Life Of The Caesars

We're at Masada. Silva has his 10th Legion, a 91-metre siege mound, an iron-plated tower, and a battering ram the size of a small building. The 960 Sicarii inside have a second wall made of logs and dirt that just gets stronger the harder you hit it.... until Silva works out that wood burns. Meanwhile Josephus, the Jewish general who surrendered to Vespasian and spent the rest of his life on the R...

This episode we're deep into Josephus on the Sicarii, the original cloak-and-dagger assassination squad - literally, they hid curved daggers under their cloaks - who spent the Jewish-Roman War killing other Jews for not being Jewish enough.... according to Josephus, who is of course completely unbiased. We also end up somewhere unexpected: how Jewish civil war, Jew-on-Jew violence, and the trauma...

Paetus is back. You remember Paetus - the general who declared "mission accomplished" against the Parthians and then immediately had to beg Corbulo to come rescue him. Now, ten years on, he's got a new emperor and a second chance at glory, and he's found himself a suitably soft target: Antiochus IV of Commagene, a loyal Roman client king of nearly forty years who, as far as anyone can tell, hasn't...

Bassus is mopping up the last Jewish holdouts in Judaea, and things go about as well as you'd expect for everyone who isn't a Roman. The defenders of Machaerus negotiate a deal to walk free.... turns out the Gentiles living below the fortress weren't included in that deal. Then Vespasian, ever the pragmatist, declares all of Judaea his personal property and slaps a permanent tax on Jews everywhere...

This episode we go deep on the hilltop fortresses still holding out in Judaea after the fall of Jerusalem, which turns into a very long detour through Pliny the Elder's chapter on menstrual blood.... which is, it turns out, absolutely packed with practical tips you can use at home. Don't let your pregnant horses anywhere near a menstruating virgin, obviously. We also get to Machaerus, the fortress...

We're covering the triumph of Vespasian and Titus, and our eyewitness is Josephus.... a Jewish priest who watched Rome parade the looted contents of his own temple down the street and somehow managed to keep it together enough to write one of the most vivid accounts of a Roman triumph we have. The menorah, the multi-storey floats, rivers of gold and ivory, Jewish prisoners dressed in finery to hid...

This episode we're deep in the Temple of Isis - which turns out to be exactly where Vespasian and Titus had to spend the night before their joint triumph, for reasons both boring and genuinely weird. We also cover Decius Mundus, a man so obsessed with a married woman that he bribed priests to let him dress up as Anubis and have sex with her.... which Josephus drops right after his suspiciously glo...

Titus wraps up the Jewish War with a five-month tour of the region, dropping in on city after city with two legions at his back and thousands of Jewish captives in tow.... who he then has killed, in as many creative ways as possible, as entertainment. Meanwhile he's sleeping with Berenice, Jewish princess and co-ruler of the very territory he just levelled, which is complicated. And somewhere in S...

Vespasian is finally making his way back to Rome and apparently every city he passes through absolutely loses its goddamn mind.... according to Josephus who is, of course, completely unbiased. Meanwhile Domitian is talking a big game about personally crushing the Batavian revolt until Mucianus very firmly tells him to go back to his room. The post The Last Man Standing – Vespasian #21 appeared fir...

On this episode, the siege of Jerusalem is over and Titus is handing out medals, melting down temple gold to crown his best soldiers, and carving up his legions for their next postings around the empire. We dig into what happened to the early Christian community in Jerusalem — spoiler: nobody really knows, and that's the fascinating part. Then Cam and Ray pause to take in the sheer scale of what j...

On this episode, Cameron and Ray wrap up the fall of Jerusalem in September 70 CE — Titus strolls into the ruins, declares Yahweh helped him destroy Yahweh's own temple, and the boys go deep on the genuinely wild linguistic coincidence that the Roman sky-god Jove and the Hebrew God share the same name. Then it's grim accounting time: survivors get sorted into gladiators, mine slaves, and beast-fod...

This week we finally reach the end of the Siege of Jerusalem — and it's brutal. Titus storms the upper city, the rebels' back is broken, Simon and John have vanished into the tunnels, and by September 25th, 70 CE, the city is rubble and the Temple is gone forever. We also dive into the fate of the sacred Menorah — where it went, what it meant, and why nobody knows where it is today. The post UNLEA...

It's August 70 CE, and the siege of Jerusalem is entering its apocalyptic final act. In this episode, Cameron and Ray pick up where the last one left off — starving rebels launching desperate sorties against exhausted Roman legionaries, Titus ordering his men to burn down the silver-coated temple gates to finally crack open the last Jewish stronghold, and the mounting pressure on one of the ancien...

It's 70 CE, the walls of Jerusalem are crumbling, and the city is eating itself alive — literally. In this episode of Life of Caesar, Cameron and Ray wade deep into Josephus's harrowing account of the final, grinding assault on the Antonia Fortress and the Temple Mount, where the siege of Jerusalem has reached a level of horror almost beyond comprehension. Titus is still trying to take the city in...

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