Give us history’s real women, yes, but don’t cut out the bawdy bits
TV historian Bettany Hughes has set herself quite the challenge. For too long, she says, women from history have been portrayed as little more than “sexpots” on screen. You can blame Elizabeth Taylor for that, or more recently Bromans, the ancient answer to Love Island, in which men train as Roman gladiators while their girlfriends laze around in bikinis and fling grapes at one other. As co-founder of a new television production company, Hughes is now seeking to redress the balance and present women as they really were.
No more gratuitous shots, then, of Boudicca flicking her hair. Hughes is right: it is time we heard what made the queen of the Iceni so strong and intellectually capable. Women, after all, were far more powerful than many dramas would have us believe. In ancient Rome they could own property, dine with men, move through the city, albeit overseen by a male protector. Mothers often proved more astute than their imbecilic emperor sons.
The problem, though, is that with power came the sort of intrigue that ancient historians liked best. Messalina, a wife of Emperor Claudius, may have been a masterful tactician, but the ancient sources also portray her as an insatiable minx. According to one historian, she even engaged in a competition with a prostitute to see who could have sex with the most men in 24 hours. Messalina won. She managed 25.
Nero, meanwhile, was said to have had a curious predilection for a prostitute who resembled his overbearing mother (whom he later attempted to dispatch in a perilous yacht). When some of the oldest sources paint portraits as tantalising as this, what is a television producer to do?
Excising the most salacious episodes, as a historian might, on the basis of bias does not necessarily make for colourful TV. Just imagine Robert Graves’s
I Claudius, dramatised so brilliantly for telly in 1976, with a prim and proper Messalina. The Annals of Tacitus and Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars, two of the key sources for the Roman emperors, teem thrillingly with illicit sex and murder. In these books, it isn’t only the women who are presented as sex-crazed.
The challenge for today’s documentary-makers is to decide what they can risk leaving out. A mission to rescue women from a voyeuristic lens also involves rescuing them from the very historians who preserved their memory. The sources, however unreliable they may be, deserve to be treated with respect. Who are we to say that Messalina didn’t once bed 25 men?
A good historian will always consider a suspect source before dismissing it. Too often, documentaries leave us out of that process. We’re given one version of events without being privy to the alternative versions which have been rejected.
The plan to put women back into history as they really were provides the perfect opportunity to reinvent those rules. By all means discredit the sources, but give us their stories in all their scandalous, shocking, sexy glory first. Keep the colour, while peeling back the layers to discover the people behind them. It’s only by knowing why these women were presented the way they were that we might finally understand them. We may even discover that a woman’s sexuality was no impediment to her intellect.
Daisy Dunn is the author of ‘Catullus’ Bedspread’