Drama · Documentary · Docudrama · Film

Ancient Rome Documentaries, Series and Films

What is actually worth watching about ancient Rome, from the drama that gets it right to the documentary that gets it wrong beautifully.

151 films, series and documentaries, grouped by form

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Cogitare, how it was thought and ordered

FeelingAny

Sentire, what was lived and endured

DoingAny

Facere, what hands made and did

PeriodAny

when it happens

FormAny

how it is made

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who is talking

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Three different evenings, all of them Rome.

Drama · 20 hours
Rome
Twenty hours across two seasons, following two soldiers through Caesar's rise and Octavian's, with the politics of the street built as carefully as the politics of the senate.
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Documentary · 180 min
Meet the Romans with Mary Beard
Three hours in which Mary Beard goes after the ordinary people through their tombstones, and changes who you picture when you picture Rome.
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Documentary · 180 min
Pompeii: The New Dig
Filmed inside the largest excavation at Pompeii in a generation, with the archaeologists still working while the camera runs.
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Screen Rome divides cleanly into three. There is drama, which is fiction and should be judged as fiction. There is documentary, which is argument with pictures. And there is docudrama, the reenactment-plus-talking-head format that has taken over streaming, where the quality depends entirely on which historians agreed to appear.

The short version: Rome (HBO, 2005) is still the best screen Rome ever made and it is not close. It was cancelled after two seasons because the sets cost more than the network could carry, and its real achievement is texture: a city that is loud, painted, religious and filthy.

For documentary, Mary Beard's films for the BBC are the ones that treat the audience as adults. For the ash-and-bodies subject that television cannot leave alone, the Pompeii films are strong because the evidence under them is. And for the recent streaming docudramas, the entries below say plainly which historians turned up and where the script overruled them.

Drama

Fiction, and to be judged as fiction.

10h 50mI, Claudius EssentialDrama

The 1976 BBC serial, thirteen episodes, made on a budget that shows and with a cast that does not care. Derek Jacobi's Claudius is the performance every later screen Roman is measured against. The history is Robert Graves', which is to say Tacitus at his most gossipy, but nothing has bettered it as drama.

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20h 10mRome EssentialDrama

Two seasons, cancelled far too early, and still the only screen Rome that feels lived in. It follows two soldiers through Caesar's rise and Octavian's, and the politics of the street is as carefully built as the politics of the Senate.

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35hSpartacus EssentialDrama

Wildly stylised, gleefully bloody, and much smarter about slavery, patronage and Roman social climbing than its reputation suggests. Push through the first few episodes; the show finds itself and then does not let go.

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7h 20mDomina Drama

Livia's story as drama, and much better than its lack of an audience suggests. Takes the standard hostile sources and asks what she would have said.

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8h 20mThose About to Die Drama

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.

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Docudrama

Reenactment cut with historians talking to camera.

6hAncient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire Ancient RomeDocudrama

The BBC's six-part dramatisation from 2006, each episode a single turning point carried by actors. Dated in places, and still the clearest television account of how the whole arc fits together.

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6hBarbarians Rising Docudrama

The History Channel's four parts told from the other side, from Hannibal to Alaric. Uneven, and the only mainstream television that treats the barbarians as people with aims.

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1hColosseum: Rome's Arena of Death Docudrama

How the building worked as a machine, which is more interesting than the body count: lifts, trapdoors, an awning worked by sailors.

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1hPompeii: The Last Day Docudrama

One hour, real people reconstructed from the bodies in the ash, and a volcanic timeline you can set your watch by. The scene everyone remembers is the pyroclastic surge, and it earns it.

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3h 45mRoman Empire: Master of Rome Roman EmpireDocudrama

Part of Roman Empire

The Caesar season, and the strongest of the three: reenactment cut with historians who are given room to disagree with the script. Season three is the weak one.

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4h 30mRoman Empire: Reign of Blood Roman EmpireDocudrama

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.

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3hRoman Empire: The Mad Emperor Roman EmpireDocudrama

Part of Roman Empire

Caligula, tyranny and paranoia. The weakest season for accuracy and the one the historians on screen most visibly strain against, which is its own kind of interesting.

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Documentary

Argument with pictures.

1h 30mRome's Invisible City EssentialDocumentary

Mary Beard and Michael Scott underground, into the sewers, aqueducts and catacombs, with laser scanning. Ninety minutes on the plumbing, the water supply and the burial system that kept a million people alive.

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51mAncient Engineering: Rome Ancient EngineeringDocumentary

Roads, bridges, aqueducts and the Colosseum taken as engineering problems, with the solution drawn out each time. Fifty-one minutes, and the one to send someone who wants to know how the empire was physically held together.

CuriosityStream (subscription)

1hCaligula with Mary Beard Documentary

Beard takes the maddest emperor and asks the awkward question: how much of this is Suetonius settling scores a century later? A masterclass in reading a hostile source.

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20mHerculaneum Scrolls: Unraveling History Herculaneum ScrollsDocumentary

Twenty minutes on the carbonised library at Herculaneum and the imaging that reads a scroll without opening it. Short enough to watch before the Pompeii films, and it explains why the town that gets less attention is the one holding the books.

CuriosityStream (subscription)

49mI, Caesar: The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire I, CaesarDocumentary

Six rulers from Julius Caesar to Hadrian, taken one at a time, public life beside private life. Forty-nine minutes an episode, and the shape of the whole empire read off the men who held it.

MagellanTV (subscription)

59mJulius Caesar with Mary Beard Documentary

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.

MagellanTV (subscription)

39mLearning From the Roman Empire: Are We Repeating their Rise and Decline Learning From the Roman EmpireDocumentary

Caroline Winterer of Stanford on the decline analogy: who reaches for it, and what it has to assume about Rome before it works. A talk, filmed as a talk, and thirty-nine minutes of argument.

CuriosityStream (subscription)

52mLeptis Magna: Rome in Africa Leptis MagnaDocumentary

Septimius Severus was born in Leptis Magna and rebuilt it as a showpiece of the empire he came to rule. Fifty-two minutes on what that says about Roman citizenship: the provinces produced emperors, and the emperors paid the provinces back in marble.

MagellanTV (subscription)

50mLost City of Gaul: Unearthing Bibracte Lost City of GaulDocumentary

Bibracte is where the Gauls made Vercingetorix their commander and where Caesar wrote up his own campaign. Fifty minutes in Burgundy on the town that was a capital before Rome arrived and empty within a generation after.

MagellanTV (subscription)

3hMeet the Romans with Mary Beard Meet the RomansDocumentary

Beard's three parts on ordinary Romans, read off their tombstones. The corrective to every documentary that is only about emperors.

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46mNero's Golden House Documentary

Forty-six minutes inside the Domus Aurea, the palace Nero drove through a burnt quarter of Rome and, by the film's reckoning, the largest building standing anywhere at the time. The scale is the argument: it explains why the dynasty that followed drained his lake and put a public amphitheatre on it.

MagellanTV (subscription)

52mPompeii: Buried Secrets of the Villa Giuliana Documentary

Italian archaeologists opening a Pompeian street, roadside food counter and all. Fifty-two minutes on how the town ate and moved, which is the half the death casts crowd out.

CuriosityStream (subscription)

1h 37mPompeii: Disaster Street Documentary

Ninety-seven minutes inside the first new dig at Pompeii in seventy years, filmed with the archaeologists while the finds come out of the ash. The DNA work on the victims is what lifts it past a tour of the ruins.

CuriosityStream (subscription)

1hPompeii: New Secrets Revealed with Mary Beard Documentary

Beard on the excavation as it happens, with the bodies treated as people. The section on what the casts can and cannot tell us is the honest counterweight to every dramatised eruption.

Wikipedia

3hPompeii: The New Dig Documentary

The BBC's three parts on the Regio IX excavation, filmed as it happened, so you watch rooms come out of the ash. The best Pompeii documentary made this century.

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52mReal Life of a Roman Soldier Documentary

Decades of excavation set against the legionary of the films: what he carried, what he was paid, where he slept and how long he lasted. Fifty-two minutes, and the clichés come off one by one.

MagellanTV (subscription)

43mThe Emperor's Lost Harbour Documentary

The harbour of Theodosius, found under a modern city while they were digging a railway. Forty-three minutes on the port that fed the capital of the last emperor to rule both halves of the empire.

MagellanTV (subscription)

52mThe Etruscans: Rise and Fall of a Mysterious Civilization The EtruscansDocumentary

The people Rome learned its gods, its letters and its drainage from, followed through a 2019 burial ground dug up in Aleria on Corsica. Fifty-two minutes on the civilisation that was there first and left the writing nobody can fully read.

MagellanTV (subscription)

50mThe Hidden History of Rome Documentary

Terry Jones on the Romans who never ruled anything: what they ate, how they washed, what they found funny. Fifty minutes, and the Python eye for the ridiculous detail turns out to be a good instrument for social history.

MagellanTV (subscription)

4hThe Roman Empire in the First Century Documentary

The PBS series from 2001, four hours, and still the most sober television treatment of the period. No reenactment, no hyperbole.

Website

3hTreasures of Ancient Rome Documentary

Alastair Sooke setting out to demolish the idea that Roman art was second-hand Greek work with the originality taken out. Three parts, and the section on late imperial portraiture changes how you look at every bust in every museum.

Wikipedia

4hUltimate Rome: Empire Without Limit Ultimate RomeDocumentary

Beard on what held the empire together across four hours, which is a better question than how it fell and gets asked far less often.

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47mVesuvius and the First Pompeii Documentary

The eruption of 79 is the famous one; this is about the one eighteen centuries before it, which buried a Bronze Age settlement on the same mountain. Forty-seven minutes, and it turns Vesuvius from a single catastrophe into a habit.

MagellanTV (subscription)

53mWhat Killed the Roman Empire? Documentary

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.

MagellanTV (subscription)

Film

Feature films, from the great to the gloriously wrong.

3h 17mSpartacus EssentialFilm

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.

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2h 07mAgora Film

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.

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3h 32mBen-Hur Film

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.

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1h 37mCenturion Film

The Ninth Legion vanishing into Caledonia, filmed as a survival chase. Nonsense as history, and the only film that makes the northern frontier feel as cold and hostile as the tombstones suggest.

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2h 35mGladiator Film

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.

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1h 34mMonty Python's Life of Brian Film

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.

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2h 51mQuo Vadis Film

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.

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3h 08mThe Fall of the Roman Empire Film

Anthony Mann's, and the film Gladiator quietly borrowed its plot from. It flopped so badly it ended the Hollywood epic for a generation, and it is better than that history suggests.

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YouTube

Channels running on a documentary budget, or on one person and a map.

ongoingEpic History TV EssentialYouTube

Animated history at the production level of a broadcast documentary, with maps that move the way campaigns actually moved. The Roman episodes are a fraction of the channel and the fraction to start with.