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LOST ROMAN HEROES

LOST ROMAN HEROES

By: Matteo & Matthew Storm
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A father and son ancient history podcast that dives deep into the history of Rome, from its founding to its death, uncovering Rome’s greatest heroes along the way. We read the sources, share lost Romans' incredible stories, debate their legacy, and at the end of every episode we score our hero and decide whether they belong in the Hall of Heroes.Copyright 2026 All rights reserved. The Last Roman LLC. World
Episodes
  • Lost Roman Heroes - Episode 108: Heraclius (Part 8 - The Warrior Emperor)

    Lost Roman Heroes - Episode 108: Heraclius (Part 8 - The Warrior Emperor)
    Nov 1 2026
    Saturday, 12 December 627. Mist on the plain of Nineveh, coming up off the Tigris. For six weeks Heraclius has been running, or appearing to run. Baggage train sent to the front, no lines of communication, everything about him saying this man is going home. Behind him, coming on hard, is the last Persian field army still loyal to Khosrow, under Rahzadh, who has orders from the King of Kings to engage whatever the cost and not to wait for the three thousand elite guardsmen marching north to join him. In forty eight hours those orders will not matter, because Rahzadh will have the numbers. Heraclius does not have forty eight hours. He has this morning. And out of that mist, in battle array, come the Romans. This is the episode where twenty six years of war end. An emperor of Rome rides out in front of his own line and fights three men in single combat, on a plain the ancient world called Gaugamela, where Alexander broke a Persian empire nine hundred and fifty seven years before. A turmarch named Georgius marches a thousand men forty eight miles in a single winter night and takes four bridges without letting one messenger through. A Roman army celebrates Christmas nine hundred kilometres inside Persia, on land belonging to Khosrow's murdered Christian treasurer. And then the palace at Dastagird, standing open, with three hundred Roman standards stacked inside it. Every eagle Persia had taken since Julian died in the sand in 363. What follows is stranger than the battle. A king running from a man he once called his vile and insensate slave. A son who was passed over. A vault built to hold treasure, and what it was finally used for. And a letter from Ctesiphon addressed to the emperor of the Romans, and our brother. The war ends where it began, in the birthplace of the emperor whose murder started it. And when Heraclius finally comes home to Constantinople, after seven years away, there is no chariot, no red paint, no captive king or slaves dragged through the streets. What Rome needed was not a triumph. It was a THANKSGIVING.
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    1 hr and 5 mins
  • Lost Roman Heroes - Episode 107: Heraclius (Part 7 - Mission Impossible)

    Lost Roman Heroes - Episode 107: Heraclius (Part 7 - Mission Impossible)
    Oct 18 2026
    Constantinople held. The City had survived the Great Siege. But the war with Persia was far from over. The Persians still had the overwhelming advantage in every way that mattered. Military, political, economic. What Rome had was an emperor, one army, and something it had not had in twenty years: hope. This is the episode where Khosrow starts doing Rome's work for it. A general packed in salt and carried home to be abused in front of the men still holding armies. And a letter. One poisonous letter, written to the wrong man, carried by a courier who rode straight into the hands of the one emperor he should never have underestimated. Then, in September 627, the Turks go home. And Heraclius, alone, two thousand miles from Constantinople, with no reinforcements coming and winter closing in, looks south at the Zagros mountains. Every rule of ancient warfare said stop. Armies had campaigned between spring and autumn for four thousand years, for the simple reason that a man cannot eat scenery. Nobody takes an army into snow choked mountain passes in November. He went anyway. And for six weeks the record goes dark, because the chronicler who had the report cut it out, literally deleting it from history. Heraclius comes out of those mountains in Assyria, in the ruins of an ancient empire that had died over a thousand years before, and camps in its shadows on the plain of Nineveh on the Tigris, in modern Iraq, waiting for the Persian general Rahzadh, and for what he knew would be the last battle of the war. The one that would determine it all.
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    45 mins
  • Lost Roman Heroes - Episode 106: Heraclius (Part 6 - The Great Siege)

    Lost Roman Heroes - Episode 106: Heraclius (Part 6 - The Great Siege)
    Oct 4 2026
    In the summer of 626, two empires agreed to end Rome together. Khosrow sent Shahrbaraz, his finest general, to the Asian shore. The Avar Khagan came down from the Danube with eighty thousand men, Slavs and Bulgars and Gepids among them. Between them they would crush Constantinople, and the list of Rome would finally be extinguished. Inside the walls: twelve thousand soldiers with no emperor to lead them. Heraclius was two thousand miles east and had made a very cold calculation, that the City could stand without him. What it had instead was a man almost nobody has heard of. Bonus appears in the sources like a figure stepping out of fog. No great backstory, no famous victories, just a title that meant substitute for the emperor, and forty days in which to earn it. This is the story of those forty days. A moat, three walls and ninety six towers built by a man who never got the credit. A patriarch carrying an icon around the battlements. Ambassadors in pure silk, and what came back across the water in answer. Slav dugouts in the Golden Horn. A signal fire lit at exactly the wrong hour. And a page missing from the only manuscript in the world that records it, taking four days of the greatest siege in Roman history with it. Constantinople had never been breached. In August of 626 it came closer than it ever had, and the man who saved it, Bonus, did it with genius, cold calculation, nerves of steel and subterfuge worthy of his most ancient, and greatest, Roman ancestors.
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    48 mins
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