Blueprints · How Rome ran: the army, the money, the law, the concrete.
Galen, eye salve, and the pandemics that emptied the cities.
36 entries · 21 hours · 34 with a written verdict · British 15 · American 10 · Australian 8 · Mixed 1
Two pandemics hit the empire at its height, and the second may have killed a fifth of everyone alive. Galen wrote up what he saw and his work ran the practice of medicine for the next fourteen centuries. Kyle Harper's argument that climate and disease did more damage than any invader turns up across several shows here, and it is the most modern-feeling debate in the whole corpus.
I feel like…
when it happens
how it is made
who is talking
how much time you have
With a written verdict
Part of Tides of History
Seventy-six minutes recorded in spring 2020, two narrative historians talking about plague and revolution while living through the first of them.
Part of The Ancients
With Kyle Harper
Kyle Harper on the volcanic dust veil of the 530s followed by bubonic plague in 541, and on the argument that climate and disease set the limits everything else happened inside. Sixty-four minutes.
Part of The Partial Historians
With Debby Sneed
Sixty-one minutes on disability in the Greek world: the medical writers, the myths, and the gap between the two.
Kyle Harper on disease as a cause and not a backdrop: the Antonine plague, the Cyprianic, and the bubonic outbreak of 541. Sixty minutes, third of the Fall of Rome run.
Fifty-eight minutes on a year where disease and the codification struggle ran together, and the sources blame the gods for both.
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 Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium
Fifty-one minutes on the emperor who ordered the empire-wide sacrifice and died in a swamp fighting the Goths, the first to fall in battle against a foreign enemy.
Part of The Rest Is History
Kyle Harper with Tom and Dominic, fifty minutes on disease as a first-order cause of Roman decline, which is a newer argument than it sounds.
With Laura Spinney
Laura Spinney on ancient DNA that pushes Yersinia pestis back more than five thousand years, long before the outbreak of 541 that was thought to be the first. Forty-eight minutes.
Part of The Fall of Rome Podcast
Forty-three minutes on volcanoes, plague and earthquakes arriving in the same century as the political collapse.
Forty-three minutes from 2017 on Justinian's reign running into volcanic cooling and then plague, reposted in 2020 for reasons the host states plainly.
Forty-one minutes on Galen and the humours, and on how a theory of four fluids organised European medicine for fifteen hundred years.
Part of The History of Byzantium
Forty-one minutes on the plague of 541, which killed perhaps a third of the empire and ended the reconquest without a battle.
Thirty-eight minutes with Kyle Harper on his argument that climate and disease did more to the empire than any invader.
Part of Emperors of Rome
With Leanne McNamara
Thirty-seven minutes on Roman medicine: surgery without anaesthetic, a public water supply, and a life expectancy dragged down by infant death.
With Robert Bruton
Thirty-three minutes with Robert Bruton on the volcanic winters of the 530s, the coldest decade in two thousand years, and the plague that followed.
With Nick Summerton
Nick Summerton on the epidemic that arrived with the armies returning from the east in the 160s: the flight from cities, the advice on staying well, and what Galen recorded. Thirty-two minutes.
Thirty-one minutes on a plague that killed consuls and augurs alike, and on what an ancient city could and could not do about disease.
Thirty-one minutes on the 540s: plague, bankruptcy, the Gothic war restarting, and an emperor who would not stop.
With Tim Parkin
Thirty minutes on growing old in Rome: no pension, a father's legal power for life, and a literature that treats age as a subject for complaint.
Half an hour on finding a doctor in the late Roman world, where your options ran from a trained physician to a shrine.
Part of Being Roman with Mary Beard
Galen as team doctor to the gladiators at Pergamon, keeping expensive men alive and learning anatomy from their wounds. Twenty-seven minutes.
Twenty-five minutes on Roman eye medicine, known from the stone stamps oculists used to mark their ointment sticks, dozens of which survive with the recipe named on them.
Twenty-three minutes on a doctor who left the city as the epidemic arrived and described it anyway. Perhaps five million died.
Part of The Pax Romana Podcast
Twenty-two minutes on the poisonings and exiles of the Julio-Claudian court, where the family was the government.
Twenty-one minutes on what the Antonine plague actually was, where Galen's symptoms are the only clinical evidence there is.
Part of Echoes of Empires
Twenty-one minutes on the plague that struck in 541 and killed on the scale of the Black Death. Everything Justinian planned after this is shaped by it.
Eighteen minutes on the climate optimum that made the good centuries possible, and what happened when it ended.
Sixteen minutes on the epidemic the armies brought back from Parthia, which may have killed a tenth of the empire.
Sixteen minutes on the second great epidemic, described by a bishop who used it to argue for his own faith.
Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast
Fourteen minutes on Roman army medicine: what the evidence supports about surgeons, orderlies and field hospitals, and what the novels have added.
Part of Life of Caesar
Thirteen minutes on a passage in the Natural History that shows what a Roman encyclopaedia counted as established fact.
The bridge of boats at Baiae, the campaign against the sea, the horse and the consulship. Twelve minutes asking which of these are stories and which are policy misread on purpose.
Part of Ancient Rome Live
Eight minutes on Roman bathing taken as medicine: mineral springs, prescribed cures, and resorts built on water that was thought to work on particular complaints.
Everything else
Part of Ithaca Bound · Andrew Schiestel on the Mediterranean, 2021 to 2022; 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
