Curated playlist
1st-century Romans
- Tiberius GemellusTiberius Gemellus was born on the 10th of October AD 19, the same day his uncle Germanicus died far away in Syria. He was a grandson of the emperor Tiberius and a first cousin of Caligula, the man who would one day rule Rome. By the year…
- 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…
- JuvenalThe name Decimus Junius Juvenalis appears in a single inscription found at Aquinum, yet the life of this Roman poet remains shrouded in speculation. Traditional accounts claim he was born around 55 CE and died sometime after 138 CE, but…
- AugustusOn the 8th of May 44 BC, a teenager named Gaius Octavius accepted a dead man's will and, with it, the most dangerous inheritance in the Roman world. Julius Caesar, his great-uncle and Rome's dictator in perpetuity, had been stabbed to…
- JosephusFlavius Josephus surrendered to the Roman army in AD 67, then told his captor a prophecy that would save his life. Trapped in a cave with forty companions after the six-week siege of Yodfat, he proposed that the group kill one another by…
- Pliny the ElderPliny the Elder died on the 25th of August, AD 79, on a beach near Stabiae, surrounded by the ash and toxic gases of Mount Vesuvius, having gone there not to flee the disaster but to sail toward it. He was a corpulent man with a chronic…
- PtolemyPtolemy lived sometime around 100 to 170 AD, and in that span he wrote about a dozen scientific treatises that would shape how people understood the heavens, the earth, and the stars for over a thousand years. His full name was Claudius…
- PetroniusGaius Petronius Arbiter spent his days in sleep, his nights in official duties or amusement. That was not a criticism. It was his reputation, and he wore it as a badge of distinction. In the court of the emperor Nero, this man became so…
- MartialMartial, the Roman poet born in Bilbilis in Hispania, left behind 1,561 epigrams that read less like literature and more like dispatches from the crowded, stinking, brilliant heart of imperial Rome. He wrote about landlords who committed…
- Seneca the YoungerSeneca the Younger spent his final hours in a warm bath, dictating last words to a scribe while friends gathered around him in his home. He had already tried to bleed to death by severing veins, and taken poison that failed to kill him. In…
- PersiusPersius, born Aulus Persius Flaccus on the 4th of December 34 AD, packed the full force of Roman Stoic philosophy into a single slim book of fewer than seven hundred lines. He died on the 24th of November 62 AD, at just twenty-seven years…
- HadrianHadrian was born Publius Aelius Hadrianus on the 24th of January 76, in the town of Italica in southern Spain, far from the city he would one day rule. He governed Rome from 117 to 138, yet he spent more than half that time outside Italy,…
- SuetoniusSuetonius, the Roman historian born around AD 69, spent his career collecting the secrets of emperors. He recorded the earliest known accounts of Julius Caesar's epileptic seizures. He catalogued omens, physical descriptions, and private…
- QuintilianMarcus Fabius Quintilianus arrived in the world around 35 AD within the town of Calagurris, now known as Calahorra in La Rioja. His father was a well-educated man who sent him to Rome early during Nero's reign. The young student sought out…
- 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…
- Pliny the YoungerPliny the Younger watched a cloud rise from a mountain across the Bay of Naples and described it as resembling a pine tree, its trunk shooting upward before spreading out into branches of ash and smoke. That observation, written roughly 25…
- PlutarchPlutarch, the Greek philosopher and biographer born in the small town of Chaeronea in the region of Boeotia, left behind a body of work that shaped how Shakespeare wrote his plays and how the American founders understood republican virtue.…
- BritannicusTiberius Claudius Caesar Britannicus arrived in Rome on the 12th of February AD 41. His father, Emperor Claudius, had been reigning for less than a month when this son was born. The emperor issued special coins called sestertii to mark the…
- LucanLucan was born on the 3rd of November in AD 39, in the Roman colony of Corduba, in the province of Hispania Baetica, now Córdoba, Spain. His full name was Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, though English speakers know him simply as Lucan. Ancient…
- Vibia SabinaVibia Sabina was a Roman empress whose face appeared on more official coinage than any imperial woman before her. She lived from 83 to 136 or 137 AD, wife and second cousin once removed to Emperor Hadrian. Her family tree ran straight…
- FrontinusFrontinus received the surrender of 70,000 Lingones in AD 70. That single figure, recorded in his own hand, captures something essential about Sextus Julius Frontinus: a man who lived at the center of Roman military and administrative…
- Naevius Sutorius MacroQuintus Naevius Cordus Sutorius Macro was born in 21 BC in a hilltop town at the foot of Monte Velino and died in AD 38 having helped place a new emperor on the throne, only to be arrested at the port of Ostia and left with no choice but…