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 m…
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 hi…
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 pr…
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 …
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…
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 na…
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 s…
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 ga…
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 …
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