Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, Goalhanger
58 episodes indexed · 51 hours
Presented by Dominic Sandbrook, Tom Holland
Periods · The kings, The Republic, The late Republic, The Pax Romana, The third-century crisis, Christian Rome, The fall of the west
Themes · Battle Power struggle Government Life on the frontier Religion Love and sex The army Art, music and letters
Holland has translated Herodotus and Suetonius and written three books on Rome; Sandbrook is a modern historian who plays the interested outsider. They do Rome in multi-part runs of four or five episodes, and 58 of those are indexed here. It is the most entertaining way into a subject, and the trade-off is that two widely-read generalists are talking, so the confident asides are asides.
Where to start. Any Rome multi-parter; each run is self-contained.
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
Carthage and the Punic Wars 814 – 146 BC · 13
Part three, sixty-nine minutes on Scipio crossing to Africa and on Zama in 202 BC, the one time the two best commanders of the age faced each other.
Holland and Sandbrook's four-part Carthage run, and the most entertaining way into the subject. Start at part one; they build.
Part two, sixty-one minutes on the Battle of Ibera and on Scipio in Spain, which is where the Punic War was settled while everyone was watching Italy.
Part four, sixty minutes on 146 BC, when Rome went back and finished it: the city burned, the site cursed, and the Mediterranean left with one power in it.
Part one of two, fifty-eight minutes on where Carthage came from and on whether it really burned its children. The archaeology of the tophet is the hinge of that argument.
Part two, fifty-eight minutes on 218 BC and on the harder question underneath it: why the Republic could lose army after army and still field another one.
Part four, fifty-eight minutes on 216 BC and on the double envelopment that military academies still teach, from the point of view of the men in the middle of it.
Part three, fifty-six minutes on the crossing and its price: Hannibal reached Italy with a fraction of the army he set out with, and won anyway.
Part one, fifty-five minutes on Hamilcar rebuilding Carthaginian power in Spain and on the son he raised inside that project.
Part two, fifty-three minutes on the constitution Aristotle admired and the trade network that paid for it, across the ninth century BC to the second.
Part four, fifty-three minutes on the collision itself, between an upstart that had taken Italy and a city that had run the western sea for centuries.
Part three, forty-nine minutes on how the two of them ended up in the same sea with the same ambitions and no way of sharing it.
With Juliette Pochin
Thirty minutes on Dido, whom Virgil placed three centuries out of her own time so that she could meet Aeneas. Juliette Pochin sings the Lament at the end.
The Late Republic 133 – 44 BC · 4
Holland and Sandbrook on the Cimbri and Teutones smashing into the Republic, and on Marius rebuilding the army to stop them. The moment the legions began swearing to a general.
Part one, seventy-three minutes on Marius climbing from complete obscurity, which in Republican Rome was a more dangerous route than any battlefield.
Seventy-three minutes on the first time a Roman general marched his legions on Rome itself. Sulla did it in 88 BC and every later civil war starts from that precedent.
Seventy minutes on the younger Marius against Sulla, with Crassus and Pompey appearing as the next generation. The proscriptions are in here.
Julius Caesar 100 – 42 BC · 7
The Ides of March at thriller pace, fifty-seven minutes. The detail that sticks is how many of the sixty-odd conspirators Caesar had personally pardoned after fighting them in the civil war.
Fifty-six minutes on what the assassins had not planned for: no plan. The liberators freed a Republic that no longer had anyone able to run it.
Fifty-three minutes on how much of Star Wars and Dune is Roman furniture: a republic that votes itself an emperor, a senate, an imperium already rotting at the centre.
Part one, forty-eight minutes on 55 BC: scouts along the Kentish coast, a contested landing, and a Roman picture of Britons as savages the Romans half envied.
Part two of four on Cleopatra, covering the Alexandrian war and the years she spent in a villa across the Tiber while Caesar was alive. Forty-one minutes.
Part one, thirty-nine minutes on how Caesar became powerful enough that crossing a small river in northern Italy counted as a declaration of war.
Part two, thirty-seven minutes on the crossing itself and on Caesar going into Italy with a single legion against the Senate and Pompey.
Antony, Cleopatra and Augustus 44 BC – AD 14 · 1
Part three of four, forty minutes on what Plutarch and then Shakespeare did to the story before anyone alive today met it.
The Julio-Claudians AD 14 – 68 · 6
Part four, sixty-six minutes on the vacuum after Caligula was killed at twenty- eight, the brief talk of restoring the Republic, and the uncle the guard found and made emperor.
Part three of the emperors run, sixty-five minutes on Caligula, built largely on Suetonius, who was writing eighty years later with the archives open and a taste for the worst version.
Part two, fifty-eight minutes on Tiberius and on Suetonius, whose biography of him is the most salacious he wrote and the reason the reputation stuck.
Part two, fifty-six minutes on AD 43 and on Claudius, underestimated by everyone around him and in need of a triumph he could not win himself.
Two halves in thirty-two minutes: Tom sets up the Year of the Four Emperors after Nero, Dominic takes a defeat that started the long Byzantine decline.
Part two, thirty-two minutes on the road to the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 and on Josephus, who was on both sides of it.
The Flavians and Vesuvius AD 68 – 96 · 3
Part three, fifty-three minutes on the burning of the Temple, the triumph that paid for the Colosseum, and Masada.
Fifty-three minutes on the Flavian amphitheatre: gladiators, mock sea battles, and executions staged as scenes from mythology for an audience of tens of thousands.
Forty-six minutes on the eruption of AD 79, a column of gas and ash some twenty-one miles high and the surges that came down the mountain after it collapsed.
The High Empire AD 98 – 192 · 3
Kyle Harper with Tom and Dominic, fifty minutes on disease as a first-order cause of Roman decline, which is a newer argument than it sounds.
Antinous drowned in the Nile in AD 130 and Hadrian answered by making him a god, with temples, a city and coinage. Forty-nine minutes on grief exercised by someone with the power to enforce it.
Forty-six minutes on facial hair as politics, taking in Marcus Aurelius, whose beard was a philosopher's statement and not a fashion.
Severans and the Third-Century Crisis AD 193 – 284 · 1
Aurelian reconquered a broken empire in five years, walled Rome for the first time in six centuries, and almost nobody has heard of him. This is the fix.
The Fall of the West AD 395 – 565 · 8
Christmas Day 800, and a Frankish king is acclaimed Augustus more than three centuries after the west stopped having emperors. Sixty-three minutes on what that title was meant to mean.
Fifty-four minutes on the question that has no single date: 410, 476, 1453 and 1806 all have a case, and which one you pick says what you think Rome was.
The last of three: the reconquest of Italy, the plague that arrived in 541, and the ledger afterwards. Fifty-three minutes.
Fifty-three minutes on Theophanu, sent from Constantinople in 972 to marry the heir of the western emperor, and ruling the west as regent when he died.
Part one, fifty-one minutes on the Frankish warlords who inherited the western provinces and built something else on top of them.
Part one of three, forty-nine minutes on Theodora before the throne, whose early life comes to us through Procopius writing in private and with a grudge.
Forty-eight minutes on the far western province: Roman Lusitania, then Visigoths, then the long reconquest, with the Roman layer at the bottom of all of it.
Part two, thirty-nine minutes on the Nika riots of 532, which burned the city centre and came close to ending the reign in its fifth year.
Roman Life, Army and Culture across the centuries · 12
Harald Hardrada in the Varangian Guard, a Norwegian prince serving as a bodyguard in Constantinople before going home to claim a throne. Sixty-four minutes.
Part four, fifty-nine minutes on the decades after Boudica, when Rome decided the province was worth holding and sent Agricola north to prove it.
Fifty-eight minutes on Roman tourism: villas on the Bay of Naples, graffiti carved on Egyptian monuments, and guided tours of the Holy Land.
A fifth-century BC military grave turned up a macaque buried dressed as a legionary, and nobody can say whether he was a mascot or something closer. Fifty-eight minutes on animals in armies.
Fifty-six minutes on the family that held the Roman imperial title in the west for four centuries, and on Charles V, who was king of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor at once.
Part three, fifty-four minutes on the revolt of AD 60. Cassius Dio puts the dead at eighty thousand and blames the loss of the province on a woman.
Recorded live on location, fifty-three minutes on Roman London: the bridge, the port, the burning by Boudica, and what is still under the modern streets.
Part two, fifty-three minutes on the Saxon wars: thirty years of campaigning and forced conversion that built the kingdom Charlemagne was crowned over.
Part one, fifty-three minutes on Suetonius, who had the imperial archives open to him and used them to write the most quotable and least reliable book on the Caesars.
Part one, fifty minutes on the Frankish rise that ends with a Roman imperial title being handed out again in 800, three centuries after the west stopped issuing one.
Forty-eight minutes on where Rome kept going after it fell: in Constantinople, in the Tsars, in the Kaisers, and in arguments still running today.
Part two, forty-five minutes on Abbasid Baghdad, founded in 762 and inheriting the Greek learning that the Roman east had kept.
