Life on the frontier

Thirty-three episodes, finished, by a historian whose doctorate is on this exact period. Wyman's argument is that the machinery of the western state came apart slowly and locally, province by province, and he builds it out of tax records, coin finds and the archaeology of abandoned villas. Twenty-three hours, complete since 2018.

Part of Fall of Civilizations

The episode that started the series: an hour and a quarter on what it felt like when the empire stopped coming, built out of the archaeology of villas going quiet and coins running out. Alexey Sibikin's sound design carries the last ten minutes almost alone.

Nick Holmes writes books about the end of the Roman world and this is the argument from them in his own voice, held across 47 episodes. Ran as The Fall of the Roman Empire until 2026, so that name now finds a different show by somebody else.

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.

Beard on what held the empire together across four hours, which is a better question than how it fell and gets asked far less often.

Part of SandRhomanHistory

What happened in Britain after 410, following the archaeology where the written sources stop.

Part of SandRhomanHistory

A documentary on how post-Roman Britain turns into medieval England, following the archaeology where the written sources stop.

Part of Life of Caesar

The mopping up after Alesia, including Uxellodunum where the survivors had their hands cut off. Two hours on what pacification meant in practice.

Part of The History of Byzantium

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.

Part of Voices of the Past

How far Roman traders and embassies actually got, read from the accounts themselves: China, the Baltic, the edge of the Sahara.

Part of Life of Caesar

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.

Part of SandRhomanHistory

Four and a half centuries of Roman Britain in one documentary, from Caesar's landing to the withdrawal.

The Ninth Legion vanishing into Caledonia, filmed as a survival chase. Nonsense as history, and the only film that makes the northern frontier feel as cold and hostile as the tombstones suggest.

Part of SandRhomanHistory

Ninety-six minutes touring what was standing in 476 across the former western provinces, kingdom by kingdom. Animated throughout, and the map does the arguing.

Part of Life of Caesar

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.

Part of Life of Caesar

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 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.

Part of Life of Caesar

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.

Part of The Ancients

With Rob Collins

Britain is the clearest case study in the whole collapse, because the coins stop, the pottery stops, and the archaeology shows a material standard of living falling off a cliff within a generation.

Part of Life of Caesar

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 The History of Byzantium

With Marco Cappelli

Eighty minutes with Marco Capelli on the Byzantine centuries in Italy, which Italian history teaching largely passes over.

Part of Life of Caesar

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.

Part of Life of Caesar

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.

Part of Life of Caesar

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.

Part of The Ancients

With Rob Collins

Rob Collins on the fifth century at the wall, when the forts stayed occupied long after the pay stopped arriving. Seventy-five minutes on an ending that took generations.

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.

Part of The Ancients

With David Gwynn

Where to start on the fall if you want one episode: what was already wrong before anything visibly went wrong.

Part of Life of Caesar

Seventy-four minutes with the British History Podcast on what Rome left in Britain and what the island made of it afterwards.

Part of The Ancients

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 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 Life of Caesar

Seventy minutes on the first crossing, with two legions, no cavalry that arrived, and a beach landing against a defended shore.

Part of Life of Caesar

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.

Part of Life of Caesar

The aqueducts begun in his reign and finished under Claudius, plus the harbour works. An hour on the building programme the stories leave out.

Part of Life of Caesar

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.

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.

Part of Life of Caesar

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.

Part of Cost of Glory

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

Sixty-four minutes on 4 September AD 476, a date with no battle behind it: a boy emperor pensioned off and a German general deciding the title was surplus.

Part of The Rest Is History

Harald Hardrada in the Varangian Guard, a Norwegian prince serving as a bodyguard in Constantinople before going home to claim a throne. Sixty-four minutes.

Part of Life of Caesar

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The History of Byzantium

With Nicholas Morton

Sixty-two minutes with Nicholas Morton on the whole sea at once, which is the frame that makes the crusades make sense.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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 of Cost of Glory

Sixty-one minutes on Lucullus driving Mithridates out of Pontus and following him into Armenia, where the war stopped being winnable.

Part of The Ancients

Londinium founded around AD 47, burnt by Boudica inside fifteen years, rebuilt, and given up in the fifth century. Sixty minutes on the commercial logic of a bridging point nobody had thought worth a town before.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Partial Historians

With Owen Rees

Sixty minutes with Owen Rees of badancient.com on what ancient writers put at the edges of the map. Rees debunks modern claims about antiquity for a living, and here he does it to the ancients themselves.

Part of Tides of History

With Kathryn Lomas

Kathryn Lomas on her own book, sixty minutes on the Italy that Rome grew up inside: Oscan and Umbrian speakers, Greek colonies on the coast, and one Latin town among many.

Part of The Rest Is History

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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 of The Rest Is History

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.

Part of Life of Caesar

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.

Part of The Ancients

With Eve MacDonald

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.

Part of The Rest Is History

Part one of two, fifty-eight minutes on where Carthage came from and on whether it really burned its children. The archaeology of the tophet is the hinge of that argument.

Part of HistoryHit

With Peter Heather

Fifty-eight minutes taking the whole collapse in one run, to camera. Useful as the frame to hang the detailed episodes on, because it moves fast enough to keep the fourth and fifth centuries as one story.

Part of The Partial Historians

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

Murray Dahm on his own book about the end of Roman Britain and the Saxon settlement, with Marc DeSantis asking the questions. Fifty-seven minutes.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Rest Is History

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 of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

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 of The Rest Is History

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

Miles Russell argues that Arthur is five earlier figures welded into one by later writers. Fifty-three minutes on how a legend gets assembled out of real people.

Part of The Ancients

Miles Russell again, fifty-three minutes, working through the candidates including Magnus Maximus and asking what a fifth-century war leader would have looked like.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

Fifty-three minutes on why Spain took Rome two hundred years to hold, which is longer than Gaul, Britain and Egypt put together.

Smallpox, plague, volcanic winters and a cooling climate, put beside the invasions that usually get the whole blame. Fifty-three minutes of the case that the empire was ill before it was overrun.

Part of The Ancients

With Oliver Davis

Oliver Davis on Iron Age Wales on its own terms, where the single word Celt covers several quite different ways of living. Fifty-two minutes.

Part of The Ancients

With Rebecca Jones

Rebecca Jones on marching camps, the temporary earthworks an army threw up every single night. Fifty-two minutes on the evidence that shows where legions went when they built nothing permanent.

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Fall of Rome Podcast

Fifty-one minutes on who actually crossed the North Sea, where the genetics and the archaeology disagree with the chronicles.

Part of The Rest Is History

Part one, fifty-one minutes on the Frankish warlords who inherited the western provinces and built something else on top of them.

Part of Life of Caesar

Fifty-one minutes on the reprisals after Boudica, where the governor was recalled for being too thorough.

Part of Cost of Glory

Fifty-one minutes on the moment Caesar nearly lost Gaul, in a series that reads the Commentaries as propaganda as much as report.

Part of The Ancients

With Eve MacDonald

Eve MacDonald on Ardashir overthrowing the Parthians in the 220s and building a state that pressed Rome harder than anything before it. Fifty minutes.

Part of The Ancients

With Ian Wood

Ian Wood on the Franks, who started as one group among many on the Rhine and ended up with the whole of Gaul. Fifty minutes on how that happened.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

Dura-Europos was buried under a Sasanian siege ramp and rediscovered in 1920 with its synagogue and its church still painted. Forty-nine minutes.

Part of The Ancients

With Andy Merrills

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.

Part of The Fall of Rome Podcast

Forty-nine minutes on the loss of Africa, which took the grain supply and the tax base of the western empire in one campaign.

Part of The Ancients

With Rachel Pope

Rachel Pope on where the Celts actually began, in the Alpine and upper Danube country, long before the word attached itself to Iron Age Britain. Forty-nine minutes giving a loosely used term a map.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

Forty-nine minutes on the auxiliaries, recruited from the provinces and paid in citizenship after twenty-five years. Half the army, and the half that is usually skipped.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of The Rest Is History

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.

Part of The Ancients

Emran El-Badawi on Mavia, queen of the Tanukhids, who fought Rome in the 370s and then supplied it with cavalry on her own terms. Forty-eight minutes.

Part of The Ancients

With Peter Heather

Peter Heather on the Saxon migrations: mercenaries invited in, a Roman order that stopped paying, and how much of the population actually moved. Forty-eight minutes.

Part of The Fall of Rome Podcast

Forty-eight minutes on the province that collapsed hardest: coinage gone, pottery gone, and towns empty within two generations.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

Forty-eight minutes on four centuries against Sasanian Persia, the last rival Rome treated as an equal and the one that outlasted the western empire.

Part of The Rest Is History

Forty-eight minutes on the far western province: Roman Lusitania, then Visigoths, then the long reconquest, with the Roman layer at the bottom of all of it.

Part of The Rest Is History

Part one, forty-eight minutes on 55 BC: scouts along the Kentish coast, a contested landing, and a Roman picture of Britons as savages the Romans half envied.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

Forty-seven minutes on the question underneath the German campaigns: what Augustus wanted from the Rhine, and whether a province beyond it was ever really the plan.

Part of Life of Caesar

Forty-seven minutes on the annexation of Mauretania after Caligula murdered its client king, which took four years of fighting.

Part of The Ancients

AD 43, the crossing, and the campaign that finally stuck where Caesar's two had not. Forty-six minutes with the archaeologist Duncan Mackay on where the landings actually were.

Part of The Ancients

With Jim Crow

Jim Crow on Housesteads, the auxiliary fort with the best-surviving latrines in Roman Britain. Forty-six minutes in which sanitation turns out to be the most talkative evidence on the site.

Part of The Ancients

With Ted Kaizer

Ted Kaizer on the caravan city that sat on the only reliable water for a long way, first named in the second millennium BC and rich on the traffic that had to stop there. Forty-six minutes.

Part of The Ancients

With Miles Russell

Miles Russell on Ambrosius Aurelianus, the one named Briton in Gildas who fought the Saxons and is the nearest the record comes to a documented Arthur. Forty-six minutes.

Part of The Ancients

With David Gwynn

David Gwynn on the Goths from the Danube crossing of 376 to the sack of 410 and the kingdoms after it. Forty-six minutes on refugees who became successors.

Part of The Ancients

With Hyun Jin Kim

Forty-six minutes on 453 and after: Attila dies on his wedding night and the empire he assembled comes apart among his sons inside a generation.

Part of The Ancients

Forty-six minutes on the auxiliary, recruited from the provinces, paid less than a legionary, and handed citizenship on discharge along with a bronze diploma to prove it.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

With Owen Rees

Forty-six minutes with Owen Rees on how Rome took Greece in fifty years, and on Corinth in 146 BC, destroyed in the same year as Carthage.

Part of The Ancients

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 Ancient Warfare Podcast

Forty-five minutes on the three decades of campaigning that began when Germanic warbands crossed the Rhine in 17 BC and ended at Teutoburg.

Part of The Ancients

Ronald Hutton on the Druids of Britain and Gaul: what Caesar reported, what Cicero's meeting with one suggests, and how little of either can be checked. Forty-five minutes.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

Forty-five minutes on the eastern half under pressure before the formal division: Gothic raids across the Danube and a frontier that never got quiet.

Part of HistoryHit

What happened in Britain once Rome left: rival kingdoms fighting over what remained. The episode gives the century after 410 its own hour.

Part of The Ancients

With Eve MacDonald

Eve MacDonald on the eastern frontier, where Rome faced the only neighbour with a comparable state behind it. Forty-four minutes.

Part of The Ancients

With Hyun Jin Kim

Hyun Jin Kim on the Huns as a state with a court, diplomacy and a tax base. Forty- four minutes correcting a picture written by their victims.

Part of The Ancients

With Hyun Jin Kim

Hyun Jin Kim on Attila consolidating the Hunnic tribes and turning them on the Balkans. Forty-four minutes, the first of two.

Part of The Ancients

With Hyun Jin Kim

Part two, forty-four minutes on Attila after the Balkans: Gaul in 451, Italy in 452, and the meeting with Pope Leo that everyone painted afterwards.

Part of The Ancients

Forty-three minutes on what the archaeology of late Iron Age Britain will actually support: the trade with Rome, the question of the druids, and the evidence for human sacrifice.

Part of The Ancients

With Gordon Noble

Gordon Noble on the Picts, who appear in the third century as Rome's northern problem and left carved stones where other peoples left documents. Forty-three minutes.

Part of The Ancients

With Fraser Hunter

The Traprain Law hoard, dug up near Edinburgh in 1919 and buried around the time the legions left Britain. Fraser Hunter on why Roman silver ended up chopped into pieces north of the wall. Forty-three minutes.

Part of Tides of History

With Douglas Boin

Douglas Boin on Alaric as a Roman insider: a commander who had served the empire and wanted a settlement from it, not a barbarian at the gates. Forty-three minutes.

Part of Tides of History

The Samnites came closer to stopping Rome than anyone before Hannibal, and this episode treats them as a civilisation with aims of its own.

Part of Tides of History

Forty-three minutes on the fifty years in which Rome, which had barely noticed the Greek east, took down both of its great kingdoms.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

Forty-three minutes running through the peoples Rome fought, including the ones it never conquered and the ones that came back.

Part of The History of Rome

Forty-three minutes on how the provinces were actually governed: a governor, a tiny staff, and local elites doing the work.

Part of The Ancients

With Simon Elliott

Simon Elliott on the two landings of 55 and 54 BC, neither of which left a garrison behind. Forty-two minutes on what Rome knew about Britain before it went, which was almost nothing.

Part of The Ancients

Camulodunum is the nearest Britain came to a town before the Romans arrived, and the first place Boudica burned. Forty-two minutes with Frank Hargrave of the Colchester Museum.

Part of The Ancients

With Andrew Birley

Andrew Birley on that season's dig, forty-two minutes from a site that has been excavated annually for fifty years and still has most of itself underground.

Part of Tides of History

Forty-two minutes on the fourth century BC, when Rome went from one town in Latium to the master of Italy. The terms offered to the defeated do more of the work here than the battles.

Part of Tides of History

Forty-two minutes on Hamilcar Barca rebuilding Carthage out of Spanish silver after the First Punic War, which is where the second one actually begins.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

Forty-two minutes on the peninsula before Rome held it: Etruscans in the north, Samnites in the mountains, Greek cities in the south. Murray Dahm, Lindsay Powell and Michael Taylor on the neighbours Rome had to beat before anyone else.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

Forty-two minutes on Agricola in Britain, drawn almost entirely from a biography written by his son-in-law Tacitus, which is the whole problem with it.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

Forty-two minutes on the invasions that hit Marcus Aurelius from AD 166: tribes crossing the Danube in numbers Rome had not planned for, with plague already in the camps.

Part of The Ancients

Recorded at the site, forty-one minutes on the days before the ambush of September AD 9. Part one of two, and the ground does much of the explaining.

Part of Tides of History

Forty-one minutes tracking Carthage from Phoenician outpost to the edge of empire around 500 BC, told as its own history with Rome still a small town.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

Forty-one minutes on the Tenth, raised against Sextus Pompeius and then stationed in the east for centuries, where it besieged Jerusalem and later garrisoned it.

Part of Tides of History

Forty minutes on the year the board was set: Rome throwing out its kings, Carthage rising in the central Mediterranean, Greece about to turn classical.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

Forty minutes on three centuries against Parthia, the neighbour Rome never conquered and which killed two emperors and one triumvir.

Part of The Ancients

Thirty-nine minutes on the Ninth, which disappears from the record after York and has been fictionally massacred in Scotland ever since. The evidence points elsewhere.

Part of Tides of History

Thirty-nine minutes on the end of the third century BC, when the war with Hannibal was closing and Rome turned its attention east for the first time.

Part of The Ancients

With Duncan Mackay

Duncan Mackay on the final battle, whose location is still unknown, and on why the candidates keep moving. Thirty-eight minutes.

Part of The Ancients

Thirty-eight minutes on the admiral who took Britain and northern Gaul in 286, minted his own coins with Roman legends on them, and held it for seven years.

Part of Tides of History

Thirty-eight minutes on the Gauls of the Po valley, who sacked Rome around 390 BC and frightened it for longer than Hannibal ever did.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

Thirty-seven minutes on the two Dacian wars, which ended with a province, a column in Rome and enough gold to pay for both.

Part of The Ancients

Thirty-six minutes on Armorica under Rome, a peninsula of the empire with its own trade routes to Britain and a very thin written record.

Part of Emperors of Rome

Alesia, recorded in front of an audience: a Roman army besieging a hill fort while itself under siege from a relief force. The double ring of fortifications is the reason this battle is still taught.

Part of HistoryHit

The two British expeditions that achieved almost nothing militarily and everything politically, which is why Caesar wrote them up at length.

Part of The Ancients

With Emma Southon

Emma Southon on Zenobia, who beat the Sasanians, stabilised the Roman east and then claimed it. Thirty-four minutes on the three years she ran a third of the empire.

Part of Emperors of Rome

A longer return to Gaul than the early episode, this time reading the war as a book Caesar wrote for voters back home. The campaign and the publicity campaign were the same operation.

Part of Emperors of Rome

With Caillan Davenport

Galerius against the Persians, ending in a treaty that held the eastern frontier for forty years. Thirty-four minutes on the campaign that proved the four-man system could fight.

Part of Emperors of Rome

With Caillan Davenport

Thirty-four minutes on the queen of Palmyra who took Egypt and Asia Minor, and who may have ended her life in a villa outside Rome.

Part of The Ancient World

Thirty-four minutes on Gaius Caesar's eastern expedition, with Juba II along, and on the wound in Armenia that killed Augustus's heir.

Part of Tides of History

Thirty-three minutes touring the whole sea in 146 BC, region by region, at the moment it became one power's lake.

Part of Emperors of Rome

With Christopher Gribbin

The campaign in Illyricum in the thirties BC, fought partly to give his soldiers something to do and his reputation something to stand on. Half an hour on a war chosen for its usefulness.

Part of The Ancient World

Thirty-two minutes on the Greek kingdoms of Central Asia lasting into the Kushan period, and on Hadrian's measures in Judaea that set off Bar Kokhba.

Part of The Ancients

Thirty-one minutes on what the evidence for Boudica actually is, which is two Roman writers and a burnt layer in three towns.

Part of Historia Civilis

Thirty minutes of rectangles on Antony's Parthian campaign, the one that lost him the reputation Actium then finished off.

Part of Emperors of Rome

With Caillan Davenport

Two emperors become four, each with his own court and his own quarter of the empire. Thirty minutes on the arithmetic of the tetrarchy and why it needed so many capitals.

Part of The Ancient World

Thirty minutes on Artabanus gathering Parthia for revenge while, further south, the Sasanids take Fars and begin replacing him.

Part of When in Rome

With Peter Guest

Thirty minutes recorded on the site itself: Caerleon in south Wales, headquarters of the Second Legion and the furthest west this show has been. The amphitheatre and the barracks are still there.

Part of The Ancient World

Twenty-nine minutes on Shapur inheriting Persia after the destruction of Hatra, and on Gordian III's invasion ending in defeat and a dead emperor.

Part of The History of Byzantium

Twenty-nine minutes on a figure playing both sides of a frontier, which in this period was a normal career.

Part of The Ancient World

Twenty-eight minutes on Juba II accompanying Octavian into Egypt in 30 BC, at the end of which Cassius Dio writes that Egypt was enslaved.

Part of The Ancient World

Twenty-eight minutes on Ardashir beating Artabanus, taking the Parthian empire, and turning a tired neighbour into Rome's most dangerous one.

Part of The History of Byzantium

Twenty-eight minutes on Syria, Egypt and Palestine, the richest part of the empire and the part that would be lost fastest.

Part of Being Roman with Mary Beard

Regina was a British slave from the Catuvellauni, freed and married by Barates, a Syrian from Palmyra, and he buried her at South Shields in two languages. Twenty- eight minutes.

Part of Echoes of Empires

Twenty-eight minutes on the recall to Italy with too few troops, which is how the reconquest turned into twenty years of war.

Part of The Ancients

With Simon Elliott

Simon Elliott on the campaign of 208 to 211, the largest force Rome ever sent north, aimed at conquest and abandoned the moment Severus died at York. Twenty-seven minutes.

Part of Cost of Glory · Alex Petkas on Plutarch, 45 hours

Part of Cost of Glory · Alex Petkas on Plutarch, 45 hours

Part of The History of Constantinople · The city, from the Greek colony onwards

Part of The History of Constantinople · The city, from the Greek colony onwards

Part of The History of Constantinople · The city, from the Greek colony onwards

Part of The History of Constantinople · The city, from the Greek colony onwards

Part of The History of Constantinople · The city, from the Greek colony onwards

Part of The History of Constantinople · The city, from the Greek colony onwards