Bloodlines · Who it happened to: the plotting, the gods, the beds, the graves.
Virgil, Ovid, Tacitus, and Rome on film ever since.
728 entries · 613 hours · 164 with a written verdict · American 443 · British 131 · Australian 108 · Mixed 18
Virgil wrote the national epic to order and asked for it to be burned. Ovid wrote a manual for seduction and was exiled to the Black Sea. Tacitus wrote the most quotable Latin prose in existence about how much he disliked the men in charge. The reception is here too, because the Partial Historians will happily spend ninety minutes on what Gladiator II got wrong and why it matters.
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With a written verdict
Wildly stylised, gleefully bloody, and much smarter about slavery, patronage and Roman social climbing than its reputation suggests. Push through the first few episodes; the show finds itself and then does not let go.
Part of The History of Byzantium
With Anthony Kaldellis
Kaldellis has spent a career arguing that the Byzantines were Romans, called themselves Romans, and were renamed by later scholars for reasons that had nothing to do with evidence. Two hours of him making that case will change how you read everything after 476.
Primary sources read aloud, unabridged, with the images that go with them. No presenter between you and the text. Hearing a Roman letter home in full does something no summary manages.
Forty-five hours on Plutarch's Roman lives, taken one figure at a time and argued with as they go, at full length.
Alastair Sooke setting out to demolish the idea that Roman art was second-hand Greek work with the originality taken out. Three parts, and the section on late imperial portraiture changes how you look at every bust in every museum.
Hypatia in Alexandria, and the only feature film about late antique intellectual life. Takes liberties with her death and is honest about the world she lived in.
Part of Voices of the Past
Two hours and seven minutes on the founding, which is longer than most books give it. The length is the point: the traditions contradict each other and here the contradictions get room.
Part of The Partial Historians
A hundred and three minutes on the Python film, which two ancient historians rate higher on daily life than most serious productions. The crucifixion scene gets its own discussion.
A hundred and two minutes, the third part with Kaldellis, on narrative history and on what a thousand-year account has to leave out.
Not history, and the funniest film anyone has made about the Roman occupation of Judaea. The aqueduct scene is a better summary of imperial infrastructure than most documentaries manage.
The Taylor and Burton epic held against what is actually known, which is less than the film assumes and stranger. An hour and a half, and the costume budget gets the scrutiny it deserves.
Part of Life of Caesar
An hour and a half in the late reign, where the building, the games and the executions all run on the same money and the money runs out.
Part of Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium
Eighty-seven minutes with two Norse-saga podcasters on how Scandinavia saw the empire, which from up there was mainly a place that paid well for guardsmen.
Eighty-six minutes with the Rex Factor hosts, who score monarchs the way this show scores emperors. Two scoring systems arguing about the same dictator is a better introduction to Sulla than either alone.
The last of three episodes of live commentary on the 1979 film, eighty-six minutes of it. Watching two historians react to Tinto Brass and Gore Vidal is a way into the reception of Caligula that no straight narrative gives you.
Part of Cost of Glory
Eighty-six minutes opening the life of Cato the Younger, from a childhood marked by the murder of his uncle. Rome's great Stoic starts here.
The second half of the Taylor and Burton epic, and the studio that nearly went under making it. Eighty-three minutes, with the history checked as they go.
Mike Duncan as guest, on the structural rot he later wrote a book about: the land, the armies and the men who owned both. An hour and twenty on why the Republic was already failing.
With Emma Southon
Eighty minutes on Roman homicide: what counted as murder, who could be killed lawfully, and a legal system with no police force.
Lindsay Powell, who has written biographies of Augustus' generals, on the men who actually won the wars. Eighty minutes on Agrippa and the others whose names are missing from the monuments.
With Alexandra Sills
Alexandra Sills on the sequel, with the naval battle in the arena and the sharks. Seventy-nine minutes separating what is exaggerated from what is invented.
Seventy-eight minutes with Marc Hyden, who wrote the biography of Titus. Vespasian's reign makes more sense through the son he was grooming, and Hyden argues the succession was planned from the start.
Seventy-seven minutes on the philosopher king, scored against the wars he spent most of his reign fighting and the son he left in charge.
Part of The Ancients
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 Lindsay Steenberg
Lindsay Steenberg on the same film as a film: the fight choreography, the genre and what an audience is being sold. Seventy-six minutes.
Seventy-six minutes with Kaldellis on his argument that Byzantium remained a republic in which the people could unmake an emperor. The most contested thesis in the field, argued out.
Anthony Kaldellis of Chicago picks ten East Romans the political narrative skips over. Part one, seventy-five minutes.
Seventy-five minutes with an economist on the Roman economy, applying modern tools to evidence that was never collected for them.
Seventy-four minutes with the History of the Papacy podcast on the legend of Peter leaving Rome, and where a story like that comes from.
Seventy-four minutes with the British History Podcast on what Rome left in Britain and what the island made of it afterwards.
Two shows on Spartacus for over an hour, arguing about whether he had a political programme or simply wanted to go home.
Part two, seventy minutes, and the half where the choices get stranger.
With Jeremiah McCall
Jeremiah McCall on Roman warfare on screen against what the evidence supports, from formation to sound. Seventy minutes.
The second half of the same demolition, ending with why a film this bad still shapes what people think they know. Seventy minutes.
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.
With Jeremy Swist
Jeremy Swist on how many metal bands are singing about Rome, and which Rome they have in mind. Sixty-nine minutes on antiquity in a genre that takes it seriously.
Sixty-nine minutes on why every second Roman is called Gaius: three names, a handful of praenomina, and women named after their father's clan.
The Partial Historians as guests, arguing about how much of Suetonius can be used at all. An hour and a bit of two shows disagreeing about evidence.
With Martin M. Winkler
Martin Winkler, who has written books on antiquity in cinema, on where the sequel sits in a century of Roman epics. Sixty-eight minutes.
The first CinemaScope film, made about a Roman tribune at the crucifixion. Sixty-eight minutes on Hollywood's Rome at the height of the biblical epic.
The 1979 Penthouse film taken apart scene by scene, with what the sources actually say beside it. Just over an hour, and the gap is wider than the defenders admit.
Sixty-eight minutes with Johnathan Bi on the philosophy behind the politics, which is the half most narratives of Cato skip.
With Joel P. Christensen
Sixty-seven minutes with Joel Christensen on why myths kept being retold and what that did to the people telling them. It is about the mechanism of storytelling, so it works as an introduction to every other episode in this theme.
With LJ Trafford
LJ Trafford on the standard monsters and on how a reputation gets fixed by writers with their own scores to settle. Sixty-six minutes.
Sixty-five minutes on Seneca's Medea with the MythTake hosts. Seneca wrote her angrier than Euripides did, and the conversation is about what a Roman audience under Nero was supposed to hear in that.
With Stephanie McCarter
Sixty-five minutes on Stephanie McCarter's translation of the Metamorphoses, the first by a woman, and on the choices she made about the rapes in it. Translation decisions are the subject, not a footnote to it.
Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast
With Joanne Ball
Joanne Ball of Liverpool on the Netflix series and on what sits behind it: a Roman officer of Germanic birth choosing a side. Sixty-five minutes.
Stephen Dando-Collins on the legions of the period and on how the army saw the reign. An hour with a military historian on a subject usually left to the gossip.
Sixty-five minutes with Tom Stevenson on Caesar scholarship, and on which ancient claims about him still survive examination.
Lindsay Powell on whether the madness is diagnosis or invective, and what a hostile senatorial tradition does to a reputation over four centuries. An hour.
Part of Tides of History
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.
Sixty-three minutes on how a sixth-century general ended up as a subject for metal bands, and on what modern reception does with Byzantium.
The Pisonian conspiracy, forty-one people implicated and nineteen dead including Seneca. An hour on the plot that turned suspicion into policy.
Robert Harris on writing Cicero as a character, which turns into a conversation about what a novelist may invent and a historian may not. An hour with a working novelist, and the license question gets a straight answer.
Sixty-two minutes on an emperor who spent decades waiting and wrote books on ceremony and administration while he waited.
Arthur Keaveney, who wrote the standard biography of Sulla, on whether the dictator believed his own restoration. An hour with someone who has spent a career on the question.
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.
Sixty-one minutes on Basil II's long war with Bulgaria, the blinding of fifteen thousand prisoners, and an empire at its widest since Justinian.
With Laura Jenkinson-Brown
Sixty-one minutes with Laura Jenkinson-Brown, who turned the Odyssey into a game you play through. Greek material in a Roman index, and worth it for how the two doctors argue with her.
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.
Sixty minutes of the magazine team recommending books, films and podcasts to each other, recorded in spring 2020. Useful as a reading list from people who read for a living.
With Victoria Austen
Victoria Austen on the altar of peace and the painted garden room from Livia's villa, two Augustan works about nature and control. Fifty-nine minutes.
Fifty-nine minutes on Nero and the city crowd, who liked him considerably more than the senate did and said so after he died.
Fifty-nine minutes with Rhiannon Evans, who presents Emperors of Rome, on reading the late Republic through its own propaganda.
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.
Claudius wrote histories of Carthage and Etruria, twenty books each, and both are lost. Fifty-eight minutes on the scholar inside the emperor.
With Rhiannon Evans
Rhiannon Evans on the word itself and what Romans needed it to do: define an inside by describing an outside. Fifty-seven minutes.
With Eric McGeer
Fifty-seven minutes with Eric McGeer on tenth-century military manuals, written by men who had commanded and meant them to be used.
With Maximilian Lau
Fifty-seven minutes with Maximilian Lau on where Komnenian scholarship has moved since his last appearance.
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.
With Jenny Williamson
Jenny Williamson on her novel about Boudica's daughters, and on writing fiction into the gaps the sources leave. Fifty-six minutes.
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.
Fifty-five minutes on the biopic of the blacklisted screenwriter who wrote Spartacus, which is how a Roman slave revolt ended up in an American political fight.
With Yentl Love
Fifty-four minutes on two thousand years of reinvention: Roman propaganda, Shakespeare, Hollywood, and the argument about who gets to play her.
Fifty-four minutes on classical imagery in a pop video, and on who gets to use antiquity and how the argument about that goes.
With Nat Friedman
Fifty-four minutes with Nat Friedman on the Vesuvius Challenge, the prize for reading the carbonised Herculaneum scrolls without opening them. A Roman library is being read as we speak.
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.
Fifty-three minutes on her children's book about Rome and on what has to change when the audience is ten years old and the subject is an empire built on slavery.
Part of The Rest Is History
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, 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.
Fifty-three minutes with Maximilian Lau on John II, the most competent Komnenos and the least written about.
Part of The Pax Romana Podcast
Fifty-one minutes on the sequel, with the sharks, the naval battle and what the second century actually looked like.
Fifty minutes on a film with no Romans in it, taken as a study of how an industry mythologises its own past. A detour, and they know it.
Fifty minutes on Nero's Rome as MGM built it, with a burning city and a soundtrack. The history gets checked scene by scene.
Fifty minutes of the team on the novels, which is a better guide to what is worth reading than any list, because they can say where each book gets the kit wrong.
Terry Jones on the Romans who never ruled anything: what they ate, how they washed, what they found funny. Fifty minutes, and the Python eye for the ridiculous detail turns out to be a good instrument for social history.
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.
With Daisy Dunn
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.
Khachaturian's Soviet ballet, in which Spartacus is a proletarian hero and Crassus dances. Forty-nine minutes on what each era needs him to be.
With Alastair Blanshard
Forty-nine minutes of two ancient historians watching the 1997 Disney film and marking it against the myth. Reception studies with jokes, and the gap between Hades and Hades is the lesson.
With Leonora Neville
Forty-nine minutes with Leonora Neville on the princess who wrote the Alexiad, the only full history of the period by a woman.
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.
Forty-seven minutes finishing the film, including the arena sequence and what the sources actually say about the persecution.
Forty-six minutes with the designer Mark Backhouse on Strength and Honour, and on what a set of rules has to decide about ancient combat before anyone can play it.
Forty-six minutes with the maker of the Imperium Romanum channel on making Roman documentaries, and on what an audience will and will not sit through.
Forty-six minutes on the trailer alone, before anyone had seen the film, working out which bits of it could have happened.
The same panel after actually watching Gladiator II, forty-six minutes. Worth taking with the trailer episode for how far the guesses landed.
Forty-six minutes on facial hair as politics, taking in Marcus Aurelius, whose beard was a philosopher's statement and not a fashion.
Forty-six minutes inside the Domus Aurea, the palace Nero drove through a burnt quarter of Rome and, by the film's reckoning, the largest building standing anywhere at the time. The scale is the argument: it explains why the dynasty that followed drained his lake and put a public amphitheatre on it.
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.
Part of Emperors of Rome
Kubrick's film, the blacklist it broke, and the famous scene that no source supports. Forty-four minutes on how one movie fixed the story.
With Liz Smith
Forty-four minutes on how women are represented across the sources they use, which is the methodological problem under half of this show.
With Peter Frankopan
Forty-four minutes with Peter Frankopan on his argument that the First Crusade began as a Byzantine request for mercenaries.
Forty-three minutes on witches as Romans wrote them, alongside the women who actually sold curses and brews. The distance between the two is the episode.
Forty-three minutes of recommendations from the magazine team, new studies and old standards, with reasons attached to each.
Forty-two minutes on erasing a name from every inscription in the empire, which is how we know exactly who was erased.
With Julien Blurel
Julien Blurel, who makes the Invicta channel, on rebuilding a legion at true scale to see how much ground it actually covers. Forty-two 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.
Forty-one minutes on a man charged with sorcery for marrying a rich widow, and on the speech he gave in his own defence. It survives in full, so we can read a Roman magic trial almost as it was argued.
With David Hendrix
Forty-one minutes with David Hendrix, who has photographed what survives, on the Byzantine remains hiding in plain sight in Istanbul.
Forty minutes on the historian most of this series depends on: when he wrote, what he had to work with, and why his early books are literature before they are evidence.
Part of The Ancient World
Forty minutes on the Efqa spring that made Palmyra possible, and on the close of the Bloodline series. Scott Chesworth reads the inscriptions slowly and lets them do the arguing.
Part three of four, forty minutes on what Plutarch and then Shakespeare did to the story before anyone alive today met it.
The companion argument to Kaldellis, from a different angle: the word Byzantine is a seventeenth-century coinage doing quiet damage. Short, sharp, and it will change how you read every book on the shelf.
Thirty-nine minutes on the letters: a governor, a lawyer, and the only eyewitness account of Vesuvius written by someone who watched from across the bay.
Thirty-nine minutes on the afterlife of a man known entirely through two hostile writers.
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 Peter Davis
Thirty-seven minutes on Ovid's Ars Amatoria, a manual for seduction published while Augustus was legislating against adultery.
Part of HistoryHit
Thirty-seven minutes checking the film against the evidence: how often gladiators actually died, where they came from, and what the thumb meant.
With Michael Tremblay
Thirty-six minutes with a philosopher on Stoicism as it was practised, by Seneca among others, while serving an emperor who had him killed.
Thirty-five minutes on Ridley Scott's film, in which Commodus is strangled in the arena and the real one was strangled in a bath.
Thirty-four minutes of listener questions from the middle Macedonian stretch, including the ones about how the army was actually paid.
Thirty-three minutes on the epigrams: fifteen hundred short poems about everyone in Rome, most of them obscene and all of them useful.
The Coen brothers' Hollywood satire read by two ancient historians, who find the Roman film inside the film more accurate than expected. Half an hour, and mostly for fun.
Thirty-one minutes doing what Plutarch does: setting a Roman beside a Greek and asking which life went better. The comparison is the method this whole show is built on.
Thirty minutes on the Aeneid as commissioned literature that outgrew the commission, and on the instruction to burn it that was ignored.
Bread and circuses came from here, along with most of what people quote about Roman decadence. Thirty minutes on a satirist taken as a reporter.
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.
With Brian Blessed
Brian Blessed, who played Augustus in I, Claudius fifty years ago, talking about the man. Exactly as loud as you are hoping and considerably more thoughtful.
Part of Being Roman with Mary Beard
With Elizabeth Fentress
Julia Balbilla wrote verses on the leg of the Colossus of Memnon while travelling up the Nile with Hadrian and Sabina, and they are still legible. Twenty-eight minutes.
Sulpicius Maximus was eleven when he improvised Greek verse in front of Domitian and a crowd of thousands, and his parents put the poem on his tomb. Twenty-eight minutes.
With Estelle Strazdins
Twenty-seven minutes on the richest private citizen in the empire, who built an odeon in Athens and was prosecuted by his own city.
The nickname his fellow senators used, the beard nobody had worn, and a Spaniard who preferred Athens to Rome. Twenty-six minutes on an emperor who made his taste into policy.
With Ronald Ridley
Twenty-six minutes on a hundred and forty-two books of which thirty-five survive, and on writing the Republic's history under its first emperor.
With Caillan Davenport
Twenty-five minutes on the tutor whose correspondence with Marcus Aurelius survived, showing the emperor as a student who wrote about his cold.
Six thousand crosses along the Appian Way, and two thousand years of everyone from Marx to Hollywood claiming him. Twenty-five minutes on the afterlife.
Twenty-four minutes on Sulpicia and the handful of women whose verse survived, mostly because a man copied it into his own collection.
The finances: an empire bankrupted by Nero and four civil wars, put back in order by a man who taxed everything. Twenty-three minutes.
Twenty-three minutes of Pliny the Elder's Natural History read aloud, which is where antiquity filed its strangest reported facts, collected by a man who later died sailing towards Vesuvius.
Part of Echoes of Empires
Procopius wrote the official history and then a private pamphlet calling the empress a whore and the emperor a demon. Twenty-three minutes on what to do with a source that contradicts itself on purpose.
Twenty-two minutes on the murder in 415 and on the politics between a bishop and a prefect that used her to settle it.
Twenty-two minutes on the emperor remembered for one word, Apostate, and on the rest of him: the writing, the reforms, the eighteen months he had.
Exiled to the Black Sea for a poem and a mistake he never named. Twenty-one minutes on the punishment that produced his best work.
Twenty-one minutes on the actor who produced Spartacus as well as starring in it, and who insisted the blacklisted writer be credited.
Twenty-one minutes on Roman writing about Judaea, where the geography is accurate and the ethnography is hostile.
The end, in twenty minutes: a senate that declared him an enemy, a flight to a freedman's villa, and a last line about the artist dying in him.
Twenty minutes on Hadrian's deathbed poem to his own soul, five lines that have been translated for eighteen centuries.
Pliny writing from Bithynia about aqueducts, fire brigades and what to do with Christians, and Trajan answering. Twenty minutes on the only surviving correspondence between an emperor and his governor.
Twenty minutes on the carbonised library at Herculaneum and the imaging that reads a scroll without opening it. Short enough to watch before the Pompeii films, and it explains why the town that gets less attention is the one holding the books.
Nineteen minutes on the mathematician and teacher, before the mob and before every later writer made her a symbol.
Sixteen minutes on the city Augustus claimed to have found in brick and left in marble, and on how much of that was quarry facing over old concrete.
Part of Ancient Rome Live
A walk through the Roman collection at the Metropolitan Museum with someone explaining what each piece is for.
Thirteen minutes on one object: a bronze head cut from a statue in Egypt and buried under a Kushite temple step, so that everyone entering trod on the emperor. Portraiture as politics, both ways.
Part of Invicta
Thirteen minutes on a Total War patch, which is here because the family-tree system is a decent model of how Roman political dynasties actually worked.
Eleven minutes on Trajan's Column and its successors as evidence: a narrative carved for a Roman audience, on a monument almost nobody could read from the ground.
Eleven minutes on an accident of the record: Aurelian reunified the empire in five years and is thinly documented, while Diocletian got a biography.
Eleven minutes of informed hoping: the carbonised Herculaneum scrolls are starting to be read, and this is what military historians would most like to find in them.
Ten minutes on how an army recruited from Syria to Britain gave orders anyone could follow, and what Latin actually functioned as.
Ten minutes on the siege of AD 73 and on Josephus as the single source for what happened on top of the rock.
Ten minutes on the famous meeting at Ephesus where Hannibal ranks the great generals and flatters Scipio at the end. Murray Dahm weighs the sources and the travel times.
The trophy as a monument type, from a pile of captured armour to the marble versions on Trajan's column.
Nine minutes on why imperial campaigns are so much worse documented than Republican ones, when the empire was larger and more literate.
The next 16 of 728, longest first
Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast · The companion to Ancient Warfare magazine, since 2008
Part of Cost of Glory · Alex Petkas on Plutarch, 45 hours
With Nicholas Tobias
Part of Lost Roman Heroes · Matteo and Matthew Storm, 101 episodes
Part of Autocrat: A Roman History Podcast · Vince and Cassie, 137 numbered episodes
Part of Understanding Rome · Agnes Crawford, licensed guide in Rome
