Lives Before Ours makes long, quiet documentaries about how people actually lived — one city, in one era, walked all the way through. Every film is read from what survives: parish registers and coroners’ rolls, ration lists, building accounts, excavation reports. Where the record runs out, we say so.
Newest film·1 September 2026
Rome·AD 120·3 hr 10 min
Most Romans slept four or five floors above the street, in a room with no kitchen, no chimney and no water. The building might burn down. It might simply fall down.
This is a slow, sourced walk through the largest city the ancient world ever built — Rome in the year 120, at the height of the empire under Hadrian. The apartment blocks and the street counters, the baths and the brothels, the law and the games and the gods, the children, the countryside, the night. Everything in it comes from the record: Juvenal and Martial, Seneca’s letters, a water commissioner’s report on how much of the supply was being stolen, a physician’s instructions to midwives, a burial club’s rulebook cut into marble. Where the evidence runs out, we say so.
Ordinary people were written down when they were taxed, baptised, buried, sued or caught — which leaves a great deal of silence in between, and a surprising amount of detail where the paperwork survives.
A film begins with that paperwork: an attendance register kept in two colours of ink outside Thebes, the marble building accounts of the Athenian acropolis, a churchwarden’s plague ledger from Westminster, a parliamentary inquiry in which a nine-year-old collier speaks for forty-three words and is then lost. Numbers and named people are checked across at least two independent sources before they are spoken. Claims that are everywhere in popular history but cannot be traced are either counter-narrated or left out.
Each film carries its own bibliography, and all of them are collected in one place. A few of them, taken from across the shelf:
