Curated playlist
Ancient Romans in Britain
- 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…
- Theodosius ITheodosius I was born in Hispania on the 11th of January, probably in the year 347, and by the time he died in Mediolanum on the 17th of January 395, he had done something no Roman emperor would ever do again: ruled the entire empire, from…
- Constantine the GreatConstantine the Great was born on the 27th of February 272 in Naissus, a provincial city in what is now Serbia, to a Roman army officer and a Greek woman of low birth. He died on the 22nd of May 337 as the sole ruler of the Roman Empire,…
- CaracallaCaracalla was born Lucius Septimius Bassianus on the 4th of April 188 in Lugdunum, Gaul, the city now called Lyon, France. He would die on the 8th of April 217, stabbed by a soldier while stopping to urinate on a road in the eastern…
- VespasianVespasian was born on the 17th of November, 9 AD, in a village called Falacrinae, northeast of Rome, to a moneylender and debt collector. His family had no political pedigree worth mentioning. His mother's family had inched a little…
- Septimius SeverusSeptimius Severus died on the 4th of February 211, in a garrison city at the far edge of the known world, far from the sun-baked coast of Libya where he was born. He had climbed from an obscure provincial family to become the sole ruler of…
- 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…
- ClaudiusClaudius was born on the 1st of August 10 BC in Lugdunum, modern Lyon, making him the first Roman emperor born outside Italy. He came into the world with a limp, a stammer, and a tremor, physical signs that his own mother Antonia Minor…
- TitusTitus Flavius Vespasianus was born on the 30th of December 39 AD, in the same world that would later watch him tear down one of its most sacred buildings. He ruled Rome for just over two years. In that time, a volcano buried two cities, 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…