Curated playlist
Aurelii
- Augustine of HippoAugustine of Hippo was born on the 13th of November 354 in Thagaste, a small town in Roman North Africa that today is Souk Ahras, Algeria. He died on the 28th of August 430 as the Vandals were laying siege to his city. In the seventy-five…
- 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…
- PrudentiusPrudentius drew Luxuria as a warrior entering combat: "Flowershod and swaying from the wine cup, every step a fragrance." Those lines appear in a poem he composed after leaving behind a long public career. He was born in 348 in the…
- Claudius GothicusMarcus Aurelius Claudius, remembered today as Claudius Gothicus, once knocked out a horse's teeth with a single punch, or so an ancient legend claims. That brute strength carried him from the ranks of the Roman army to the imperial throne…
- DiocletianDiocletian retired from the most powerful office in the world and went home to grow cabbages. When rivals begged him to return to the throne in 308, he wrote back: "If you could see the cabbages I have planted here with my own hands, you…
- MaximianMaximian died by hanging in July 310, on the orders of his own son-in-law, the emperor Constantine. Within seven years, that same man had declared him a god. Born around 250 near Sirmium, in what is now Serbia, Maximian grew up in a family…
- CommodusCommodus was born on the 31st of August 161 into perhaps the most gilded circumstance a Roman child could occupy: his father was the reigning emperor Marcus Aurelius, and the empire at that moment was still basking in what later…
- ElagabalusElagabalus became Roman emperor at fourteen years old, declared so by a single legion at sunrise on the 16th of May 218. He would be dead before he turned nineteen. In the four years between, this Syrian teenager managed to install a…
- MaxentiusRome itself recognized Maxentius as emperor. Every other emperor in the empire refused to. He ruled from 306 to 312, holding the ancient capital while the rest of the empire called him a usurper. The man who finally defeated him spent…
- 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…