Bibliography
SOURCES
What the films are built from.
The Principate is not a highlight reel of other people’s documentaries. Scripts are written from the ancient sources and from modern work that has earned a place on the desk. Ancient writers contradict each other. Later moral folklore sticks to famous deaths. Where the evidence is thin, the films say so.
Primary sources
- Cicero — Letters to Atticus, Catilinarians, Philippics, De Officiis, and the speeches of the law courts
- Caesar — Gallic War, Civil War
- Sallust — Catiline, Jugurtha
- Plutarch — Lives of Cicero, Pompey, Crassus, Caesar, Antony, Brutus, Sulla, Marius, Cato Minor
- Appian — Civil Wars; Sallust — Jugurtha
- Cassius Dio — Roman History
- Suetonius — Divine Julius, Divine Augustus, Tiberius
- Tacitus — Annals; Velleius Paterculus; the Res Gestae Divi Augusti
Modern work (selection)
- Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution
- Adrian Goldsworthy — Caesar, Augustus, and the late-Republican military world
- Anthony Everitt; Kathryn Tempest; Elizabeth Rawson — Cicero
- Robin Seager; Pat Southern — Pompey
- Standard campaign treatments of Carrhae, Gaul, and Actium, used as maps of argument rather than last words
Maps
Era maps on this site are schematic, drawn for documentary storytelling in a textbook-atlas style. Coastlines are modern reference shapes; political fills and routes are interpretive. They are teaching pictures, not GIS reconstructions. Where a basemap is used in the films, it is credited in the video description.
Music
Background music is drawn from the YouTube Audio Library, with Kevin MacLeod (CC BY) as backup. Cue sheets live with each production package. Silence is preferred under Latin, assassinations, and points of no return.