Blueprints · How Rome ran: the army, the money, the law, the concrete.
The denarius, the grain fleet, and the day the coinage stopped working.
125 entries · 82 hours · 108 with a written verdict · British 51 · American 42 · Australian 20 · Mixed 2
Egyptian grain fed a million people in one city, and the ships that carried it ran on a schedule. Silver from Spain paid the legions, debasement ate the silver, and in the third century a functioning currency came apart in a single lifetime. Colin Elliott and Patrick Wyman both take the economy as the main event, and once you have heard them the fall stops being a mystery.
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With a written verdict
Part of Fall of Civilizations
Three and a half hours on Carthage as a civilisation in its own right, with the sound design Cooper is known for. Carthage is the subject here and Rome the visitor.
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 Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium
Ninety-two minutes on sixty-six days, which tells you this show will not shorten an episode just because the reign was brief.
Part of The Partial Historians
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.
Part of Life of Caesar
Seventy-five minutes with an economist on the Roman economy, applying modern tools to evidence that was never collected for them.
Seventy-one minutes on an emperor who abolished a hated tax and still left the largest surplus in Byzantine history.
With Emma Southon
Southon on the fact everything else rests on: this was a slave economy, and the villas, the leisure and the literature were paid for by it. Uncomfortable, unsentimental, necessary.
Sixty-eight minutes on money before coinage: bronze by weight, cattle as a unit, and a state that ran on credit between aristocrats.
Part of The Ancients
Emma Southon on slavery as the engine of the whole system: the mines, the fields, the households, and the numbers Rome needed to keep replacing. Sixty-seven minutes.
Sixty-six minutes on the dictatorship as a working government: the calendar, the colonies, the debt laws and the senate packed with provincials.
With Nick Rauh
Nick Rauh and Adam Dawson on piracy from Spain to Syria across the second and first centuries BC, and on Pompey clearing the sea in a single season. Sixty-three minutes.
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 Autocrat: A Roman History Podcast
Sixty-two minutes with a numismatist on coins as evidence: how a hoard is dated, what a portrait was advertising, and what debasement did to the empire.
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.
With Barry Cunliffe
Barry Cunliffe on the long chain from Egypt to China: Roman glass and silver going east across monsoon seas, silk coming back, and nobody at either end meeting the other. 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.
With Lucy Shipley
Start here for the people Rome learned it from. Cities, writing, painted tombs and a naval reach across the Tyrrhenian Sea while Rome was still huts on a hill.
With Liv Yarrow
Liv Yarrow on coins as the Republic's only mass medium: who chose the images, and what a moneyer was advertising. Fifty-six minutes.
With Eve MacDonald
Eve MacDonald on Carthage as a Phoenician colony on the Tunisian coast that outgrew the mother city at Tyre. Fifty-four minutes before Rome enters the story at all.
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.
Fifty-three minutes on the court and the household, where the stories about the emperor's private life start and mostly stay.
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.
The young Caesar captured by pirates, demanding they raise his ransom, and crucifying them afterwards as promised. Forty-nine minutes on the anecdote that tells you the rest.
With William Dalrymple
William Dalrymple on India as Rome's largest trading partner, reached by monsoon sailing from Egyptian ports, and on the pepper and the gold that went each way. Forty-eight minutes.
Massalia, founded by Greeks from Phocaea around 600 BC and still there. Forty-eight minutes on France's oldest city, which was Greek before it was anything else.
Part of Tides of History
With Dennis Romano
Dennis Romano on Venice from salt pans to empire to tourism, a city founded by people leaving the Roman mainland and lasting a thousand years. Forty-eight minutes.
With John Giebfried
Forty-eight minutes on the last Latin emperor of Constantinople, who pawned the crown of thorns and sold the lead off his own roof.
Forty-seven minutes on the grain shortages of the early Republic, where famine and politics ran on the same calendar and the tribunes learned what a hungry city was worth.
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.
Forty-six minutes on the fifth century as a chain of local failures, each one making the next more likely.
Part two, forty-five minutes on Abbasid Baghdad, founded in 762 and inheriting the Greek learning that the Roman east had kept.
Forty-four minutes on the western government running out of soldiers, money and legitimacy at roughly the same moment.
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.
Forty-three minutes on that trade network disappearing, which is the clearest evidence that something real ended.
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.
Forty-two minutes on how integrated the fourth-century economy was, measured in pottery that travelled a thousand miles to ordinary farms.
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.
With Karen Carr
Karen Carr on what Roman women could own, inherit and lend, which is more than the rhetoric about them suggests. Forty-one minutes.
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.
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.
Forty minutes opening a run of episodes on the first-millennium economy, starting with whether the ancient economy is one subject at all.
Part of The Pax Romana Podcast
Forty minutes on Aurelian's currency reform, which triggered a mint workers' revolt in Rome that cost thousands of lives.
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.
Forty minutes on Carthage turning economic weight into territory in Sicily, timed to the moment Athens destroyed its own expedition there.
The Pompeii Lakshmi, carved in India and dug out of a house near the Bay of Naples. Thirty-nine minutes on the trade route that could carry an object that far.
Listener questions: where the gold came from, how Romania ended up speaking a Romance language, whether the Byzantines played polo. Thirty-nine minutes of the loose ends a narrative show cannot stop for.
Thirty-seven minutes on Byzantine diplomacy: gold, titles and marriage used as cheaper substitutes for armies.
Thirty-seven minutes on the numbers: how many people, how much grain, and how little of it can be known with confidence.
With Peter Stothard
Peter Stothard on the richest man in Rome, who made it partly from fires and proscriptions and lost it all at Carrhae in 53 BC. Thirty-five minutes.
Part of Emperors of Rome
Thirty-five minutes on the three-way arrangement that Crassus financed, and on why the money man wanted a military command badly enough to die for it.
Thirty-three minutes on the triumph as an economic event: what was carried through the streets and where it went afterwards.
Thirty-three minutes touring the whole sea in 146 BC, region by region, at the moment it became one power's lake.
Thirty-three minutes on the Republic as an economy: what an expanding market felt like from inside a workshop, and where the proceeds of conquest actually landed.
Thirty-three minutes with Walter Scheidel on why Europe never reassembled into a single empire, which he argues was the making of it.
With Caillan Davenport
Thirty-three minutes on the class below the senate: a property qualification, a gold ring, and the men who actually ran the imperial administration.
With Andrew Connor
Thirty-three minutes on Egypt as the emperor's private province, where no senator could set foot without permission and the grain fleet started.
Thirty-three minutes on Alexios rebuilding the state around his own family, which worked for a century and left nothing underneath it.
Thirty-two minutes on an emperor who spent a generation's revenue on western adventures and left the eastern frontier thin.
Thirty-one minutes on the tax system that paid for that recovery, which is the least glamorous and most decisive part of the story.
Thirty-one minutes closing that stretch with the army unpaid, the coinage debased and the Turks in Anatolia.
Thirty minutes on the richest man in Rome starting out, and on a war against Rome's own Italian allies that made careers.
Thirty minutes on sumptuary laws that nobody obeyed, and on a moralising tradition that treated imported silk as a political problem.
Half an hour of counterfactuals: which Byzantine defeats were avoidable, handled with more care than that usually gets.
Thirty minutes on three days in April 1204, when a Christian army sacked the largest Christian city and shipped the bronze horses to Venice.
Twenty-nine minutes on the political structure the two of them built between them, which Caesar then inherited whole.
Twenty-nine minutes on an emperor spending the reserve Basil II had left, which took roughly one generation.
Twenty-eight minutes on the empire's pull on its neighbours: everyone wanted its gold, its titles and its church, and nobody wanted its tax collectors.
Twenty-eight minutes on savings that cost more than they saved, which is a recurring Byzantine fiscal move.
Part of Being Roman with Mary Beard
Lucius Caecilius Iucundus lent money, ran auctions and took a cut of both, and his business archive survived the ash on wax tablets. Twenty-eight minutes on Pompeii's middleman.
A carved stone from a vineyard in southern Italy records an innkeeper's bill in dialogue, itemised down to the girl and the mule. Twenty-eight minutes on Calidius Eroticus.
Twenty-seven minutes on Diocletian's price edict and tax reform, and on why a command economy was the only lever left.
Twenty-seven minutes on the eleventh-century economy, which grew while the army and the currency were falling apart.
Twenty-seven minutes with John Giebfried on the Venetian quarter of the fragmented empire, which was run as a business.
Twenty-six minutes on the Roman property ladder: the census classes, the equestrian line, and what a senator was legally forbidden to do for money.
Twenty-six minutes on an empire holding more ground than it could pay for, which is the bill the next century had to settle.
Twenty-six minutes on the great landowning families buying out the peasant soldiers, which emperors legislated against for a century and lost.
Twenty-five minutes on what the assassins of Caesar thought they were defending, and whether it still existed by 44 BC.
Twenty-five minutes on the Persian army walking into the third city of the empire while the best troops were in Italy.
Twenty-five minutes on the tenth-century recovery, when the frontier started moving east again after three hundred years of moving west.
Twenty-five minutes on two new powers in the Mediterranean, one of them soon holding the empire's trade and the other its Italian provinces.
Part of Echoes of Empires
Anastasius two centuries later, praised for leaving a full treasury and doing it with the same instruments Diocletian built. Twenty-five minutes, and a good argument for how long the reforms ran.
Twenty-four minutes on the man who bought the empire at auction and held it for sixty-six days.
Twenty-four minutes on Julianus' sixty-six days and the execution that ended them, with the line he asked his killers.
Twenty-three minutes on the free grain: two hundred thousand recipients, a fleet to carry it, and a politics built on it.
The praetorians auctioning the empire and Didius Julianus winning. Twenty-three minutes on the day the throne had a price.
Twenty-three minutes on the decade when everything worked: Africa retaken in a season, the law codified, and Hagia Sophia going up.
Part of Ancient Rome Live
Twenty-two minutes on Roman rubbish. Monte Testaccio is a hill thirty-five metres high made of smashed olive oil amphorae, which is what accumulates when a container cannot be used twice.
The edict of 301 fixed a price for a thousand goods, from lions to legal fees, with death for overcharging. Twenty-one minutes on an experiment in price control that the market simply walked around.
The solidus, struck at seventy-two to the pound and stable for seven hundred years, and the temple treasuries that paid for it. Twenty-one minutes on the coin that outlived the empire that minted it.
Twenty-one minutes on the fall of the Armenian capital, a city of a thousand churches that the empire had annexed and then failed to defend.
Twenty minutes on debasement: a silver coin that ended up mostly copper, and prices nobody could control.
Nineteen minutes on the two men who between them held more money and more legions than the state, and who could not stand each other.
Nineteen minutes on Anastasius, who abolished a hated tax, left a treasury of three hundred and twenty thousand pounds of gold, and is remembered by almost nobody.
Nineteen minutes on how a Roman city paid for itself: rents, workshops, and a grain supply that came from somewhere else.
Eighteen minutes on climate as a force in Roman history, from the warm centuries of the early empire to the cooling that came with the plague years.
Seventeen minutes on the temple treasure carried through Rome in the triumph of 71, still carved on the arch of Titus.
The tax reform behind the price edict: a new census counting land and people together, so the state could finally budget. Seventeen minutes on the dull reform that actually held.
Seventeen minutes arguing the fourth century was a good time to be alive, which cuts against the decline story most listeners arrive with.
Sixteen minutes on how a dispute over Messana pulled a land power into a naval war it had no fleet for.
Sixteen minutes on the ladder from senator to enslaved, and on the freedmen who could be richer than the men above them.
Fifteen minutes on confidence in the coinage, which held for two centuries and then did not.
Fifteen minutes on the praetorian auction of 193, the day the guard sold the throne to the highest bidder.
Fifteen minutes on 193 again from the other end: what it cost, who paid, and how long he lasted.
Part of toldinstone
Fourteen minutes on Delos, sacred birthplace of Apollo and, once Rome made it a free port in 166 BC, the busiest slave market in the Aegean. Both facts are on the same small island.
The ten-year siege of Veii, deliberately told as Rome's own Troy. Thirteen minutes on a conquest that doubled the state.
Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast
Eleven minutes on whether recruits had to buy their way in, and on the deductions from pay that the Egyptian papyri actually record.
Nine minutes on a listener's claim that Dacia extracted tribute from Rome, which it did under Domitian, and on what Trajan did about it.
Eight minutes on the macellum, the covered market hall, traced from Pompeii to Jerash in Jordan. The plan barely changes between the two, which are two thousand kilometres apart.
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Part of Autocrat: A Roman History Podcast · Vince and Cassie, 137 numbered episodes
Part of When in Rome
