Bloodlines · Who it happened to: the plotting, the gods, the beds, the graves.
Tombs on the roadside, funeral orations, and the memory of the dead.
67 entries · 42 hours · 56 with a written verdict · British 18 · Australian 16 · American 16
Roman tombs stood along the roads out of every city so that travellers would read them, and many are addressed to you directly. A senator's funeral put actors in the wax masks of his ancestors and walked them behind the body. The inscriptions are the largest surviving body of ordinary Roman writing, and Mary Beard reads them better than anyone.
I feel like…
when it happens
how it is made
who is talking
how much time you have
With a written verdict
Beard's three parts on ordinary Romans, read off their tombstones. The corrective to every documentary that is only about emperors.
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
The revolt of the Eburones and the loss of fifteen cohorts, after which Caesar swore not to shave until it was avenged. An hour and a half on the winter Gaul nearly turned.
Eighty-four minutes on March 37, when Tiberius was seventy-seven and had been emperor for twenty-two years. The title refers to the report that he woke up after being declared dead, and the episode weighs whether that happened.
Part of Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium
Titus scored on the show's fixed categories, which is awkward for an emperor who reigned twenty-six months and got Vesuvius, a fire and a plague.
Part of The Ancients
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.
Part of The History of Byzantium
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.
Part of The Partial Historians
With Victoria Austen
Victoria Austen on the tomb Augustus built for himself at thirty-five, decades before he needed it, and on what a garden-topped mound was saying to Romans. An hour on architecture as a claim.
Part of Our Fake History
Hadrian has been celebrated as one of Rome's five good emperors, but his reputation is complicated by the mysterious death of his teenage lover, Antinous.
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.
The exile, the march on Rome with Volscian troops, and the mother who stopped him. Sixty-one minutes on a story Shakespeare found already shaped.
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.
Kyle Harper on disease as a cause and not a backdrop: the Antonine plague, the Cyprianic, and the bubonic outbreak of 541. Sixty minutes, third of the Fall of Rome run.
Fifty-six minutes on the Allia and the sack of 390, the defeat Romans dated their calendar around for centuries.
Part of Emperors of Rome
Fifty-four minutes on the eleven months in Alexandria after the defeat, and two suicides staged with care. The asp arrives late in the tradition and may be entirely literary.
Fifty-one minutes on a find from the Great Pompeii Project, in a suburban villa some seven hundred metres from the walls. Excavation there is still producing new bodies.
Forty-nine minutes back at Pompeii and Herculaneum, with what the excavations have turned up since the previous episode on them.
The eruption of 79 is the famous one; this is about the one eighteen centuries before it, which buried a Bronze Age settlement on the same mountain. Forty-seven minutes, and it turns Vesuvius from a single catastrophe into a habit.
Part of The Rest Is History
Forty-six minutes on the eruption of AD 79, a column of gas and ash some twenty-one miles high and the surges that came down the mountain after it collapsed.
With Carolina Lima
Carolina Lima on the cremated remains from Roman Colchester and what isotopes and bone can say about where those people had come from. Forty-four minutes.
Forty-four minutes on Arria, who stabbed herself first and handed the dagger to her husband with that line. Roman suicide as a public argument.
With Gillian Shepherd
Forty-four minutes on a punishment reserved for slaves and rebels, designed to take days and be watched.
With Zachary Herz
Forty-three minutes on the lists posted in the forum with a price on each name, under Sulla and again under the triumvirs.
Forty-one minutes on the longest private inscription from Rome: a husband's funeral speech for a wife who hid him during the proscriptions.
Forty-one minutes on the plague of 541, which killed perhaps a third of the empire and ended the reconquest without a battle.
Forty minutes on the eruption of AD 79 itself, hour by hour, in the series the show built around the town. Carries a warning for the descriptions of how people died.
With Ewan Coopey
Thirty-nine minutes with Ewan Coopey on what auxiliaries and legionaries chose to put on their own gravestones, from northern Britain to the Near East. Rank, years served, and who paid for the stone.
With Nick Summerton
Nick Summerton on the epidemic that arrived with the armies returning from the east in the 160s: the flight from cities, the advice on staying well, and what Galen recorded. Thirty-two minutes.
Part of The Ancient World
Thirty-two minutes on the death of Tiberius and Caligula's first year, including the summons and execution of Ptolemy of Mauretania for no reason anyone recorded.
Part of Historia Civilis
The Ides drawn minute by minute, with who stood where in the theatre of Pompey. Sixty conspirators is a logistical problem and this shows it as one.
Thirty-one minutes on a plague that killed consuls and augurs alike, and on what an ancient city could and could not do about disease.
Thirty minutes on Aurelian crushing the second Palmyrene revolt, and on the sources that cannot agree whether Zenobia died on the road, in the triumph or in a villa at Tivoli.
Twenty-eight minutes previewing their Masada series: a siege ramp, a mass suicide, and one source written by a man who changed sides.
Twenty-eight minutes on the end of the Macedonian line, with the throne passing through elderly empresses to whoever they married.
The legends that gathered around Constantine XI, including the one where an angel carries him under the Golden Gate to wait. Twenty-seven minutes on how a defeat turns into a prophecy.
Part of The History of Rome
Attila's death and the collapse of the Hunnic confederation within a year. Twenty-seven minutes on an empire that was one man.
Twenty-seven minutes on Roman ghost stories, including Pliny's haunted house in Athens and the bones found under the floor.
Twenty-seven minutes on Nerva's short reign, in which an elderly senator was pushed into adopting a general to stay alive.
Part of Being Roman with Mary Beard
Allia Potestas, remembered on her tombstone by a lover who shared her with a friend and thought the arrangement worth carving in stone. Twenty-seven minutes with Mary Beard on a single inscription.
With Caillan Davenport
Twenty-five minutes on the massacre at Alexandria and the murder on the road to Carrhae that ended him.
Part of Autocrat: A Roman History Podcast
Twenty-five minutes of Roman ghost stories, most of them from Pliny and Suetonius, who reported them straight.
With Jodi Magness
Jodi Magness, who co-directed the 1995 excavations, on the 967 who supposedly died on the rock in AD 73 and on how much of Josephus the digging actually supports. Twenty-three minutes.
Twenty-two minutes on deathbed baptism, which made sense in a theology where baptism wiped the slate and an emperor had a great deal to wipe.
Antony's speech and the riot it started, which decided more than the murder did.
Twenty-one minutes on Valens at Adrianople, where two thirds of an eastern field army died in an afternoon.
Part of The Pax Romana Podcast
Baptised on his deathbed, buried among twelve apostolic tombs, and succeeded by three sons who divided everything. Twenty-one minutes on an ending arranged in advance and still gone wrong.
Part of Echoes of Empires
Twenty-one minutes on the plague that struck in 541 and killed on the scale of the Black Death. Everything Justinian planned after this is shaped by it.
Twenty minutes on Hadrian's deathbed poem to his own soul, five lines that have been translated for eighteen centuries.
Seventeen minutes on an emperor dying at York with advice for his sons that neither of them took.
Fourteen minutes on an emperor whose short reign was almost entirely disaster relief.
Fourteen minutes on the last years: illness, a failed suicide attempt, and a succession arranged two deep so it would hold. It held for eighty years.
Part of Ancient Rome Live
Where executions actually happened: the Carcer, the Tarpeian Rock, and what the locations meant to the crowd.
Part of toldinstone
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.
Seven minutes at Sidyma in the Lycian hills, where the tombs outlasted the town and a village was later built in among them.
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.
Everything else
Part of Lost Roman Heroes · Matteo and Matthew Storm, 101 episodes
Part of Autocrat: A Roman History Podcast · Vince and Cassie, 137 numbered episodes
