How Rome was governed

Two men work through every single emperor in order and then score him out of a hundred on legacy, war record and sheer madness. It sounds like a gimmick and it is the most efficient way ever devised to remember two hundred emperors, because the argument about the scoring is what makes them stick.

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.

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

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 The History of Byzantium

With Anthony Kaldellis

Kaldellis has spent a career arguing that the Byzantines were Romans, called themselves Romans, and were renamed by later scholars for reasons that had nothing to do with evidence. Two hours of him making that case will change how you read everything after 476.

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.

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.

The Republic year by year from the foundation, argued out of the sources by two academics who mark Livy on a scale of their own invention. The most detailed treatment of early Rome in audio, and much funnier than that makes it sound.

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.

Every emperor in order, in half-hour episodes, by a classicist and a broadcaster who asks what a normal person would ask. The gentlest way in of all of these, and the easiest to keep going with.

Colin Elliott is a Roman historian at Indiana and this is the imperial centuries told straight and at length. The political intrigue is handled like drama without the facts being bent to fit.

Forty-two hours on the Republic turning into a monarchy, told by two hosts working forward through it without skipping the dull decades.

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.

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.

Eight and a half hours of narrated Republic, carried end to end by one voice with no guests to interrupt the thread.

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.

The PBS series from 2001, four hours, and still the most sober television treatment of the period. No reenactment, no hyperbole.

Part of SandRhomanHistory

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

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.

Part of Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium

The longest emperor episode this show has made, two hours and four minutes on Alexios Komnenos. He inherited an empire that had lost Anatolia and handed on one that had it back, and the First Crusade arrived in the middle of that.

Part of The History of Byzantium

With Anthony Kaldellis

Two hours in which Anthony Kaldellis of Chicago names his ten greatest emperors and defends each one. It is the clearest short route into who actually ran the eastern empire well, and every choice comes with its argument.

Part of Life of Caesar

Two hours on the weeks before 10 January 49 BC, in the detail the moment deserves: which senator moved what, which tribune vetoed it, and how a legal dispute about a provincial command turned into a civil war.

Part of Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium

Nearly two hours on an emperor who toured western Europe in person begging for troops and came home with almost none. The empire was two cities by then, and the score has to mean something different at that point.

Part of The History of Byzantium

With Anthony Kaldellis

The companion to the ten greatest, and the more useful of the two: Kaldellis explains what an emperor had to do to lose an empire. Nearly two hours, and the failures repeat in ways the successes do not.

Part of The History of Byzantium

With Anthony Kaldellis

A hundred and sixteen minutes with Kaldellis on the middle period, and on why the standard periodisation of this empire keeps misleading people.

Part of Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium

Nearly two hours on a fourth son who was never meant to rule and then held the empire at its last real height for thirty-seven years. What he built came apart within a decade of his death, and the score has to carry both.

Part of Life of Caesar

A hundred and twelve minutes opening the Augustus run from the day he died at 75, then working back. Starting at the end is the point: it sets up how much one man had changed before anyone could say how.

Part of The History of Byzantium

With Anthony Kaldellis

A hundred and five minutes finishing the conversation, on the last centuries and on what a thousand-year synthesis costs its author.

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 Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium

A hundred and three minutes on the second Komnenos, who took a recovering empire and kept it recovering for twenty-five years. Steady competence scores badly on most lists and the hosts argue with that.

Part of Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium

A hundred and two minutes on the short reign between John III and the recovery of the city, with the empire a hair away from its goal. Illness decided more than politics did.

Part of The History of Byzantium

With Anthony Kaldellis

A hundred and two minutes, the third part with Kaldellis, on narrative history and on what a thousand-year account has to leave out.

Part of Cost of Glory

A hundred and one minutes closing the life, from the burning of the senate house after Clodius' murder to the end at Utica.

Part of Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium

Ninety-six minutes on the soldier who took the empire after the Constantinian line died out and held the Rhine for eleven years. He is remembered for dying of rage at an envoy, which the episode spends its time on the Rhine instead.

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 Autocrat: A Roman History Podcast

Ninety-three minutes with Daniel of Eastern Roman History arguing about the worst emperors of the east. Two shows disagreeing about the same shortlist is a faster way into the period than either list alone.

Part of The Partial Historians

Ninety-one minutes on 403 BC, with Rome and Veii sliding toward a war that will last ten years. The senate argument is the episode, and the two doctors read the speeches Livy gives the tribunes as the literature they are.

Part of Life of Caesar

An hour and a half in the late reign, where the building, the games and the executions all run on the same money and the money runs out.

Part of Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium

Ninety minutes on the man who took Constantinople back in 1261 and founded the last dynasty. He blinded the boy he displaced, and the episode weighs the recovery against that.

Part of Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium

Ninety minutes on the man who ended the third-century crisis by splitting the empire four ways and then walked away from the throne alive. The retirement is as remarkable as the reforms, and the score has to hold both.

Part of Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium

Eighty-eight minutes on the first of the Angeloi, the dynasty in charge when the Fourth Crusade arrived. The show scores the reign that made 1204 possible.

Part of Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium

Eighty-eight minutes on the emperor who was on the throne when Rome was sacked, asking how much of that was him and how much was the men around him. The famous line about the chicken gets its two minutes and the rest goes to the Rhine.

Part of Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium

Eighty-seven minutes on the man who built a working Roman state in exile at Nicaea after the capital fell. Building a state in exile is a different job from inheriting one, and the score has to handle that.

Part of Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium

Eighty-seven minutes on a general who took the throne by coup with a plan for the finances, and then lasted two years. The plan is the interesting part.

Part of SandRhomanHistory

The argument that the fall took a thousand years and that 476 is an arbitrary line in it.

Part of Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium

Eighty-six minutes on the reign after the capital was recovered, when the money ran out and the fleet was scrapped. What the empire could no longer afford is the subject.

Part of Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium

Eighty-six minutes on the boy whose father made him emperor and whose deposition in 476 is where most timelines stop. The episode is about how little anyone noticed at the time.

Part of Cost of Glory

Eighty-six minutes opening the life of Cato the Younger, from a childhood marked by the murder of his uncle. Rome's great Stoic starts here.

Part of Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium

Eighty-four minutes on the emperor everyone underestimated, and the show refuses to settle whether the stammer was a disability, an act, or both. Britain, the harbour at Ostia and four wives all count toward the score.

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 Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium

Eighty-two minutes on the first emperor, and the show spends much of it on the question of what to call him, because Octavius, Octavian and Augustus are three political positions with one man inside them.

Part of Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium

Eighty-two minutes on the man who watched three emperors destroy each other in one year and then took the throne with the eastern legions behind him. The show scores him on what he stabilised, which is the fairest measure for a reign that inherited a ruin.

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 Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium

Eighty minutes on an urban prefect handed the throne because a dying emperor needed an heir that week. The show scores what happens when the job goes to whoever is standing nearby.

Part of Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium

Seventy-eight minutes on the man who ruled the east while the west disappeared, and who succeeded his own son. Everything that survived into the sixth century survived on his watch.

Part of Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium

Seventy-seven minutes on everything before the emperors, from the geese that saved the Capitol to the flaming phallus in the hearth. The series scores every emperor from episode two onward, and this one sets the scale.

Part of The History of Byzantium

With Anthony Kaldellis

Seventy-six minutes with Kaldellis on his argument that Byzantium remained a republic in which the people could unmake an emperor. The most contested thesis in the field, argued out.

Part of The History of Byzantium

With Anthony Kaldellis

Anthony Kaldellis of Chicago picks ten East Romans the political narrative skips over. Part one, seventy-five minutes.

Part of Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium

Seventy-five minutes on the one emperor the senate actually chose, and on how quickly the army reminded him who decided. His solution was to adopt Trajan, which bought Rome eighty years.

Part of Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium

Seventy-five minutes on the emperor installed by Psellos and the civil families, who cut the army to pay for it. Manzikert follows twelve years later, and this episode is where it starts.

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 Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium

Seventy-four minutes on the emperor whose advisors ran the state into a currency collapse. His nickname translates as a quarter-short, which was about the coinage.

Part of Life of Caesar

Seventy-four minutes on the emperor who lost half the empire and kept the other half working through fifteen years of crisis. He reformed the cavalry and stopped putting senators in command, and both outlasted him.

Part of The Partial Historians

Seventy-two minutes on 415 and 414 BC and the fall of Postumius, killed by his own soldiers. What a Roman army would and would not tolerate from a commander is the subject.

Part of Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium

Seventy-two minutes on the emperor elected in a Persian desert with the army surrounded and no supplies. He signed away five provinces to get it home and died within a year, and the show asks what anyone else would have done.

Part of Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium

Seventy-one minutes on an emperor who abolished a hated tax and still left the largest surplus in Byzantine history.

Part of The History of Byzantium

With Anthony Kaldellis

Part two, seventy minutes, and the half where the choices get stranger.

Part of Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium

Seventy minutes on the colleague nobody discusses, which is the reason to hear it. Diocletian's tetrarchy needed a second man who would take orders and then step down, and Maximian did both and then unretired twice.

Part of The Ancients

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 of The Ancients

With Adrian Goldsworthy

The men nobody remembers between 455 and 476, and the case that 476 is a date historians chose, and that nobody alive that year noticed.

Part of The Partial Historians

With Tim Cornell

Tim Cornell, whose book on early Rome set the terms for the whole debate, on how much of the regal period can be defended. Sixty-eight minutes with the standard authority.

Part of The Partial Historians

Sixty-eight minutes on enslaved people in the early Republic: how many, from where, and the manumission rate that made Roman slavery different from later systems.

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.

Part of Life of Caesar

Sixty-six minutes on the day Caligula was killed and Claudius was found behind a curtain and made emperor by the praetorians. The accident of that accession shaped everything he did to prove he belonged.

Part of Life of Caesar

Sixty-six minutes on the dictatorship as a working government: the calendar, the colonies, the debt laws and the senate packed with provincials.

Part of The Ancients

Barry Strauss of Cornell picking ten emperors and defending each choice, which is more useful than a list because the argument is the point. Sixty-five minutes.

Part of The Partial Historians

Sixty-five minutes on the second secession of the plebs, a moment the sources report and modern historians contest. Carries a warning for sexual violence, because Verginia is the trigger for it.

Part of Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium

Sixty-five minutes on the first eastern emperor who was governed by his own court. The show scores him against Valentinian II, another puppet, which is the only fair comparison.

Part of The Partial Historians

Sixty-four minutes on the moment the plebeians finally got what they had been pushing for, and on how grudgingly the patricians gave it. The two doctors have been building to this for a hundred episodes.

Part of Life of Caesar

Sixty-four minutes on Caesar's consulship of 59 BC, when he ignored his colleague so completely that Romans joked about the year of Julius and Caesar. The precedents set here are what the civil war was later fought over.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

Counterfactuals are usually a waste of an hour. This one earns it by making the case that the Republic was already gone and the assassins were the last people to notice.

Part of The Rest Is History

Christmas Day 800, and a Frankish king is acclaimed Augustus more than three centuries after the west stopped having emperors. Sixty-three minutes on what that title was meant to mean.

Part of Life of Caesar

The Pisonian conspiracy, forty-one people implicated and nineteen dead including Seneca. An hour on the plot that turned suspicion into policy.

Part of The Ancients

With David Gwynn

David Gwynn on the fifty years from 235 to 284, when Rome ran through more than twenty emperors and almost none of them died in bed. Sixty-two minutes on the century that reorganised the empire by breaking it.

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 Life of Caesar

Sixty-two minutes on the private arrangement between Caesar, Pompey and Crassus that ran Rome without holding any office for it. It was not a constitutional body, and that is the point.

Part of HistoryHit

Sixty-one minutes with Mary Beard on the daily business of being emperor: the petitions, the letters, the dinners, and how much of the job was answering post.

Part of Life of Caesar

Sixty-one minutes on what Caesar actually changed as dictator: the colonies, the grain dole, the calendar. His enemies conceded the reforms made sense, and this episode shows why.

Part of Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium

Sixty minutes on the emperor at Nicaea who made the exile solvent enough to take the capital back, which his successors then did. Several men claimed the title at once, and this episode sorts out which claim had a state behind it.

Part of Life of Caesar

Sixty minutes on a sixteen-year-old becoming emperor and the senate deciding not to stop it. The episode asks what the senate thought it was getting, which explains the first five years.

Part of Emperors of Rome

An hour live on how a constitutional position was assembled out of old republican offices, none of which was called king. The audience questions are worth staying for.

Part of Life of Caesar

The first years: courts reformed, citizenship extended, and an emperor who heard cases himself. Fifty-nine minutes on a reign that worked before the household ruined it.

Part of Life of Caesar

Fifty-nine minutes on the turn to treason trials, confiscations and a senate that learned what the reign had become.

Part of The Ancients

With Jeremy Armstrong

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.

Part of The Partial Historians

Fifty-eight minutes on 472 and 471 BC, the years the tribunes start being elected by the comitia tributa. Dr Radness reads Livy and Dr G reads Dionysius, and the gap between those two is what the episode is about.

Part of The Partial Historians

Fifty-eight minutes on a year where disease and the codification struggle ran together, and the sources blame the gods for both.

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 Ancients

The seven kings, and the far more interesting question of why there are exactly seven of them covering 244 years, which is an average reign no royal line has ever managed.

Part of Tides of History

Fifty-seven minutes on 1453, after sixty years of Ottoman attempts, and on what the capture meant for everyone else around that sea.

Part of The History of Byzantium

With Maximilian Lau

Fifty-seven minutes with Maximilian Lau on where Komnenian scholarship has moved since his last appearance.

Part of The Rest Is History

Fifty-six minutes on what the assassins had not planned for: no plan. The liberators freed a Republic that no longer had anyone able to run it.

Part of The Rest Is History

Fifty-six minutes on the family that held the Roman imperial title in the west for four centuries, and on Charles V, who was king of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor at once.

Part of Ancient Rome Live

Fifty-six minutes on the constitutional sleight of hand: a man who invented no new office ended up holding everything, and the Senate voted him each piece of it.

Part of The History of Rome

Fifty-five minutes of Mike Duncan reading his own first chapter, on the Gracchi and the decades where the Republic started coming apart.

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.

Part of Lost Roman Heroes

The rise, from the bodyguard ranks to sole rule, in just under an hour. The first of two.

Part of The Partial Historians

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 Partial Historians

Fifty-four minutes on the king whose birth was announced by a flame around his head and whose census organised Rome for the next five centuries. The legend and the institution sit in the same episode, and that is the argument.

Part of The Rest Is History

Fifty-four minutes on the question that has no single date: 410, 476, 1453 and 1806 all have a case, and which one you pick says what you think Rome was.

Part of Tides of History

With Nicola Terrenato

Nicola Terrenato on Rome expanding by deal, with aristocratic families across Italy cutting arrangements with each other. Fifty-three minutes.

Part of The Rest Is History

Fifty-three minutes on how much of Star Wars and Dune is Roman furniture: a republic that votes itself an emperor, a senate, an imperium already rotting at the centre.

Part of The Rest Is History

Part two, fifty-three minutes on the constitution Aristotle admired and the trade network that paid for it, across the ninth century BC to the second.

Part of The History of Byzantium

With Maximilian Lau

Fifty-three minutes with Maximilian Lau on John II, the most competent Komnenos and the least written about.

Part of The Ancients

Fifty-two minutes on Ravenna, capital of the west from 402 because marshes defended it better than walls, and the place the last western emperors actually lived.

Part of The Rest Is History

Aurelian reconquered a broken empire in five years, walled Rome for the first time in six centuries, and almost nobody has heard of him. This is the fix.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

With Catherine Steel

The unglamorous decades before Gaul, when he was a heavily indebted politician buying an electorate. The part that explains the rest.

Part of The Ancients

With Hannah Cornwell

16 January 27 BC, the day Octavian was handed the name Augustus and had the gates of Janus shut. Hannah Cornwell on what actually changed that morning, in fifty minutes.

Part of The Rest Is History

Part one, fifty minutes on the Frankish rise that ends with a Roman imperial title being handed out again in 800, three centuries after the west stopped issuing one.

Six rulers from Julius Caesar to Hadrian, taken one at a time, public life beside private life. Forty-nine minutes an episode, and the shape of the whole empire read off the men who held it.

Part of Emperors of Rome

Forty-eight minutes on how two consuls were actually chosen each year: the canvassing, the bribery, the centuries voting in an order that made the rich count first. The mechanics explain more about Roman politics than most narratives of it.

Part of The Partial Historians

Appius Claudius the decemvir, four centuries earlier, whose abuse of a citizen's daughter brought down the whole commission. Forty-eight minutes on the Republic's own Claudian scandal.

Part of The Partial Historians

Forty-eight minutes on the demand to write the law down, which took eight years and an embassy to Greece before anyone put chisel to bronze.

Part of Tides of History

Forty-eight minutes on Mehmed after Constantinople, when taking the city turned out to be the start of the expansion and not the end of it.

Part of The Rest Is History

Forty-eight minutes on where Rome kept going after it fell: in Constantinople, in the Tsars, in the Kaisers, and in arguments still running today.

Part of The History of Byzantium

Part two, forty-seven minutes on Trebizond from 1297 to 1453 under the Grand Komnenoi, the last Roman state to fall and the one nobody remembers.

Part of The Ancients

With Philip Nothaft

Philip Nothaft on the Julian calendar, Caesar's reform that outlasted every other one and still sets the year, with 46 BC stretched to 445 days to force the seasons back into place. Forty-six minutes.

Part of The Ancients

Forty-six minutes of argument with Matt Lewis of Gone Medieval about where the ancient world stops and the medieval one starts, which is a boundary nobody can draw.

Part of The Fall of Rome Podcast

Patrick Wyman as guest on whether taking Italy back destroyed it. Forty-six minutes on a reconquest that left the peninsula emptier than the Goths did.

Part of The Partial Historians

Forty-six minutes on the long middle of the conflict, where the patricians conceded slowly and kept the priesthoods longest.

Part of Tides of History

Peter Sarris on his own biography of Justinian, with Patrick Wyman pressing on the balance sheet: the reconquest, the Code, Hagia Sophia, and the plague that arrived in the middle of all three. Forty-six minutes.

Part of The Ancients

With Helen Bond

Helen Bond on Pilate outside the Gospels: a prefect of Judaea under Tiberius, known from an inscription at Caesarea and from Josephus complaining about him. Forty-five minutes.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

Forty-five minutes on whether the Marian reforms happened as a package at all, which is now seriously doubted, and on what Marius did do.

Part of The Rest Is History

Part two, forty-five minutes on Abbasid Baghdad, founded in 762 and inheriting the Greek learning that the Roman east had kept.

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 Federico Santangelo

Federico Santangelo on Marius, born 157 BC without rank, consul seven times, and called Rome's third founder by people who had just watched him save it. Forty-four minutes.

Part of The Fall of Rome Podcast

Forty-four minutes on the western government running out of soldiers, money and legitimacy at roughly the same moment.

Part of The Partial Historians

Ten men given all the power in the state to write a law code, and for one year it worked. Forty-four minutes on the experiment before it soured.

Part of Tides of History

Wyman on the transition from kings to Republic, which is the moment the sources are least trustworthy and most interesting.

Part of Tides of History

Forty-four minutes on the Republic around 450 BC, when the magistracies and the written law appear and the city is poorer than it had been under the kings.

Part of The Partial Historians

Forty-three minutes on the year the tribunate reached ten members, and on whether that made it stronger or easier to buy.

Part of The History of Byzantium

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.

Part of The Ancients

Adrian Goldsworthy from the archive on what the Roman peace actually was: two centuries with less warfare inside the frontier than anywhere had managed, and what it cost to hold. Forty-two minutes.

Part of Tides of History

With Walter Scheidel

Walter Scheidel on the question nobody asks: China reassembled its empire repeatedly and Europe never did once. Forty-two minutes on why the failure to reunify mattered.

Part of Tides of History

Forty-two minutes on the whole question, answered by looking at Rome's rivals as carefully as at Rome, which is where most accounts stop short.

Part of The History of Byzantium

Part one, forty-one minutes on Trebizond from 1204, when the Fourth Crusade broke the empire into pieces and this piece went its own way.

Part of Tides of History

Forty-one minutes on 509 BC and on how little is actually known about the first decades: the consular lists are reconstructions and the stories are later.

Part of Tides of History

Forty-one minutes on what a century of conquest did to the conquering city: the money, the slaves, the building, and the politics that came with them.

Part of HistoryHit

With Simon Elliott

Forty-one minutes taking the whole rise in one run, to camera, which makes it a frame to hang the detailed episodes on.

Part of The Ancients

With Mary Beard

Mary Beard on the office itself: what an emperor actually did all day, and why the wildly different personalities produced such similar reigns. Forty minutes.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

With Jason Klazmer

Jason Klazmer on how Diocletian rebuilt an army that had spent fifty years making and unmaking emperors, and on the price of the fix. Forty minutes.

Part of The Ancients

Thirty-nine minutes on how a man from Arpinum with no consular ancestors talked his way to the top of Roman politics. Catherine Steel on why the speeches still work.

Part of Emperors of Rome

With Caillan Davenport

The system itself: two Augusti, two Caesars, and a succession plan that skipped sons. Forty minutes on the one Roman constitutional experiment that worked exactly once.

Part of The Partial Historians

A Vestal buried alive and a plebeian agitation in the same year, which the sources connect and modern historians doubt. Thirty-nine minutes on how Rome explained a bad year.

Part of The Partial Historians

The lex Icilia that handed the Aventine to the plebs for housing. Thirty-nine minutes on the first Roman public housing scheme.

Part of Tides of History

Thirty-nine minutes on the best question in the whole war: Rome lost the battle of the century and did not sue for peace. The answer is in how the Republic was put together.

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 Rest Is History

Part two, thirty-nine minutes on the Nika riots of 532, which burned the city centre and came close to ending the reign in its fifth year.

Caroline Winterer of Stanford on the decline analogy: who reaches for it, and what it has to assume about Rome before it works. A talk, filmed as a talk, and thirty-nine minutes of argument.

Part of The Ancients

With Dafydd Daniel

What Christians actually argued about in 325, which was not what most people assume, and how an emperor came to be chairing it.

Part of The Partial Historians

The plebeian secession to the Sacred Mount, a general strike two and a half thousand years early. Thirty-eight minutes on the fight that produced the tribunate.

Part of The Partial Historians

The first Roman accused of aiming at kingship, executed for proposing a land law. Thirty-eight minutes on a pattern that would repeat for four hundred years.

Part of The Partial Historians

Thirty-eight minutes on the year's reported conspiracies, most of them arriving in the sources as hearsay, which the hosts treat as the interesting part.

Part of Tides of History

Thirty-eight minutes on Rome's actual entrance into Mediterranean power politics, a decade before the Punic Wars that everyone starts with.

Part of The Ancient World

Thirty-eight minutes on the end of the Seleucid line and on Tigranes II of Armenia, invited in to rule Antioch and taking all of Syria with him.

Part of Hardcore History · Dan Carlin, six parts, twenty-two hours

Part of Lost Roman Heroes · Matteo and Matthew Storm, 101 episodes

Part of Lost Roman Heroes · Matteo and Matthew Storm, 101 episodes

Part of Lost Roman Heroes · Matteo and Matthew Storm, 101 episodes

Part of Lost Roman Heroes · Matteo and Matthew Storm, 101 episodes

Part of Lost Roman Heroes · Matteo and Matthew Storm, 101 episodes

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

Part of Lost Roman Heroes · Matteo and Matthew Storm, 101 episodes

Part of Lost Roman Heroes · Matteo and Matthew Storm, 101 episodes

Part of Lost Roman Heroes · Matteo and Matthew Storm, 101 episodes

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 Constantinople · The city, from the Greek colony onwards