Curated playlist
2nd-century Romans
- IrenaeusIrenaeus was a Greek bishop who, around the year 180, sat down to dismantle a rival vision of Christianity that promised secret wisdom to a chosen few. His weapon was a book whose full title runs On the Detection and Overthrow of the…
- TertullianQuintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus, writing from Carthage around the turn of the third century, asked a question that still echoes through the history of Western thought: "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" That single line…
- Cassius DioCassius Dio spent ten years collecting every Roman achievement from the city's founding through the death of Septimius Severus in 211 AD, then spent twelve more years writing it all down. The 80 volumes he produced, composed entirely in…
- JuvenalJuvenal, the Roman poet known for the most caustic verse to survive from antiquity, is almost entirely unknown as a person. His contemporary Martial described him as "a poor dependent cadging from rich men." That description captures the…
- Clement of AlexandriaClement of Alexandria spent years wandering the ancient world before he ever arrived in Alexandria. Born around 150 AD under the full Roman name Titus Flavius Clemens, he had grown up in a pagan household and rejected that faith as a young…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- Gaius (jurist)Gaius was a Roman jurist who flourished between roughly AD 130 and 180, and yet almost nothing is known about who he actually was. His full name remains a mystery. Gaius, or Caius, is merely a praenomen, a personal first name, and no…
- Maximinus ThraxMaximinus Thrax became Roman emperor in 235 without ever having sat in the Senate, without ever having governed a province, and without any of the social credentials Rome's ruling class considered essential. He rose from what ancient…
- 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.…
- LucianLucian of Samosata once described himself sailing past the Pillars of Heracles, only to be swept up by a whirlwind and dropped onto the Moon. There he found two kings at war over the colonization of the Morning Star. He told this story in…
- HerodianHerodian, writing in Greek sometime around the 3rd century, set himself a task that no other historian of his era attempted in quite the same way. He would document, from personal experience, the full sweep of imperial Rome across a period…
- MacrinusMacrinus, born around 165 in Caesarea - the city now called Cherchell in modern Algeria - became Roman emperor in April 217 without ever having set foot in the Senate. He was a Berber from Mauretania Caesariensis, the son of an equestrian…
- PudentianaPudentiana was a Christian virgin and martyr of the second century who refused to worship the Roman emperors Marcus Aurelius and Antoninus Pius as deities. She was sixteen years old when she died. The daughter of a Roman senator, she is…
- ApuleiusApuleius was born around 124 AD in Madauros, a colonia on the North African coast, and he described himself as "half-Numidian half-Gaetulian." He left behind the only ancient Latin novel to survive in its entirety, a courtroom defense that…
- PapinianPapinian died on the orders of an emperor he had served for decades, his body dragged through the streets of Rome after he refused to defend a fratricide. That moment, somewhere around 212 CE, crystallized who Aemilius Papinianus was: a…
- 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…
- Apollodorus of DamascusApollodorus of Damascus built a bridge across the Danube wide enough to carry an army. He raised a column in Rome that had never been attempted before. He engineered a forum so vast it reshaped the very center of the capital. And then, if…