Why TV makes ancient Rome look shockingly modern
Can a new Sky drama, asks Jake Kerridge, knock some sense into a genre that’s too full of silliness and sex?
Early in Domina, Sky’s new drama about the life of the Roman Empress Livia Drusilla, there’s a scene in which the 15-yearold Livia finds the future Emperor Augustus forcing himself on her. She stops him by grabbing hold of his, ahem, imperial jewels – and the implication is that her hand will metaphorically remain there once she has married him, keeping the first ruler of the world’s greatest empire under her vice-like control.
As always in dramas about Imperial Rome, sex and politics are interdependent. “It’s a political drama, but it’s told from the point of view of the wives, the daughters, the mothers, the sisters and the mistresses, at a time when policy came to be made in the bedroom and not the Senate,” the show’s creator, Simon Burke, told the Radio Times.
Apologies to Mr Burke, but when I read that, I started sniggering, because talk of “making policy in the bedroom” in Roman times inevitably makes me think of Carry On Cleo. “Aren’t we going to cement our alliance?” says Amanda Barrie’s Cleopatra, batting her huge bedroom eyes at Kenneth Williams’s Julius Caesar. “Of course. I’ve brought along a clean trowel,” Caesar replies.
It’s always hard to take dramas about ancient Rome seriously, because our minds are full of the endless parodies, from Up Pompeii! to Plebs. But then the reason there are so many parodies is that the dramas themselves hover so close to the edge of pastiche. Carry On Cleo, for instance, is no sillier than the film it spoofs: Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. (The latter was described in one newspaper headline, in a brilliant pun on the title of a Gracie Fields song, as “the biggest asp disaster in the world”.)
The sword-and-sandal epics of Hollywood’s golden age – often dismissively called “peplum” movies, after the ubiquitous, and not always historically accurate, revealing tunics sported by the male characters – preferred melodrama and spectacle to authenticity, and their kitschy influence pervades the supposedly more sophisticated television dramas that came after them.
Take the HBO-BBC drama Rome (2005–07), which prided itself on its gritty realism, but seemed to me ludicrously (if enjoyably) camp. I particularly enjoyed the portrayal of Cleopatra as a bad-ass diva, sweeping into Rome to seize control of the situation after Caesar’s assassination; you could almost hear her humming I Will Survive. In reality, Cleopatra was already in Rome when Caesar was killed, and she very sensibly fled straight away, taking the son she’d had by Caesar away from danger rather than bringing him into it.
Then there’s the sex. We know from the graphic frescoes in Pompeii that the Romans did have some exotic tastes in this area, but producers seem to take this as licence to go over the top. In TV’s version of ancient Rome, sex scenes come along at a far greater rate, with far more depravity, than in any other TV drama bar Game of Thrones. When Rome was first broadcast, the director, Michael Apted, complained that the BBC had rejigged it to sex it up: “The BBC has not only sold this series on sex and violence, but in the way it has edited and cut… it has made sex scenes more important than the Senate scenes.”
The apogee of Imperial Roman television is, of course, I, Claudius (1976), but even that is battily lurid. It exaggerates further the exaggerations of Robert Graves’s novels, which are principally drawn from the works of the gossipy and prejudiced ancient historian Suetonius – described by one commentator as “the William Hickey of Imperial Rome”, after the tabloid gossip columnist.
It was Suetonius who offered the fact that Caligula wanted to make his favourite horse a consul as evidence of madness – whereas historians nowadays think it was a satirical jibe at the quality of his politicians. Of course, the scene in I, Claudius in which John Hurt’s Caligula welcomes the newly elevated horse to a wedding – “You know everybody, don’t you? Well, find yourself a place” – is sublime. But Hurt’s interpretation of Caligula as a cross-dressing, incestuous psychopath, a forerunner to Malcolm McDowell in Tinto Brass’s 1979 film Caligula, puts the worst spin on the few facts we know about the emperor.
The acting is so good and the script so witty that we hardly notice the characters in I, Claudius are caricatures. Take them out of their togas and put them in modern dress and we’d find them over the top; but we’re prepared to believe anything of the rotten Romans, however much today’s historians debunk the tales of their worst excesses.
I liked Domina, which strives to be a bit more low-key than usual, and stints on the titillating sex scenes. But there is a lot of stylised violence, with the young Livia drenched in blood after bashing a would-be rapist’s brains out with a rock in the first episode, and a montage of senators being slaughtered on Augustus’s orders. It wasn’t quite fresh enough that I could forget Kenneth Williams braying: “Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me!”
Part of the problem is that these shows all rehash the same stories of the Imperial families. I’m hoping for something different from another promised series, based on Lindsey Davis’s novels about the plebeian Roman detective Falco: they draw on the spirit of sardonic interest in everyday events that’s found in the satires of the Roman poet Horace. The series is being planned by ITV after the rights languished with the BBC for some years; the problem may have been too little sex and only cameo roles for the emperors.
As it stands, the Romans are represented on television as we would be if, in 2,000 years, everybody drew their knowledge of our era solely from The Crown. The bad behaviour of first families, inevitably distorted by gossip, may make for gripping telly – but wouldn’t it also be nice to have the option of something that offers the flavour of ordinary Roman life?
The Romans had exotic sexual tastes, but these shows go over the top