Rome Recommended
As a preliminary matter, we should note that Prof. Elaine Fantham, who has forgotten more about Rome than we will ever learn, very much liked the first several episodes of HBO's mini-series, Rome, which she reviewed for NPR. We ourselves were intrigued enough by the buzz to order HBO from our cable company. It turns out that to get HBO, you have to get digital. This led to dvr nightmares yet to be fully resolved and the discovery that one simply, cannot, as yet, get the Comedy Channel in our corner of Central Maine. Said fact leads us to curse the darkness on a regular basis, but we digress.
Having upgraded, and prepared the pop corn we settled down Sunday evening to watch Rome. First impression - lots of sex and violence. Generally speaking, we think that Rome was a sexy, violent place, so we're not complaining on historical grounds. And the actors who were doing the sex and violence were quite good looking (and quite good acting) so we hardly complaining on aesthetic grounds. Unfortunately, from a pedogogical perspective, we feel uncomfortable requiring students to watch sexy, violent t.v. clips in class when the scenes are not grounded in specific sources. Darn.
Still, there are scenes we'd very much like to use from the first show. There is an excellent example in a scene where one of the heros of the show, Titus Pullo, a Roman soldier, who is the thoughtful creation of the show's writers, concludes the slaughter of some Gauls by raising the hilt of the sword towards the skies and shouting, "Mars, Mars, look! Look upon this sacrifice I have made for you, only for you." People just don't realize how pius the Romans were - even, perhaps especially, the soldiers and students in a Christian era have no idea what piety in a non-Christian world could look like. It was a thoughtful, interesting touch.
It appears the show is going for an Upstairs, Downstairs meets Colleen McCullough approach. There are no sources that give us the biographies of ordinary Romans (unless you count the Christian Gospels - and this exception doesn't really help) - so the HBO folks have given us fictional biographies that conform to the history we know about soldiers and their lives. For example, the centurian Lucius Vorenus is married. Roman law, until very late in the game, did not allow soldiers serving on active duty to marry - although as a practical matter soldiers, particularly those stationed in stable provinces, often sustained long term relationships with women and had children with them. In, fact, it was not unlike the status of families formed by gay couples in our own day. Socially recognized - legally screwed. The show provides a brief scene where Vorenus explains that he received a dispensation to marry. We're not sure how frequently such dispensations were granted, but the writers at least recognized that he would have to have acquired one. One suspects that HBO couldn't imagine their audience accepting a family values kind of young centurian who lacked the benefits of marriage and thus came up with this solution.
The members of the Roman elite (Pompey, Caesar, Antony) are drawn with some attention to the details of the historical sources, where the sources provide details. Where the sources don't provide details - boy do they go to town (the Colleen McCullough approach). We particularly liked the portrayal of Julius Caesar offered thus far. Caesar belonged to a patrician family (although one whose financial fortunes had rather been on the decline). The actor who portrays him for HBO, Ciaran Hinds, very much portrays him a lordly fellow.
Modern pop history would give you a Caesar as man of the people, confusing his political association with populares (elite politicians who furthered their own political careers by suppporting increasing the legal/social authority of ordinary citizens (male) at the expense of the senatorial elite) with his personal style. Caesar was notoriously popular with the army and the urban mob, but that popularity was due to his brilliant success as a general, which provided his soldiers and the city (and ultimately the mob) with beaucoup de booty, not his "common touch." [To be fair, there are anecdotes about Caesar sleeping in the rough as a common soldier would and enjoying the bawdy teasing his soldiers subjected him to in celebration of their victories - our point, however, still stands.]
The escapades of young Octavian (much less those of his wild and crazy momma) offered in the first episode do not rely on historical sources for their content. But, with one obvious exception, they do not contradict any of the sources we do have and they make for good tv drama. So bravo, HBO, in our opinion. The exception has to do with the representation of a religious ritual Octavian's mother participates in - which appears to be a conflation of rituals associated with Mithras and the Magna Mater and is, well, really wrong. The suggestion that Caesar and Pompey were consuls togther in 52 bce, also suffers from a lack of historical accuracy.
Our attitude with contemporary pop culture's butchering of the details of Roman history, however, can be summed up in two words: "who cares". If the show gets students into the Roman history classes it is up to the professorate to clean up the little messes left behind (we have never complained about the Latin mistakes made in Gladiator, for example). It is easy, in any event, to get the factoids wrong. It is often hard to get that grand concepts (soldierly piety, for example) right. What we cannot forgive is a boring butchery of history (c.f., Alexander), for which there is utterly no excuse and which drives post-pubescent youths into economics classes with a dreary regularity. Ergo, if HBO continues the standard of entertainment it has achieved in the first episode of Rome, we are more than content, we are grateful.
We suspect those not burdened by the study of Roman history will find it quite good fun on Sunday evenings this autumn.
