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The Roman World · 26 episoder
Ancient Rome and its culture still exerts an enormous influence on modern culture, particularly in the west. Through media such as film, literature, a...
Buried under the ash from the cataclysmic eruption of the volcano Vesuvius in AD 79, Pompeii and other sites around the Bay of Naples provide extraord...
Amphitheatres are notorious as the places where the Romans held their more gruesome forms of "entertainment", including gladiatorial fights, execution...
After Nero's suicide in 68 CE Rome was plunged into civil war again, as successive military commanders were declared emperor. The victor was Flavius V...
Nero’s subversive courtier, Petronius, is almost certainly the Petronius Arbiter who wrote the satirical work Satyricon, one of the most interesting a...
Work is represented as something dirty and sordid by the Roman elite, particularly Cicero, while freedmen always retained some of the stigma associate...
Work is represented as something dirty and sordid by the Roman elite, particularly Cicero, while freedmen always retained some of the stigma associate...
Nero seems to have encouraged innovative art and architecture (including his own extravagant houses), and to have fostered literary achievement. But h...
Claudius is famous as the survivor of the Julio-Claudian family – an unlikely emperor according to both ancient historians and Robert Graves alike. Hi...
When Augustus died in 14 CE, he had successfully established a dynastic form of monarchy which was confirmed by the continuation of the principate. Th...
Augustus continued the late Republican trend of utilising public building as a propagandist tool, to promote himself and his regime. However, Augustan...
Love poetry during the Augustan period is notable for the elegiac genre, a short-lived but significant body of poetry which represents the poet as ens...
War is the central theme of Aeneid 7-12, as Aeneas faces opposition to his settlement in Italy, primarily from the Rutulian prince, Turnus. This lectu...
Although the Aeneid is set in the remote, mythical past, it deals with Vergil's present, most prominently in books 6 and 8. In book 6, Aeneasvisits th...
The doomed love affair of Aeneas and Dido is, on the face of it, an unusual tale for ancient epic. This lecture shows how Vergil's account of Dido's p...
The fall of Troy might be the most famous myth from Classical antiquity. In the second book of the Aeneid, Aeneas himself tells the story of Troy's de...
Vergil's Aeneid is one of the highlights of Roman literature, and its influence over all later Roman writing, as well as post antique European literat...
The rise of Augustus is often represented as a political and cultural revolution at Rome. Julius Caesar's heir claimed to be restoring the Republic af...
The city of Rome was a space for individual competition during the Republic. Triumphant generals dedicated public buildings such as temples or basilic...
Cicero was the most prominent orator of his day and a significant political figure in the late Republic. However his success was anything but expected...
The last hundred years of the Republic saw tensions between competing military and political leaders at Rome, out of which grew urban violence, polit...
Comic plays are the earliest complete literary texts we have from Rome, and the comedies of the mid-Republican poet Plautus have been enormously influ...
Rome's growing power in the Mediterranean during the mid-Republic (4th to 2nd centuries BCE) gave it wealth, luxury goods and access to new cultures. ...
This lecture looks at Roman slavery and power structures during the Roman Republic. Although the foundation of the Republic was represented by the Rom...
This lecture will explore the stories which Romans believed formed their earliest history, including the myth of Romulus and Remus, the arrival of Aen...
The disposal and commemoration of the dead gives us significant insight into a society. This is particularly true of the Romans, who venerated their a...
