Ancient Rome Documentaries, Series and Films

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Roman politics and battles as animated coloured blocks. It should not work and it is the clearest explanation of the constitution and of tactical manoeuvre that exists in any medium.

Part of Historia Civilis

Actium in animated blocks, which sounds absurd and is the clearest explanation of the battle anywhere. Historia Civilis makes fleet movements legible in a way no documentary manages.

Primary sources read aloud, unabridged, with the images that go with them. No presenter between you and the text. Hearing a Roman letter home in full does something no summary manages.

Garrett Ryan has a doctorate in ancient history and makes short, precise videos answering the questions people actually have: what it smelled like, what it cost, what happened if you got ill.

Part of SandRhomanHistory

Ninety-six minutes touring what was standing in 476 across the former western provinces, kingdom by kingdom. Animated throughout, and the map does the arguing.

Part of Voices of the Past

Five eyewitness accounts of war read straight from the sources, opening in Rome.

Part of Voices of the Past

Five eyewitness accounts of military disasters, read from the sources themselves. That is what this channel does: the text, with no narrator summarising it for you.

Part of toldinstone

Five minutes at the Tower of Hercules above A Coruna, built under Trajan and the only Roman lighthouse anywhere still in service.

Part of SandRhomanHistory

What happened in Britain after 410, following the archaeology where the written sources stop.

Part of Ancient Rome Live

Ravenna, Milan, Trier and Constantinople as the cities that took over when Rome stopped being the capital.

Darius Arya filming on the sites themselves, usually with the excavation still open behind him. Less polished than the animated channels and considerably closer to the dirt.

Part of Ancient Rome Live

A walk through the Roman collection at the Metropolitan Museum with someone explaining what each piece is for.

Part of Historia Civilis

Thirty minutes of rectangles on Antony's Parthian campaign, the one that lost him the reputation Actium then finished off.

Part of toldinstone

Fourteen minutes at Arykanda, stacked up a Lycian mountainside in terraces so that the theatre looks out over the valley from halfway up.

Part of toldinstone

The monument Augustus built where his camp stood before Actium, decorated with the rams of the ships he captured.

Part of Ancient Rome Live

How the baths were built, how they were heated, and what stood in the niches. The engineering and the decoration in one film.

Part of SandRhomanHistory

The argument that the fall took a thousand years and that 476 is an arbitrary line in it.

Part of HistoryMarche

The battle fought at the walls of Rome itself, which settled Sulla's war and began the proscriptions.

Part of Historia Civilis

The years of manoeuvring before the crossing, drawn as diagrams the way this channel does everything. You see the legal trap close around Caesar before he reaches the river.

Part of Historia Civilis

What happened after the Rubicon, with the senate leaving the city and Caesar walking into an empty capital. The animation makes the speed of it legible.

Part of Historia Civilis

The question mark in the title is the episode: whether Caesar was reaching for a crown, and what the evidence for that really is.

Part of HistoryMarche

Vercellae in 101 BC and the reforms that made it winnable. Marius as the model Caesar inherited.

Part of HistoryHit

The two British expeditions that achieved almost nothing militarily and everything politically, which is why Caesar wrote them up at length.

Part of Historia Civilis

Antony's speech and the riot it started, which decided more than the murder did.

Part of Ancient Rome Live

The edict of 212 that made almost every free inhabitant a citizen, and the argument about whether it was principle or tax revenue.

Part of Historia Civilis

Cicero in his sixties taking on Antony with words alone, and losing his head for it. The Philippics as a political campaign.

Part of toldinstone

Corinth after Rome destroyed it and rebuilt it as a colony, which is two cities on one site.

Part of HistoryMarche

Part one of the animated Sulla series, on the first Roman army to march on its own city.

Part of toldinstone

A Roman city in Algeria preserved well enough to walk through, filmed on the ground.

Part of Ancient Rome Live

Eight minutes on the temple of Serapis that Caracalla put on the Quirinal, one of the largest in the city and now known mostly from two enormous fragments.

Part of toldinstone

A Byzantine fortress walked through on camera, the kind of site that never makes a narrative history.

Part of toldinstone

The Roman capital of Crete, filmed on site, with the law code carved in stone that is still standing there.

Part of Ancient Rome Live

The largest surviving water tanks in the empire, filmed inside them. The Piscina Mirabilis at Misenum held twelve thousand cubic metres for the fleet.

Part of HistoryMarche

Twenty-two minutes on the first fight at Capua in 212 BC, animated, part two of the sequence. Hannibal takes the field and the siege lines close behind him anyway.

Part of Ancient Rome Live

Eight minutes on Roman bathing taken as medicine: mineral springs, prescribed cures, and resorts built on water that was thought to work on particular complaints.

Part of HistoryHit

Seventy-five minutes running from Caesar's two landings in 55 and 54 BC to Agricola in the north, in one sitting. A single historian to camera, which suits a story usually told in fragments.

Part of HistoryHit

What happened in Britain once Rome left: rival kingdoms fighting over what remained. The episode gives the century after 410 its own hour.

Part of HistoryHit

With Peter Heather

Fifty-eight minutes taking the whole collapse in one run, to camera. Useful as the frame to hang the detailed episodes on, because it moves fast enough to keep the fourth and fifth centuries as one story.

Long-form narrative documentaries, often two hours, in the register of a good radio feature. For the ancient world it comes nearer to a book than anything else on YouTube.

Battle animations with the terrain drawn properly, which turns out to be the whole difference. The Punic Wars series is the clearest visual account of Hannibal's campaigns anywhere.

Part of Ancient Rome Live

Fifteen minutes on August 410, when a Gothic army that had served Rome for years opened the Salarian Gate. The city had not fallen to an enemy in eight hundred years.

Part of Voices of the Past

Two hours and seven minutes on the founding, which is longer than most books give it. The length is the point: the traditions contradict each other and here the contradictions get room.

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.

How the Roman army was organised, paid, fed and moved, at the level of grain rations and marching order. Logistics, on the argument that an empire lives in its supply lines.

Part of toldinstone

Nine minutes at Italica near Seville, founded in 206 BC for wounded veterans of the Spanish campaigns and later the birthplace of two emperors.

Part of Ancient Rome Live

Eight minutes on the Samnites, the mountain confederation that sent a Roman army under the yoke at the Caudine Forks in 321 BC and took three wars to subdue.

Part of HistoryMarche

Narses in Italy, the eunuch general who finished what Belisarius started. He was past seventy when he took the command and he won every battle he fought.

Part of Kings and Generals

Animated campaign maps with arrows that actually move the way the armies did. Best used the moment a podcast loses you geographically, which with Roman campaigns is roughly every twenty minutes.

Part of toldinstone

Seven minutes at the cenotaph raised in Lycia for Gaius Caesar, the grandson Augustus meant to succeed him, who died there in AD 4 at twenty-three. The tomb is empty; the succession went to Tiberius.

Part of HistoryHit

Sixty-one minutes with Mary Beard on the daily business of being emperor: the petitions, the letters, the dinners, and how much of the job was answering post.

Part of toldinstone

Ten minutes in Emerita Augusta, founded in 25 BC for discharged legionaries and still standing well enough that the theatre holds a festival every summer.

Arms, armour and Latin pronunciation, from someone who handles the reproductions and reads the sources in the original. Opinionated and occasionally combative; strongest when he is holding a gladius and explaining why the grip is that shape.

Part of toldinstone

The Byzantine city in the Peloponnese that outlasted Constantinople by seven years, filmed among the ruins.

Part of toldinstone

Eleven minutes at Patara, capital of the Lycian League and later the province, where the council chamber has been rebuilt and the lighthouse still stands in pieces.

Part of toldinstone

Fourteen minutes at Pinara, a Lycian city under a cliff face honeycombed with rock- cut tombs, empty since the Byzantine centuries.

Part of HistoryMarche

Faventia in 82 BC, where the animation shows morale deciding a battle that numbers said should go the other way.

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.

Part of Voices of the Past

Twenty-three minutes of Pliny the Elder's Natural History read aloud, which is where antiquity filed its strangest reported facts, collected by a man who later died sailing towards Vesuvius.

Part of HistoryMarche

Aquae Sextiae in 102 BC, the first of the two battles that stopped the migration.

Part of toldinstone

Eight minutes on the Romanesque churches of northern Spain, put up five centuries after the empire and still using its arch, its vault and its basilica plan.

Part of HistoryMarche

All parts of the Cimbrian war in one sitting, on the invasion that nearly ended Rome before Marius rebuilt the army.

Part of Ancient Rome Live

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.

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.

Part of Ancient Rome Live

Eight minutes on the Meta Sudans, the conical fountain that stood beside the Colosseum from Domitian's reign until Mussolini had the stump cleared in 1936 to widen a road for parades.

Part of HistoryMarche

Volturnus in 554, the last battle a Roman army won in Italy. A quiet end to the animation series.

Part of Historia Civilis

What Caesar actually built once he had won, which is the part the story usually skips on its way to the Ides.

Part of HistoryMarche

Part twenty-three of an animated march through the Second Punic War, on the year Hannibal broke camp at Capua and rode for Rome to pull the siege off his allies. Twenty-four minutes, and the maps carry it: two consular armies splitting and closing again is movement that defeats prose.

Part of Historia Civilis

Thirty-eight minutes on Pompey's surviving son, who held Sicily with a fleet and starved Italy of grain until Agrippa built a navy that could beat him.

Part of HistoryMarche

The dictatorship as a template, and the argument that Caesar copied a working model. Sulla laid down the office voluntarily, which is the part Caesar left out.

Part of Ancient Rome Live

Fifty-six minutes on the constitutional sleight of hand: a man who invented no new office ended up holding everything, and the Senate voted him each piece of it.

Part of toldinstone

Five minutes at Segovia, where roughly 25,000 granite blocks stand in two tiers with no mortar holding any of them together.

Part of Historia Civilis

The Ides drawn minute by minute, with who stood where in the theatre of Pompey. Sixty conspirators is a logistical problem and this shows it as one.

Part of Historia Civilis

Twenty-two minutes of moving rectangles on Philippi in 42 BC, two battles three weeks apart in which both sides lost a commander to suicide on bad information.

Part of toldinstone

Five minutes at Lugo in Galicia, ringed by a third-century wall that still runs its entire circuit. No other Roman city in Europe can say that.

Part of toldinstone

What survives of Roman Alexandria, which is less than you would expect and stranger.

Part of Historia Civilis

Twenty-six minutes of coloured rectangles on the last year of both of them, Actium to the asp. Historia Civilis is strongest on sequence, and 30 BC is almost entirely sequence.

Part of SandRhomanHistory

Four and a half centuries of Roman Britain in one documentary, from Caesar's landing to the withdrawal.

Part of Historia Civilis

Pharsalus and the flight to Egypt, ending with a murder on a beach. The diagrams show where each legion stood, which a narration cannot.

Part of SandRhomanHistory

A documentary on how post-Roman Britain turns into medieval England, following the archaeology where the written sources stop.

Part of SandRhomanHistory

The Jewish revolt and the siege that ended it, with the ramp the Romans built still standing.

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.

Single-subject deep dives of an hour or more, delivered flat and sourced carefully. The kind of channel that assumes you already know the outline and wants to argue about the detail.

Part of Ancient Rome Live

The first dynasty told as the family it was, which explains more of the murders than the politics does.

Part of toldinstone

Nine minutes at Xanthos in Lycia, where the dead were put in pillar tombs raised above the living. The reliefs from the Harpy Tomb are in London; the pillars are still standing.

Part of HistoryHit

With Simon Elliott

Forty-one minutes taking the whole rise in one run, to camera, which makes it a frame to hang the detailed episodes on.

Part of Ancient Rome Live

A street into the forum reopened after centuries, filmed as the excavation finished.

Part of Historia Civilis

The sacred boundary of the city, why a general lost his command by crossing it, and how that one line shaped Roman politics for five centuries.

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.

Part of Ancient Rome Live

The trophy as a monument type, from a pile of captured armour to the marble versions on Trajan's column.

Part of toldinstone

Eight minutes at Oenoanda, where a citizen named Diogenes had an entire Epicurean philosophy carved along a public portico for passers-by to read.

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.

Part of Ancient Rome Live

The river followed from its source to the sea, and what it meant for a city built on it.

Part of toldinstone

Seven minutes at Sidyma in the Lycian hills, where the tombs outlasted the town and a village was later built in among them.

Part of HistoryMarche

Nisibis in 217, three days against Parthia that ended with Rome paying two hundred million sesterces to go home.

Part of Invicta

Thirteen minutes on a Total War patch, which is here because the family-tree system is a decent model of how Roman political dynasties actually worked.

Part of Historia Civilis

Twenty-six minutes on the years when the triumvirate stopped pretending, told through the propaganda each side published about the other.

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 Ancient Rome Live

Four early churches in Rome examined as buildings, which is where the transition from temple to basilica is visible.

Part of Ancient Rome Live

The children Antony had with Cleopatra and with Octavia, and what Augustus did with them. Most of them lived.

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.

Part of Ancient Rome Live

The floods that repeatedly put the forum under water, and what Rome did about them.

Part of Ancient Rome Live

Where executions actually happened: the Carcer, the Tarpeian Rock, and what the locations meant to the crowd.

Part of Ancient Rome Live

Marcellus, Gaius, Lucius and Agrippa Postumus, the four who were supposed to succeed and did not. Tiberius was the last option, not the first.

Part of Ancient Rome Live

Nine minutes on the last great bath complex built in Rome, raised on the Quirinal around AD 315 and pulled down in 1605 to clear ground for a cardinal's palace. The drawings made before it went are most of what survives.

Part of Ancient Rome Live

Eight minutes on the Septizodium, the three-storey show front Septimius Severus put at the foot of the Palatine in AD 203 so that travellers from Africa met it first. Sixtus V quarried it away in 1588.

Part of Ancient Rome Live

Nine minutes on the Temple of Minerva in Domitian's Forum Transitorium, which stood nearly intact for a thousand years, spent the Middle Ages as a grain store, and came down in 1606 when Paul V wanted the marble for something else.