoples left documents. Forty-three minutes.
Roman Life, Army and Culture across the centuries · 50
With Carey Fleiner
Carey Fleiner on spinning: sixty-seven minutes on the work that produced clothes, sailcloth and rope, done by women and slaves, and almost absent from the histories written by men who wore the results.
Emma Southon on slavery as the engine of the whole system: the mines, the fields, the households, and the numbers Rome needed to keep replacing. Sixty-seven minutes.
Ben Kane on the legionary as he actually was across the centuries, since the segmented armour everyone pictures was worn for only part of that time. Sixty-six minutes.
Barry Strauss of Cornell picking ten emperors and defending each choice, which is more useful than a list because the argument is the point. Sixty-five minutes.
With Lindsay Powell
Lindsay Powell again on the Guard, sixty-five minutes this time. Same ground as the 2021 episode with more room for the emperors they made and unmade.
Sixty-four minutes on the aqueducts, which ran on gradients around two metres per kilometre, with Pliny putting the minimum at twenty centimetres and delivered water by the million litres a day.
Lindsay Powell on the cohorts that guarded the emperor and then started choosing him. Sixty-three minutes from the Guard's founding to the point where the job reversed.
With Hannah Platts
Hannah Platts on communal latrines with no partitions, the shared sponge on a stick, and sewers that ran to the Tiber. Sixty-three minutes on the plumbing nobody puts in the films.
Sixty-two minutes on gladiators as celebrities and property at once: sex symbols who could not marry freely and were buried outside the normal cemeteries.
Ben Kane on the centurion, the rank the whole army turned on: promoted from the ranks, paid many times a soldier's wage, and expected to die at the front. Sixty minutes.
With Mai Musié
Mai Musie on the Greek novel, the most widely read fiction in the empire for four centuries, and on what it says about how Romans sorted people. Sixty minutes.
With Harry Sidebottom
Harry Sidebottom walking through a fighter's day: the barracks, the diet of barley, the doctor, and the fact that most bouts were not meant to end in a death. Fifty- nine minutes.
Fifty-six minutes on Roman sexual norms, which sorted people by who was doing what to whom and cared about status far more than about gender.
Fifty-five minutes at Paestum, where three Greek temples from the sixth and fifth centuries BC stand better preserved than almost anything in Greece itself.
With Matthew McCarty
Matthew McCarty on Mithras, a cult with no scripture and hundreds of underground temples, and on how it got attached to 25 December by people arguing about Christmas. Fifty-four minutes.
Mike Loades on experimental archaeology with real chariots, including whether the scythed blades on the Boudica statue at Westminster could have existed. Fifty-four minutes.
With Mary Beard
Mary Beard and Charlotte Higgins on borrowing: what Rome took from Greece, what it changed, and how thoroughly it rewrote the credit afterwards. Fifty-three minutes.
With Rebecca Jones
Rebecca Jones on marching camps, the temporary earthworks an army threw up every single night. Fifty-two minutes on the evidence that shows where legions went when they built nothing permanent.
Daisy Dunn on the women of the late Republic, Servilia, Fulvia, Clodia and the rest, who had no office and considerable power. Fifty-one minutes.
Daisy Dunn on Catullus, who wrote a hundred and sixteen poems in the last decades of the Republic and used language that translators kept quietly softening. Forty-nine minutes.
Massalia, founded by Greeks from Phocaea around 600 BC and still there. Forty-eight minutes on France's oldest city, which was Greek before it was anything else.
With Colchester Museum Curator Glynn
The Colchester Vase carries names scratched beside its fighters, which turns a decorated pot into a record of a real bout. Forty-seven minutes on gladiators this far north.
Ben Kane on the practical odds: fire, disease, the water supply, the food, and the parts of the city you would not walk through after dark. Forty-seven minutes.
With Catherine Fletcher
Catherine Fletcher on the road network, from the Via Appia of 312 BC onward, and on what it was built for, which was armies before it was trade. Forty-seven minutes.
Six women at a time, chosen between six and ten years old, sworn for thirty years, and buried alive if the vow broke. Forty-six minutes on Rome's only full-time priesthood.
Forty-six minutes on the auxiliary, recruited from the provinces, paid less than a legionary, and handed citizenship on discharge along with a bronze diploma to prove it.
With Ian Goh
Ian Goh on the Roman dinner party, which was mostly conversation, reclining and a fixed order of courses. Forty-five minutes correcting the orgy.
With Carolina Lima
Carolina Lima on the cremated remains from Roman Colchester and what isotopes and bone can say about where those people had come from. Forty-four minutes.
Forty-four minutes recorded at Chalke Valley on what a Roman soldier actually carried: the pilum designed to bend, the short gladius, and the shield used as a weapon.
With Greg Woolf
Greg Woolf on the city itself: how a million people were fed, housed and kept from burning, and what it took to keep them there. Forty-three minutes.
With Fraser Hunter
The Traprain Law hoard, dug up near Edinburgh in 1919 and buried around the time the legions left Britain. Fraser Hunter on why Roman silver ended up chopped into pieces north of the wall. Forty-three minutes.
Daniel Ogden on ancient werewolves and the strix, the night bird that drank blood, and on how both survived into folklore unbroken. Forty-one minutes.
With Robert Symmons
Robert Symmons on Fishbourne in Sussex, begun within three decades of the conquest and found in 1960 by a workman digging a water main. Forty-one minutes.
With Anne Rogerson
Anne Rogerson on Virgil, who asked for the Aeneid to be burned and was overruled by Augustus. Forty-one minutes on the poem that became Rome's official founding story.
Mary Beard on the office itself: what an emperor actually did all day, and why the wildly different personalities produced such similar reigns. Forty minutes.
Matthew Nicholls on chariot racing, which drew crowds several times the size of the Colosseum's and ran four factions with supporters who rioted over them. Forty minutes.
With Ewan Coopey
Thirty-nine minutes with Ewan Coopey on what auxiliaries and legionaries chose to put on their own gravestones, from northern Britain to the Near East. Rank, years served, and who paid for the stone.
Jo Ball on what happened to the losers: enslavement, ransom, display in a triumph, or execution at the end of it. Thirty-nine minutes.
Alastair Blanshard on where the orgy came from, which is largely later writers and a Victorian appetite for a decadent Rome. Thirty-seven minutes.
William Dalrymple on Indian culture moving east through the same trade that reached Rome, and on what it became at Angkor. Thirty-seven minutes.
Thirty-six minutes on Armorica under Rome, a peninsula of the empire with its own trade routes to Britain and a very thin written record.
Thirty-six minutes on what people actually ate, which involved no tomatoes, no aubergines and a great deal of fermented fish sauce.
With Caroline Freeman-Cuerdan
Caroline Freeman-Cuerdan on the venatio, the morning event before the gladiators, and on the supply chain that emptied provinces of animals. Thirty-three minutes.
With Yorkshire Museum
Four objects found by metal detectorists near Ampleforth in May 2020, including a bronze bust thought to be Marcus Aurelius. Twenty-nine minutes on what they were buried for.
Twenty-nine minutes on Roman intelligence: the frumentarii who started as grain officers and ended as the emperor's informers, and the couriers who carried it all.
Twenty-eight minutes on the specialists: scouts, speculatores, and the units that did the work an army needs done before a battle exists.
With Kevin Butcher
Kevin Butcher on Saturnalia, 17 to 23 December: drinking, gift-giving, and masters serving their slaves for the duration. Twenty-six minutes from the History Hit archive.
Twenty-five minutes from the archive on the Forum: a drained marsh between hills that ended up holding the law courts, the treasury and the speaker's platform.
Twenty-five minutes on Roman eye medicine, known from the stone stamps oculists used to mark their ointment sticks, dozens of which survive with the recipe named on them.
With Alisa Vanlint
Alisa Vanlint on the evidence for women fighting in the arena, which comes down to a relief from Halicarnassus, a Senate ban, and a handful of hostile lines. Twenty- three minutes.
