Hollywood has gone to elaborate lengths to recreate the violence and mayhem of ancient warfare in movies, but what were ancient battles really like? What weapons, tactics, armor, training, and logistics were used? What were the crucial factors that could turn the tide of battle, giving one side victory and consigning the other to slaughter, capture, or, at best, escape to fight another day? These lectures examine some of the most notable battles...

Macro and Cato return to Rome after a campaign against the Parthians. Landing in Crete after their ship is almost capsized by a tidal wave they discover an earthquake has struck the island. In the aftermath with the slaves revolting, the governor calls on Macro and Cato to quell the rebellion.

Inscribed in Latin, The Prophecy has resided in the hands of a single family for generations, revealing secrets about the world that is to come, and guiding them to wealth and power ... It begins when a Celtic noble betrays his people at the behest of his mother's belief in The Prophecy and sides with the conquering Roman legions. For the next 400 years, Britannia thrives-as does the family that contributed to Rome's reign over the island with the...

"In 63 BC the corrupt aristocrat Lucius Sergius Catilina (Catiline in English) aimed to topple the Roman Republic. Catiline attracted a wide array of supporters: debt-ridden men and women from prominent families, youths looking for adventure, the less well-off tried of a political class that seemed only to look out for its own interests. Frustrated in his efforts to be elected consul, Catiline fled Rome while several of his associates stayed behind...

"From the bestselling author of Gates of Fire comes an historical epic about the early years of the Roman Empire. A Man at Arms is a Western set in Jerusalem and the Sinai desert in the first century AD, a few years after the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. The villains are the Romans. They're in pursuit of a courier bearing an incendiary letter from Paul the Apostle. For agents of Rome, this letter represents an existential threat that will propagate...

From an award-winning historian of ancient Rome, a definitive history of Hadrian's Wall. Stretching eighty miles from coast to coast across northern England, Hadrian's Wall is the largest Roman artifact known today. It is commonly viewed as a defiant barrier, the end of the empire, a place where civilization stopped and barbarism began. In fact, the massive structure remains shrouded in mystery. Was the wall intended to keep out the Picts, who inhabited...

"The award-winning author of Clash of Eagles and Eagle in Exile concludes his masterly alternate-history saga of the Roman invasion of North America in this stunning novel. Roman Praetor Gaius Marcellinus came to North America as a conqueror, but after meeting with defeat at the hands of the city-state of Cahokia, he has had to forge a new destiny in this strange land. In the decade since his arrival, he has managed to broker an unstable peace between...