Garrett Ryan, sixteen films
22 episodes indexed · 3 hours
Presented by Garrett Ryan
Periods · The kings, The Republic, The late Republic, The Pax Romana, The third-century crisis, Christian Rome, The fall of the west
Themes · Archaeology Engineering Life on the frontier Death and burial
Ryan answers the questions people actually have and rarely find answered: what a Roman ate, what a street smelled like, what happened to the bodies. He wrote Naked Statues, Fat Gladiators and War Elephants, which is on our books page, and the channel is the same material at the length of a coffee. Sixteen films indexed here, several of them shot at the site they describe, from the tombs of Sidyma to the hippodrome at Constantinople.
Where to start. Any title that asks a question you have wondered about.
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
Antony, Cleopatra and Augustus 44 BC – AD 14 · 2
The monument Augustus built where his camp stood before Actium, decorated with the rams of the ships he captured.
Seven minutes at the cenotaph raised in Lycia for Gaius Caesar, the grandson Augustus meant to succeed him, who died there in AD 4 at twenty-three. The tomb is empty; the succession went to Tiberius.
The High Empire AD 98 – 192 · 2
Ten minutes in Emerita Augusta, founded in 25 BC for discharged legionaries and still standing well enough that the theatre holds a festival every summer.
Nine minutes at Italica near Seville, founded in 206 BC for wounded veterans of the Spanish campaigns and later the birthplace of two emperors.
Severans and the Third-Century Crisis AD 193 – 284 · 1
Five minutes at Lugo in Galicia, ringed by a third-century wall that still runs its entire circuit. No other Roman city in Europe can say that.
The Fall of the West AD 395 – 565 · 1
A Byzantine fortress walked through on camera, the kind of site that never makes a narrative history.
Roman Life, Army and Culture across the centuries · 16
Fourteen minutes at Arykanda, stacked up a Lycian mountainside in terraces so that the theatre looks out over the valley from halfway up.
Fourteen minutes at Pinara, a Lycian city under a cliff face honeycombed with rock- cut tombs, empty since the Byzantine centuries.
Fourteen minutes on Delos, sacred birthplace of Apollo and, once Rome made it a free port in 166 BC, the busiest slave market in the Aegean. Both facts are on the same small island.
Eleven minutes at Patara, capital of the Lycian League and later the province, where the council chamber has been rebuilt and the lighthouse still stands in pieces.
A Roman city in Algeria preserved well enough to walk through, filmed on the ground.
What survives of Roman Alexandria, which is less than you would expect and stranger.
Nine minutes at Xanthos in Lycia, where the dead were put in pillar tombs raised above the living. The reliefs from the Harpy Tomb are in London; the pillars are still standing.
The Roman capital of Crete, filmed on site, with the law code carved in stone that is still standing there.
Eight minutes in the Hippodrome, where the Nika riots of 532 ended with the army penning the crowd in and killing it, and where an obelisk cut for Thutmose III still stands on the base the Byzantines built for it.
Eight minutes at Oenoanda, where a citizen named Diogenes had an entire Epicurean philosophy carved along a public portico for passers-by to read.
Eight minutes on the Romanesque churches of northern Spain, put up five centuries after the empire and still using its arch, its vault and its basilica plan.
The Byzantine city in the Peloponnese that outlasted Constantinople by seven years, filmed among the ruins.
Seven minutes at Sidyma in the Lycian hills, where the tombs outlasted the town and a village was later built in among them.
Corinth after Rome destroyed it and rebuilt it as a colony, which is two cities on one site.
Five minutes at the Tower of Hercules above A Coruna, built under Trajan and the only Roman lighthouse anywhere still in service.
Five minutes at Segovia, where roughly 25,000 granite blocks stand in two tiers with no mortar holding any of them together.
