Blueprints · How Rome ran: the army, the money, the law, the concrete.
Aqueducts, roads, concrete, and the Pantheon's dome.
119 entries · 82 hours · 91 with a written verdict · British 47 · American 33 · Australian 15 · Mixed 7
The Pantheon has stood for nineteen hundred years and remains the largest unreinforced concrete dome on earth. Roman concrete gets stronger in seawater, which took a materials lab until 2017 to explain. Toldinstone walks the sites and films what survives, Understanding Rome is presented by a licensed guide who lives there, and both make you want to go and put your hand on it.
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when it happens
how it is made
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With a written verdict
Mary Beard and Michael Scott underground, into the sewers, aqueducts and catacombs, with laser scanning. Ninety minutes on the plumbing, the water supply and the burial system that kept a million people alive.
Twelve and a half hours on the city itself, foundation to 1453, told as the biography of a place while the emperors come and go through it.
Part of Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium
A hundred and three minutes on a reign of forty-two years that produced a law code and the walls that saved the city for a millennium.
Part of The Partial Historians
Seventy-nine minutes walking the sites of the regal city with the Ancient Blogger, matching each story to the ground it is supposed to have happened on.
Hadrian scored out of ten across the show's fixed categories, which forces the awkward comparison between the builder and the man who crushed Bar Kokhba. Seventy-six minutes.
The second half of the same walk, covering the Palatine and the forum valley. Seventy minutes.
Part of Life of Caesar
The turn of 39, when the trials came back and the senate learned that the good years were over. An hour and a bit on how quickly a reign can reverse.
Part of The Ancients
Lindsay Powell on the later career of Marcus Agrippa: the aqueducts, the first Pantheon, the fleet that won Actium. Sixty-seven minutes on the man who built most of what Augustus is remembered for.
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.
Sixty-four minutes on the aqueducts, which ran on gradients around two metres per kilometre, with Pliny putting the minimum at twenty centimetres and delivered water by the million litres a day.
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 Ancient Warfare Podcast
With Bret Devereaux
Bret Devereaux on his own paper on mail in the middle Republic: when Rome adopted it, how widespread it was, and what it cost to make. Sixty-three minutes.
An hour on two enormous pleasure barges raised from a lake in the 1930s and burnt in 1944, the best physical evidence of the reign that existed.
The Fucine Lake drainage, eleven years and thirty thousand men, and the naval battle staged on it before the plug was pulled. Fifty-eight minutes on Rome's largest civil engineering project.
Part of Tides of History
With Simon Stoddart
Simon Stoddart on how the city spread across the Iron Age Mediterranean, worked out from Etruria where the evidence is thickest. Fifty-five minutes on the urban habit Rome inherited from its neighbours.
Mike Loades on experimental archaeology with real chariots, including whether the scythed blades on the Boudica statue at Westminster could have existed. Fifty-four minutes.
Fifty-four minutes on early Roman building: tufa, the Servian wall, and what the archaeology says about a city the sources describe as mud huts.
Part of The Rest Is History
Fifty-three minutes on the Flavian amphitheatre: gladiators, mock sea battles, and executions staged as scenes from mythology for an audience of tens of thousands.
With Andrea Brock
Andrea Brock on the earliest Rome as an engineering problem: a flood plain raised and drained by hand, decades before anyone would call it a city. Fifty-two minutes.
With Jesse Obert
Jesse Obert pushing against the standard account of the Roman navy: whether the fleets were permanent, and whether anti-piracy was really the job. Fifty-two minutes.
Septimius Severus was born in Leptis Magna and rebuilt it as a showpiece of the empire he came to rule. Fifty-two minutes on what that says about Roman citizenship: the provinces produced emperors, and the emperors paid the provinces back in marble.
With Frances McIntosh
Fifty-one minutes on the build itself: between eleven and sixteen feet high depending on which side of the Irthing you stand, some eighty Roman miles across northern Britain, and still an open question what it was actually for.
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.
The 1,900th anniversary episode, assuming the wall was begun in AD 122 and not 119. Forty-nine minutes of the panel arguing about the date and the purpose, both of which are genuinely unsettled.
With Dennis Romano
Dennis Romano on Venice from salt pans to empire to tourism, a city founded by people leaving the Roman mainland and lasting a thousand years. Forty-eight minutes.
Part of The History of Byzantium
With Steve Guerra
Forty-eight minutes with Steve Guerra on what happened to the old capital after the emperors left, which is a story of popes and cattle.
With Andrew Tibbs
Andrew Tibbs on the wall Antoninus Pius ordered about AD 142 between the Forth and the Clyde, turf on stone, held for roughly twenty years and then given up. Forty- seven minutes.
With Catherine Fletcher
Catherine Fletcher on the road network, from the Via Appia of 312 BC onward, and on what it was built for, which was armies before it was trade. Forty-seven minutes.
With Katherine Pangonis
Forty-five minutes with Pangonis on Mediterranean cities that were great and then were not, Antioch and Ravenna among them.
Forty-three minutes on Agrippa before the buildings: Naulochus, Actium, and a career that stayed loyal at every point where it could have turned into a bid of his own.
With Nathan Elkins
Nathan Elkins on the Flavian amphitheatre: who paid for it, what the spoils of Jerusalem had to do with it, and how a building that size was emptied in minutes. Forty-three minutes.
With Matthew Nicholls
Matthew Nicholls on the Pantheon: Agrippa's temple, burnt and rebuilt by Hadrian around AD 126, and a concrete dome nobody matched for thirteen centuries. Forty- three minutes.
With Greg Woolf
Greg Woolf on the city itself: how a million people were fed, housed and kept from burning, and what it took to keep them there. Forty-three minutes.
With John Giebfried
Forty-three minutes with John Giebfried on the city under Latin rule after 1204, when the conquerors found they had taken something too big to run. The physical decay is the evidence.
The harbour of Theodosius, found under a modern city while they were digging a railway. Forty-three minutes on the port that fed the capital of the last emperor to rule both halves of the empire.
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 Robert Symmons
Robert Symmons on Fishbourne in Sussex, begun within three decades of the conquest and found in 1960 by a workman digging a water main. Forty-one minutes.
Matthew Nicholls on chariot racing, which drew crowds several times the size of the Colosseum's and ran four factions with supporters who rioted over them. Forty minutes.
Forty minutes taking the site from Greek Byzantion to imperial capital, early in a run that went on for another three hundred and sixty episodes. The compact version of the whole story.
Part of The Fall of Rome Podcast
Thirty-eight minutes on the Roman city as a machine: baths, forum, aqueduct and a council that paid for them.
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-three minutes on that machine stopping, with the baths closing first and the walls going up last.
Thirty-three minutes weighing what was left in 565: Italy ruined by twenty years of war, the treasury empty, and a law code that outlived every province he took.
Part of Emperors of Rome
Thirty-two minutes on why the senate gave him the title Optimus Princeps, which it gave to nobody else. Winning over the senate and the people at once is the achievement the episode takes apart.
Part of When in Rome
With Niccolò Mugnai
Thirty-one minutes on the birthplace of Septimius Severus on the Libyan coast, which he rebuilt as emperor into something meant to rival Rome. A harbour city preserved by sand.
With Alice König
The water commissioner who wrote a book on the aqueducts including the fraud he found. Thirty minutes on Roman administration in its own words.
The fourth king, who built the first bridge over the Tiber and the port at Ostia. Thirty minutes on infrastructure as the beginning of a city that could grow.
An Etruscan immigrant who talked his way into the kingship, drained the forum and started the Circus Maximus. Twenty-nine minutes on how open early Rome actually was.
With Adrian Goldsworthy
Twenty-eight minutes on the Roman fort as a standard product: the same plan from Scotland to Syria, so a soldier always knew where the hospital was.
Part of The History of Rome
Duncan on the decision to stop expanding: Trajan's conquests abandoned, a wall across Britain and a palisade in Germany. Twenty-seven minutes on an empire choosing its own edges.
Antinous, the drowning in the Nile, and a city founded for a dead boy. Twenty-six minutes on grief turned into an imperial cult with temples of its own.
Rome walled for the first time in six centuries, twelve miles of it built in five years because the frontier no longer held. Twenty-six minutes.
Twenty-five minutes from the archive on the Forum: a drained marsh between hills that ended up holding the law courts, the treasury and the speaker's platform.
The triple wall that kept Constantinople for a thousand years, built while the west was losing its provinces. Twenty-five minutes.
Twenty-five minutes on the taxes, the factions and the resentment that piled up in Justinian's first five years before anyone struck a match.
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.
With Caillan Davenport
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 The Pax Romana Podcast
Twenty-three minutes on AD 330 and the decision to put a second capital on the Bosphorus. Everything else on this page follows from that one act.
Twenty-two minutes on the recapture of Constantinople in 1261, taken almost by accident by a scouting party that found a gate open.
Duncan on the reign that later emperors were measured against, including the phrase the senate used at every accession afterwards. Twenty-one minutes.
Twenty-one minutes on the coronation ritual and the building it happened in, where the ceremony and the architecture were designed together.
Part of Byzantium And The Crusades
Twenty-one minutes on the one weak point in the best-fortified city in the medieval world, and on the Turkish ships dragged overland to reach it.
Twenty-one minutes on the cannon Mehmet commissioned, cast by a founder who had offered it to the Byzantines first and been told they could not pay. The walls had held for a thousand years until this.
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.
Nineteen minutes more of the same, covering the British campaign where he died at York telling his sons to agree.
Part of Ancient Rome Live
The floods that repeatedly put the forum under water, and what Rome did about them.
Seventeen minutes walking the forum the Dacian gold paid for: a basilica, two libraries and a column, on ground cut out of a hill.
Seventeen minutes on the wall as an object: eighty Roman miles of it, seventy-three of ours, a milecastle at every one of them, and a customs post as much as a defence.
Part of Echoes of Empires
Seventeen minutes, the shortest way into the founding, from a host who argues the city mattered more than the conversion Constantine is remembered for.
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.
Sixteen minutes on whether the famous naval weapon was ever used in a siege, and on how closely the recipe was kept.
Part of Historia Civilis
The sacred boundary of the city, why a general lost his command by crossing it, and how that one line shaped Roman politics for five centuries.
How the baths were built, how they were heated, and what stood in the niches. The engineering and the decoration in one film.
Fourteen minutes on Roman sanitation, which delivered enormous quantities of water and no understanding of what caused disease.
The river followed from its source to the sea, and what it meant for a city built on it.
Eleven minutes on the question Hadrian's Wall keeps raising: a barrier that could not stop an army, so it was doing something else. Customs, control of movement, or display.
Ten minutes on the Roman navy beyond the trireme: liburnians, quinqueremes, river patrol craft, and what each was actually for.
Ten minutes on Macedonian arms manufacture under Philip and Alexander, and on how much thinner that evidence is than the Roman equivalent.
Part of toldinstone
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 on the last great bath complex built in Rome, raised on the Quirinal around AD 315 and pulled down in 1605 to clear ground for a cardinal's palace. The drawings made before it went are most of what survives.
Eight minutes on the polybolos, a repeating catapult that worked and that nobody kept, which makes it a good test of what ancient armies actually valued.
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.
Eight minutes on the Meta Sudans, the conical fountain that stood beside the Colosseum from Domitian's reign until Mussolini had the stump cleared in 1936 to widen a road for parades.
Eight minutes on the Septizodium, the three-storey show front Septimius Severus put at the foot of the Palatine in AD 203 so that travellers from Africa met it first. Sixtus V quarried it away in 1588.
The largest surviving water tanks in the empire, filmed inside them. The Piscina Mirabilis at Misenum held twelve thousand cubic metres for the fleet.
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 Lugo in Galicia, ringed by a third-century wall that still runs its entire circuit. No other Roman city in Europe can say that.
Five minutes at Segovia, where roughly 25,000 granite blocks stand in two tiers with no mortar holding any of them together.
Darius Arya filming on the sites themselves, usually with the excavation still open behind him. Less polished than the animated channels and considerably closer to the dirt.
Everything else
Part of Lost Roman Heroes · Matteo and Matthew Storm, 101 episodes
Part of The History of Constantinople · The city, from the Greek colony onwards
Part of The History of Rome · Mike Duncan, 179 episodes, 2007 to 2012
Part of Autocrat: A Roman History Podcast · Vince and Cassie, 137 numbered episodes
Part of Understanding Rome · Agnes Crawford, licensed guide in Rome
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
