Bloodlines · Who it happened to: the plotting, the gods, the beds, the graves.
Gladiators, chariots, beast hunts and the crowd that decided.
69 entries · 68 hours · 61 with a written verdict · British 24 · Australian 19 · American 11 · Mixed 4
The Circus Maximus held a quarter of a million people, which no venue on earth has matched since. Gladiators were professionals with contracts, trainers and fans, and most fights ended with both men walking out. Harry Sidebottom and Alexander Mariotti both make the case that the arena tells you more about Roman politics than the senate does.
I feel like…
when it happens
how it is made
who is talking
how much time you have
With a written verdict
Kubrick's, with Kirk Douglas, and the film that broke the Hollywood blacklist by putting Dalton Trumbo's name on the credits. The history is loose and the politics of the making are a story in themselves.
Roland Emmerich doing the chariot-racing and gladiator business under Vespasian. Historically loose and gleefully so; watch it for the machinery of the games, not for the dates.
Part of Roman Empire
Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, and the strongest of the three Netflix seasons because the historians on camera are given real disagreements to have.
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.
Commodus did fight in the arena and everything else is invention. Watch it for what it is, then listen to the Marcus Aurelius episode above and enjoy how little survives contact.
Part of Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium
Eighty-nine minutes on the last Julio-Claudian, scored against his own reputation. The hosts keep asking which of the famous stories has a source close enough to the events to be worth anything.
Eighty-nine minutes on the son, with the arena career and the renamings taken seriously as policy before they are laughed at.
Part of The Partial Historians
With Alexandra Sills
Alexandra Sills on the sequel, with the naval battle in the arena and the sharks. Seventy-nine minutes separating what is exaggerated from what is invented.
With Lindsay Steenberg
Lindsay Steenberg on the same film as a film: the fight choreography, the genre and what an audience is being sold. Seventy-six minutes.
Part of Life of Caesar
Seventy-six minutes on four triumphs in one year, with Vercingetorix strangled at the end of the first and a Ptolemy paraded in the second.
The German and British expeditions, ending with soldiers ordered to gather shells on the beach. An hour and a bit on campaigns that produced a triumph and no conquest.
With Martin M. Winkler
Martin Winkler, who has written books on antiquity in cinema, on where the sequel sits in a century of Roman epics. Sixty-eight minutes.
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 The Ancients
Sixty-two minutes on gladiators as celebrities and property at once: sex symbols who could not marry freely and were buried outside the normal cemeteries.
Shushma Malik on Nero the performer: the lyre, the poetry, the Greek tour he came home from with 1,808 victory crowns. Sixty-one minutes on why an emperor on a stage scandalised Rome more than an emperor in a war.
How the building worked as a machine, which is more interesting than the body count: lifts, trapdoors, an awning worked by sailors.
With Harry Sidebottom
Harry Sidebottom walking through a fighter's day: the barracks, the diet of barley, the doctor, and the fact that most bouts were not meant to end in a death. Fifty- nine minutes.
Part of Tides of History
With Alexander Mariotti
Alexander Mariotti on the economics of the games: who owned fighters, what they cost, and why killing your own investment made no sense. Fifty-eight minutes.
The Fucine Lake drainage, eleven years and thirty thousand men, and the naval battle staged on it before the plug was pulled. Fifty-eight minutes on Rome's largest civil engineering project.
With Alex Imrie
Alex Imrie on Commodus, who came to the throne at eighteen, fought in the arena as Hercules and renamed Rome after himself. Fifty-four minutes on the reign the film borrowed.
Mike Loades on experimental archaeology with real chariots, including whether the scythed blades on the Boudica statue at Westminster could have existed. Fifty-four minutes.
Part of The Rest Is History
Fifty-three minutes on the Flavian amphitheatre: gladiators, mock sea battles, and executions staged as scenes from mythology for an audience of tens of thousands.
Fifty-three minutes on the games under Nero and on an emperor who wanted to compete in them himself.
Part of The Pax Romana Podcast
Fifty-one minutes on the sequel, with the sharks, the naval battle and what the second century actually looked like.
With Colchester Museum Curator Glynn
The Colchester Vase carries names scratched beside its fighters, which turns a decorated pot into a record of a real bout. Forty-seven minutes on gladiators this far north.
Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast
Forty-six minutes on the trailer alone, before anyone had seen the film, working out which bits of it could have happened.
The same panel after actually watching Gladiator II, forty-six minutes. Worth taking with the trailer episode for how far the guesses landed.
Part of The History of Byzantium
Forty-five minutes of listener questions after 1204, which is the point where the series has to explain what an empire in exile even is.
Harry Sidebottom on his own book, forty-four minutes on why a society that valued restraint watched people die for entertainment and saw no contradiction.
With Nathan Elkins
Nathan Elkins on the Flavian amphitheatre: who paid for it, what the spoils of Jerusalem had to do with it, and how a building that size was emptied in minutes. Forty-three minutes.
With Matthew Nicholls
Matthew Nicholls on chariot racing, which drew crowds several times the size of the Colosseum's and ran four factions with supporters who rioted over them. Forty minutes.
Thirty-nine minutes on the gladiator barracks and the graffiti scratched by the men who lived there, which record wins, losses and admirers by name.
Part of HistoryHit
Thirty-seven minutes checking the film against the evidence: how often gladiators actually died, where they came from, and what the thumb meant.
Part of Emperors of Rome
Thirty-five minutes on Ridley Scott's film, in which Commodus is strangled in the arena and the real one was strangled in a bath.
Thirty-four minutes on a Constantinopolitan triumph: the route, the captives, and the ceremony borrowed from Rome eight centuries earlier.
With Caroline Freeman-Cuerdan
Caroline Freeman-Cuerdan on the venatio, the morning event before the gladiators, and on the supply chain that emptied provinces of animals. Thirty-three minutes.
Half an hour on five days of riot, a city on fire, and thirty thousand dead in the hippodrome. Theodora's line about purple making a fine shroud is here.
Part of The Ancient World
Twenty-eight minutes on the early years of Cleopatra Selene, daughter of Cleopatra and Antony, walked through Rome in a triumph as a child.
Part of Being Roman with Mary Beard
Sulpicius Maximus was eleven when he improvised Greek verse in front of Domitian and a crowd of thousands, and his parents put the poem on his tomb. Twenty-eight minutes.
Twenty-seven minutes live on whether Commodus was mad or simply an emperor who did what he liked, which is a harder question than it sounds.
Part of The History of Rome
The assassination by a wrestler in a bath, after poison failed. Twenty-seven minutes on an end that fits the reign.
Galen as team doctor to the gladiators at Pergamon, keeping expensive men alive and learning anatomy from their wounds. Twenty-seven minutes.
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.
Twenty-five minutes on the renamings: the months, the legions, the city itself, all given the emperor's own names.
Twenty-five minutes on the murder by a wrestler after the poison failed, and the senate's vote to drag his body with a hook.
Part of Echoes of Empires
Twenty-five minutes on January 532, when a riot at the hippodrome nearly ended Justinian's reign in its fifth year. Theodora's line about purple making a fine shroud comes from here.
Twenty-four minutes on the man himself, which is mostly a study in how little is known: a Thracian, an auxiliary, possibly a deserter, and after that nothing certain.
With Alisa Vanlint
Alisa Vanlint on the evidence for women fighting in the arena, which comes down to a relief from Halicarnassus, a Senate ban, and a handful of hostile lines. Twenty- three minutes.
The finances: an empire bankrupted by Nero and four civil wars, put back in order by a man who taxed everything. Twenty-three minutes.
Twenty-two minutes on the games for Apollo, voted during the war with Hannibal and kept for six centuries after it.
Twenty minutes on the end of the year of four emperors, with the only one left standing being the one who had stayed furthest away.
Twenty minutes on the emperor who ended the run of adoptive succession simply by being his father's son.
Part of The Fall of Rome Podcast
Nineteen minutes on when the games actually stopped, which is later and vaguer than the standard story allows.
Eighteen minutes on a reign that broke the run of good emperors, and on whether adoption had ever been the reason for it.
Part of Historia Civilis
What a triumph actually involved: the route, the spoils, the prisoners killed at the end. A standalone explainer; it stands outside the narrative run.
Seventeen minutes walking the forum the Dacian gold paid for: a basilica, two libraries and a column, on ground cut out of a hill.
Seventeen minutes on Titus touring the east after Jerusalem, with games in which thousands of prisoners died.
Part of Ancient Rome Live
The amphitheatre riot of AD 59 between Pompeians and Nucerians, which Rome punished with a ten-year ban on games. Seventeen minutes, and there is a fresco of it painted by someone who was in the town.
Four triumphs in one year, staged with captured leaders and paid crowds. Fifteen minutes on what a triumph cost and what it bought.
Nine minutes on why legionary bases built amphitheatres, from Carnuntum on the Danube to newly identified sites at Megiddo. The army trained and watched in the same building.
Part of toldinstone
Eight minutes in the Hippodrome, where the Nika riots of 532 ended with the army penning the crowd in and killing it, and where an obelisk cut for Thutmose III still stands on the base the Byzantines built for it.
Everything else
Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast · The companion to Ancient Warfare magazine, since 2008
Part of Understanding Rome · Agnes Crawford, licensed guide in Rome
Part of The History of Ancient Greece · Greek history in order, from the Stone Age forward; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of Greeced Lightning · Myths and movies with a doctor of classics; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of The Partial Historians · Dr Fiona Radford and Dr Peta Greenfield, the Republic year by year
Part of Ancient History Hound · Ancient Blogger on Greece, Rome and antiquity for every level; only the Roman episodes are indexed
