Tides of History

With Kathryn Lomas

Kathryn Lomas on her own book, sixty minutes on the Italy that Rome grew up inside: Oscan and Umbrian speakers, Greek colonies on the coast, and one Latin town among many.

With Simon Stoddart

Simon Stoddart on how the city spread across the Iron Age Mediterranean, worked out from Etruria where the evidence is thickest. Fifty-five minutes on the urban habit Rome inherited from its neighbours.

Wyman on the transition from kings to Republic, which is the moment the sources are least trustworthy and most interesting.

Forty-three minutes on where the Etruscans came from, which the genetics now answers less exotically than Herodotus did. Their language is still only half readable and their goldsmiths worked granulation nobody has since matched.

The Samnites came closer to stopping Rome than anyone before Hannibal, and this episode treats them as a civilisation with aims of its own.

Forty-two minutes on the fourth century BC, when Rome went from one town in Latium to the master of Italy. The terms offered to the defeated do more of the work here than the battles.

Forty minutes on 281 BC, when a Hellenistic king crossed the Adriatic with elephants and a professional army and discovered that beating Rome twice was not the same as winning.

Forty minutes on how the costliest kind of victory got its name, and on the Roman habit of simply raising another army that would decide the next two centuries.

Thirty-eight minutes on Rome's actual entrance into Mediterranean power politics, a decade before the Punic Wars that everyone starts with.

Thirty-three minutes on the Republic as an economy: what an expanding market felt like from inside a workshop, and where the proceeds of conquest actually landed.

A composite life assembled from scattered evidence, following one enslaved man through the institution around 200 BC. Thirty minutes, and the method is declared out loud because no single such life survives whole.

With Bret Devereaux

Bret Devereaux on what made the Republic so hard to kill: the manpower pool, the terms it gave its allies, and a political system that could absorb Cannae. Sixty- seven minutes.

With Bret Devereaux

Bret Devereaux on the uncomfortable answer: Carthage was a threat because it was the state most like Rome, with the same reach and the same appetite. Fifty-nine minutes.

Forty-two minutes on Syracuse, the third power in the central Mediterranean, which fought Carthage for a century and is missing from most Roman accounts.

Forty-two minutes on Hamilcar Barca rebuilding Carthage out of Spanish silver after the First Punic War, which is where the second one actually begins.

Forty-one minutes tracking Carthage from Phoenician outpost to the edge of empire around 500 BC, told as its own history with Rome still a small town.

Forty-one minutes on twenty-three years of attrition that put Rome on the map, cost both sides fleets they could barely replace, and settled almost nothing.

Forty minutes on the year the board was set: Rome throwing out its kings, Carthage rising in the central Mediterranean, Greece about to turn classical.

Forty minutes on Sicily as the contested ground between Carthage and the Greek tyrants, in the same year Xerxes came down on Greece.

Forty minutes on Carthage turning economic weight into territory in Sicily, timed to the moment Athens destroyed its own expedition there.

Forty minutes on Zama in 202 BC, and on the fifteen years between Cannae and it when Hannibal was never again that close.

Thirty-nine minutes on the best question in the whole war: Rome lost the battle of the century and did not sue for peace. The answer is in how the Republic was put together.

Thirty-nine minutes on the one genuinely exceptional Roman commander the war produced, and on the Spanish campaigns where he learned it.

Thirty-nine minutes on the end of the third century BC, when the war with Hannibal was closing and Rome turned its attention east for the first time.

Thirty-eight minutes on the crossing itself, in the teeth of an Alpine autumn with tens of thousands of men and a baggage train that had to go over the same passes.

Thirty-eight minutes on the Gauls of the Po valley, who sacked Rome around 390 BC and frightened it for longer than Hannibal ever did.

Thirty-seven minutes on Messana, a small city and a small incident that started twenty-three years of war neither side had a reason to want.

Thirty-seven minutes on Cannae from inside the ranks: what a man in the compressed middle could see, hear and do, which was almost nothing.

Thirty-three minutes touring the whole sea in 146 BC, region by region, at the moment it became one power's lake.

With Douglas Boin

Douglas Boin on Clodia, known to most people only as the target of one of Cicero's nastiest speeches, and on the political weight that speech was written to destroy. Forty-six minutes.

Forty minutes opening a run of episodes on the first-millennium economy, starting with whether the ancient economy is one subject at all.

Fifty-seven minutes on 1453, after sixty years of Ottoman attempts, and on what the capture meant for everyone else around that sea.

Forty-eight minutes on Mehmed after Constantinople, when taking the city turned out to be the start of the expansion and not the end of it.

Peter Sarris on his own biography of Justinian, with Patrick Wyman pressing on the balance sheet: the reconquest, the Code, Hagia Sophia, and the plague that arrived in the middle of all three. Forty-six minutes.

Forty-three minutes from 2017 on Justinian's reign running into volcanic cooling and then plague, reposted in 2020 for reasons the host states plainly.

With Douglas Boin

Douglas Boin on Alaric as a Roman insider: a commander who had served the empire and wanted a settlement from it, not a barbarian at the gates. Forty-three minutes.

Twenty-six minutes on Patrick, who was carried off from Roman Britain by raiders and wrote about it himself, which almost nobody enslaved in antiquity got to do.

Seventy-six minutes recorded in spring 2020, two narrative historians talking about plague and revolution while living through the first of them.

With Mike Duncan

Sixty-three minutes of two history podcasters interviewing each other at a bookshop event, which is where each of them says what his own show leaves out.

With Jeremy Armstrong

Jeremy Armstrong on early Roman warfare as private warbands under aristocratic leaders, long before anything resembling a state army. Sixty minutes.

With Alexander Mariotti

Alexander Mariotti on the economics of the games: who owned fighters, what they cost, and why killing your own investment made no sense. Fifty-eight minutes.

With Nicola Terrenato

Nicola Terrenato on Rome expanding by deal, with aristocratic families across Italy cutting arrangements with each other. Fifty-three minutes.

With Andrea Brock

Andrea Brock on the earliest Rome as an engineering problem: a flood plain raised and drained by hand, decades before anyone would call it a city. Fifty-two minutes.

With Dennis Romano

Dennis Romano on Venice from salt pans to empire to tourism, a city founded by people leaving the Roman mainland and lasting a thousand years. Forty-eight minutes.

With Harry Sidebottom

Harry Sidebottom on his own book, forty-four minutes on why a society that valued restraint watched people die for entertainment and saw no contradiction.

With Francesca Fulminante

Francesca Fulminante on how villages became a city, read from the archaeology of central Italy and not from Livy. Forty-four minutes.

Forty-four minutes on the Republic around 450 BC, when the magistracies and the written law appear and the city is poorer than it had been under the kings.

Forty-three minutes on the fifty years in which Rome, which had barely noticed the Greek east, took down both of its great kingdoms.

With Walter Scheidel

Walter Scheidel on the question nobody asks: China reassembled its empire repeatedly and Europe never did once. Forty-two minutes on why the failure to reunify mattered.

Forty-two minutes on the whole question, answered by looking at Rome's rivals as carefully as at Rome, which is where most accounts stop short.

Forty-one minutes on 509 BC and on how little is actually known about the first decades: the consular lists are reconstructions and the stories are later.

Forty-one minutes on what a century of conquest did to the conquering city: the money, the slaves, the building, and the politics that came with them.

Forty minutes on the villages on the hills above the Tiber and how they merged, which is the part the founding myth papers over.