Bloodlines · Who it happened to: the plotting, the gods, the beds, the graves.
Vestals, Mithras, the imperial cult and the rise of Christianity.
332 entries · 407 hours · 162 with a written verdict · British 141 · American 72 · Australian 52 · Mixed 4
Six priestesses kept a fire alight and the state believed the city depended on it. Soldiers on the Rhine worshipped a god killing a bull in an underground room. Within four centuries a persecuted sect held the throne, and the Council of Nicaea settled what it would believe. This is the busiest theme in the index for a reason: nothing else in Rome changed that completely.
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With a written verdict
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.
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.
Six hours from Nick Holmes on the two centuries in which Byzantium asked the West for soldiers and received the Fourth Crusade. 1204 is the hinge, and the case made here is that 1453 was settled then.
Eleven Oscars and a chariot race that no CGI has improved on. Fiction wrapped around a Roman Judaea that is more carefully built than the plot deserves.
Peter Ustinov's Nero is the reason to watch, and he is doing comedy in a film that does not know it. Historically the loosest film on this page.
Hypatia in Alexandria, and the only feature film about late antique intellectual life. Takes liberties with her death and is honest about the world she lived in.
Part of Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium
A hundred and twenty-two minutes, the longest in this set, on an emperor who beat Persia outright and then watched the Arabs take everything he had won.
A hundred and twelve minutes on the general who took Crete and Antioch, slept on the floor, and was murdered in the palace.
An hour and fifty on the last iconoclast emperor, who also built the palace automata that astonished foreign envoys. The first eight minutes carry an audio crackle the hosts apologise for, and it clears.
An hour and three quarters on the emperor with the most myth attached, and the show scores him against the myth. The conversion, the new capital and the sons all get weighed, and the number at the end is defended.
Part of The Partial Historians
A hundred and three minutes on the Python film, which two ancient historians rate higher on daily life than most serious productions. The crucifixion scene gets its own discussion.
Ninety-nine minutes on the last pagan emperor, scored on a reign of twenty months and a body of writing that outlasts it.
Ninety-seven minutes on the last man to rule both halves, who made Nicene Christianity the state religion and did public penance to a bishop.
Not history, and the funniest film anyone has made about the Roman occupation of Judaea. The aqueduct scene is a better summary of imperial infrastructure than most documentaries manage.
Ninety-four minutes on the tetrarch who drove the persecution and issued the edict of toleration from his deathbed.
Ninety-three minutes on the teenage priest-emperor, weighed against sources that were trying to justify his murder.
Eighty-seven minutes on the gods before the Greek borrowings: numina, the flamines, and a religion of procedure where the words had to be exactly right.
Part of The History of Byzantium
With Anthony Kaldellis
Eighty-seven minutes with Kaldellis on his single-volume history and on the argument that this was the Roman empire throughout, never a Byzantine one.
Eighty-three minutes on the emperor who held Constantinople through the siege of 717 and then started smashing icons.
Eighty-one minutes on the emperor who removed the altar of Victory from the senate house and was killed by his own general at twenty-four.
Eighty minutes, the longest episode in this stretch, on how the western half slipped away and what the eastern half told itself about it.
Seventy-four minutes with the History of the Papacy podcast on the legend of Peter leaving Rome, and where a story like that comes from.
Part of Autocrat: A Roman History Podcast
Seventy-three minutes with Dominic Perry of The History of Egypt on Egyptian mythology and where the field stands now. The Roman connection is thin; the hour is worth it for Perry.
Seventy-one minutes on the recovery and the Camillus tradition, where a disaster gets rewritten into a story about a saviour.
Part of Life of Caesar
Seventy minutes on one of Caligula's first acts, releasing Herod Agrippa from prison, and on what that did in Judaea. The New Testament Herod and the Roman emperor turn out to share a story here.
The temple, the statue meant for Jerusalem, and the question of whether Caligula believed any of it. An hour and a bit on divinity as a weapon against the senate.
The first CinemaScope film, made about a Roman tribune at the crucifixion. Sixty-eight minutes on Hollywood's Rome at the height of the biblical epic.
Part of Cost of Glory
Sixty-eight minutes with Johnathan Bi on the philosophy behind the politics, which is the half most narratives of Cato skip.
Part of The Ancients
With Peter Heather
How a small movement went from persecuted to imperial in three centuries. The demographic arithmetic is the interesting part.
The ten-year siege of Rome's nearest rival, ending with a tunnel under the citadel. Sixty-six minutes on the conquest that doubled Roman territory.
Part of SandRhomanHistory
The Jewish revolt and the siege that ended it, with the ramp the Romans built still standing.
With Jeremy Swist
Jeremy Swist on the last pagan emperor, who wrote philosophy, restored the old temples and died in Persia after twenty months. Sixty-four minutes.
With John Strickland
Sixty-four minutes continuing the same conversation, into the schism and what actually divided the churches.
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.
Sixty-three minutes on how an army sworn to Egypt ended up outside Constantinople: a debt to Venice, a claimant with promises, and nobody willing to stop.
Sixty-three minutes with an Orthodox priest walking through the liturgy, which is the part of Byzantine life that never stopped.
Sixty-three minutes on the sister he deified, the first Roman woman to be made a goddess by vote of the senate.
Sixty-three minutes on the governorship that paid off his debts and gave him a triumph he gave up to stand for consul.
With Matilda Brown
Elagabalus took the throne at fourteen and was dead at eighteen, and the people actually running the empire in between were his grandmother and his mother. Sixty minutes with Matilda Brown on the women.
Fifty-nine minutes on 398 BC, when Rome sent to Delphi for an answer about the Alban lake and got one. The two doctors take the consultation seriously as a political act, which is how it worked.
Fifty-eight minutes on what happened to temples, statues and libraries as Christianity took the state, and on how much destruction the evidence will actually carry.
With Nicholas Morton
Fifty-eight minutes with Morton on his book about the thirteenth-century Near East, where Mongols, Mamluks and crusaders all arrive at once.
Fifty-eight minutes on the regent who restored the icons in 843 and then was pushed aside by her brother.
With David Gwynn
The most systematic Roman attempt to destroy Christianity, launched in 303, over within a decade, and followed by a Christian emperor. Also good on the four-emperor system that worked exactly once.
Fifty-seven minutes of questions on Orthodox belief and practice, answered from inside the tradition.
With Holy Land, Jodi Magness
Jodi Magness on Herod outside the nativity: a client king who built Caesarea, Masada and the Temple platform, and killed several of his own sons. Fifty-six minutes.
With Rosamond McKitterick
The bishops of Rome before there was a papacy, when the claim to primacy was still being invented.
Fifty-six minutes on abduction in Roman story and law, from the Sabine women onward, where the founding myth and the statute sit uncomfortably close.
Fifty-five minutes on whether the early Christians read Nero into the number of the Beast, and on what the persecution after the fire of 64 actually looked like.
Fifty-five minutes at Paestum, where three Greek temples from the sixth and fifth centuries BC stand better preserved than almost anything in Greece itself.
With Matthew McCarty
Matthew McCarty on Mithras, a cult with no scripture and hundreds of underground temples, and on how it got attached to 25 December by people arguing about Christmas. Fifty-four minutes.
Fifty-four minutes with Nicholas Morton on the crusade that aimed at Egypt, took Damietta and gave it back.
With Guy Maclean Rogers
The war that destroyed the Temple in AD 70 and paid for the Colosseum. The Arch of Titus still shows the menorah being carried through the city.
Part three, fifty-three minutes on the burning of the Temple, the triumph that paid for the Colosseum, and Masada.
Part two, fifty-three minutes on the Saxon wars: thirty years of campaigning and forced conversion that built the kingdom Charlemagne was crowned over.
With Joan Taylor
Joan Taylor on Bethlehem before the nativity, a small place south of Jerusalem with a longer history than the one story it is known for. Fifty-two minutes.
With David Potter
Milvian Bridge, the sign he described differently to different audiences, and a deathbed baptism. Whether he was convinced or calculating is an argument that will outlive all of us, and the episode does not pretend otherwise.
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.
Fifty minutes on Nero's Rome as MGM built it, with a burning city and a soundtrack. The history gets checked scene by scene.
Forty-nine minutes on Constantine's climb from York in 306 to sole rule, and on how much of the Christian account of it comes from writers who needed him to be a convert.
Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast
With Josho Brouwers
Forty-nine minutes on three revolts across seventy years: AD 66, the diaspora rising under Trajan, and Bar Kokhba, each ending worse than the last.
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.
With David Gyllenhaal
Forty-nine minutes with David Gyllenhaal on how Byzantines explained defeat: if God favours the empire, what does a lost province mean.
Forty-eight minutes on how an Idumaean with no claim became king of Judaea, which took Roman backing, a civil war and a marriage into the Hasmoneans.
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.
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 Lost Roman Heroes
Forty-eight minutes on the campaign Heraclius funded by melting down church gold, because everything else had been tried. The gamble that beat Persia and emptied the treasury.
Forty-seven minutes finishing the film, including the arena sequence and what the sources actually say about the persecution.
Forty-seven minutes on the defeat of 1176 in a mountain pass, which ended any hope of taking Anatolia back.
Six women at a time, chosen between six and ten years old, sworn for thirty years, and buried alive if the vow broke. Forty-six minutes on Rome's only full-time priesthood.
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.
Ronald Hutton on the Druids of Britain and Gaul: what Caesar reported, what Cicero's meeting with one suggests, and how little of either can be checked. Forty-five minutes.
With Ben Duval
Forty-five minutes with Ben Duval on Saladin as a planner, which is the part the chivalric legend leaves out.
With Peter Frankopan
Forty-four minutes with Peter Frankopan on his argument that the First Crusade began as a Byzantine request for mercenaries.
Forty-four minutes on the pope who fed Rome when the empire could not, and who sent the mission that converted England.
With Matthew Nicholls
Matthew Nicholls on the Pantheon: Agrippa's temple, burnt and rebuilt by Hadrian around AD 126, and a concrete dome nobody matched for thirteen centuries. Forty- three minutes.
Part of Emperors of Rome
With Caillan Davenport
The last and largest persecution, run as administration: edicts, registers of scripture, and officials asked to prove compliance. Forty-two minutes on bureaucracy turned on a religion.
The lectisternium, where statues of gods were laid on couches and served dinner. Forty-two minutes on ritual as crisis management.
Lindsay Powell on his own book about the revolt of AD 132: a Jewish state that minted its own coins for three years, and a war Hadrian won by depopulating Judaea. 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.
With Peta Greenfield
Thirty-nine minutes on six women with more legal freedom than any other in Rome, and a death penalty of being walled up alive.
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.
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.
William Dalrymple on Indian culture moving east through the same trade that reached Rome, and on what it became at Angkor. Thirty-seven minutes.
With Peter Sarris
Peter Sarris on his biography, arguing the reconquest was less reckless than it reads with hindsight. Thirty-seven minutes with a historian defending an unfashionable position.
Thirty-six minutes on the order that every inhabitant sacrifice and collect a certificate, the first empire-wide persecution and the first census of belief.
Thirty-six minutes weighing the dynasty as a whole: they held the walls against the Arabs and are remembered for smashing pictures.
With Michael Tremblay
Thirty-six minutes with a philosopher on Stoicism as it was practised, by Seneca among others, while serving an emperor who had him killed.
Thirty-four minutes on the restoration of icons in 843 and the feast that still marks it in the Orthodox calendar.
Thirty-four minutes on September 70, when Titus walked into the ruins of Jerusalem and the temple treasure went to Rome to pay for the Colosseum. The episode follows the money.
Thirty-three minutes on the short reigns between dynasties, which are usually skipped and are where the succession rules get tested.
Thirty-three minutes on a regency run by an empress and her brother, and the son who eventually killed the uncle.
Thirty-three minutes on the first months of the Flavian regime and on the earliest Christian communities in the same city. The two stories run alongside each other in the sources and rarely in the retellings.
Thirty-two minutes on the senate vote that made a dead emperor a god, and the eagle released from the pyre to carry him up.
Thirty-two minutes on Uranius Antoninus, high priest at Emesa, watching Ardashir found Sasanian Persia from the frontier it was about to cross.
Thirty-two minutes on Aurelian sparing Tyana on the strength of a vision and then meeting Zenobia's forces in Syria.
Part two, thirty-two minutes on the road to the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 and on Josephus, who was on both sides of it.
Thirty-one minutes on Valentine of Rome, patron saint of beekeepers and of epilepsy, and on how a martyr with almost no biography acquired one.
Thirty-one minutes on a teenage emperor, a black stone from Emesa installed as the chief god of Rome, and sources that hate him too much to trust.
Thirty-one minutes on the armies that turned up after Jerusalem fell, and on Alexios telling them which route to avoid. They took it.
Thirty minutes on Drusilla of Mauretania, great-granddaughter of Antony and Cleopatra, married to the procurator of Judaea who kept Paul in prison for two years.
Half an hour on the administrative grind of the reign: the census, the new taxes and the senate restocked with provincials.
The second king, who founded priesthoods and a calendar and fought nobody for forty-three years. Twenty-nine minutes on a reign invented to balance the first.
Twenty-nine minutes on Samsigeramus saving Emesa from the Sasanians and then declaring himself Augustus, until Valerian arrived and Odaenathus took over.
With Emma Southon
Twenty-eight minutes on the freedwoman whose testimony triggered the suppression of the Bacchanalia in 186 BC, with seven thousand implicated.
Twenty-eight minutes on an emperor who needed an heir and married four times to get one, against a church that allowed three.
John VIII asks the Pope for a council to reunite the churches and is told yes. Twenty-seven minutes on the delegation that sailed to Italy, covering 1425 to 1448.
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.
The joke on his deathbed about becoming a god, and the tax on public urinals that gave Italian the word for them. Twenty-seven minutes on an emperor who found the office funny.
Twenty-seven minutes on Emesa becoming a pilgrimage centre and on Trajan's confrontation with Parthia over the Armenian crown.
Twenty-seven minutes on Elagabalus trying to put a Syrian sun god above Jupiter, and on the grandmother who arranged his replacement when it failed.
Twenty-seven minutes on the Battle of Emesa, where the Palmyrene cavalry broke a Roman line and then chased it too far.
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.
Twenty-seven minutes opening a side series on individual lives, starting with a preacher from Antioch whose sermons got him exiled twice.
Roman writers on Jewish practice, and the tax imposed on every Jew in the empire after the temple fell. Twenty-seven minutes on a settlement that lasted two centuries.
Part of Echoes of Empires
Twenty-seven minutes on 626, with Avars on the land side and Persians on the Asian shore while Heraclius was away campaigning. The city held with almost no field army inside it.
With Kevin Butcher
Kevin Butcher on Saturnalia, 17 to 23 December: drinking, gift-giving, and masters serving their slaves for the duration. Twenty-six minutes from the History Hit archive.
Listener questions on the Secret History, eunuchs, the Crown of Thorns and where the Doukas name came from. Twenty-six minutes.
Part of Tides of History
Twenty-six minutes on Patrick, who was carried off from Roman Britain by raiders and wrote about it himself, which almost nobody enslaved in antiquity got to do.
Twenty-six minutes on the December festival: gifts, gambling allowed, and slaves at table while their owners served.
Twenty-six minutes on the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, with the episode's title taken from the Canaanite god whose name is the root of shalom and salaam.
Twenty-six minutes on the Frankish kingdom that met the Arab advance into Gaul, and on the conversion that made it Rome's heir in the west.
Twenty-five minutes on Julia Domna, daughter of the high priest at Emesa, who married Septimius Severus and outlasted him. Scott Chesworth reads Cassius Dio on gold turning to rust.
Twenty-five minutes on Domitian's fall and the formal erasure that followed, with his name chiselled off inscriptions across the empire.
A Christmas crossover with the Augustus History podcast, running the year in review. Lighter than the main series and useful mostly to find the other show.
Twenty-four minutes on the Arab siege of 717, which this episode argues is one of the hinges of European history. The city had Greek fire and two years of grain; the besiegers had a winter.
With Jodi Magness
Jodi Magness, who co-directed the 1995 excavations, on the 967 who supposedly died on the rock in AD 73 and on how much of Josephus the digging actually supports. Twenty-three minutes.
Part of The Pax Romana Podcast
The vision before the Milvian Bridge, the two surviving accounts of it, and the twenty years of policy that followed. Twenty-three minutes on a conversion that is easier to date than to describe.
With Daniel Ogden
Twenty-three minutes on curse tablets thrown into springs and drains, which is where ordinary Roman anger survives in writing.
Twenty-three minutes on the decade when everything worked: Africa retaken in a season, the law codified, and Hagia Sophia going up.
Part of Byzantium And The Crusades
Twenty-three minutes on what the fall meant, from the end of the Roman state to the scholars who carried Greek manuscripts west. The closing episode of the run.
Constantine II, Constans and Constantius II, and the twenty-four years in which they fought each other more than anyone else. Twenty-three minutes.
Twenty-two minutes on how Venice, Rome and Moscow each reacted to 1453, and on the people who later claimed descent from the last emperor.
Twenty-two minutes on the games for Apollo, voted during the war with Hannibal and kept for six centuries after it.
Twenty-two minutes on the murder in 415 and on the politics between a bishop and a prefect that used her to settle it.
Twenty-two minutes on a December festival for a goddess with her finger to her lips, guarding a secret name of the city.
Twenty-two minutes on deathbed baptism, which made sense in a theology where baptism wiped the slate and an emperor had a great deal to wipe.
Twenty-two minutes on the emperor touring Europe for help and the church union he signed to get it, which his own city rejected.
Twenty-two minutes on 1204, when a crusade aimed at Egypt ran out of money and took the Christian capital instead. The city never recovered, which is why 1453 went the way it did.
Twenty-two minutes on the emperor remembered for one word, Apostate, and on the rest of him: the writing, the reforms, the eighteen months he had.
Twenty-two minutes on the First Crusade told from the Byzantine side, where the armies arriving were a problem as much as an answer.
The omens collected after the fact and the oracle at Carmel, all of it assembled once he had already won. Twenty-one minutes on legitimacy manufactured backwards.
Twenty-one minutes on the coronation ritual and the building it happened in, where the ceremony and the architecture were designed together.
Twenty-one minutes on the speech at Clermont, of which five versions survive and all were written after the crusade succeeded.
Twenty-one minutes on the apologists arguing their case to an empire that thought them atheists.
Twenty-one minutes on the years after Adrianople, when the empire had a religious civil war on top of a military one.
Twenty minutes on Jewish life under the empire, legally tolerated and repeatedly restricted, over a thousand years.
Twenty minutes on what a congregation actually did: meals, letters, and a burial fund.
Twenty minutes on the prison diary of a young woman executed at Carthage, one of the earliest surviving texts by a Christian woman.
Twenty minutes on the children's crusade of 1212, one of the strangest episodes in the whole story and one where the sources are at their least reliable.
The moment the succession plan met a son with an army: Constantine is acclaimed at York and the system starts unwinding. Nineteen minutes on how fast it went.
Nineteen minutes on the mathematician and teacher, before the mob and before every later writer made her a symbol.
Nineteen minutes on the February festival where young men ran the city striking women with goatskin thongs, and where Antony offered Caesar a crown.
Nineteen minutes on the closing of the old temples and the last pagan academies, done by law over decades.
The third part on the mathematician killed by a mob in 415, and on what her death is used to argue about ever since.
Eighteen minutes on a December country festival for Faunus, which is the kind of rural religion the city sources barely bother with.
Eighteen minutes on the same turn from the other side: what changed for the churches once the emperor was paying for basilicas and calling councils.
Part of Voices of the Past
A Roman writing about the new sect and about a man he calls Jesus son of Panthera, read as the source gives it.
Trajan's instruction that Christians should be punished if accused and never hunted, and anonymous denunciations ignored. Seventeen minutes on a policy of deliberate inattention.
Seventeen minutes on the temple treasure carried through Rome in the triumph of 71, still carved on the arch of Titus.
Part of Ancient Rome Live
Four early churches in Rome examined as buildings, which is where the transition from temple to basilica is visible.
Sixteen minutes on the second great epidemic, described by a bishop who used it to argue for his own faith.
The next 18 of 332, longest first
Part of Cost of Glory · Alex Petkas on Plutarch, 45 hours
Part of Lost Roman Heroes · Matteo and Matthew Storm, 101 episodes
With Barry Strauss
Part of The History of Constantinople · The city, from the Greek colony onwards
Part of Rome Retold · T.E. Sarma, narrative history by season
Part of Autocrat: A Roman History Podcast · Vince and Cassie, 137 numbered episodes
Part of Understanding Rome · Agnes Crawford, licensed guide in Rome
