Persia Reborn: Rise of the Sasanians

Why did Emperor Constantine abandon Rome to build a spectacular new capital from scratch? In the year 312 a bloody civil war and a miraculous heavenly vision changed the Roman world forever.Tristan Hughes and Professor Judith Herrin uncover the epic origins of Constantinople. Dis ...  Show more

It's one of history’s most compelling cold cases. What happened to the Ninth Legion, a crack unit of 5,000 Roman soldiers who vanished from the historical record without a trace?Tristan Hughes is joined by Roman historian Dr Simon Elliott to investigate the fate of the legion tha ...  Show more

Persia was the first great superpower. The empire built by Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes and the rest of the Achaemenids stretched from India in the east to the Mediterranean in the west, from Russia in the north to the Gulf of Oman in the south. It laid the foundation for empires of the ...  Show more

In the highlands of the Iranian Plateau, a collection of enormous pillars reach up to the sky...In this episode, we tell the story of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Find out how this remarkable ancient power sprung up from the rubble of a ruined world to become the most powerful ...  Show more

In the latest in our series tackling the big questions on major historical topics, Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, an expert in ancient history, responds to listener questions and popular internet search queries on the Persian empire. Once the largest empire the world had ever s ...  Show more

The Roman empire was used to getting its own way – but there was one power it was never able to overcome. Despite frequent bouts of warfare, the Parthian and later Persian empire managed to hold its own against Rome for more than six centuries, until a new force emerged that woul ...  Show more