No civilisation has been more relentlessly re-examined than Rome. Its scale alone demands it – at its height, the empire stretched from Scotland to Mesopotamia, governing perhaps a third of humanity. Yet it is the collapse that haunts us, and the myths that have accumulated ever since. Was Caesar truly betrayed by friends? Was Nero really a monster? Was Pompeii simply frozen in time?
New archaeology and a generation of revisionist scholarship keep returning different answers, dismantling the Rome we think we know and replacing it with something stranger and more compelling. This October, Ancient Rome Season on Viasat History gathers six documentaries that approach the ancient world from archaeology, political history, and the intimate corners of imperial life.
Buried Evidence: What Pompeii Keeps Revealing
The two Pompeii documentaries anchor the season in the ground itself, but they pull in different directions. Ancient Pompeii: The Secrets of Villa Oplontis focuses on a luxury villa on the Bay of Naples linked to Poppaea Sabina, Nero’s second wife – a building of extraordinary opulence whose new excavations expose something less comfortable alongside the frescoes and marble: slave quarters, tools, and forensic evidence of the rigid hierarchy that underpinned Roman wealth. The villa does not let you admire the grandeur without confronting who maintained it.
Pompeii: The New Dig works on a larger canvas. The biggest excavation of the site in a generation, it follows archaeologists uncovering a bakery, a wealthy townhouse connected to the politician Aulus Rustius, and a fresco whose ingredients bear an unexpected resemblance to a flatbread topped with fruit and spices – immediately dubbed a proto-pizza by a delighted press. More seriously, a forensic strand traces which residents actually survived the eruption of 79 AD and follows their descendants to the present day, turning archaeology into something close to a detective story.
Power Won, Held and Lost: Emperors and Dynasties
Three documentaries in the season concern themselves with how Rome was ruled – and how that rule so often destroyed its rulers. Constantine The Great follows Constantine’s rise from the provincial city of Naissus through a genuinely brutal power struggle to his eventual founding of Constantinople, a new Rome built to his own design. Emperor: The Rise and Fall of a Dynasty takes the longer view, tracing the Julio-Claudian line through Livia Drusilla – the calculating matriarch who manoeuvred her son Tiberius onto the throne – before watching the dynasty unravel through Caligula’s excesses, Claudius’s poisoning by his own wife Agrippina, and Nero’s catastrophic end. The Roman Empire: Beyond the Myths opens the frame still further, reconstructing four centuries of history through four ordinary lives: a merchant, a senator, a gladiator, and a Praetorian guard, with Cleopatra, Boudicca, and the Baths of Caracalla woven through.
Why Watch Ancient Rome Season on Viasat History?
The season’s achievement is breadth without superficiality. Mary Beard’s Secret Lives of the Roman Emperors closes it out by going behind palace walls to ask what the emperors’ daily existence actually looked like, away from the Senate and the battlefield – a reminder that even the most powerful figures in history were also just people, navigating boredom, paranoia, and the ordinary texture of a day. Taken together, these six films show Rome from every angle: its buried streets and excavated kitchens, its dynastic bloodletting, and the scholarship still rearranging our understanding two thousand years on.
Where to Watch
Ancient Rome Season airs on Viasat History throughout October 2026.
- Watch on:
- Monday to Friday
- 5 October 2026 to 30 October 2026
- 22:10 CET
- See the full TV schedule