HBO’s Rome: Down with this sort of thing! (Careful now)
January 8, 2007 by Alun
[Cross posted to Revise & Dissent]
Rome returns this week on HBO, so perhaps there’ll be a spring or summer showing in the UK. However, as Adrian Murdoch says, not everybody is happy. Mediawatch-uk has already complained about the programme, though it’s uncertain as to whether any of their members have seen it yet.
I have to admit I haven’t seen the first whole series yet. I only got the DVD at Christmas and I have a couple of episodes to go. However so far I’m enjoying it. I may lose Classics-cred for that, but the scene where Vorenus was offered a dormouse, around a century after they’d ceased being dinner items, didn’t ruin the series for me. There are anachronisms but on the whole I think it’s view of Rome is a compliment to I, Claudius.
What I think Rome does well that I, Claudius didn’t do is that it relates the power struggles in what is effectively an anarchic period to the lives of the ordinary people of Rome. Not everyone in ancient Rome was an emperor - not even in the third century AD. Rome was a place where people could disappear after dark if they walked down the wrong alley. It was a place where people gambled and fought. It was a place where people had cheap sex and afterwards, if the graffitti of Pompeii is anything to go by, scrawled on the walls to tell people what a bargain it was.
The Mediawatch-uk complaint is a concern. John Beyer’s comment, “I assume that the BBC hopes the controversy will bring big audiences, but controversy can’t sustain a programme which has very little else to offer,” seems to be rooted in ignorance, because the first series of Rome was an interesting and intelligent portrayal of the end of the Republic. Certainly the ancient world was a world of nobles vying for power, but it also had a criminal element too. The reason why Classics is an interesting topic today is that there’s a recognition that the two social circles were not mutually exclusive. Beyer’s complaint ignores this. In contrast books like Debra Hamel’s Trying Neaira do a very good job of showing how the two worlds collide.
I think Rome is as true as ancient Rome as any other drama has been. There are anachronisms, but that’s inevitable given it’s for a twenty-first century audience. Also the interests of the ancients are not that far from modern people’s. You can read in Suetonius’s Life of Caesar:
I pass over the speeches of Dolabella, and Curio, the father, in which the former calls him [Caesar] “the queen’s rival, and the inner-side of the royal couch,” and the latter, “the brothel of Nicomedes, and the Bithynian stew.” I would likewise say nothing of the edicts of Bibulus, in which he proclaimed his colleague under the name of “the queen of Bithynia;” adding, that “he had formerly been in love with a king, but now coveted a kingdom.”
and later:
Helvius Cinna, tribune of the people, admitted to several persons the fact, that he had a bill ready drawn, which Caesar had ordered him to get enacted in his absence, allowing him, with the hope of leaving issue, to take any wife he chose, and as many of them as he pleased; and to leave no room for doubt of his infamous character for unnatural lewdness and adultery, Curio, the father, says, in one of his speeches, “He was every woman’s man, and every man’s woman.”
The ancients had an interest in sex and violence. If you bowdlerise the past then you lose something - as Tony Keen demonstrates with his beautiful arse. I think the sex and violence is artistically, dramatically and even educationally justified. Not all education is for kids.
Technorati Tags: rome, ancient rome, HBO, mediawatch, sex, violence and Could I be Caligula if you make a third series please?
If you don’t understand the title, it’s a reference to another campaign for public morality.
We can’t forget that ultimately it’s not meant to be a history lesson, it’s designed as entertainment for the masses.
I’m not the masses, and I like sex and violence. What would be the point of a show about Rome except as an excuse to show sex and violence in a shameless way? Otherwise there are many cultures I’d prefer hearing about rather than Rome on the verge of empire yet again.
Even then they stop far short of portraying everything that happened in the arena. I don’t think I’d watch the worst of that sort of violence. That they don’t go farther with the sex, though, is not about Roman history. It’s about modern desires for one’s work not to be called pornography.
Given the judgments of some about sex, it’s amazing that people managed to have enough sex for there to be 6 billion of us. Apparently many of us were conceived with the lights off, even with everyone’s eyes closed.
Yes I like to watch entertainment for my mind, but that’s such a challenge to do right. Feel free to play with my emotions. Feel free to portray my appetites (I do enjoy some cooking shows, too). Why not? My mind has always been attached to the rest of me.
The second season of Rome premiered this night in the US. It’s my kind of show except for one thing (well two, I haven’t seen the movies where Mel Gibson does this, but I like the idea of doing historical movies in the native language with subtitles). The one thing I really would like would be historical accuracy. I don’t know how well they did the culture, but the events and I would think the personalities portrayed are so far away from reality. I get enough of a sense of the artificial watching it. Then in looking up some things, I see they didn’t even bother to try to be historical in a comprehensive way. Octavian was studying in Illyria when Caesar was killed. He raised an army and fought Antony before the two later ganged up on Senators. In the first season they invented this episode of Octavian in Gaul, when in reality Octavian bonded with Caesar under somewhat different circumstances in Spain.
Then there’s the craziness of everyone’s personality, from the Machiavellian Octavian to all these Senators who seem to have no more knowledge of Roman politics than some poor modern writer just banging out the emotion of the situation. I like this Octavian better than shows that make the future divine Augustus out to be a cowardly geek, but it’s still bizarre.
It reminds me of Braveheart. I was so disappointed to read the real story there and discover the real battles were very different, the real travels of the characters were different, even if the execution of William Wallace was accurate, which is a point I don’t think I got around to confirming.
Old movies are so obviously fake, but I keep expecting modern portrayals to be accurate, because why not? Of course emotions are going to be over the top as they are with doctor shows or lawyer shows, but why make some parts complete fiction? I don’t mean using completely fictional characters to flesh out the story, but having real people say and do things that are not at all what they said and did.
Instead of complaining about that, people complain about sex and violence. Why can’t one have historical accuracy along with the entertainment of sex and violence? More jobs for Ph.D.’s. That’s my complaint. I suppose it’s a minority view.
I am compelled to mention that during my watching the second Rome episode of the second season I remembered reading an article from many years ago that listed the worst movie lines of all time. I only remember one, from the 1954 King Richard and the Crusaders, adapted from Sir Walter Scott’s The Talisman, starring George Sanders as Richard I and Rex Harrison as Saladin. In it Virginia Mayo plays a fictional English lady who utters the remarkable line, “Oh, fight, fight, fight! That’s all you ever think of, Dickie Plantagenet!”
I like the sex and violence of Rome. I like the visuals. But the personalities of the characters are ridiculous, and the historical value of what they say and do is about that of Virginia Mayo’s character.
I just have to hang on to see the bad guys die at Philippi on February 18. Then if they leave me hanging, I’ll just imagine that Vorenus was walking through the street with Mark Antony’s head, all of the evil of this show dying with his ridiculous character. Yes, this is fun for me.
Thanks for the comments. I’m caught up with work for now but I am paying attention. I’ll be interested to see if there’s a backlash from the classicists.
I am always somewhat amused when, it talking of historical accuracy, people worry about getting small details and chronology of events correct. The elephant in the living room here is that so many “accurate” movies amount to little more than costume parties on film. The interesting thing about the ancient world isn’t that they dressed different or had a few interesting events happen to them - it is that they were very different people altogether.
This is something I think the Rome series does beautifully - in fact, it may do it better than I’ve ever seen. It portrays the Romans as they were, and not as we would have them be, and not as sounding boards for our modern moral pontifications. Don’t get me wrong, I am quite a fan of the Judeo-Christian ethic. But I applaud the filmmakers from painstakingly stripping this ethic out of the Rome series - having us enter a world where husbands ruled the home with the power of death, where slavery was the norm, where mercy was not seen as a virtue, where religion had little or nothing to do with morality, where horrific cruelty was the order of the day, where sexual orgies were rampant, where courage and honor were prized among all else, and where men and women, parents and children, friends and brothers were as devoted and loving as ever. It’s one of the best series I have come across.
Yes, yes, it’s fine that everyone in Rome is so free, but why do these characters have to be so stupid? They know next to nothing about Roman politics. These characters aren’t the people of history their names claim to be. It’s bait and switch, some childish dream of the real thing. I’ve been robbed. If it weren’t free for me, I’d ask for my money back. My time I’ll give them. I, Claudius was better, as much as it suffered from some of the same fantasies.
It’s not a matter of small details. I suppose Rome does fine on small details. It’s why people do what they do, for family, for reputation, for principle, and even for raw power, but not just that. It’s how real people have full personalities, not just characatures. The sex has gotten old. The violence is limited - battle scenes are severely truncated, with no sense of how the superior forces were so often beaten in these battles. OK, they don’t have the money for that, fine. I can live without an orgy of gore. I know the smell of blood. I can see the real thing in my mind. I’m still stuck needing to see Philippi Sunday evening. I’ll fill in the real battles in my mind. I just need to see Brutus and Cassius kill themselves, so the misguided killers of the heroic Caesar will once more be confronted with their folly. Killing the strong man doesn’t put down the masses. That requires much more, even letting the masses into the elite’s game. I don’t think the series has abandoned history in that regard. Then if they do have any more episodes, I’ll see what my alternatives are.
Has there been a historically accurate movie of life before the 19th century? I wonder how accurate Shogun was. I don’t know Japanese history that well, but at least they didn’t have Sir Francis Drake sailing into Tokyo Bay. Small details indeed. I wonder what Dickie Plantagenet would say about this.
I still haven’t seen the second series as it’s not out over here yet. Part of the familiarity with politics might come from hindsight, but I’d agree with David that some things are odd. For instance Cicero has to yell at Mark Antony to use his veto as a Tribune in the second episode of the first series. Dramatically this is fine, but Mark Antony would have been aware that the whole point of him becoming a Tribune would have been to have to have this veto. It is drama rather than history. In which case why do the small details matter to the production team? From Jonathan Stamp’s podcasts, they clearly do.
I’ll be interested to see how the comments here compare to comments at the Classics Hell conference.
Whew! They finally got rid of one set of bad guys. So many subplots now. If I had any patience I would have recorded it and watched only the 20 good minutes, but I didn’t. I know I have no patience. Philippi was missing a swamp and the separate commands of the various leaders, among other deviations from reality. Will they ever quit treating the future divine Augustus as a boy? It’s not a small detail. He had finished his term as counsel of Rome at this point. Both Brutus and Cassius died non-historic deaths. They went for irony with Brutus. Artists so love to be artistic.
Darn, it seems they are showing 4 new episodes in March. Maybe I’ll have enough patience now just to record them. Whoever watches this in the UK, one thing you can do in between the interesting parts is decide which subplot you hate the most. There are several choices. I have my 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choices for worst subplot pretty well set at this point. Suddenly I really am looking forward to fast forwarding at least through those.