A ROMAN RUIN
For centuries the heroism and noble idealism of ancient Rome inspired the West. So what does the BBC’s lurid ( and wildly inaccurate) series tell us about our own values?
THROUGHOUT the long history of Western civilisation, ancient Rome has shone like a beacon as something noble and dignified, to be admired, even emulated. Tonight, we have on our screens the second instalment of BBC2’ s much- hyped drama series Rome, offering a very different vision of this once-revered civilisation: a lurid kind of soft-porn Carry On Cleo, attached to a plot that would look feeble in the Beano.
So what suddenly went wrong with Rome? Or did something go wrong with us? Certainly, we are the first generation to have treated Rome with such contempt.
In the Middle Ages, Virgil, Rome’s greatest poet, was so highly regarded that he was thought a magician.
The Renaissance was inspired by an inexhaustible nostalgia for the Classical past (take note, those who parrot the cliché that we must look forward, not back, and that dwelling on past glories is stifling and destructive. Try telling that to Michelangelo.)
Look at how Shakespeare, who knew a thing or two about human nature, paints his Romans: far from perfect, naturally, but still tragic and glorious in their flawed nobility.
Or consider a painting like JacquesLouis David’s magnificent The Oath Of The Horatii,which depicts the resolve of a warring band of brothers in ancient Rome. Painted on the eve of the French Revolution, it was an inspiration to a generation of European idealists looking for some new model of human dignity and brotherhood.
For those same noble ideals brought to verse, read the Victorian poet Thomas Babington Macaulay’s thrilling, galloping How Well Horatius Kept The Bridge — an epic account of the defence of Rome by one brave foot soldier, then consider how the Victorians’ profound sense of public duty and civic responsibility was informed by their idea of Rome.
Even in more recent times, witness how public and grammar schools in this country taught about the greatness of the Greeks and Romans, in the hope that their values might be passed on.
And then — oh dear — try watching the BBC’s Rome. There you will learn that, far from being noble and heroic, the Romans were in actuality nasty, conniving, bloodthirsty, sexually exploitative swine.
Bruno Heller, the writer of the new TV series, has said: ‘You were allowed to murder your neighbour or covet his wife if it didn’t p**s off the wrong person. All the sadomasochistic elements of human nature were right out in the open in the Roman world.’
HELLER has worked hard to recreate those cruelties and bring them directly into our living rooms. So is this the new truth? Enough historians have already exploded any pretensions the series may have to historical accuracy.
They have pointed out the glaring historical howlers, like the fact that high- born Roman women, such as the show’s lead seductress Atia — depicted as a cross between Lady Macbeth and Madam Pompadour — were not expected to show an interest in politics, still less to flaunt their sexuality. In fact, to behave as she does in the series would have been literally fatal.
As someone who has spent much of the past few years researching and writing a trilogy of novels set in ancient Rome, I have spotted many other such glaring errors.
But these might be more forgivable if the makers of the TV series had not seized on the most misogynist and poisonous gossip that has survived from various sources and rehashed it for our entertainment as the simple truth.
The equivalent would be a historian 2,000 years hence holding up a copy of the Sunday Sport and arguing that it represents an accurate picture of 21st-century Britain. The result is a series that, despite its £60 million budget, is clunkingly dull, its makers having failed to realise that gore is no substitute for plot, nor nudity for characterisation.
The tragedy is that viewers might actually have preferred not to be dragged through the mire, and offered instead a story of bravery, loyalty and heroism. Has the BBC not heard how well The Lord Of The Rings did at the box office?
It is not so much what is present in the BBC’s Rome — the relentless stabbing and sexual panting, all captured by a pitiless, cold-eyed camera for our delectation — but what is absent that is so dispiriting. Besides the orgies and tortures, there is never a breath of nobility, self- sacrifice, that stern old Roman stoicism or love.
We have come to expect that television drama will always show the ruling classes as wicked and murderous — it’s supposed to show how scrupulously democratic the makers are, I think.
But in the BBC’s Rome, even ordinary soldiers who were entrusted, in episode one, with retrieving Caesar’s stolen gold eagle — the standard under which his army fought and without which their morale was sapping — were soon revealed in their true colours as nasty little specimens of humanity.
Our attention was drawn primarily to the one who was a murderous, brothel- creeping rapist.
As for the principal players: we are given the drunken, loutish side of Mark Antony, but what of the side which won him the love of Cleopatra? His charisma, charm and brilliant military leadership? In Shakespeare’s words, she mourned for him, ‘For his bounty/ There was no winter in’t; an autumn ’ twas/ That grew the more by reaping.’
At Caesar’s death, Antony laments: ‘O what a fall was there, my countrymen!’ And Brutus (on our TV screens a prissy and ineffectual prig) was for Shakespeare ‘the noblest Roman of them all’.
Other extraordinary figures from the ancient world might include Coriolanus, that austere, impossible figure, for Shakespeare ‘too noble for the world. An eagle in a dovecote’; or the republican general Regulus, who returned to his captors in Carthage as good as his word, knowing he was going back only to torture and death, even though he might have escaped.
His story has inspired generations of writers since, from Cicero to Kipling, but I doubt if it would inspire a modern TV drama.
The point is not the simplistic question: ‘What was Rome really like?’ Rome, like any other human society before or since, embraced everything from the lowest squalor to the highest nobility. The point is, what does each succeeding age derive from Rome?
NIETZSCHE once wrote: ‘ Remember that when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you!’ One could say the same of Rome: what we choose to find in it, and how we portray it, says far more about us than it does about any real ‘Rome’.
Previous ages have revealed themselves in many intriguing ways: the Middle Ages’ passion for the sad, majestic poetry of Virgil; the Renaissance love of Roman dignity and realism; Shakespeare’s timeless studies of Rome’s flawed, tragic nobility; the high-minded Victorian admiration for Imperial Rome.
As for the contemporary view, of the Romans as no more than bloodthirsty, lecherous little mammals squabbling in the gutter — what will future generations think that says about us, I wonder?
It reveals, I think, that distinctively modern, mean- spirited phenomenon: the replacement of ancestor- worship, or at least reverence, for a kind of contempt for all that has gone before.
It does not, I’m afraid, show us in a very good light.
Perhaps it would be better for us if we switched off our TVs tonight and turned back to Macaulay’s celebrated poem instead — preferably read aloud: And in the nights of winter, When the cold north winds blow, And the long howling of the wolves Is heard amidst the snow ... With weeping and with laughter Still is the story told, How well Horatius kept the bridge In the brave days of old.
CHRISTOPHER HART, under the pseudonym William Napier, is the author of Attila: The Scourge Of God (Orion, £12.99).