Curated playlist
1st-century BC Romans
- Lucius Varius RufusLucius Varius Rufus stood at the center of Roman literary life during one of history's most celebrated creative moments. Born around 74 BC and dying around 14 BC, he moved in a circle that included Virgil and Horace, two poets whose work…
- Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (son of Pompey)Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus died on the 12th of April 45 BC, cornered and killed by a man named Lucius Caesennius Lento, weeks after watching his army shatter at a battle in southern Spain. He was perhaps thirty years old. His name was…
- TiberiusTiberius Julius Caesar Augustus was born on the 16th of November 42 BC, and by the time he died on the 16th of March AD 37, he had ruled the Roman Empire for more than two decades and left the imperial treasury holding nearly 3 billion…
- HoraceQuintus Horatius Flaccus, the poet the English-speaking world calls Horace, once described himself as a man who fled the Battle of Philippi in 42 BC without his shield. He was no born aristocrat. He was the free-born son of a former slave,…
- VirgilVirgil stood on a pillar of bright tin-plated iron. That is how Geoffrey Chaucer placed him in The House of Fame, written between 1374 and 1385, granting the Roman poet a uniquely prominent position in history. Dante went further. In the…
- CatullusGaius Valerius Catullus wrote two lines that translators have spent two thousand years trying to equal: "I hate and I love. You ask how this is possible. I do not know, but I feel it, and I am in agony." That couplet, poem 85, captures…
- LivyLivy, the Roman historian born in 59 BC in the prosperous northern Italian city of Patavium, devoted the greater part of his adult life to a single staggering project: a complete history of Rome from its earliest legends through the reign…
- Gaius Cassius LonginusGaius Cassius Longinus spent his life fighting against what he saw as tyranny, only to be remembered for the act that made him infamous: driving a blade into Julius Caesar's chest on the 15th of March, 44 BC. He was not the most famous…
- GalbaGalba put on a linen corset on the morning of the 15th of January AD 69, knowing it would offer little protection against so many swords. He had been emperor for just seven months. Within hours, soldiers he had refused to pay would hack…
- Gaius Julius HyginusGaius Julius Hyginus is a name that appears twice in the history of Latin letters: once as a living man who walked the halls of Roman power, and once as a ghost attached to two ancient texts that no one can definitively explain. He lived…
- Dionysius of HalicarnassusDionysius of Halicarnassus arrived in Rome sometime after the civil wars ended, carrying a scholar's ambition and a Greek's outsider eye. He would spend twenty-two years in that city, studying Latin, gathering materials, and teaching…
- GermanicusGermanicus Julius Caesar died on the 10th of October AD 19 in Antioch, at the age of thirty-three. He left behind a Roman world in mourning so genuine that ordinary citizens began the formal mourning rituals before the Senate had even…
- Nero Claudius DrususNero Claudius Drusus stood at the bank of the Elbe in 9 BC, further east than any Roman army had marched before. An apparition appeared before him, the ancient sources report: a Germanic woman warning him to proceed no further and…
- Cato the YoungerCato the Younger stabbed himself in the abdomen in April 46 BC rather than accept a pardon from Julius Caesar. The details of that final night in the city of Utica are vivid and brutal: after his family removed his sword, he tore his own…
- SallustSallust, the Roman historian and politician born around 86 BC, left behind something almost paradoxical: the man who made moral decline the central obsession of his writing was also a man convicted of corruption by his own contemporaries.…
- Quintus Caecilius Metellus NumidicusQuintus Caecilius Metellus Numidicus was born around 155 BC into one of Rome's most powerful families, yet the moment that defines him is not a battlefield victory or a political triumph. It is a quiet act of refusal. Every senator in Rome…
- VitruviusVitruvius, the Roman architect and engineer who lived roughly from around 80-70 BC to sometime after 15 BC, left behind exactly one book. And yet that book became the foundation stone for nearly every architect who came after him. De…
- CatilineCatiline - or Lucius Sergius Catilina, as Rome knew him - died in the winter of 62 BC with his face turned toward the enemy and his body found far in advance of his fallen soldiers. When the battle outside Pistoria was over, the republican…