Rhetoric and persuasion

Part of Life of Caesar

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.

Part of The Partial Historians

Ninety-one minutes on 403 BC, with Rome and Veii sliding toward a war that will last ten years. The senate argument is the episode, and the two doctors read the speeches Livy gives the tribunes as the literature they are.

Part of Life of Caesar

Sixty-nine minutes on Catiline, with Caesar arguing in the senate against executing the conspirators and nearly being lynched for it.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

Mutina, April 43 BC, with Octavian, Antony and Decimus Brutus all fielding armies and Cicero holding only a voice. Steele Brand takes Tristan Hughes through the campaign that gave the Philippics their weight and then cost Cicero his head and his hands.

Beard on Caesar as general, dictator and politician at once, and on how much of the man we have is his own account of himself. Fifty-nine minutes; start here before the assassination episodes anywhere else in the index.

Part of Emperors of Rome

Forty-nine minutes on Gaius, who went further than his brother on grain, courts and citizenship, and died the same way.

Part of Emperors of Rome

Forty-eight minutes on how two consuls were actually chosen each year: the canvassing, the bribery, the centuries voting in an order that made the rich count first. The mechanics explain more about Roman politics than most narratives of it.

Part of Emperors of Rome

With Kathryn Tempest

Forty-two minutes on the fourteen speeches Cicero aimed at Antony while the armies were already marching. He named them after Demosthenes on purpose, and it cost him his head and his hands, nailed to the rostra he had spoken from.

Part of The Ancients

Thirty-nine minutes on how a man from Arpinum with no consular ancestors talked his way to the top of Roman politics. Catherine Steel on why the speeches still work.

Part of The Ancients

Henriette van der Blom on Cicero across the whole career, thirty-six minutes, from the prosecution of Verres to the head and hands nailed up on the rostra.

Part of Emperors of Rome

Thirty-six minutes on the debt crisis underneath the conspiracy, which is the part that made people follow him.

Part of Emperors of Rome

Thirty-six minutes on the price of those five executions: a law aimed at Cicero by name and eighteen months out of Italy.

Part of Emperors of Rome

Thirty-five minutes on the last battle at Pistoria, where Catiline died in the front line with his men.

Part of Emperors of Rome

With Estelle Strazdins

Twenty-seven minutes on the richest private citizen in the empire, who built an odeon in Athens and was prosecuted by his own city.

Part of Emperors of Rome

With Caillan Davenport

Twenty-five minutes on the tutor whose correspondence with Marcus Aurelius survived, showing the emperor as a student who wrote about his cold.

Part of The History of Byzantium

Twenty-one minutes on the speech at Clermont, of which five versions survive and all were written after the crusade succeeded.

Part of The Pax Romana Podcast

Twenty-one minutes on the apologists arguing their case to an empire that thought them atheists.

Part of Emperors of Rome

Twenty minutes on the man whose letters are the reason we know the late Republic day by day, and who died on the proscription list he expected.

Part of The History of Rome

Cicero's consulship, five executions without trial, and a plot whose scale depends entirely on who is describing it. Twenty minutes.

Part of The Pax Romana Podcast

Nineteen minutes on Caesar's funeral, where Antony's speech and the will turned a crowd into an arson mob.

Part of Cost of Glory · Alex Petkas on Plutarch, 45 hours

Part of Cost of Glory · Alex Petkas on Plutarch, 45 hours

Part of Ithaca Bound · Andrew Schiestel on the Mediterranean, 2021 to 2022; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of Ithaca Bound · Andrew Schiestel on the Mediterranean, 2021 to 2022; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps · Peter Adamson on the whole history of philosophy; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps · Peter Adamson on the whole history of philosophy; only the Roman episodes are indexed