Bloodlines · Who it happened to: the plotting, the gods, the beds, the graves.
Dinner, laundry, toilets, holidays and what the flat smelled like.
193 entries · 150 hours · 163 with a written verdict · British 81 · American 37 · Australian 32 · Mixed 4
Most Romans lived up four flights with no kitchen and bought dinner in the street. The public latrines seated twenty and had no partitions. Toldinstone and Understanding Rome are the two that go looking for the ordinary hour, and Mary Beard's Being Roman takes a single life off an inscription and reconstructs the whole week around it.
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when it happens
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With a written verdict
Two seasons, cancelled far too early, and still the only screen Rome that feels lived in. It follows two soldiers through Caesar's rise and Octavian's, and the politics of the street is as carefully built as the politics of the Senate.
Garrett Ryan has a doctorate in ancient history and makes short, precise videos answering the questions people actually have: what it smelled like, what it cost, what happened if you got ill.
Agnes Crawford is a licensed guide in Rome, and this is the city itself: what is standing, who paid for it, what happened where you are standing. Twenty short episodes to have in your ears while walking it.
Beard's three parts on ordinary Romans, read off their tombstones. The corrective to every documentary that is only about emperors.
The BBC's three parts on the Regio IX excavation, filmed as it happened, so you watch rooms come out of the ash. The best Pompeii documentary made this century.
Part of Lost Roman Heroes
Ninety-eight minutes of listener questions, long enough to cover the sources, the method and the arguments the series keeps having.
Ninety-seven minutes inside the first new dig at Pompeii in seventy years, filmed with the archaeologists while the finds come out of the ash. The DNA work on the victims is what lifts it past a tour of the ruins.
Part of Life of Caesar
Seventy-three minutes on July 64 and the fire that burned for six days. Tacitus is the only near-contemporary and he was nine years old at the time, which the episode does not let you forget.
Part of The Ancients
Frances McIntosh on the daily round at the wall: rations, rotas, and local gods picked up on the spot and worshipped alongside the official ones. Seventy minutes treating the garrison as residents.
Part of The Partial Historians
With Rebecca Futo Kennedy
Rebecca Futo Kennedy on Athenian women and citizenship, and on how badly Athens compares with Rome on that count. Sixty-nine minutes, and the comparison is the point.
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.
What the city was like to live in, from the harbour to the tophet, which is the part every account of the wars skips.
With Carey Fleiner
Carey Fleiner on spinning: sixty-seven minutes on the work that produced clothes, sailcloth and rope, done by women and slaves, and almost absent from the histories written by men who wore the results.
Sixty-seven minutes on Vitellius, a governor chosen for being harmless who was carried to the throne by the Rhine legions.
The first months, when he emptied the prisons, published the accounts and was cheered for it. An hour on a beginning that nobody expected to curdle.
With Jessica Venner
The eruption hour by hour, and the argument about the date: the traditional 24 August has been under attack since a charcoal inscription turned up in 2018 pointing at October.
With Kyle Harper
Kyle Harper on the volcanic dust veil of the 530s followed by bubonic plague in 541, and on the argument that climate and disease set the limits everything else happened inside. Sixty-four minutes.
With Andrew Wallace-Hadrill
The other town, better preserved, less visited, and with carbonised scrolls that are now being read by particle accelerator.
With Hannah Platts
Hannah Platts on communal latrines with no partitions, the shared sponge on a stick, and sewers that ran to the Tiber. Sixty-three minutes on the plumbing nobody puts in the films.
Part of Emperors of Rome
With Caillan Davenport, Gillian Shepherd
Sixty-three minutes of listener questions, the longest of these anthologies and the one with the most detours.
With Dominic Perring
Dominic Perring on Londinium from a timber drain of AD 47, the earliest dated structure on the site, to the empty walls of the fifth century. Sixty-one minutes on a river crossing nobody had thought worth a town.
With Debby Sneed
Sixty-one minutes on disability in the Greek world: the medical writers, the myths, and the gap between the two.
One hour, real people reconstructed from the bodies in the ash, and a volcanic timeline you can set your watch by. The scene everyone remembers is the pyroclastic surge, and it earns it.
Recorded at the dig in Norfolk with William Bowden, on what the Iceni did after the revolt failed. Sixty minutes in which the archaeology keeps showing continuity where the written accounts report extermination.
Beard on the excavation as it happens, with the bodies treated as people. The section on what the casts can and cannot tell us is the honest counterweight to every dramatised eruption.
With Harry Sidebottom
Harry Sidebottom walking through a fighter's day: the barracks, the diet of barley, the doctor, and the fact that most bouts were not meant to end in a death. Fifty- nine minutes.
With Tom Moore
Tom Moore on pre-Roman Britain as the archaeology has it: roundhouses, hillforts, chariots, feasting debris, metalwork sunk in rivers for the gods. Fifty-nine minutes on the society Caesar filed under barbarian.
Dominic Perring on how a city of tens of thousands became empty ground inside a century, read out of the dark earth layer that sits over the Roman levels. Fifty- eight minutes.
With Caillan Davenport
The fire of 64 taken apart live: what burned, how long, and where the story about the lyre comes from. Fifty-eight minutes, and the blame lands on the sources as much as on Nero.
Part of The Rest Is History
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.
Part of Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium
Fifty-eight minutes on Basil II's brother, who waited sixty-five years for a throne he held for three and used mostly for blinding people.
The series opens on the family's view of him: an embarrassment kept out of sight for forty years. Fifty-seven minutes on the disability and what Rome made of it.
Fifty-six minutes on Roman sexual norms, which sorted people by who was doing what to whom and cared about status far more than about gender.
Part of The Fall of Rome Podcast
Fifty-five minutes on Gaul, which changed hands three times and kept more of its Roman shape than anywhere else in the west.
With Ray Laurence
Ray Laurence on Pompeii as a working town: traffic, shopfronts and street life, with the casts left aside. Fifty-five minutes on the city before the ash.
Jess Venner on the graffiti and the people who left it, from election slogans to insults. Fifty-four minutes on the writing on Pompeian walls.
With Andrew Birley
Andrew Birley, who runs the excavation, on the site that gave up the writing tablets: a birthday invitation, an order for socks and underpants. Fifty-three minutes on the only Roman voices in Britain that are not carved in stone.
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.
With Gabriel Zuchtriegel
Gabriel Zuchtriegel, who runs the site, on what the current excavations are turning up and on what a director decides to leave buried. Fifty-two minutes.
With William Dalrymple, Caillan Davenport
Fifty-two minutes in which Rhiannon Evans, Caillan Davenport, Matt Smith and William Dalrymple each bring one Roman subject they keep returning to. Four specialists off the leash for an hour.
Fifty-two minutes on a drought year in the early Republic, where the response was religious before it was practical.
Italian archaeologists opening a Pompeian street, roadside food counter and all. Fifty-two minutes on how the town ate and moved, which is the half the death casts crowd out.
Decades of excavation set against the legionary of the films: what he carried, what he was paid, where he slept and how long he lasted. Fifty-two minutes, and the clichés come off one by one.
Fifty-one minutes on who actually crossed the North Sea, where the genetics and the archaeology disagree with the chronicles.
Roads, bridges, aqueducts and the Colosseum taken as engineering problems, with the solution drawn out each time. Fifty-one minutes, and the one to send someone who wants to know how the empire was physically held together.
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-eight minutes on the province that collapsed hardest: coinage gone, pottery gone, and towns empty within two generations.
With Ben Kane
Ben Kane on the practical odds: fire, disease, the water supply, the food, and the parts of the city you would not walk through after dark. Forty-seven minutes.
Forty-six minutes on the fifth century as a chain of local failures, each one making the next more likely.
Forty-six minutes on facial hair as politics, taking in Marcus Aurelius, whose beard was a philosopher's statement and not a fashion.
With Ian Goh
Ian Goh on the Roman dinner party, which was mostly conversation, reclining and a fixed order of courses. Forty-five minutes correcting the orgy.
Part of The History of Byzantium
Forty-five minutes of listener questions after 1204, which is the point where the series has to explain what an empire in exile even is.
Forty-four minutes on the pope who fed Rome when the empire could not, and who sent the mission that converted England.
Forty-three minutes on volcanoes, plague and earthquakes arriving in the same century as the political collapse.
Part of Tides of History
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.
The lectisternium, where statues of gods were laid on couches and served dinner. Forty-two minutes on ritual as crisis management.
With Ginna Closs
July AD 64, and two-thirds of the city burnt before it was stopped. Ginna Closs on the fire, the rebuilding, and the persecution that followed it. Forty-one minutes.
With Mary Beard
Beard on what emperors actually ate and, more to the point, what dinner was for. Seating, obligation and humiliation at the table, which turns out to be where a lot of Roman politics happened.
With Alexander Christie-Miller
Forty minutes with Alexander Christie-Miller on modern Istanbul and the Byzantine layer still visible under it.
Listener questions: where the gold came from, how Romania ended up speaking a Romance language, whether the Byzantines played polo. Thirty-nine minutes of the loose ends a narrative show cannot stop for.
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 institution the economy rested on, including the manumission rate that made freedmen a class of their own.
Thirty-nine minutes on who actually lived in the empire: farmers, soldiers, and a capital that ate what the provinces grew.
Thirty-eight minutes on the Roman city as a machine: baths, forum, aqueduct and a council that paid for them.
Thirty-eight minutes of listener questions around the First Crusade, which is the moment the empire and the west start reading each other wrong.
Thirty-seven minutes on the evidence for brothels in Pompeii, and on how much of it is a modern habit of reading every carved phallus as a signpost.
Alastair Blanshard on where the orgy came from, which is largely later writers and a Victorian appetite for a decadent Rome. Thirty-seven minutes.
Thirty-seven minutes on Constantinople itself, which in Greek is simply the City, and which everyone in this story is trying to reach.
Thirty-seven minutes on the city in 1025, away from the monuments: where people lived, how many there were, which harbours still worked. An ordinary year at the height of the empire.
Thirty-seven minutes on the numbers: how many people, how much grain, and how little of it can be known with confidence.
Thirty-seven minutes on what the sack did to the people in the city, which the political narrative usually passes over in a sentence.
Thirty-six minutes on what people actually ate, which involved no tomatoes, no aubergines and a great deal of fermented fish sauce.
Thirty-six minutes of listener questions on the seventh-century collapse, when the empire lost half its territory inside one generation.
Thirty-five minutes on the vineyards replanted inside Pompeii's walls from the root cavities the ash preserved, which is how anyone knows what was growing there.
Episode one of the series, thirty-five minutes on the town as a working place before AD 79: the elections painted on walls, the bakeries, the water supply.
Thirty-five minutes of listener questions from the years of the successor states.
Thirty-four minutes of listener questions, ranging from Roman dentistry to what happened to the elephants.
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 Republic as an economy: what an expanding market felt like from inside a workshop, and where the proceeds of conquest actually landed.
Thirty-three minutes on that machine stopping, with the baths closing first and the walls going up last.
Thirty-three minutes on the epigrams: fifteen hundred short poems about everyone in Rome, most of them obscene and all of them useful.
Thirty-three minutes of listener questions after the Justinianic stretch, where the host answers what the narrative had to leave out.
Thirty-three minutes on the short reigns between dynasties, which are usually skipped and are where the succession rules get tested.
Thirty-three minutes on women's lives across the empire, built from law codes, saints' lives and wills.
With Robert Bruton
Thirty-three minutes with Robert Bruton on the volcanic winters of the 530s, the coldest decade in two thousand years, and the plague that followed.
Thirty-two minutes of listener questions around the early Macedonian period, where the narrative has to skip the most and the host knows it.
Thirty-two minutes of the last question session, taken after more than three hundred episodes.
Thirty-one minutes inside the siege of Jerusalem, when the city was starving and its factions were still fighting each other. The hosts stay with the eyewitness Josephus, who was standing outside the walls working for the Romans.
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.
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 Tim Parkin
Thirty minutes on growing old in Rome: no pension, a father's legal power for life, and a literature that treats age as a subject for complaint.
Thirty minutes on sumptuary laws that nobody obeyed, and on a moralising tradition that treated imported silk as a political problem.
Thirty minutes on the toga as a uniform: who was allowed which stripe, and the purple that only one man could wear.
Thirty minutes of listener questions covering the iconoclast century, where the sources were written afterwards by the side that won.
Half an hour of listener questions from the eleventh century, the decades where every explanation of the collapse is still argued over.
Twenty-nine minutes of listener questions, which is where the show parks what fits no other episode.
Twenty-nine minutes more of the same, the second half of a long question session.
What happened to the Romans after 1453: enslavement, ransom, flight west, and the families who did well out of Ottoman rule. Twenty-eight minutes on an ending that kept going.
Twenty-eight minutes on Syria, Egypt and Palestine, the richest part of the empire and the part that would be lost fastest.
Twenty-eight minutes on the empire's pull on its neighbours: everyone wanted its gold, its titles and its church, and nobody wanted its tax collectors.
Part of Being Roman with Mary Beard
Lucius Caecilius Iucundus lent money, ran auctions and took a cut of both, and his business archive survived the ash on wax tablets. Twenty-eight minutes on Pompeii's middleman.
A carved stone from a vineyard in southern Italy records an innkeeper's bill in dialogue, itemised down to the girl and the mule. Twenty-eight minutes on Calidius Eroticus.
The letters of Claudius Terentianus, a young soldier who wrote home begging his father for sandals and complained about nearly everything else. Twenty-eight minutes on the army from inside it.
Gaius Julius Alpinus Classicianus arrived as procurator in 61 to find the governor still killing Britons, and wrote to Nero that a province of corpses pays no tax. Twenty-eight minutes; his tombstone is in the British Museum.
Twenty-seven minutes opening a side series on individual lives, starting with a preacher from Antioch whose sermons got him exiled twice.
Twenty-seven minutes taking apart a story the sources tell well and the evidence does not support.
Twenty-seven minutes on Latin rule in Greece read as an occupation, with the question of what the locals actually experienced.
Twenty-seven minutes on the clerks: the thousands of men who kept the provinces fed and watered, and the complaints they left behind about each other.
The longest private inscription to survive from Rome: a husband's account of a wife who hid him through the proscriptions and offered him a divorce when she could not bear children. Twenty-seven minutes.
Roman writers on Jewish practice, and the tax imposed on every Jew in the empire after the temple fell. Twenty-seven minutes on a settlement that lasted two centuries.
With Kevin Butcher
Kevin Butcher on Saturnalia, 17 to 23 December: drinking, gift-giving, and masters serving their slaves for the duration. Twenty-six minutes from the History Hit archive.
Twenty-six minutes on the December festival: gifts, gambling allowed, and slaves at table while their owners served.
Part of The History of Rome
Twenty-six minutes on the Roman property ladder: the census classes, the equestrian line, and what a senator was legally forbidden to do for money.
Twenty-six minutes on two cousins, one running the empire and the other waiting, which ends badly for everyone including the empire.
Twenty-six minutes on the Anatolia the empire had lost: who lived there now, and how much had actually changed for them.
Twenty-five minutes on Roman eye medicine, known from the stone stamps oculists used to mark their ointment sticks, dozens of which survive with the recipe named on them.
Twenty-five minutes on the dinner party: the couches, the order of the courses, and what your seat said about your standing.
Twenty-five minutes on the tenth-century recovery, when the frontier started moving east again after three hundred years of moving west.
Twenty-five minutes taking stock five hundred years after the west fell, with the east still calling itself Roman.
Twenty-five minutes walking the city: the walls, the forums, the palace and the hippodrome, with what is still standing today.
Part of When in Rome
Twenty-five minutes on the largest baths Rome ever built, put up in the early fourth century and now holding a church, a museum and a railway station.
Part of Byzantium And The Crusades
Twenty-five minutes on daily life in the crusader states, Outremer, the part of the story that is neither battle nor politics.
Part of The Pax Romana Podcast
Twenty-three minutes on the free grain: two hundred thousand recipients, a fleet to carry it, and a politics built on it.
Twenty-three minutes on the fire, the persecution that followed, and the number in Revelation that may be counting a name.
Twenty-three minutes following an ordinary Roman through a day, from the morning salutation to the baths, which is the episode to send someone who has never listened.
Twenty-three minutes on the second Italian campaign, fought with a scraped-together army years after the first one had won.
The tour of Greece, the neglected armies and the revolt of Vindex, ending with four emperors in one year. Twenty-three minutes on how a dynasty runs out.
Twenty-two minutes on a system organised by who penetrated whom, with gender a secondary question. Modern categories fit it badly.
Twenty-two minutes on a December festival for a goddess with her finger to her lips, guarding a secret name of the city.
Part of Ancient Rome Live
Twenty-two minutes on Roman rubbish. Monte Testaccio is a hill thirty-five metres high made of smashed olive oil amphorae, which is what accumulates when a container cannot be used twice.
Twenty minutes on Jewish life under the empire, legally tolerated and repeatedly restricted, over a thousand years.
Twenty minutes on the city under Manuel Komnenos in the twelfth century, with two palaces in use and the Italian quarters growing. The Italians in this episode are why 1204 happened.
Twenty minutes on what a congregation actually did: meals, letters, and a burial fund.
Nineteen minutes on the February festival where young men ran the city striking women with goatskin thongs, and where Antony offered Caesar a crown.
Nineteen minutes on the closing of the old temples and the last pagan academies, done by law over decades.
Nineteen minutes on how a Roman city paid for itself: rents, workshops, and a grain supply that came from somewhere else.
Eighteen minutes on the other side of the same frontier, and on villages that paid taxes to whichever side reached them.
Eighteen minutes on the climate optimum that made the good centuries possible, and what happened when it ended.
Part of Echoes of Empires
Eighteen minutes on climate as a force in Roman history, from the warm centuries of the early empire to the cooling that came with the plague years.
Part of Voices of the Past
A Roman writing about the new sect and about a man he calls Jesus son of Panthera, read as the source gives it.
The floods that repeatedly put the forum under water, and what Rome did about them.
The amphitheatre riot of AD 59 between Pompeians and Nucerians, which Rome punished with a ten-year ban on games. Seventeen minutes, and there is a fresco of it painted by someone who was in the town.
Seventeen minutes on the climate argument, which has moved from the margins of the field to the centre in twenty years.
Seventeen minutes arguing the fourth century was a good time to be alive, which cuts against the decline story most listeners arrive with.
Sixteen minutes on Roman marriage as an institution: the forms, the dowries, and how easily either party could end it.
Sixteen minutes on the ladder from senator to enslaved, and on the freedmen who could be richer than the men above them.
How the baths were built, how they were heated, and what stood in the niches. The engineering and the decoration in one film.
Fifteen minutes on the fifth century BC: plague, famine, Volscian raids and a city that nearly failed before it started.
Fifteen minutes on Christianity as a cultural fact before it was a state religion, the first of a five-part run.
Fourteen minutes on six days of burning, ten of the fourteen districts damaged, and the rebuilding code that followed.
Fourteen minutes on Roman sanitation, which delivered enormous quantities of water and no understanding of what caused disease.
Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast
Twelve minutes on posca, the sour wine and water mix that was the standard army drink, and on how Roman soldiers made bad water safe.
Twelve minutes on the Saturnalia, the week in December when the household order was inverted and slaves were served at table.
The river followed from its source to the sea, and what it meant for a city built on it.
Eleven minutes on dice and board games in the ancient world, which is where Caesar's line at the Rubicon comes from and what it actually meant to a player.
A street into the forum reopened after centuries, filmed as the excavation finished.
Ten minutes on the ninety-odd per cent of army life that was not battle: building, drilling, quarrying, and the paperwork that survives from Egypt.
Eight minutes answering a listener: how legionaries fought at the Arar and Bibracte in 58 BC and were fit to do it again weeks later. Murray Dahm on training, grain ration and discipline.
Eight minutes on Roman bathing taken as medicine: mineral springs, prescribed cures, and resorts built on water that was thought to work on particular complaints.
Eight minutes on the macellum, the covered market hall, traced from Pompeii to Jerash in Jordan. The plan barely changes between the two, which are two thousand kilometres apart.
The largest surviving water tanks in the empire, filmed inside them. The Piscina Mirabilis at Misenum held twelve thousand cubic metres for the fleet.
Arms, armour and Latin pronunciation, from someone who handles the reproductions and reads the sources in the original. Opinionated and occasionally combative; strongest when he is holding a gladius and explaining why the grip is that shape.
The next 17 of 193, longest first
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Part of The Delicious Legacy · Food history from a Greek gourmand; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of Greeced Lightning · Myths and movies with a doctor of classics; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of Echoes of History · History Hit for Assassin's Creed; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of Ithaca Bound · Andrew Schiestel on the Mediterranean, 2021 to 2022; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast · The three centuries between Alexander and Actium; only the Roman episodes are indexed
