Emperors of Rome

Chart positions today

If you like Emperors of Rome, try…

RI

The Rest Is History

Goalhanger

L

Lore

Aaron Mahnke

TH

The Team House

dee takos

WW

World War II with Tom Hanks

The HISTORY Channel | Back Pocket Studios | Audacy

A

The Ancients

History Hit

YW

You're Wrong About

Sarah Marshall

Ranking history

About the show

Latest episodes

• The War of the Words (Live at the Melbourne Museum)

  September 16, 2026 · 54 min

  In this special live episode recorded at the Melbourne Museum we set aside the military narrative to look at something just as fierce: the propaganda war waged between Octavian and Antony in the years before Actium. The insults traded in…

• The Young Warlord

  August 19, 2026 · 49 min

  The decade after Caesar's murder is make or break for Octavian. He is very young and inexperienced, he is often between Mark Antony and the senate, and he needs to avenge Caesar and become his acknowledged heir. Despite these challenges he…

• The Rise of Octavian

  July 7, 2026 · 33 min

  How did Octavius become Octavian? We trace what we know of Octavius’ early life in Rome during a tumultuous era of violence and civil conflict, through to Julius Caesar's unexpected adoption of a perennially sickly teenager. Come and see…

• Octavian Before Octavian

  June 9, 2026 · 43 min

  Before Augustus reached his great heights as Emperor, before he was even Octavian, he was Giaus Octavius, born to a relatively humble family and giving no indication of the greatness he would achieve. While his father had a reasonably…

• Germania

  May 27, 2026 · 35 min

  Tacitus's Germania is one of the most fascinating, strange, and surprisingly modern texts to survive from the ancient world. Part ethnographic survey, part moral provocation, part geopolitical warning, it describes the tribes living along…

• Augusti Retirement

  April 24, 2026 · 31 min

  In 305 CE, a carefully staged transition took place: the emperors Diocletian and Maximian retired, handing power to a new generation of rulers. Exactly how it happened is still debated, but the act itself was unprecedented in the long…

• The Tetrarchic Persecution of Christians

  March 31, 2026 · 43 min

  In the early fourth century the emperors of the Tetrarchy initiated what later Christians would call the “Great Persecution.” Under Diocletian and his colleagues, churches were demolished, sacred texts seized, and believers forced to…

• How the Tetrarchy Won the East

  March 21, 2026 · 35 min

  With the tetrarch system still taking shape, Diocletian and his Caesar Galerius come under growing pressure in the East, facing rebellion from Egypt and invasion from the Persian King Naresh. A series of hard campaigns, careful political…