LOST ROMAN HEROES

Join LRH as we interview historian and podcaster Emma Southon, author of the recently published "Not Built in a Day: How Slavery Made the Roman Empire." For 98 episodes we've covered Roman heroes. But we've never told the story of the millions of enslaved people who built everything our favorite heroes stood on. It always appeared as backdrop. As color. As afterthought. Roman slavery started in ea...

Today we collaborate with the awesome father-daughter team of Roly and Maddie from the History in Zoomer Podcast for a very special Father's Day Episode. Together we explore candidates for the very best, and worst fathers in the history of Rome and choose a winner for 'best' and 'worst' Roman dad that are bound to surprise you. Happy Father's Day everyone!

Rome is an island in a Lombard sea. The emperor is in Constantinople, offering criticism instead of troops. The plague is killing people in the streets. And Gregory, the man who tried to flee his own election hidden in a wine cask, is the only one left to save it. In Part 2, we watch a reluctant monk become the de facto ruler of Italy, negotiate face-to-face with a Lombard king, and send a nervous...

In 540 AD, Rome had thirty thousand people struggling to survive, living inside walls built for a million. Sheep grazed in the forums of Augustus and Trajan. Into this world was born one of the last great Roman aristocrats, a man who would give away his fortune, flee to a monastery, get sent to Constantinople, and spend six years politely chastising Emperor Mauricius, would would not listen, or di...

This week we're doing something a little different. We've joined forces with the wonderful Ladies of Lore, a podcast dedicated to the fierce, forgotten and fascinating women of history, mythology and folklore, to bring you three exceptional women who helped keep Rome alive when the men around them were dropping the ball. Galla Placidia, who survived sack, exile and captivity to rule the Western Em...

In Part 2 of Mauricius' tale, the empire that he spent twenty years building begins to crack from within. We meet the generals he trusted, the ones he sidelined, and the ones he should never have appointed (like brother Petrus). We follow the Avars and the Slavs as they push the Balkans to the breaking point. And we watch as one man's iron discipline, the very quality that made him great , becomes...

The young man from Arabissus catches the eye of Tiberius, rises through the Excubitors, and is sent to command the Roman eastern legions in the middle of a major Roman-Persian war with no experience under his belt! And what does the paper pusher do? He wins! And wins again, pushing Roman arms deeper into Persian territory than they have been for many decades. When Emperor Tiberius dies, the rising...

Gallo-Roman aristocrat, Bishop and Saint, Gregory kept a small flame alive in what had been Roman Gaul as the darkness fell in the 6th century with the arrival of Clovis and the Merovingian dynasty that would give birth to France. If it were not for Gregory's histories, this period after the Western Empire had collapsed would be lost to time. But Gregory preserves a remarkable age for us, and pain...

Tiberius was a handsome young man, born into a humble Thracian family in post-plague Rome. He enters the civil service as a notarius, and quickly rises to the very top of the Roman world, from Count of the Excubitors, to Magister Militum Praesentalis, to Caesar, and finally to Emperor where he takes over from crazed Justin II. In his reign he reminds Rome that there is hope, distributing imperial...

Belisarius. Who was the man behind the myth? Are we right to feel uncharitably towards Antonina and Narses? Why did Justinian treat his best general and friend so poorly? And why exactly did Procopius place Belisarius on a richly deserved pedestal in the "Wars" and then tear him down in the "Secret History"? Join us with professor and historian Dr. David Parnell, author of "Belisarius and Antonina...

Procopius was raised in Caesarea, the capital of Rome's Palaestina province, and was likely educated in Gaza and Beirut. A lawyer by training, he was plucked from obscurity by Justinian, and assigned to the staff of the brilliant young general Belisarius. Procopius would accompany Belisarius across land and sea to every major military command that Belisarius would hold, sharing his privations, org...

The year is 542AD and Rome has just gone through its Thanos-moment - one out of every two Romans disappeared over the course of one fateful summer, and Justinian was almost one of them! Having personally survived the plague, he must now chart a course for a Roman empire that has half the soldiers, half the tax payers, half the farmers and fisherman with the same landmass to administer and defend,...

We leave behind Belisarius, Justinian's avenging angel, and return to the Emperor's story. The year is 532AD and Constantinople still smolders in the wake of the Nika Riots. Having narrowly survived a coup thanks to Theodora's spine and Belisarius' steel, Justinian sets about remaking the Roman world. No more tentative rule, no more deference to the Senate or ancient mores, he sets about to show t...

Recalled to Constantinople to lead Rome's response to Persian aggression, Belisarius arrives just in time for Mother Nature to unleash the most vicious one-two punch in the history of humankind, ICE AGE + PLAGUE! Belisarius can navigate these twin disasters, but alas, the politics would prove to be his undoing. Join the last chapter in Belisarius' life, where we work through our complicated emotio...

The day is March 12th of 538AD, and General Belisarius has just accomplished the impossible. Not only did he survive a year long siege behind Rome’s Aurelian Walls, hopelessly outnumbered 20-1 by a Goth horde, but he sent that Goth horde scurrying north, shamed and afraid. Now Belisarius runs the table, sweep north with his small, elite cavalry, reestablishing Roman control of Italy, landing at th...

Rome is under siege! With a force of some five thousand Roman soldiers, Belisarius is put under siege by a >100k man Goth force under King Vitiges. But despite overwhelming odds, Belisarius finds opportunities to keep his enemy uncomfortable. And as the winter sets in, with the audacious sallies from the Aurelian Walls that he leads in person, Belisarius begins to turn the tide.

Belisarius has accomplished the heretofore impossible, with a small force of his handpicked and trained elite troops he has defeated the Vandals and returned Africa to the Romans after a hundred years. After receiving the greatest honor in the ancient Roman world, a proper triumph, the first in five hundred years, the Emperor Justinian sends his favorite general back to the West with the most auda...

Belisarius. Just one name required, in the realm of other one-named immortals, like 'Jordan', 'Ali', 'Caesar', and so on. But this guy is a one-named mystery, worshipped in the ancient world, forgotten today. When we meet him in this episode, he is not let legend, simply a Thracian boy that makes his way to Constantinople, enters Justinian's bodyguard and in a heartbeat is a 28 year old Magister M...

The Emperor Justinian had the grandest of grand dreams, but he could not achieve them alone. The resurrection of the Western Empire was such an exceptionally ambitious objective, it would not just take a great emperor, it would take the most extraordinary team that Rome had ever assembled to pull it off. It just so happens that Justinian had built such a team, filled with some of Rome's all time g...

A fresh faced boy from war torn Tauresium finds himself in Constantinople, the capital of the Roman Empire, adopted son of a swineherd, making his way in the world, powered by what might just be the most audacious of all dreams. RESTORATION!

How can you begin to describe one of the most remarkable women in history, let alone one of the most remarkable Roman women? Raised by two empresses, mom and grandma, descended from multiple emperors, last in line of one of republican Rome's greatest families, you could take away all of these things and still Juliana would have been a force of nature worthy of remembrance, a woman who stood toe to...

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius was a polymath philosopher and scion of one of Rome's most ancient families. Along with his father in law Symmachus, he was one of the Senate's last lions, and one of the last keepers of the flame that was Rome in the West! Seeking higher purpose, he served in Theodoric's court, and would finish his life a prisoner in a lonely tower, in which he wrote a gift to t...

A Goth prince raised in the Imperial Palace in Constantinople, Theodoric the Amal consolidated control of the Ostrogoths, and then journeyed west at the behest of the Emperor Zeno to punish Odoacer, and to rule Italy in the Emperor's name. Ruling from the palace in Ravenna, he would rule well, and audaciously, attempting to resurrect the Empire of the West.

A LOST ROMAN CITIES special episode on Roman Thessalonica. Founded by Cassander, named after the younger sister of Alexander the Great, this city would go on to become the second city of the Roman Empire, and just perhaps, after the city of Rome herself, the longest held of Rome's possessions. What we can say for certain, is that without Roman Thessalonica (Greek Thessaloniki), Rome's history woul...

Anastasius Dicorus - a finance dude - saw a wildly complex world very clearly through one blue eye and one black, steering the empire through perilous years after the Fall of the West. When the finance dude died an ancient man he had earned Rome's thanks, leaving behind a stable government and full coffers.