Vespasian

Part of Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium

Eighty-two minutes on the man who watched three emperors destroy each other in one year and then took the throne with the eastern legions behind him. The show scores him on what he stabilised, which is the fairest measure for a reign that inherited a ruin.

Part of Life of Caesar

Seventy-eight minutes with Marc Hyden, who wrote the biography of Titus. Vespasian's reign makes more sense through the son he was grooming, and Hyden argues the succession was planned from the start.

Part of The Ancients

Four men claimed the purple in AD 69 and one was alive at the end of it. Fifty-one minutes on how a general from the Jewish war took Rome from the eastern legions.

Part of Life of Caesar

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.

Part of Life of Caesar

Titus and Berenice, a Jewish queen in Rome that public opinion refused to accept. Thirty-four minutes on a marriage that could not happen.

Part of Life of Caesar

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.

Part of Life of Caesar

Thirty-one minutes inside the siege of Jerusalem, when the city was starving and its factions were still fighting each other. The hosts stay with the eyewitness Josephus, who was standing outside the walls working for the Romans.

Part of Life of Caesar

The Judaean command and the war he inherited, which his son finished. Half an hour on the campaign that funded the Colosseum.

Part of Life of Caesar

Half an hour on the administrative grind of the reign: the census, the new taxes and the senate restocked with provincials.

Part of Emperors of Rome

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.

Part of Life of Caesar

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 The History of Rome

The last two of the four emperors, and the Flavian armies marching on Rome while the Capitoline burned. Twenty-five minutes on the end of the year of chaos.

Part of Life of Caesar

The finances: an empire bankrupted by Nero and four civil wars, put back in order by a man who taxed everything. Twenty-three minutes.

Part of Emperors of Rome

Twenty-two minutes on the mule-dealer's son who commanded in Britain, fell asleep during Nero's singing, and was sent to Judaea because he was too undistinguished to be a threat.

Part of Life of Caesar

Twenty-two minutes opening the series: where the family came from, and why a new dynasty had to work harder at looking old.

Part of Emperors of Rome

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.

Part of Life of Caesar

Twenty-one minutes on Roman writing about Judaea, where the geography is accurate and the ethnography is hostile.

Part of Life of Caesar

Twenty-one minutes on where Vespasian's power actually came from: the eastern legions and the grain of Egypt, declared before he moved.

Part of Life of Caesar

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.

Part of Life of Caesar

Twenty minutes on the Flavian succession being arranged in public, which after 69 was the point.

Part of Life of Caesar

Seventeen minutes on Titus touring the east after Jerusalem, with games in which thousands of prisoners died.

Part of Life of Caesar

Seventeen minutes on the temple treasure carried through Rome in the triumph of 71, still carved on the arch of Titus.

Part of Life of Caesar

Sixteen minutes on Egyptian gods in Roman religion, and on an emperor who spent months in Alexandria being credited with miracles.

Part of Life of Caesar · Cameron Reilly and Ray Harris, 170 hours

Part of Life of Caesar

Fourteen minutes on Judaea as imperial property after the revolt, with the land confiscated and rented back.

Part of Life of Caesar

Thirteen minutes on a passage in the Natural History that shows what a Roman encyclopaedia counted as established fact.

Part of Life of Caesar · Cameron Reilly and Ray Harris, 170 hours