Blueprints · How Rome ran: the army, the money, the law, the concrete.
Cannae, Alesia, Adrianople, and the reconstructions that hold up.
916 entries · 1314 hours · 156 with a written verdict · British 308 · American 205 · Australian 162 · Mixed 58
Rome lost catastrophically often enough that the wins have shape. Cannae, where Hannibal turned the biggest army the Republic ever fielded inside out in an afternoon; Alesia, where Caesar built two walls and starved a nation; Adrianople, where an emperor went into the line and stayed there. The best of this indexing walks the ground and counts the men, and Ancient Warfare, Cost of Glory and HistoryMarche all do the counting properly.
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With a written verdict
179 episodes, Romulus to Romulus Augustulus, made by one man in his spare time before podcasting was a job. Everything else is a footnote to it. Start at episode one and clear your calendar.
Part of Fall of Civilizations
Three and a half hours on Carthage as a civilisation in its own right, with the sound design Cooper is known for. Carthage is the subject here and Rome the visitor.
Three and a half hours on the Eastern empire from Constantine to the walls falling in 1453. If you have ever wanted the argument that Rome did not fall in 476 laid out properly, this is it.
Part of Historia Civilis
Actium in animated blocks, which sounds absurd and is the clearest explanation of the battle anywhere. Historia Civilis makes fleet movements legible in a way no documentary manages.
Roman politics and battles as animated coloured blocks. It should not work and it is the clearest explanation of the constitution and of tactical manoeuvre that exists in any medium.
Animated history at the production level of a broadcast documentary, with maps that move the way campaigns actually moved. The Roman episodes are a fraction of the channel and the fraction to start with.
The companion to Ancient Warfare magazine and the deepest military coverage anywhere: panel format, working specialists, and an hour on the logistics of one campaign when that is what it takes. Come to it once you know the outline.
Picks up the exact week Mike Duncan put the microphone down and keeps going for another thousand years. If you have ever told someone at a party that the Byzantines called themselves Romans, this is the show that armed you.
A hundred-plus hours on figures who never make the emperor lists, reaching deep into the Byzantine centuries where most Rome shows stop. Coverage is the value here.
The BBC's six-part dramatisation from 2006, each episode a single turning point carried by actors. Dated in places, and still the clearest television account of how the whole arc fits together.
The History Channel's four parts told from the other side, from Hannibal to Alaric. Uneven, and the only mainstream television that treats the barbarians as people with aims.
Six hours from Nick Holmes on the two centuries in which Byzantium asked the West for soldiers and received the Fourth Crusade. 1204 is the hinge, and the case made here is that 1453 was settled then.
Part of Roman Empire
The Caesar season, and the strongest of the three: reenactment cut with historians who are given room to disagree with the script. Season three is the weak one.
Part of SandRhomanHistory
What happened in Britain after 410, following the archaeology where the written sources stop.
Part of Life of Caesar
Over three hours in Egypt: a head in a basket, a queen who needed a Roman, and a war in the streets of Alexandria that Caesar had not planned and nearly lost.
Anthony Mann's, and the film Gladiator quietly borrowed its plot from. It flopped so badly it ended the Hollywood epic for a generation, and it is better than that history suggests.
Thapsus and the end of the Republican armies in Africa, including the suicide at Utica that made Cato a name to conjure with for the next four centuries. Nearly three hours.
The crossing to Epirus in winter with half an army, and the months at Dyrrachium where Pompey had him beaten and let him go. Two and a half hours on the campaign before the famous battle.
Ilerda, where Caesar was cut off by a flooded river and won the campaign without a pitched battle. Two and a half hours on a victory made of engineering and supply lines.
Two and a half hours on the year Caesar nearly lost Gaul: a massacre at Avaricum, then a defeat at Gergovia that cost him legionaries and prestige at once.
Part of The History of Byzantium
A hundred and thirty-nine minutes on the last Roman-Persian war, which ruined both empires and left neither able to stop the Arab armies that came ten years later.
Pharsalus at length: outnumbered two to one, Caesar put a fourth line behind his cavalry and aimed it at the faces of Pompey's young horsemen. Two and a half hours on a battle decided by one instruction.
Two hours and a quarter on Alesia: seventeen kilometres of inner wall, twenty-one of outer, and an army besieging while besieged. The most complete Roman siege there is.
Zela in five hours of fighting and three words of dispatch, plus the Pontic campaign around it. Two hours and a quarter on the briefest famous victory in Roman history.
Part of Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium
Two hours on the most famous eastern emperor, scored the way this show scores everyone. The reconquest, the law code, the plague and Theodora all get weighed, and the verdict at the end is a number you can argue with.
Two hours on the moment Caesar let a defeated garrison walk free, including its commander. Clemency as a weapon is the subject, and it worked: the next towns opened their gates.
The mopping up after Alesia, including Uxellodunum where the survivors had their hands cut off. Two hours on what pacification meant in practice.
A hundred and twenty-two minutes, the longest in this set, on an emperor who beat Persia outright and then watched the Arabs take everything he had won.
Two hours on the last Roman emperor, closing a series that scored every one of them. He died in the breach in 1453 and no body was identified, which leaves the hosts scoring a man whose end is itself disputed.
Nearly two hours on Basil the Bulgar Slayer, the high-water mark of the medieval empire, and one host spends most of it unconvinced. The disagreement is the reason to listen.
A hundred and twelve minutes on the general who took Crete and Antioch, slept on the floor, and was murdered in the palace.
A hundred and seven minutes on the defeat of 1071, where the emperor was captured and the real damage was the civil war that followed.
A hundred and seven minutes on the crusader siege, the starvation inside and outside the walls, and the relic that turned the battle.
Mehmed II becomes sultan in 1451 and starts planning at once. A hundred and one minutes covering 1448 to 1453, which is the planning and the diplomacy; the siege itself comes later.
The Sambre, where the legions were surprised mid-camp and Caesar picked up a shield himself. An hour and forty on the closest he came to losing the army.
Four and a half centuries of Roman Britain in one documentary, from Caesar's landing to the withdrawal.
Ninety-four minutes on the assault of 1204 itself, with the Venetian fleet at the sea walls and a puppet emperor already dead.
A bridge built in ten days, used for eighteen, then demolished. An hour and a half on an engineering stunt aimed entirely at readers in Rome.
The migration Caesar stopped at the Saône and the numbers he reported afterwards, which his own census tablets undercut. An hour and a half on the war's opening and its first casualty, the truth.
Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast
With Mark McCaffery
How the early Republic's army was actually organised and paid, which is the answer to why Rome could lose repeatedly and keep fielding armies.
Part of Cost of Glory
Eighty-seven minutes on Sparta's greatest king, whom Plutarch pairs with Pompey. Greek material that earns its place by the pairing.
The building programme, the marriage laws and the revival of old priesthoods, all of it aimed at a past that had never quite existed. Eighty minutes on restoration as a governing technique.
Munda, the last battle, fought against Pompey's sons and won at the cost of a thousand dead. An hour and twenty on a victory that ended the war and solved nothing.
The second crossing, with eight hundred ships and a storm that wrecked most of them. An hour and twenty on an expedition that took hostages and held nothing.
Part of HistoryMarche
The dictatorship as a template, and the argument that Caesar copied a working model. Sulla laid down the office voluntarily, which is the part Caesar left out.
All parts of the Cimbrian war in one sitting, on the invasion that nearly ended Rome before Marius rebuilt the army.
Eighty minutes, the longest episode in this stretch, on how the western half slipped away and what the eastern half told itself about it.
Mutina, the two consuls dead in a month, and a nineteen-year-old marching on Rome to demand a consulship. Eighty minutes on the year the senate discovered what it had encouraged.
Part of The Ancients
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.
Part of The Rest Is History
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.
Messalina, the bigamous wedding she held while he was at Ostia, and the execution that followed. Seventy-eight minutes on the scandal that cost him a wife and his dignity at once.
The vengeance: a whole people hunted through their own forests with neighbouring tribes invited to help. An hour and a quarter on what Caesar wrote up as a police action.
Seventy-seven minutes on the German king Caesar had recognised as a friend of Rome a year earlier and then drove back across the Rhine.
Seventy-six minutes on four triumphs in one year, with Vercingetorix strangled at the end of the first and a Ptolemy paraded in the second.
Part of HistoryHit
Seventy-five minutes running from Caesar's two landings in 55 and 54 BC to Agricola in the north, in one sitting. A single historian to camera, which suits a story usually told in fragments.
Seventy-three minutes scoring the emperor who ignored the advice to stop expanding and pushed the borders further than anyone before or after. The show weighs the conquests against what holding them cost.
With Peter Heather
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.
Part of Emperors of Rome
Seventy-two minutes on the revolt of 60: a flogged queen, three cities burnt, and an army that nearly lost Britain.
Part of The Partial Historians
Seventy-one minutes on the recovery and the Camillus tradition, where a disaster gets rewritten into a story about a saviour.
With Jeremiah McCall
Jeremiah McCall on Roman warfare on screen against what the evidence supports, from formation to sound. Seventy minutes.
Seventy minutes on Dyrrhachium and Pharsalus, where Caesar lost the first engagement badly and won the war a month later. The full panel on it.
Boudica burns three cities while Nero is in Rome, and the empire nearly loses Britain in a summer. Seventy minutes, with the Roman sources read against what archaeology found in the burnt layers.
Seventy minutes on the last campaign, against Pompey's sons in Spain, fought by an army that had stopped expecting to go home.
Seventy minutes on the first crossing, with two legions, no cavalry that arrived, and a beach landing against a defended shore.
Seventy minutes on the younger Marius against Sulla, with Crassus and Pompey appearing as the next generation. The proscriptions are in here.
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.
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.
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.
Part of Tides of History
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.
Sixty-seven minutes on Pompey abandoning Italy without a fight, which left Caesar the capital and the treasury in two months.
Robin Pierson treats the death of the last emperor as an open case: what the sources claim, where they cannot have been standing, and what became of the body. Sixty-six minutes on 29 May 1453.
The ten-year siege of Rome's nearest rival, ending with a tunnel under the citadel. Sixty-six minutes on the conquest that doubled Roman territory.
The family: a father poisoned in Syria, a mother and two brothers dead in exile, and a boy raised in the house that did it. An hour on where the paranoia came from.
Sixty-six minutes with Alexander Mikaberidze on Mithridates, the king who killed eighty thousand Romans in one day and fought three wars over forty years.
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.
Three provincial revolts in the twenties, put down without the emperor leaving Italy. An hour on an empire that ran itself while its head sulked.
Sixty-five minutes on the pursuit of Ambiorix and the destruction of the Eburones, which Caesar describes himself. Reading his own account of it is the point.
The Jewish revolt and the siege that ended it, with the ramp the Romans built still standing.
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 Marcus Manlius
Sixty-four minutes on the Etruscan cities as Rome's neighbours and rivals, told from the side that lost and left no history of its own.
The triumph and the years after it, when a government of freedmen ran the empire and the senate hated every one of them. Just over an hour.
Sixty-four minutes on the elephants and the victories that cost him his army. The phrase Pyrrhic victory is coined in these battles and the episode shows why it stuck.
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 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.
With Josho Brouwers
Sixty-nine, four emperors, and the discovery Tacitus draws out of it: an emperor could be made somewhere other than Rome.
Holland and Sandbrook's four-part Carthage run, and the most entertaining way into the subject. Start at part one; they build.
Sixty-three minutes on how an army sworn to Egypt ended up outside Constantinople: a debt to Venice, a claimant with promises, and nobody willing to stop.
Sixty-three minutes on the king smuggled out of his palace at two and raised in exile, before he ever met a Roman army. The background that makes the Italian campaign make sense.
Narses in Italy, the eunuch general who finished what Belisarius started. He was past seventy when he took the command and he won every battle he fought.
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.
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.
Sixty-one minutes on the Danube wars of Marcus Aurelius, fought by an emperor with no taste for it against pressure that never let up. Angus Wallace with Josho, Lindsay and Mark McCaffery.
Sixty-one minutes on the century of fighting that made Italy Roman before any empire existed: Latins, Etruscans, Samnites, and the settlement terms that held it together.
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.
With Anthony Kaldellis
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.
Sixty-one minutes on Lucullus driving Mithridates out of Pontus and following him into Armenia, where the war stopped being winnable.
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.
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 Jeremy Armstrong
Jeremy Armstrong on early Roman warfare as private warbands under aristocratic leaders, long before anything resembling a state army. Sixty minutes.
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.
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.
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.
Recorded for the two-thousandth anniversary, fifty-nine minutes on the loss of legions XVII, XVIII and XIX somewhere in northern Germany. Those three numbers were never issued to a legion again.
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.
An hour on the British campaign: why Claudius needed it, how the army nearly refused to sail, and what sixteen days of imperial presence bought him.
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.
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.
With Nicholas Morton
Fifty-eight minutes with Morton on his book about the thirteenth-century Near East, where Mongols, Mamluks and crusaders all arrive at once.
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.
Carrhae in 53 BC ended the richest man in Rome and opened three centuries of war with Parthia. Badly covered elsewhere.
A six-part excavation of 390 BC, the year the Gauls took the city, working from Livy upward and pointing out where he is inventing. The best demonstration anywhere of how early Roman history was written backwards from later politics.
Fifty-seven minutes on 1453, after sixty years of Ottoman attempts, and on what the capture meant for everyone else around that sea.
Fifty-seven minutes on the Mithridatic Wars, 88 to 63 BC, begun with the massacre of tens of thousands of Italians in Asia in a single coordinated day.
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-six minutes on the Allia and the sack of 390, the defeat Romans dated their calendar around for centuries.
Fifty-six minutes on abduction in Roman story and law, from the Sabine women onward, where the founding myth and the statute sit uncomfortably close.
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.
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.
Fifty-six minutes on how a single commander fought off the Roman military machine with local troops and a rival senate. Guerrilla war before the word existed.
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.
Fifty-five minutes on the Celts in the classical world, from the sack of Rome around 390 BC to the gold of Tolosa taken in 106 BC and promptly lost.
Jo Ball on her own book about Varus, who was a competent administrator given a job that was not administration. Fifty-five minutes on AD 9.
Part one, fifty-five minutes on Hamilcar rebuilding Carthaginian power in Spain and on the son he raised inside that project.
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.
With Adrian Goldsworthy
Adrian Goldsworthy on the empire that destroyed the Seleucids, killed Crassus at Carrhae and outlasted the Republic itself. Fifty-four minutes.
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.
Fifty-four minutes with Nicholas Morton on the crusade that aimed at Egypt, took Damietta and gave it back.
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.
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 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 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-three minutes on why Spain took Rome two hundred years to hold, which is longer than Gaul, Britain and Egypt put together.
Part three, fifty-three minutes on the burning of the Temple, the triumph that paid for the Colosseum, and Masada.
The last of three: the reconquest of Italy, the plague that arrived in 541, and the ledger afterwards. Fifty-three minutes.
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 two, fifty-three minutes on the Saxon wars: thirty years of campaigning and forced conversion that built the kingdom Charlemagne was crowned over.
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.
Fifty-two minutes on Sicily as the island everyone fought over: Greeks, Carthaginians, Syracusans and finally Rome, which took it first.
Fifty-two minutes with Victor Davis Hanson on Alexander destroying Thebes in 335 BC. Plutarch pairs Alexander with Caesar, which is the thread back to Rome.
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.
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 264 to 241 BC, the longest unbroken war in antiquity, fought mostly at sea by a Rome that had no fleet when it started.
Fifty-one minutes on the reprisals after Boudica, where the governor was recalled for being too thorough.
Fifty-one minutes on the moment Caesar nearly lost Gaul, in a series that reads the Commentaries as propaganda as much as report.
Fifty-one minutes opening the series, on the Roman rebel who held Spain against Rome for eight years. Beethoven and Machiavelli both took him as a subject, which says how long the story ran.
Eve MacDonald on Ardashir overthrowing the Parthians in the 220s and building a state that pressed Rome harder than anything before it. Fifty minutes.
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.
Fifty minutes on Marius, consul seven times, who opened the legions to men with no property and is credited with more reform than he probably managed.
Bibracte is where the Gauls made Vercingetorix their commander and where Caesar wrote up his own campaign. Fifty minutes in Burgundy on the town that was a capital before Rome arrived and empty within a generation after.
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.
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.
Forty-nine minutes on three revolts across seventy years: AD 66, the diaspora rising under Trajan, and Bar Kokhba, each ending worse than the last.
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.
The next 24 of 916, longest first
Part of Hardcore History · Dan Carlin, six parts, twenty-two hours
Part of Lost Roman Heroes · Matteo and Matthew Storm, 101 episodes
Part of Cost of Glory · Alex Petkas on Plutarch, 45 hours
With Barry Strauss
