Bloodlines · Who it happened to: the plotting, the gods, the beds, the graves.
Conspiracies, forged letters, poison and the Praetorian Guard.
177 entries · 176 hours · 159 with a written verdict · British 67 · Australian 57 · American 36
The Catiline conspiracy, the Pisonian conspiracy, the night the Praetorians auctioned the empire to the highest bidder and delivered it. If Spartacus and I, Claudius sharpened your appetite for people plotting against each other in corridors, the Republic and the Julio-Claudians will keep you fed for a year. Emperors of Rome and Life of Caesar are the two that linger on the plotting.
I feel like…
when it happens
how it is made
who is talking
how much time you have
With a written verdict
Two seasons, cancelled far too early, and still the only screen Rome that feels lived in. It follows two soldiers through Caesar's rise and Octavian's, and the politics of the street is as carefully built as the politics of the Senate.
The 1976 BBC serial, thirteen episodes, made on a budget that shows and with a cast that does not care. Derek Jacobi's Claudius is the performance every later screen Roman is measured against. The history is Robert Graves', which is to say Tacitus at his most gossipy, but nothing has bettered it as drama.
Roland Emmerich doing the chariot-racing and gladiator business under Vespasian. Historically loose and gleefully so; watch it for the machinery of the games, not for the dates.
Livia's story as drama, and much better than its lack of an audience suggests. Takes the standard hostile sources and asks what she would have said.
Part of Roman Empire
Caligula, tyranny and paranoia. The weakest season for accuracy and the one the historians on screen most visibly strain against, which is its own kind of interesting.
Part of Life of Caesar
Two and a half hours on 15 March 44 BC alone: who was in the room, who held the knife, who stood aside. The length is the argument, because the conspiracy had sixty members and most accounts name four.
Part of Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium
Two hours on the emperor who was deposed, mutilated and exiled, and then came back and ruled again with a gold nose. The second reign is the part most accounts skip.
The hosts announced the Ides as their last episode and then found the aftermath needed two more. This is the first, nearly two hours on the days when nobody in Rome knew who was in charge.
Nearly two hours on 54 BC in the city while Caesar was in Gaul, when bribery reached the point that interest rates doubled on election days. It explains why the Republic could not absorb a returning general.
The companion to John VI, an hour and three quarters covering kidnapping, imprisonment and fifty years on and off the throne. Between them the two episodes cover one civil war from both sides.
An hour and three quarters on a peasant from Macedonia who became emperor by befriending the man he then murdered. The dynasty he founded lasted a hundred and ninety years, which is the awkward part of scoring him.
A hundred and four minutes on 57 BC, when Clodius and Cicero fought each other with gangs in the street and speeches in the senate at the same time. The episode takes the speeches as political acts with consequences, which is how Romans heard them.
Ninety-nine minutes on Romanos Lekapenos, an admiral who took power without killing the boy emperor and handed it back before he died.
Ninety-seven minutes on the man who did that murdering and then campaigned to the gates of Jerusalem.
Eighty-eight minutes on the first emperor who had never been a senator, raised by the praetorians and gone within fourteen months.
Eighty-six minutes on the man who killed that brother, granted citizenship to every free inhabitant, and was stabbed at the roadside.
Eighty-five minutes on an emperor who deposed his own grandfather and spent the reign losing Anatolia anyway.
Eighty-four minutes on the emperor the senate erased, which means the sources are written by the people who hated him most.
The months after the Ides, with the assassins discovering that killing the dictator had not restored the Republic. An hour and twenty on the vacuum.
Part of The Partial Historians
With Emma Southon
Eighty minutes on Roman homicide: what counted as murder, who could be killed lawfully, and a legal system with no police force.
Seventy-eight minutes on a centurion who took the throne by mutiny and lost it to a man who sailed from Carthage.
Seventy-eight minutes on a money-changer who married an empress, fought epilepsy through the reign, and died a monk.
A rich plebeian who fed the city during a famine, killed in the street for it by the master of the horse. Seventy-six minutes on generosity read as ambition.
Seventy-six minutes on the death of Claudius, the poisoned mushrooms and the feather that may have finished the job. The sources disagree on almost every detail, and the episode lays out which ones and why.
Seventy-five minutes on the plot that killed him, including the praetorian commander who swung the sword. The episode follows how a suspicion of conspiracy produced a real one.
Part of The Ancients
With Steele Brand
Seventy-four minutes on the man whose ancestor supposedly expelled the last king, which is a family expectation nobody should have to carry.
Part of Cost of Glory
Seventy minutes on the general who won the eastern war and lost the credit to Pompey. Rome's politics beat him, not Mithridates.
Sixty-nine minutes on four months that ended when he exiled his adoptive mother and the city rose and blinded him.
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.
Sixty-nine minutes on Catiline, with Caesar arguing in the senate against executing the conspirators and nearly being lynched for it.
With Conn Iggulden
Nero at seventeen, with Seneca writing his speeches and Burrus running the guard. Start here and the reign reads as a decline; start at the fire and it reads as a monster story.
Part of The Rest Is History
Part four, sixty-six minutes on the vacuum after Caligula was killed at twenty- eight, the brief talk of restoring the Republic, and the uncle the guard found and made emperor.
The informers, the treason trials and the deaths of Seneca and Lucan. An hour on the years when the court learned what it could not say.
With Lindsay Powell
Lindsay Powell again on the Guard, sixty-five minutes this time. Same ground as the 2021 episode with more room for the emperors they made and unmade.
With Catharine Edwards
The coup that made Cicero and then destroyed him, because executing citizens without trial turned out to be the kind of precedent your enemies keep.
With Marcus Manlius
Sixty-four minutes on the Etruscan cities as Rome's neighbours and rivals, told from the side that lost and left no history of its own.
The building programme: the Ostia harbour, the Claudian aqueducts, and the draining of the Fucine Lake that took eleven years and thirty thousand men. An hour on public works as legitimacy.
The illness of 37 and the reign that came out the other side of it. An hour on the turn the sources all describe and none of them explains.
Lindsay Powell on the cohorts that guarded the emperor and then started choosing him. Sixty-three minutes from the Guard's founding to the point where the job reversed.
Emma Southon on Nero's mother: sister of one emperor, wife of another, mother of a third, and murdered by the last. Sixty-three minutes.
The last day, from the words at the sacrifice to the corridor under the palace. An hour on an assassination that left Rome briefly without an emperor and briefly a republic again.
Sixty-three minutes on the governorship that paid off his debts and gave him a triumph he gave up to stand for consul.
An hour on the private life the sources dwell on, and on how much of it is standard invective aimed at a dead emperor with no heirs to defend him.
Livia had more influence than any woman in Roman politics and a reputation as a poisoner invented mostly by Tacitus. The episode separates the two.
Beard takes the maddest emperor and asks the awkward question: how much of this is Suetonius settling scores a century later? A masterclass in reading a hostile source.
Britannicus dead at dinner, the physician's excuse, and a court that agreed to believe it. An hour on the first killing.
An hour on how sixty men were recruited without one of them talking, which is the hardest part of the story to believe.
Fifty-eight minutes on the day itself and the hours after, when the assassins found the forum empty of support.
Part of Ancient Rome Live
The first dynasty told as the family it was, which explains more of the murders than the politics does.
Part of Emperors of Rome
Fifty-seven minutes on Claudius' third wife, the bigamous wedding held while he was away, and a name that became a byword within a generation.
The Ides of March at thriller pace, fifty-seven minutes. The detail that sticks is how many of the sixty-odd conspirators Caesar had personally pardoned after fighting them in the civil war.
With Alex Imrie
Alex Imrie and Matilda Brown on the real Macrinus, a praetorian prefect who took the purple for fourteen months in 217, long before Denzel Washington played him. Fifty- six minutes.
Two brothers, one murder in their mother's arms, and the citizenship grant of 212 that made every free inhabitant of the empire a Roman, largely for the inheritance tax.
Fifty-four minutes on the aftermath: his house torn down, the site left empty, and the killing written up afterwards as legal.
With Daisy Dunn
Daisy Dunn on the general who won back the German frontier and then spent eleven years on Capri. Fifty-three minutes; the episode opens with a warning about its subject matter and earns it.
The last of three: the reconquest of Italy, the plague that arrived in 541, and the ledger afterwards. Fifty-three minutes.
Fifty-three minutes on seventy-seven days in 455, ending with a mob stoning him as the Vandal fleet arrived.
Fifty-three minutes on Caesar's marriages and affairs as political instruments, including the wife he was told to divorce and did not.
The shorter, tidier version of the same day. Take this one if you want the events and the other if you want the room.
Fifty-one minutes on the emperor who killed his brother in their mother's arms and then gave citizenship to every free person in the empire.
What happened on 15 March 44 BC, minute by minute, and how many of the sixty men involved Caesar had personally pardoned.
With Hannah Cornwell
Hannah Cornwell on the months after the Ides, when Antony held the consulship and the nineteen-year-old Octavian held Caesar's name. Forty-nine minutes on how that standoff became a triumvirate.
Forty-nine minutes on a son who rebelled, was blinded in one eye, escaped and did it again.
Forty-nine minutes on three months in 253, which is a long time to spend on a man most lists give one line.
Lauren Ginsberg of Duke on Octavia, Poppaea and Statilia Messalina: the three women Nero married, and the two he is said to have killed. Forty-eight minutes given to their side of it.
Forty-eight minutes on a boy emperor blinded on his eleventh birthday by the regent who then kept the throne.
The rising of Scribonianus in Dalmatia, which collapsed in five days when the legions changed their minds. Forty-eight minutes on how close the new emperor came to being a footnote.
Forty-seven minutes on 15 March 44 BC, a date that was the first full moon of the Roman year before it was anything else.
With LJ Trafford
L J Trafford on Caligula, who ruled for under four years and has been paying for it ever since. Forty-seven minutes, including what the story about the horse actually says.
Forty-seven minutes on Severus Alexander, on the throne at thirteen and killed by his own soldiers at twenty-six, which opens fifty years of the same.
Emma Southon on Publius Clodius Pulcher, who had himself adopted by a plebeian to hold the tribunate and was killed in a street fight on the Appian Way. Forty-six minutes.
With Nick Bisley
Forty-six minutes closing the series by setting Catiline beside Caesar and Clodius, who ran the same debts and the same street politics and survived both.
His niece, married after a change in the law, and the last four years of the reign run largely by her. Forty-six minutes ending with a plate of mushrooms.
Forty-five minutes on the plot of 65: forty-one people named, nineteen dead, and a court that stopped trusting anyone.
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.
The hundredth episode, live, on the Ides of March. Forty-two minutes on who was in the room, what they thought would happen next, and how badly they had thought it through.
Forty-two minutes opening a seven-part series with the man himself: a patrician with debts, two failed consular bids and nothing left to lose.
Forty-one minutes on an emperor found dead in a closed litter, which is how Diocletian's career began.
With Honor Cargill-Martin
Honor Cargill-Martin on Claudius's third wife and, more usefully, on the charge sheet: who wrote it, how long after, and what they wanted from it. Thirty-nine minutes.
Thirty-nine minutes on the afterlife of a man known entirely through two hostile writers.
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.
Thirty-eight minutes on the brother who lasted ten months and whose face was chiselled off every monument in the empire.
Thirty-six minutes counting how Roman emperors actually died, which turns out to be mostly at the hands of their own guards.
Part of The History of Byzantium
Thirty-six minutes on an emperor who came to the throne as a boy, which in this empire usually meant somebody else was ruling.
With Caillan Davenport
Two brothers left an empire between them and one of them dead in their mother's arms within a year. Thirty-five minutes.
Thirty-five minutes on the last battle at Pistoria, where Catiline died in the front line with his men.
From the reading of the will to the Second Triumvirate, including the proscriptions in which he signed away Cicero. Half an hour on the ruthless stretch that the Augustan peace was built on.
With Leonora Neville
Thirty-three minutes with Neville on whether the coup attributed to Anna Komnene happened at all, and on who wanted the story told.
Thirty-two minutes on the plot as Sallust and Cicero describe it, and on how much of it either of them could actually know.
Thirty-two minutes on Irene blinding her own son to keep the throne, and on a court that accepted it.
Thirty-two minutes on the proscription-style killings of the civil war year, where changing sides late was fatal.
Part of Our Fake History
The Great Fire of 64 AD spawned its own truther conspiracy asking whether Emperor Nero started the blaze and fiddled as Rome burned, a legend later fed by so-called pseudo-Neros.
Thirty-one minutes on a claimant who held the city for five months and later governed it while his uncle toured Europe begging for help.
Part of The Ancient World
Thirty-one minutes on Severus and Plautianus, a friendship that cost him his family, and on the British campaign he used to close the account.
Thirty minutes on the revolt of Avidius Cassius, who declared himself emperor on a false report that Marcus Aurelius had died, and was killed by his own men.
Twenty-nine minutes on Roman intelligence: the frumentarii who started as grain officers and ended as the emperor's informers, and the couriers who carried it all.
Twenty-nine minutes on a figure playing both sides of a frontier, which in this period was a normal career.
Twenty-eight minutes on the interregnum problem: no rule of succession, so every transition was improvised and several were fought.
Twenty-eight minutes on the fourteenth-century civil wars, fought while the Ottomans were crossing into Europe as somebody's allies.
Twenty-eight minutes on Sohaemus of Emesa being made to help Rome annex Commagene, a client king used against a neighbouring client king.
Twenty-eight minutes on Constantine V, called Copronymus by his enemies because of what he supposedly did at his own baptism. The nickname outlived every victory he won.
Twenty-eight minutes on Andronikos Komnenos taking the throne and the purge that came with him.
Twenty-seven minutes on a man caught in women's clothes at a women-only rite, the trial that followed, and the enmity with Cicero it started.
Agrippina married her uncle, buried him, and put her son on the throne, then found she could not control him. Twenty-seven minutes on a career that ended with a staged shipwreck.
Twenty-seven minutes on the Severans retaking the throne through Macrinus's mistakes, and on the black stone of Elah Gabal being shipped to Rome.
Twenty-seven minutes on Basil I, a peasant from Macedonia who murdered his way to the throne and founded the longest dynasty Byzantium had.
Twenty-seven minutes on the Palaiologan heirs inheriting a capital they could not afford to hold.
Part of Echoes of Empires
Twenty-seven minutes on Stilicho's fall in 408 and on Alaric taking his chance. Two years later Rome is sacked, and this is why.
Listener questions on the Secret History, eunuchs, the Crown of Thorns and where the Doukas name came from. Twenty-six minutes.
The conspiracy in the palace, run by the people closest to him. Twenty-six minutes on an assassination the senate celebrated and the army resented.
Part of The History of Rome
Agrippa, who won Augustus' battles and married his daughter, and died first. Twenty-six minutes on the man the regime could least afford to lose.
The first two of the four emperors, each lasting months. Twenty-six minutes on the year that proved an emperor could be made outside Rome.
Twenty-six minutes on Commodus, who fought in the arena and renamed the months after himself.
Twenty-six minutes on Nikephoros Phokas, a general who took Crete and Antioch and was murdered in his own bedroom by his wife's lover.
Twenty-six minutes on a brother deposing and blinding a brother, which by this point in the story is a standard transfer of power.
Part of Byzantium And The Crusades
Twenty-six minutes on the civil wars that hollowed the empire out long before the Ottomans arrived. The decline was internal first.
At least three men claimed to be Nero after his death, and the eastern provinces kept believing one of them. Twenty-five minutes on what that says about how he was actually regarded.
John V faces rebellion from his own sons and grandsons while the empire becomes an Ottoman vassal and a Venetian bargaining chip. Twenty-five minutes, 1371 to 1391.
Twenty-five minutes on Julian's rise from a scholar under house arrest to an emperor proclaimed by his troops in Gaul.
Part of The Pax Romana Podcast
The purge of 337, in which the army killed most of the extended family and left the three sons in charge. Twenty-five minutes on a succession settled with knives.
Twenty-five minutes on the murder by a wrestler after the poison failed, and the senate's vote to drag his body with a hook.
The end of the reign and the succession that passed over his own son for Agrippina's. Twenty-five minutes on a death that suited everybody except him.
Twenty-four minutes on the end of Tacfarinas in Africa and the years when Sejanus ran Rome while Tiberius ran nothing from Capri.
Three men dividing the state by law, with proscription lists to pay for it. Twenty-four minutes on a dictatorship that called itself a commission.
Agrippina's end, ordered by the son she had made emperor, with the line she is said to have given the assassins. Twenty-four minutes.
Twenty-three minutes on the general who held the west together with Hunnic allies and died at the emperor's own hand.
Twenty-three minutes on the woman who was sister, wife and mother to emperors, and the only one of the three relationships she chose.
Twenty-three minutes on Roman timekeeping: hours that changed length with the season, and a calendar that had to be fixed by decree.
The empire divided between Constantine's sons and the purge that cleared the rest of the family. Twenty-three minutes.
Twenty-three minutes on the plots against Commodus, including the sister who tried and the chamberlain who succeeded.
Procopius wrote the official history and then a private pamphlet calling the empress a whore and the emperor a demon. Twenty-three minutes on what to do with a source that contradicts itself on purpose.
Twenty-two minutes on Commodus in the arena, fighting beasts from a raised platform and billing the senate for the performance.
Twenty-two minutes of the anecdotes around Septimius Severus, an African emperor with a Syrian wife who told his sons to enrich the soldiers and ignore everyone else.
Twenty-two minutes on the civil wars of 193 to 197, fought by three provincial armies whose commanders all had a claim.
Twenty-one minutes on the Ides and the miscalculation underneath: the assassins believed the Republic would restart on its own.
Twenty-one minutes on Zeno, a mountain chieftain from Isauria who became emperor and spent most of the reign being driven out of his own capital.
Twenty-one minutes on a counter-offensive after a long stretch of losing, which in this period is rare enough to be an event.
Twenty-one minutes on money pulling the empire and its neighbours apart, with trade privileges handed to Venice that could not be taken back.
Cicero's consulship, five executions without trial, and a plot whose scale depends entirely on who is describing it. Twenty minutes.
The opening episode of the series starts where most Caesar stories end, with the body on the floor and nobody in charge. Twenty minutes on the vacuum that made Augustus possible.
Twenty minutes on the plots around Augustus, and on how a regime with no succession law generates one every few years.
The question put plainly, with the case for the assassins and the case against, in under twenty minutes. Useful precisely because it refuses to settle it.
Nineteen minutes on Agrippina managing her son's accession and discovering that a grown emperor takes orders from nobody.
Matricide, the fire, and the persecution that followed it, in eighteen minutes. The pace is the point: the collapse was quick.
Seventeen minutes on a treason trial built on forged correspondence, reported by a historian who was there.
Capri, Sejanus, and the treason trials run by letter from an island. Seventeen minutes on an emperor who governed Rome for eleven years without visiting it.
The proscriptions of 43, three hundred senators and two thousand knights on the lists, and Cicero's hands nailed to the rostra. Sixteen minutes.
Sixteen minutes on the imperial women who died conveniently, and on how often the sources reach for poison.
The children Antony had with Cleopatra and with Octavia, and what Augustus did with them. Most of them lived.
Fifteen minutes on the frumentarii, grain officers who ended up doing the empire secret-service work nobody had designed an office for.
Fourteen minutes on the four executions of 118 and the question the sources never settle: how much Hadrian knew, and how much he needed not to know.
The Ides in thirteen minutes: the warnings ignored, the senate meeting in Pompey's theatre, and twenty-three wounds of which one was fatal.
Killed in a corridor by his own guard officers after less than four years. Thirteen minutes on a murder that had no plan for the morning after.
Found behind a curtain by the praetorians and made emperor because he was there. Thirteen minutes on the limp, the stammer and the fifty years of being underestimated that kept him alive.
Marcellus, Gaius, Lucius and Agrippa Postumus, the four who were supposed to succeed and did not. Tiberius was the last option, not the first.
Eight minutes more on the same episode, including the meeting with Pope Leo that turned Attila around.
Seven minutes connecting the Ides of March to a television death scene, which is short enough to be a joke and sharp enough to land.
On the ceremonial humiliations of senators, which is the sort of detail that survives because it was told and retold in the senate house.
Sejanus at the height of his power and the letter to the senate that ended him in an afternoon. The purge that followed ran for years.
Everything else
Part of Lost Roman Heroes · Matteo and Matthew Storm, 101 episodes
Part of Cost of Glory · Alex Petkas on Plutarch, 45 hours
Part of The Ancients · Tristan Hughes and the History Hit team, twice a week since 2020
Part of Autocrat: A Roman History Podcast · Vince and Cassie, 137 numbered episodes
Part of Echoes of History · History Hit for Assassin's Creed; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of Dan Snow's History Hit · Dan Snow on history's defining moments; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of Life of Caesar · Cameron Reilly and Ray Harris, 170 hours
