The Borrowed Head

P.B. Mills
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  • History
  • Series

The making of Augustus: The Lost Commentaries of Julia Agrippina — daughter of Germanicus, sister of Caligula, wife of Claudius, mother of Nero — which Tacitus read, cited once, and which vanished for nineteen centuries. Discover more at pbmills.com.

Episodes

  1. Episode 1

    I. Book Four, Chapter Fifty-Three

    There is a sentence in Tacitus that nobody reads, because of the scene that comes before it. Mills starts there, and ends in a museum in Rome in front of a statue whose head was borrowed. A work of fiction. The manuscript and the people who found it are invented.

  2. Episode 2

    II. Nihil Correxi

    The method episode. What one scribe's colophon — "I corrected nothing" — entitles anyone to claim, what it does not, and why a forger would write exactly that. Then the first document in the roll: a birth on the Rhine, and two accounts of the moon. A work of fiction. The manuscript and the people who found it are invented.

  3. Episode 3

    III. What the Fair Copy Said

    The manuscript is the working roll, not the fair copy. So when she does the source criticism properly, in public, against her own interest, and then edits anyway — both facts survive. The hinge of the series, about twenty-six minutes in. A work of fiction. The manuscript and the people who found it are invented.

  4. Episode 4

    IV. Nine Weeks

    The charge the whole family is built on. A draft and a fair copy of one letter, a generation earlier, with the true thing in the draft and the sendable thing in the post. Mills declines to reach a conclusion on purpose. A work of fiction. The manuscript and the people who found it are invented.

  5. Episode 5

    V. Not One Document

    Nobody dies in this one. What a Roman woman legally is (nothing), the machine she built instead, the channel underneath it, and a man standing up in public to be praised for her work while she has no form of words in which to object. A work of fiction. The manuscript and the people who found it are invented.

  6. Episode 6

    VI. Both Versions

    The thesis episode. Four pairs of documents that contradict each other, kept on facing leaves for forty-four years by a woman who would not destroy either — and, after her death, by somebody else who worked out why. A work of fiction. The manuscript and the people who found it are invented.

  7. Episode 7

    VII. The Cup Is the Remedy

    The one the last three have been pointing at. Discovery, denial, collapse, and then a turn that is not about her father at all: three documents in one volume that no source, ancient or modern, has ever had together. A work of fiction. The manuscript and the people who found it are invented.

  • 7 Episodes

About

The making of Augustus: The Lost Commentaries of Julia Agrippina — daughter of Germanicus, sister of Caligula, wife of Claudius, mother of Nero — which Tacitus read, cited once, and which vanished for nineteen centuries. Discover more at pbmills.com.

Information

  • Creator
    P.B. Mills
  • Episodes
    7
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 P.B. Mills
  • Show Website
    The Borrowed Head