Curated playlist
Ancient Roman adoptees
- 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…
- 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…
- Constantius Chlorus"Constantinian propaganda bedevils assessment of Constantius, yet he appears to have been an able general and a generous ruler." That verdict comes from the Oxford Classical Dictionary. It frames the central difficulty with Constantius…
- 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…
- Marcus AureliusMarcus Aurelius was born in Rome on the 26th of April 121, in the grand villa on the Caelian Hill that his mother had inherited along with a fortune that included sprawling brickworks on the city's outskirts. He would go on to rule the…
- NeroNero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus died on the 9th of June AD 68 with a private secretary's hand helping him drive a blade home. His last words, according to Suetonius, were "Too late! This is fidelity!" It was, of all endings, an…
- Marcus Junius BrutusMarcus Junius Brutus died on the 23rd of October 42 BC, on a hillside near Philippi, by falling on his own sword. He had just lost two battles in quick succession to the armies of Octavian and Mark Antony. Four legions remained with him.…
- Lucius VerusLucius Verus became Roman emperor on the 7th of March 161, the day his adoptive father Antoninus Pius died. What makes that moment extraordinary is not just who he was, but what he and his co-emperor Marcus Aurelius represented: for the…
- 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,…
- 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…
- 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…
- TrajanTrajan was born Marcus Ulpius Traianus on the 18th of September in AD 53, in a modest Roman colony called Italica, in what is now the Andalusian province of Seville in southern Spain. At the time of his birth, Italica was a small town…
- Antoninus PiusAntoninus Pius ruled Rome for twenty-three years, and by the account of the historian J. J. Wilkes, he was likely never within five hundred miles of a legion throughout that entire reign. No other emperor of the Principate could make that…
- 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…
- Scipio AemilianusScipio Aemilianus stood weeping over the burning city of Carthage in 146 BC. He had just ordered it evacuated, torched, and razed to the ground. He had even ordered the earth plowed over where it once stood. And yet, as Polybius recorded,…
- SejanusSejanus died on the 18th of October, AD 31, strangled by order of the same emperor he had served for seventeen years. His body was thrown down the Gemonian stairs, a public staircase in Rome reserved for displaying the corpses of condemned…
- Severus AlexanderSeverus Alexander was born on the 1st of October 208 in Arca Caesarea, Phoenicia, and by the age of thirteen he was ruling the Roman Empire alone. His predecessor, the emperor Elagabalus, had been killed by his own guards, and the bodies…