Love and sex in Rome

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.

Part of Life of Caesar

Over three hours in Egypt: a head in a basket, a queen who needed a Roman, and a war in the streets of Alexandria that Caesar had not planned and nearly lost.

Part of Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium

Ninety-nine minutes on an emperor whose nickname comes from the dynasty that murdered him and needed him to look unfit.

Part of The Partial Historians

The Taylor and Burton epic held against what is actually known, which is less than the film assumes and stranger. An hour and a half, and the costume budget gets the scrutiny it deserves.

Part of Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium

Eighty-six minutes on the lawgiver who married four times to get an heir and had to be readmitted to his own church.

Part of Life of Caesar

The last of three episodes of live commentary on the 1979 film, eighty-six minutes of it. Watching two historians react to Tinto Brass and Gore Vidal is a way into the reception of Caligula that no straight narrative gives you.

Part of The Partial Historians

The second half of the Taylor and Burton epic, and the studio that nearly went under making it. Eighty-three minutes, with the history checked as they go.

Part of Life of Caesar

The marriage to his brother's daughter, the senate vote that made it legal, and the adoption of her son over his own. Seventy-six minutes on the four years that ended the dynasty's luck.

Part of Life of Caesar

The last year: Vindex, Galba, the senate's vote, and a suicide that needed help. Seventy-two minutes on the fall of the Julio-Claudians.

Part of Life of Caesar

The second half of the same demolition, ending with why a film this bad still shapes what people think they know. Seventy minutes.

Part of The Partial Historians

Livy and Dionysius both tell the story of Verginia, and the two doctors read them side by side. Sixty-nine minutes on a father who kills his daughter in the Forum to keep her from a decemvir, and on why Rome needed that story to be rid of its second decemvirate.

Part of Life of Caesar

Octavia, Acte and Poppaea, and a court where marriage was policy and affection was a threat. Just over an hour on the domestic politics of a teenage emperor.

Part of Life of Caesar

The 1979 Penthouse film taken apart scene by scene, with what the sources actually say beside it. Just over an hour, and the gap is wider than the defenders admit.

Part of The Rest Is History

Part three of the emperors run, sixty-five minutes on Caligula, built largely on Suetonius, who was writing eighty years later with the archives open and a taste for the worst version.

Part of Emperors of Rome

The two hundredth episode, live: the Donations of Alexandria, in which Antony handed Roman provinces to a foreign queen's children. An hour on the gift that made Actium inevitable.

Part of Life of Caesar

Sixty-three minutes on the incidents the sources use to prove Caligula's character, weighed one at a time for what could be behind them.

Part of Life of Caesar

Sixty-three minutes on the governorship that paid off his debts and gave him a triumph he gave up to stand for consul.

Part of Life of Caesar

An hour on the court after Messalina, with four freedmen competing to choose the next empress and the winner installing his own candidate.

Part of Life of Caesar

Fifty-nine minutes working through the scandal material and asking what each story was for when it was written.

Part of The Rest Is History

Part two, fifty-eight minutes on Tiberius and on Suetonius, whose biography of him is the most salacious he wrote and the reason the reputation stuck.

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.

Part of Life of Caesar

Messalina at fifteen, married to a man of fifty, and the court that grew around her. Fifty-seven minutes on a marriage that was policy before it was scandal.

Part of The Ancients

Fifty-six minutes on Roman sexual norms, which sorted people by who was doing what to whom and cared about status far more than about gender.

Part of The Partial Historians

With Jenny Williamson

Jenny Williamson on her novel about Boudica's daughters, and on writing fiction into the gaps the sources leave. Fifty-six minutes.

Part of Emperors of Rome

Fifty-four minutes on the eleven months in Alexandria after the defeat, and two suicides staged with care. The asp arrives late in the tradition and may be entirely literary.

Part of The Ancients

With Daisy Dunn

Daisy Dunn on the pair from Tarsus to the tomb, fifty-three minutes. The political arithmetic gets as much room as the romance, which is the only way the ending makes sense.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Rest Is History

Part one, fifty-three minutes on Suetonius, who had the imperial archives open to him and used them to write the most quotable and least reliable book on the Caesars.

Part of Life of Caesar

Fifty-three minutes on the court and the household, where the stories about the emperor's private life start and mostly stay.

Part of Life of Caesar

Fifty-three minutes on Caesar's marriages and affairs as political instruments, including the wife he was told to divorce and did not.

Part of The Ancients

With Daisy Dunn

Daisy Dunn on Catullus, who wrote a hundred and sixteen poems in the last decades of the Republic and used language that translators kept quietly softening. Forty-nine minutes.

Part of The Rest Is History

Antinous drowned in the Nile in AD 130 and Hadrian answered by making him a god, with temples, a city and coinage. Forty-nine minutes on grief exercised by someone with the power to enforce it.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

With Jeffrey Tatum

Jeff Tatum on the stretch from Philippi in 42 BC to Actium, the years when Antony was the senior partner in the triumvirate and spent that advantage. Forty-five minutes, the second of two parts.

Part of The History of Byzantium

With Mark Masterson

Mark Masterson on why the emperor who ruled for half a century never married, and on what the sources will and will not say about it. Forty-four minutes, a thousand years after his death.

Part of The Rest Is History

Part two of four on Cleopatra, covering the Alexandrian war and the years she spent in a villa across the Tiber while Caesar was alive. Forty-one minutes.

Part of The Ancient World

Forty minutes on the Efqa spring that made Palmyra possible, and on the close of the Bloodline series. Scott Chesworth reads the inscriptions slowly and lets them do the arguing.

Part of The Rest Is History

Part three of four, forty minutes on what Plutarch and then Shakespeare did to the story before anyone alive today met it.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

Thirty-seven minutes on the evidence for brothels in Pompeii, and on how much of it is a modern habit of reading every carved phallus as a signpost.

Part of The Ancients

Alastair Blanshard on where the orgy came from, which is largely later writers and a Victorian appetite for a decadent Rome. Thirty-seven minutes.

Part of Emperors of Rome

With Peter Davis

Thirty-seven minutes on Ovid's Ars Amatoria, a manual for seduction published while Augustus was legislating against adultery.

Part of Emperors of Rome

With Caillan Davenport

Thirty-five minutes on the passages about Elagabalus asking to be called lady, and on what a hostile historian was doing when he wrote them down.

Part of The Partial Historians

The last king and the rape of Lucretia, the story Romans used to explain why they hated the word. Thirty-three minutes on a founding myth for the Republic built on a woman's death.

Part of Emperors of Rome

Thirty-one minutes on the woman Catullus wrote as Lesbia and Cicero prosecuted as a poisoner, which are the only two portraits we have.

Part of Emperors of Rome

Thirty-one minutes on the Augustan law that made adultery a public crime, and on the daughter and granddaughter he exiled under it.

Part of The History of Byzantium

Twenty-eight minutes on an emperor who needed an heir and married four times to get one, against a church that allowed three.

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 Being Roman with Mary Beard

Marcus Aurelius as his letters show him, which is a good deal warmer and more flirtatious than the Meditations ever let on. Twenty-eight minutes on the correspondence with Fronto.

Part of The History of Rome

Elagabalus, fourteen years old, arriving in Rome with a Syrian sun god and a priesthood. Twenty-seven minutes on a reign nobody survived explaining.

Part of Being Roman with Mary Beard

Allia Potestas, remembered on her tombstone by a lover who shared her with a friend and thought the arrangement worth carving in stone. Twenty-seven minutes with Mary Beard on a single inscription.

Part of Historia Civilis

Twenty-six minutes of coloured rectangles on the last year of both of them, Actium to the asp. Historia Civilis is strongest on sequence, and 30 BC is almost entirely sequence.

Part of Emperors of Rome

Antinous, the drowning in the Nile, and a city founded for a dead boy. Twenty-six minutes on grief turned into an imperial cult with temples of its own.

Part of The History of Rome

Duncan on the propaganda war: Octavian as Apollo and order, Antony as Dionysus and the east. Twenty-six minutes on how you make a civil war look like a foreign one.

Part of Emperors of Rome

Twenty-five minutes on Titus, who had been feared as the next Nero and turned out generous, then died after twenty-six months.

Part of The History of Rome

Twenty-five minutes on Domitian's fall and the formal erasure that followed, with his name chiselled off inscriptions across the empire.

Part of The History of Rome

Twenty-four minutes on the dynastic marriages of the Julio-Claudians, where every wedding was a succession plan and most of them failed.

Part of Life of Caesar

Twenty-four minutes on the propaganda of 69, in which every side accused the others of exactly the same vices.

Part of Emperors of Rome

Twenty-two minutes on a system organised by who penetrated whom, with gender a secondary question. Modern categories fit it badly.

Part of The History of Rome

Duncan on the reign that kept the machine running and made everybody miserable, including the phrase the crowds shouted at his funeral. Twenty-two minutes.

Part of Emperors of Rome

Exiled to the Black Sea for a poem and a mistake he never named. Twenty-one minutes on the punishment that produced his best work.

Part of The History of Rome

Sixteen minutes on Roman marriage as an institution: the forms, the dowries, and how easily either party could end it.

Part of Autocrat: A Roman History Podcast

Fifteen minutes on the descent into the underworld, the condition attached to the rescue, and the backward glance that undoes it.

Part of Autocrat: A Roman History Podcast

Ten minutes on the lovers, the wall and the mulberry that turned red, which Ovid tells and Shakespeare rewrote twice.

Part of Autocrat: A Roman History Podcast · Vince and Cassie, 137 numbered episodes

Part of Autocrat: A Roman History Podcast · Vince and Cassie, 137 numbered episodes

Part of Autocrat: A Roman History Podcast · Vince and Cassie, 137 numbered episodes

Part of Autocrat: A Roman History Podcast · Vince and Cassie, 137 numbered episodes

Part of Professor Kozlowski Lectures · University lectures on philosophy and the humanities; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of The History of Ancient Greece · Greek history in order, from the Stone Age forward; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of Ancient History Hound · Ancient Blogger on Greece, Rome and antiquity for every level; only the Roman episodes are indexed

With LJ Trafford

Part of The History of Ancient Greece · Greek history in order, from the Stone Age forward; 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 Ancient Art Podcast (audio) · Art and culture of the ancient Mediterranean; only the Roman episodes are indexed