Curated playlist
Julio-Claudian dynasty
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- Rise of AugustusOctavian, later known to history as Augustus, marched eight legions into Rome on the 19th of August 43 BC. He was nineteen years old and held no official standing. He became Rome's youngest consul that day, his soldiers stationed on the…
- AeneidThe Aeneid opens with four Latin words: "Arma virumque cano" -- "Of arms and the man I sing." Virgil wrote those words between 29 and 19 BC, composing a poem that would run to 9,896 lines and reshape how the Romans understood their own…
- Julio-Claudian dynastyThe Julio-Claudian dynasty supplied the first five emperors of Rome, and not one of them was the blood son of the man he replaced. Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero ruled in turn, yet the line moved sideways and backward…
- CaligulaCaligula, the third Roman emperor, came to power in AD 37 at age 24, welcomed by a city delirious with relief. Tiberius, his grim predecessor, had spent his final years in paranoid seclusion on the island of Capri, presiding over a reign…
- Reign of AugustusIn 31 BC, the naval forces of Mark Antony and Cleopatra met their end at the Battle of Actium off the northwestern coast of Roman Greece. Octavian's general Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa commanded the victorious fleet that destroyed the enemy…
- 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…
- Nero Claudius DrususNero Claudius Drusus stood at the bank of the Elbe in 9 BC, further east than any Roman army had marched before. An apparition appeared before him, the ancient sources report: a Germanic woman warning him to proceed no further and…
- Lusus TroiaeLusus Troiae, the Troy Game, was a spectacle of horsemanship performed by the sons of Rome's nobility. Picture three troops of twelve riders each, weaving their horses through patterns so intricate that Vergil, in the Aeneid, compared them…
- Marcus Vipsanius AgrippaMarcus Vipsanius Agrippa was born around 63 BC into a plebeian family of no great distinction in Roman public life, and yet he would become the man without whom, in the words of historian Glen Bowersock, Octavian might never have become…